09_28_04 Geospeakers Meeting Summary

Our 2nd September meeting began right on time as our President, Ann (who is getting better and better at this) rocked us to order. Gary Curtis gave us the Galvanizing quote (Eeyore) from A.A. Milne, which gave us a hint of the bellyaching and whining to come.

Not at first, though, as Ann handled the business portion of the meeting with aplomb. She did a great job of greeting our guest, Chris Heppner, and then reminded us of the upcoming Area C-2 Humorous Speech and Evaluation contest. Our contestants will be Mitch in the Evaluation contest and Shane in the Humorous Speech contest, with Neil and Stephanie serving as contest Toastmasters and Ann of course as contest co-chair. Quite a strong showing by Geospeakers - good luck to Mitch and Shane!

Stephanie, obviously warming up for the contest, took on the role of Toastmaster, ably introducing today's theme of Bellyaching and Whining. Neil whined when Stephanie asked him to introduce the evaluation team, but he did it anyway, calling upon Mitch as timer, and Ann who stepped in without grousing as Ah Counter to go along with her role as Wordmaster/Grammarian. Ann gave us two words from which to choose: grouse and querulous. Finally, we heard from the two speech evaluators, Chris and Mitch (also doing double duty).

It's always a special meeting when we can hear an Icebreaker speech, and that was the case today as our newest member, Lauri, was our first speaker. In "The Moon and I", he told us a lot about his life up to now, particularly how the moon has figured so strongly in it. His use of moon metaphors was very apt and wonderful - great job for a first speech, Lauri!

Carol then gave us a speech from the Technical Presentations advanced manual, where the project was to present a proposal. In "The Aspirin of Life", Carol made her case that our lives could be made better by a healthy dose of spirituality. Great message for us all, Carol!

Fran then took her turn as Table Topics Master, inviting us to let loose with any querulous grousing that we wanted to do, and giving us a number of apt topics from which to choose. Our subjects of choice ranged from the upcoming election to driving to grocery shopping to people in general. Shane won Most Humorous with his multi-subject rant; Gary was awarded Most Interesting with his thoughtful list of complaints about the Electoral College; Ann was Most Eloquent as she groused about two recent TV ads that were very sexist.

Chris and Mitch led off the evaluation portion of our meeting with thoughtful evaluations of our two speakers. Both did a good job of balancing positive and negative comments; Mitch was effective in using "I" statements, which is always a good technique. We then heard from Mitch again as timer, and from Ann in her dual role of Ah Counter and Wordmaster/Grammarian. It was then left to Gary to give us the last word from Ben Franklin: "Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do."

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