Toastmasters is a pretty good gig. For $50, I got a membership and entertainment that far surpasses any Tuesday night TV lineup.

I joined Toastmasters about two months ago. For those of you unfamiliar with this group, it's an international club designed to give people confidence in public speaking.

So far, I'm liking it. I sit back and watch other people get up and tell fascinating tales about themselves, give persuasive speeches that make me instantly want to buy whatever it is they're featuring, or read stories with an impressive display of drama and feeling. It offers a wide array of weekly, one-hour entertainment. Never a re-run, often humorous, sometimes spontaneous and no commercial breaks. A far superior deal than cable.

Now they want to spoil the whole experience for me. They want me to speak. On Thursday. Which looms ominously close.

This first speech is called The Icebreaker, during which newbies are invited to speak about what they know best: Themselves.

I'm entitling mine, "John Denver Made Me Do It." I submit it here for your review.

In 1973, John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" was the #1 song in the country. I think that song is why I'm here. I think it's the reason a lot of Midwestern folks moved west.

I searched the Internet for proof of this, and couldn't find it. All I discovered was that there was a 1970s energy boom that prompted a population swell.

But even if I can't substantiate it, I believe those lyrics enchanted me and lots of other people.

Of course, I was but a wee, wee (OK, I was 9) person when this song was riding its highest, pardon the pun. But it got into my young brain. I wanted to see fire in the sky and sit around a campfire with friends and climb cathedral mountains. I've done all that, in my 20 years here - although the fire in the sky I saw was a raging wildfire.

I think this song stayed with me into high school. One night, I was riding bicycles with a high school friend on the rural roads around our hometown. Out of the blue, I said to her, "Doesn't Colorado Springs, Colorado sound like a beautiful place to live?"

She said yes, and we both agreed we've move there after we graduated from college.

Sure enough, after Cathy graduated from the University of Wisconsin, she moved to Colorado Springs. A year later, I followed her. It all seemed so poignant until I reminded her of our high school conversation and she gave me a blank look and told me she didn't remember that at all.

I like to think it was in her subconscious anyway.

So I moved here, then moved away, actually into those mountains about which John Denver wrote. I didn't move to Aspen, but to a ski resort community not all that different from any other Colorado resort town.

And then, I met John Denver.

He was the headliner for a mountain music festival near my home, and, as a reporter for the daily newspaper, I was assigned to interview him. Actually, I think I fought for the interview. I believe my friend and former fellow reporter, Jane, still bears a long scratch under her arm from me yanking it away from the telephone.

The day of the interview, I was nervous. I rigged a tape recorder up to the phone so I could keep the evidence of our conversation for years to come. I had already mapped out a series of questions. He was to call me at a specific time, and he was on the money. My voice was wobbly with nerves. His was flat with boredom. Halfway through the interview, I realized my questions required no more than "yes" or "no" answers. And that's what he gave. He chose not to expand, or even to help me as I quickly arrived at the end of the prepared questions and fumbled for more. John wanted to be done with it.

I am sure he had many more interviews to conduct that day, but it didn't matter to me. I was unimpressed, in fact, insulted, by his manner, which seemed a basic lack of courtesy. Nevertheless, I again took advantage of my reporter status to get backstage at the event and meet him. He shook my hand, and listened without a spark of recognition as I introduced myself. I asked for his autograph, simultaneously realizing I had nothing but a generic piece of notebook paper for him to sign. No CD, no book, not even a music festival program. He took the notebook with a grimace, slashed more than wrote what passed for his name, and held it back out to me.

Suffice to say, my infatuation with John Denver ended that day. But heck, I still like the song. And I still felt sad when he crashed his plane and died years later.

I stayed there in High Altitude, and watched a mountain of scars carved into the land, for 13 years. I even think I tried to touch the sun once. Or maybe that was the full moon, at bar time. At any rate, I stayed until the long winters, high cost of living and other, more-difficult-to-explain facts of high country life got to be too much for me.

Three years ago, I came back here, with an ex-husband in my rear-view mirror and a 10-year-old son who is the light of my life. I came back older, more mature and more appreciative of the everyday world in which most Front Rangers live. Where people commute, work, raise families and play on the weekends, often in those mountains that frame our world.

I think I've come full circle. After hearing the come-hither strains of John Denver's voice all those years ago, I'm moving again. This time, of course, to Denver.