I’m hooked on West Wing re-runs. Last night Mallory complimented Sam on a moving passage in a speech he had written. It went something like…"with neither glurge nor glumph; with a fittabit and a grepple, we shall smick and spunder, troob and wickham, now and forever in this great laundromat of ours." I probably didn’t get all the words right, but when Mallory complimented Sam he said, "Ah yes. Cadence." The secret to the success of the passage that Mallory loved was the cadence.
Sam and Toby are great writers, and this isn’t the first speech writing hint they’ve shared. I wonder if any of the fan sites have compiled the list.
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Yeah! I am a fan of West Wing re-runs too. Speaking of speeches, I love it when the Ron Silver character calls Sam a “Freak” for writing the speech about “reach for the stars” in the car on the way over … but, clearly, your version of the speech had me ROFL. I can’t wait for T. to get back to read it to him.
I laughed at that just last night. It was a beautiful moment, a recognition of genius.
Aha! Another fan added to our ranks. West Wing is the only television show I’ve ever considered buying on DVD. I do everything in my power to leave Monday nights free for the Bravo marathon each week (or tape all of them when I can’t) and I use the DVR rewind button so frequently to savor a scene, a speech or even a line, that it takes me 90 minutes to watch each show.
The writing has slipped in the past two seasons since Aaron Sorkin quit writing all the episodes (Imagine! he used to write 18 or 20 hour-long shows a year), but it’s still better written than anything else on television. Well, there’s The Daily Show, but that’s different.