Jill McCormick said it all when she opened her General
Evaluation remarks with “It was a funny meeting. I mean, it
really was funny, there was so much humour tonight.” The smaller
turnout lent itself to relaxed atmosphere which enabled even the
most nervous of us to truly ‘be ourselves’.
A fine example of this was Karen Arnold, one of our newest
members. If she was nervous at all we never would have known. As
Jill observed, “Her introduction to the Chairman was performed
with charm and ease”, warming the audience to Li Ying Kao with
personal remarks and commendations.
Who would have known what to expect from a theme titled “Be
Yourself”? But Li Ying, with her ready smile and quick wit, set
us up for it right away through a personal story that inspired
both thought and laughter. Essentially her message encouraged us
by her own personal example, to follow our dreams to be the
person we want to be.
One of our ardent university students, Michele Menzies, has
finished exams and was back in fine form, as Wordsmith. Her Word
of the Week could be synonymous with Toastmaster – it was
“loquacious’. To Michele’s delight, we proved to be all of that!
She listened well and rewarded us with a few rich quotes in her
end-of-the-meeting report.
Mahmoud, our eternally optimistic Wizard of Ah’s, humorously
assured us that his job was to help us count the unnecessary
filler words we use in our speeches, confident that our club
piggy bank would be considerably heavier by the end of the
evening. He even had a tongue-in-cheek ‘deal’ for us: Pay a
one-time $2.00 fee this night and be exempt from ‘ah’ ‘er’ fines
for the rest of the year .
If this had been true then Dave and Pam would have taken him up
on this immediately because just in this one night they had to
forfeit the maximum twenty-five cents for all their ‘unnecessary
utterances’!
Out of the mouths of babes: Jessica Li’s Inspiration was an
insight into the wisdom of her little girl, and into her own
abilities. After watching her mother fret and worry over this
first-time role, Jessica heard herself quoted: “Mom, just be
yourself and you will be fine.” These are the same words with
which she has often encouraged her daughter when she was unsure
of herself and even sometimes discouraged. There is no higher or
more powerful a compliment than for your wisdom to be quoted;
especially when the quote boomerangs back to you from your own
caring child. Did she take her own advice? Yes! And she was fine
Jill is right - “Personalizing an Inspiration really works.”
Omar Hung proved he is not only a philosopher, but also a good
comedian by entertaining us with a string of one-line jokes
provided by an elementary school teacher’s project. The teacher
had instructed his class to ‘complete the proverb’. For
instance: “A rolling stone …” (fill in the blank). Here one
child answered “is a rock star!” These kids were ‘just being
themselves’!
Karen Arnold’s clear explanation of the timing role and tools
was particularly important because we had a guest. She may be a
new member but she jumped in like an old-timer when last minute
help was needed. With Omar by her side, she took this first-time
role of Timer in her stride.
Don Ekroth “played” with us, using his boundless humour and
energy to give us the comfort level and confidence to actually
enjoy responding to his topics. Dave Stewart pointed out that
our speaking time was stretched from the usual 1 ½ minutes to a
2 minute maximum limit. Sometimes this increased 30 seconds can
seem like an eternity, but Don’s topics were so interesting and
easy to speak to that most of us appreciated having the extra
time. Dave was impressed with how well we used it. Examples of
some of the topics, which centered around the theme were: Argue
one side of “Our personalities are molded by environment.”
Another was “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple. Why
wait?? Why not simply be yourself now?” Don’s funniest bridging
occurred when a Speaker cried out “Carpe diem!!” and Don’s
bridging retort interpreted ‘carpe’ for ‘carp’ – spoken of
course from a professional fisherman’s point of reference .
Everyone had fun, the quality of speakers was high, the ultimate
award for Best Table Topic Speaker being a tie between Mahmoud
Moazami and Karen Arnold. Congratulations!
Always enjoying an evaluation role, Dave was happy having a
chance to give feedback to the Table Topic Speakers. “On a
general note, everybody by and large was him-or-herself.” Dave
did an excellent job of commending our pluses, and giving us
good, practical advice on how easy it would be for us to become
even that much better.
Neville Cohen once again played the part of eloquent host as he
Toasted with personal reflections culminating with “Please raise
your glasses in a Toast to “Be true to ourselves”. He then had
the privilege of introducing our Speaker for the evening, Ruth
Sol.
Ruth’s speech, from the advanced speech manual Humorously
Speaking continued to fuel the momentum of fun. Her project was
to “Keep Them Laughing” by practicing the art of breaking up the
possible tedious or more complex parts of a serious speech by
incorporating humour (relating to her topic) at the beginning,
end, and appropriately in the body. The fact that the serious
part of Ruth’s speech was very interesting to us added greatly
to our enjoyment .
In “My Other Life” she explained the project that has engulfed
her life for the past eleven months, which encompassed
attempting to forecast the future of the transport industry to
enable trade. Through her clear explanation we not only
understood the situation, but also had some good hearty chuckles
along the way.
Jill complimented Pam for her “well planned, step by step
evaluation”.
Part of Jill’s report has actually been quoted in parts of the
body of this newsletter. She had good advice and motivating
praise for everyone she evaluated. Suffice it to say that she
tied with Pam in receiving the award for the Best Evaluator for
the evening.
As you can see, we had a lot of fun along with our learning this
night – so much, in fact, that our new guest will be Inducted as
our newest member at our next meeting, May 1st. We are looking
forward to seeing you there, along with anyone who might like
come along and check us out
.
Club 1085
