  The New York Times Jodi Wilgoren The speech won’t last long, maybe 20 minutes including all the applause.
She will wear a skirt, probably white or ivory, rather than the pantsuits she favors on the campaign trail. And Teresa Heinz Kerry has already started rehearsing on the TelePrompTer, a device she has never before used, in anticipation for the biggest public appearance of her life, on Tuesday evening at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Speaking to reporters aboard her husband’s chartered campaign plane before it took off from Denver for the flight here Saturday morning, Mrs. Heinz Kerry said her convention speech would likely touch the same themes she has been talking about for months, with some new material.
One of her aides said the speech would be missing the protein of a red-meat missive, and was framed more as a conversation with both the people in the hall and the television audience, particularly the women among them.
After practicing with the prompter – one with two screens, not the three she will likely have at Boston’s Fleet Center -- last weekend on Nantucket island in Massachusetts, Mrs. Heinz Kerry said she is not nervous about reading the electronic text because “it’s my language,” meaning she had written the words herself. She said she had not rehearsed the speech in front of her husband, Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ nominee-to-be, but that he had read the text. Mrs. Heinz Kerry said Mr. Kerry had practiced his speech for her – but that, as is his habit, he is still very much in the midst of writing and rewriting and rewriting. She left here after a rally Saturday afternoon bound for Boston, four days ahead of her husband, to continue speech prep and attend events in and around the convention.
On Monday night, she is expected to watch President Clinton speak from the family box in the Fleet Center, and on Tuesday, she will be feted at a private luncheon, thrown by Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s wife, Vicki, at the Museum of Fine Arts. On Wednesday, she plans to drop by a huge reception, at the chic restaurant Mistral, thrown by Bob Crowe, a Boston developer who has been a prolific Kerry fundraiser, and then to return to the family box to watch Senator John Edwards of North Carolina accept the vice presidential nomination.
And Thursday, she will likely meet with several convention caucuses and speak to the delegation from Pennsylvania, which she still considers her primary residence. As for clothes, Mrs. Heinz Kerry, who changed from beige knit pants and a white button-down blouse to white cotton capris and beige espadrilles during the flight here, said Tuesday night’s outfit would definitely be a skirt. She also said Mr. Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, would wear “soft colors” so the two would not clash. Marla Romash, Mrs. Heinz Kerry’s spokeswoman, told reporters they would have to just wait and see. “I’ll know more about that once we get to Boston and I look in her closet,” Ms. Romash explained.
“Because I’m the one who’s going to say, ‘Can you raise your arms in that suit?’” 
