Our story opens on a school bus one Saturday morning heading towards an exclusive private school for a meet of the Western Bay Forensics League. On this bus are the league-wide known strange Speech Teams of Thomas Starr King Middle School and John Marshall High School...
I was sitting near the back of the bus, engaged in normal raucous activities with my teammates from JMHS, when I saw a poor orphaned orange rolling on the bus floor. As it rolled past my feet, I grabbed it.
Perhaps it was some strange conjunction of the planets, maybe a psychic connection, but probably just boredom, but I raised the orange above my head and proclaimed that it was now our mascot. The rest of the team, as usual, paid little attention to me.
We arrived at the school and set our bags and supplies down at the base of a statue of some guy. Beats me who it was. I placed the orange at the feet of the statue and again proclaimed that it was our mascot.
As the day went by, teammates eventually began to think of the orange as our mascot, and would even proclaim it as so to any passerby that asked.
Eventually, some heathen threw it out.
When the next tournament came about, the memory of our poor orange was still strong. That morning, before the meet, one of the members of our team went out an bought a bag of oranges, giving one orange to each team member. We carried them to our competitions, some people placing them on desks for moral support, some people carrying them in their pockets, or whatever.
And thus was the orange placed as a permanent (at least for now) mascot of the JMHS Speech Team.
All we can do now is hope that future generations of Speech members keep the spontaneous tradition alive.
Well, I said it wasn't that interesting...