Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris (1st excerpt)

Excerpt from a friggin' hilarious book:

"'My speech therapist's name is Miss Chrissy Samson.'  She'd hand me the microphone and lean back with her arms crossed.  'Go ahead, say it.  I want you to hear what you sound like.'

     She was in love with the sound of her own name and seemed to view my speech impediment as a personal assault.  If I wanted to spend the rest of my life as David Thedarith, then so be it.  She, however, was going to be called Miss Chrissy Samson.  Had her name included no s's, she probably would have bypassed a career in therapy and devoted herself to yanking out healthy molars or performing unwanted clitoridectomies on the schoolgirls of Africa.  Such was her personality.

     'Oh come on," my mother would say.  'I'm sure she's not that bad.  Give her a break.  The girl's just trying to do her job.'

   I started keeping watch over the speech therapy door, taking note of who came and went.  Had I seen one popular student leaving the office, I could have believed my mother and viewed my lisp as the sort of thing that might happen to anyone.  Unfortunately, I saw no popular students.  Chuck Coggins, Sam Shelton, Louis Delucca: obviously, there was some connection between a sibilate s and a complete lack of interest in the State versus Carolina issue.

    None of the therapy students were girls.  They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains.  'You don't want to be doing that," the men in our families would say.  'That's a girl thing."  Baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. .....

    "One of these days I'm going to have to hang a sign on that door," Agent Samson used to say.  She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA.  We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues.  At the beginning of the school year, while we were congratulating ourselves on successfully passing for normal, Agent Samson was taking names as our assembled teachers raised their hands, saying, "I've got one in my homeroom,'  and 'There are two in my fourth-period math class.'  Were they also able to spot the future drunks and depressives?  Did they hope by eliminating our lisps, they might set us on a different path, or were they trying to prepare us for future stage and choral careers?

    .....At school, where every teacher was a potential spy, I tried to avoid an s sound whenever possible.  'Yes,' became 'correct,' or a military 'affirmative.'  'Please,' became 'with your kind permission,' and questions were pleaded rather than asked.  After a few weeks of what she called 'endless pestering' and what I called 'repeated badgering,' my mother bought me a pocket thesaurus, which provided me with s-free alternatives to just about everything.  I consulted the book both at home in my room and at the daily learning academy other people called our school.  Agent Samson was not amused when I began referring to her as an articulation coach, but the majority of my teachers were delighted.  'What a nice vocabulary,' they said.  'My goodness, such big words!'

    Plurals presented a considerable problem, but I worked around them as best I could; 'rivers,' for example, became either 'a river or two' or 'many a river.'  Possessives were a similar headache, and it was easier to say nothing than to announce that the left-hand and right-hand glove of Janet had fallen to the floor.  After all the compliments I had received on my improved vocabulary, it seemed prudent to lie low and keep my mouth shut.  I didn't want anyone thinking I was trying to be a pet of the teacher. 

.....Thanks to Agent Samson's tape recorder, I, along with the others, now had a clear sense of what I actually sounded like.  There was the lisp, of course, but more troubling was my voice itself, with its excitable tone and high, girlish pitch.  I'd hear myself ordering lunch in the cafeteria, and the sound would turn my stomach.  How could anyone stand to listen to me?  Whereas those around me might grow up to be lawyers or movie stars, my only option was to take a vow of silence and become a monk.  .....

     'Oh, relax,' my mother said.  'Your voice will change eventually.'

     'And what if it doesn't?'

     She shuddered.  'Don't be so morbid.'

(later)......It was unlike Agent Samson to speak so casually, and awkward to sit in the hot little room pretending to have a normal conversation.

     'So,' she said, 'what are your plans for the holidays?'

     'Well, I usually remain here and, you know, open a gift from my family.'

     'Only one?' she asked.

     'Maybe eight or ten.'

     'Never six or seven?'

     'Rarely,' I said.

     'And what do you do on December thirty-first, New Year's Eve?'

     'On the final day of the year we take down the pine tree in our living room and eat marine life.'"

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