We had a somewhat hoarse Toastmaster Dave filling in for Ellie tonight who apparently had apparently succumbed to ‘the bug’. “You need to stop kissing” retorted one enthusiastic Toastmaster from the audience! But despite the croak, Toastmaster Dave was full of beans, clearly happy to be recovered from illness and pleased to be back at Cathedral City Toastmasters.
This evening was jam packed with goodness. There was learning taking place left-right-and-centre as several people took on new roles and others extended themselves in all kinds of ways. This is what it’s all about. With three prepared speakers as well as grammarian and the obligatory slap-of-tea-interlude to get through, there wasn’t a moment to spare.
The word of the day was ‘Epiphany’, introduced by able Grammarian, Sam H. Fresh back from competing in the area competitions, Sam showed how his confidence has clicked up a notch at the lectern. Great stuff. Sam described his word well and came back at the end of the evening with a report which our Timer Kathy described as her funniest ever grammarian’s report. Perfect.
Speech number one was Binaya, with his first formal speaking role at Cathedral City. ‘Stop wasting food’ was incredibly well researched. Binaya traversed the environmental, economic and social costs of food wastage in the world. “We can’t put back the landscape” he stated, urging the audience to be more careful with the way they use food. Binaya offered several ways to reduce food waste, but his take-home message was that the responsibility rests with us. Thank you Binaya, you’re off to a great start at Cathedral City!
Next was Matt with a rather cryptic speech title “How do gorillas market?”. Or was that guerrilla? This Competent Communicator #8 speech was very clever, as Matt unpacked the methods and tricks of guerrilla marketing, a topic Matt has been studying at university. There was a kit-kat bar disguised as a park bench, MacDonalds fries on a pedestrian crossing and even a few failed examples. Congratulations on delivering such a captivating speech tonight Matt!
“Most of us don’t realise the importance of water” began Chrissy in the evening’s third speech tonight. Project number 3 from the speaking to inform manual is calls the speaker to give a demonstration talk. This talk was a demonstration of the eSpring water purifier. Chrissy began, building a case for the importance of clean water for our health, then showed us the solution. A new machine which can carbon-filter and electronically treat water with UV light. This speech was hands-on, with Chrissy passing parts of the machine around the audience as she demonstrated how the machine functioned. A brilliant interpretation of this speaking project, well done!
Dave Ba’s Tabletopics tonight had humor written all over it, while being quite a challenge. Dave had dropped famous New Zealanders into, um, interesting jobs, with the participants set-up to describe their new roles. There was John Key who’d become a bank manager in Christchurch (Gary), Peter Jackson the MP in the labour party (Gray), Paul Henry with a new social worker job (Sam B) and Lorde, who’d recently become New Zealand’s Prime Minister, based in Christchurch (Roberto). Wow!
Thanks for another great evening. See you all next time!