English speech competition

Okay I have to confess something right now. I am featured in a Japanese High School Textbook. I guess I am a bit more than a feature, since there is a whole chapter devoted to me, and my former life. It was written like 3 years ago, and well the people of my small town think it is the bees knees. Which is why 2 of the three speeches that were prepared for the speech competition today, featured bits about me and how cool i am. I mean, not to try and denounce that factor, but really give me a break...it was overkill. A bit wierd...and ultimately a tiny bit humiliating. I mean, people thought i wrote the speeches and made my kids talk about me...but they were written by the english teacher, and she would only let me pull out the mention of my name in ONE of the speeches...So alas, my first years were stuck talking about cool, cool me. Oy vey...those poor kids. This place can be so wierd. I mean I left LA a pretty normal person and woke up one day to having a mini-celebrity following. I get followed on the streets, my grocery basket gets pawwed through, I have two regular newspaper columns, weekly speech requests, and now I am the subject matter of the speech competition. YIKES!!! what kind of parallel universe is this??

By the way, my kids lost...but they took it pretty well.