Capital City Toastmasters Meeting Recap - June 24, 2010

Submitted by Wade Hudson and Brian Simpson

 

Today's Theme: Life's a Beach!

 

The surf was definitely up this morning at the Capital City Toastmasters meeting as Martin Rock led our meeting with his theme, “Life’s a Beach.” Martin assigned a beach-related nickname to each participant.

April Young took the Sgt. at Arms role and got us started at 7AM, encouraging our group of 23 to ignore some last-minute beach balls that were being blown up while she introduced our Toastmaster, Martin. Martin presented himself in t-shirt and sun-glasses and laid out the beach theme complete with decorations, including a large poster of dolphins, Hawaiian leis and a stuffed-animal whale.

Kudos as well to our audience participants who dressed appropriately for the beach: Martin, Stephen, Mike, Dennis, Andrew and Wade.

Cameron Henley led the invocation by sharing some wisdom from Albert Einstein including, “learn from yesterday, live for today.”

Stephen Beasang then delivered a beachy joke about a lady who was selling batteries along the beach, or as Stephen explained, she sells C-cells by the sea shore. :)

Andrew Soloninka gave us littoral (pronounced like 'literal') as our Word of the Day. Littoral means of or pertaining to the shore of a lake, sea or ocean.

Gwen Vass then set out the time parameters for our speakers.

Mike Eaves padded across our sandy shores to speak first. Mike’s related a story about going to eat at Johnson’s Drive In in Siler City in his speech, “A Memorable Experience,” where he enjoyed much more than a delicious cheeseburger. Check out this YouTube video for a glimpse of what Mike described:

 

Dean DiLillo followed by giving us some concrete action to take in his talk, “The Oil Spill: What can we do?”  Dean encouraged us all to stop contributing to the billions of tons of plastic (made out of OIL!) being dumped in the ocean by not just recycling but instead refusing to use single use plastics, like grocery bags and bottled water. He referred to The Great Pacific Patch. Watch this YouTube video to learn more:

 

Finally, Bob Crump emerged from the ocean having swum across the pond from Ireland. Bob then shared an Irish folktale “The Fox and the Ranger” complete with an Irish accent and a corn pipe – very entertaining!

Wade Hudson led Table Topics by pulling names from a hat. Chris Colburn, Mark Leonard and Dennis Smith shared their ideas as they were put on the spot in some curious situations at the beach.

Tom Beaulieu, April Young and Brian Simpson provided outstanding feedback as our evaluators. While they all had great praise for our speakers, they also gave some thoughtful  suggestions for improvement including:

 

  1. Provide more details
  2. Have a clear and structured opening
  3. Stay away from superfluous information
  4. DO take risks
  5. Don’t let your props become a distraction (use and put aside)
  6. Slow down and use pauses (helps eliminate filler words)

 

Tom Presley came ashore next to deliver the Grammarian’s report. He encouraged our speakers to use more vivid descriptions in their talks.

Colleen Slaughter then provided the general evaluation for our meeting. In addition to noting that it’s the first time we’ve seen Mike in shorts, she advised our Toastmaster to be ready to go at 7 sharp since some of the preparations continued past the start time and were distracting. She also suggested that the Table Topics Master remind the participants of the time requirements since all the participants today fell short of the time qualification. Last but not least, she reminded us to make the definition for the Word of the Day large enough so we can all read it.

Award Winners:

Best Speaker: Mike Eaves

Best Evaluator: Brian Simpson

Best Table Topics: Mark Leonard