I found a draft blog entry from after I'd done my fourth speech (toward the end of June) and realize I never finished it!  So, finally finished, albeit out of order, comes this recounting of how that went:

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Ooh!  I just did my fourth speech.  I had previously decided I was going to put some more prep into a speech, but then I turned around and did what I usually do:  picked a date to force myself to adhere to a deadline, then procrastinated to the point where my options for what to do were limited.

Because the objective of the speech was to choose your words carefully, I wrote out the whole speech first, then went back and replaced some words, added some similes, and made other word-choice-related changes.  I rehearsed it a lot... sometimes just the opening or the closing or from some random point in the middle, but frequently from the beginning.  I wish I had started earlier, however, as I would have liked to add a few more rhetorical devices.  Still, the speech ended up being pretty fun.

I ended up making a speech out of elaborating on a personal story about getting lost driving.  One of many getting-lost stories from my early days of driving.  In this one, I ended up crossing and re-crossing the Brooklyn Bridge... FOUR TIMES IN 20 MINUTES!

You see, my objectives from the beginning have always been to condition me or prep me for more storytelling-style presentations.  I'm super-interested in the storytelling venue called "The Moth" (in New York City... Do yourself a favor and look it up! ...also, search for it on iTunes!).  I really want to try my hand at some personal storytelling like what goes on at The Moth, so there's really no reason to NOT focus on that now!  I felt like most people could relate to getting lost while driving and that was the only thing I truly felt I needed to connect with the audience.  After that, it was all about me and my ordeal.

Even though I didn't prepare for the speech as much as I would have liked, it came off pretty well.  I was more nervous than I'm sure I would have been if I had prepared more, but I felt like I delivered the story the way I wanted.  At the last moment, before leaving the house that morning, I grabbed an oil painting of the Brooklyn Bridge off my wall and brought it in with me.  The paining figured into the speech and I thought it would be nice to work it in as a prop.  Although I hadn't rehearsed using it AT ALL, I figured out a way to start the speech holding it (walking around the room to show it more closely to people as I delivered my introduction), used it for emphasis of a detail about the bridge in the middle, and end by holding it again.  It all came together nicely.