The Speechwriters LLC Holiday Newsletter

Hello one and all! Welcome back to the site. Winter is finally upon us, according to the almanacs, who obviously haven’t been outside at any point in the past two months. I mean, good LORD, my spit was freezing before it hit the ground three days before Thanksgiving, and I’m supposed to act like that was Autumn?

In any event, it’s here, so we have taken the advice of our many, many lawyers and gotten safely off the road until this whole thing blows over. In fact, we’ve taken it a step further and have actually left the country, with Misha currently sunning himself on the shores of the North Sea and Dave having spent the last week and a half in an undisclosed location, surrounded by Bush daughters.

And whither young Kolsk, you may ask, throughout all this scandal and intrigue? A fine question, and it grieves us to report that after completing a peerless tour of duty with us this fall, Matthew J. Kolsky has wisely decided to spend the next two semesters finishing college rather than stealing sandwiches across America and fending off the advances of lovesick teenage coeds, leaving Misha and I with a man-plus-luggage sized hole in both our van and our hearts. And despite what you’ve been hearing from those no-talent hacks at Entertainment Tonight, it was as amicable a split as this world has ever seen, so don’t you even try to start a war or we will shut you down so fast you won’t even know what hit you. Except that we just told you it would be us, but we’ll still hit you so hard that you’ll maybe just forget and wonder what the hell happened, like a chump.

That being said, trust us when we say that the LLC’s heyday is far from over. There are some who would argue that it hasn’t even begun, which is kind of harsh and not even at all true, but it definitely isn’t over. We are under new management, for starters, and these people are staggeringly competent. We have new songs coming out of us from places that we were heretofore positive couldn’t grow songs, and new Shaolin recording techniques that will leave you as breathless as they left us when first they kicked us in the lung. And our giant spring tour? Already 90% booked, no big deal.

All of which is to say, Happy New Year, and, seriously, thank you for being part of our extended family. Stay tuned.

Cheers,

Dave

Our tech people just finished massively reorganizing the website, so please let us know if anything we used to have that you liked isn’t here anymore and we’ll try to bring it back, unless we got rid of it on purpose.

Speechwriter’s Prayer

It’s a Monday in 1973

the year of our Lord Richard Nixon’s departure

and Mustang Sally, Ike’s honest old retriever

seems so damn far away.

This stomach has ulcers undiagnosed

the throat is swollen, the hands shake

and breathing is more difficult than it has been.

I’m queasy and my very structure

these bones and things

seem also to be more brittle

more stretched to breaking.

I’ve got a last speech to write for him

and many other details also

and all of this with a metabolism that feels recently returned

from malaria or some summer camp for dysentery.

So sick am I becoming that I fear

this Woodward and Bernstein disease

may just be the Epstein-Barr of every hack betrayed.

Please God, have him walk directly onto the helicopter

with no turning around to make that two-fisted victory sign.

Do this one thing for me, after all

I have given so much.

-attributed to Raymond K. Price