We had a great meeting with a wonderful theme and a
tremendous set of Toastmasters. With a
mercifully short business meeting (e.g., no business to conduct besides an
announcement of the Sept. 17 humorous speech contest), FRTM President Ray
Pezolt was able to turn the meeting over to our Toastmaster for the evening,
Colette Smith. Colette recently took the oath as an American citizen and our
theme for the evening was America and American history.
Colette did a fabulous job of leading us through the
meeting, getting our Word of the Day (ballyhoo) from Pattie Apple, our Timer
introduction and Inspiration from Patrick Bowen, and our description of Ah
Counting from Jeff Stoll.
We had a full slate of speakers with Minh Nguyen presenting
speech #3 from the Competent Communicator manual, Jennifer Dunne also
presenting speech #3, Joe Weinsteiger giving speech #10 from the CC manual and,
just a boy with a dream, Dirk Kittredge giving speech #5 from the CC manual.
After the break, the lovely and gracious… no… wait, that’s
how you’d describe a woman… the brave and fearless… OK, maybe a little over the
top… the OK and just getting by (all right, we’ll go with that) Table Topics
Master Bill Farrand led us through a Table Topics session on odd American
History. All our contestants acquitted
themselves very admirably.
The General Evaluator for the evening, the lovely and
gracious (OK, now here it works) Deb Obermiller led the evaluation portion of
the meeting with Jonathan Kolber evaluating Minh, Dirk K (wait, didn’t he
already
give a speech?) evaluating Jennifer, Beth Chacon evaluating Joe, and Ray Pezolt
evaluating Dirk. Deb gave positive and
constructive feedback on the evaluations and the meeting as a whole. Deb also
collected reports from our Ah
Counter, Jeff, and Grammarian, Pattie, and got questions for the audience from
Quiz Master Jarrod (sorry if I mangled your name, dude).
The pulse-pounding awards segment came next with Jennifer D
being our best Speaker of the evening, Ray being best Evaluator, and (round of
applause please) Kathy Barrett being our best Table Topics speaker of the
evening.
We were able to wrap the meeting up without a role call
(really, isn’t that what e-mail is for?) and head for the egress (a little
inside joke there) more or less on time.
Good night Gracie and see you next week…
