09/27/05 Geospeakers Meeting Summary

President Chris Gutmacher rocked our meeting to order and welcomed back our VP of Education, Shane Detweiler. Under the order of club business, she gave thanks to the members who had participated in the Toastmasters Fall Humorous and Evaluation Contest held on September 23, which she had chaired. Thanks went to Gary Curtis for handling registration, Daniel Malmon for ballot counting, Carol Reiss for timing, Ann Gunderson for participating as a contestant (she placed first in the evaluation contest!), Neil Shapiro for being Toastmaster of the humorous speech contest, Fran Hostettler for serving as a judge in ALL contests, even C4's, as they did not have enough judges, and Stephanie Ross for being Chief Judge.

She also thanked Carol Reiss and Ann Gunderson (who assisted Carol's masterpiece creation) for decorating the room in Hawaiian motif. For those of you who were not able to attend, the ambience was quite something: A huge patio umbrella hung with leis from each spoke and a huge paper pineapple from the center covered the food tables, silk flower petals and colorful miniature umbrellas were scattered along the participant tables, a USGS 15 foot mural of Molokai graced the wall, Hawaiian grass skirts decorated the doorway and the front tables, and large green fronds and Hawaiian pictures were alternated with beach torchiers along the walls.

Chris gave Ann a delicious (YUM!) loaf of zucchini bread for being our Evaluation Contestant. Stephanie Ross thanked Chris for her exemplary job of chairing the contest. Congratulations to Geospeakers for all our good work!

Chris then handed the podium over to Stephanie Ross, who was our Toastmistress. Stephanie asked Ann Gunderson, Master Evaluator, to introduce her team. Daniel Malmon served as Wordmaster Grammarian, choosing as the word of the day "discord" and his instructions were to use it! Neil Shapiro was Ah Counter, Fran Hostettler was Timer. Stephanie noted that both of our speeches for the day were Icebreakers, and would be given by Irish Catholic girls.

Our first speaker was Mary Caroline (pronounced as one word) Mattly, whose speech title was "News Flash: Catholic Girl Screams on Roller Coaster". Mary Caroline gave us a very candid introduction to her speech-she refused a request by her daughter's first grade teacher to speak about Ireland because she has a fear of speaking in public. (There certainly aren't any of US who relate to that, are there?) Since Ireland is a very important subject to her, she decided to join Geospeakers! She may be a bit fearful (as many of us are, of course), but she was graceful, humorous, well organized, and eloquent. We learned that the Catholic nuns who taught her were very strict and repressive, even going so far as to slap her hands, and that, as a teenager, she enjoyed rebelling, especially along Telegraph Avenue, to the call of Love, No War, and the Peace movement of the 70s. College came next, followed by work as a counselor in half-way houses, where she found a very fine line between the staff and the residents on the "wacky" scale. She met her husband while working in high tech. Her repressive Catholic background kept showing up now and then-even when riding roller coasters, she was not able to yell and scream. She decided to change this, so if you are at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk near the roller coasters and see her, she'll be screaming along with the rest of you! (Editor's note: I am still afraid to even RIDE the roller coasters, so kudos to you, MC.) Her moving conclusion was that she wants her daughter to be able to speak her mind, but knows that she needs to be able to do this herself, first.

Imelda White was our next Icebreaker speaker. She gave us her life story through a treatment of her involvement with, and history of, the preservation of the Irish language, by creatively weaving in the events of her life with the efforts on the part of the Irish government and herself to keep the Irish language alive. Imelda was born in Ireland and, therefore, was bilingual in English and Irish at a very early age. The Irish government decreed at the time that Irish should be taught in all the schools. Imelda had good, kind teachers, loved school, and learned her Irish well. Because of the economics of the times, the young people of Ireland found it more profitable to go abroad, to England, or the States, and, therefore, felt that the Irish language was not so useful to them. After graduating from college, Imelda found a job in Germany, met her husband there, and remained for 10 years. Learning language was very easy for her, and she became fluent in German, as well. Although she kept herself fluent in Irish through her years in the United States, her jobs at Stanford University did not allow her to devote much time to teaching it. Since she has retired in the last couple of years, she has had more time to do so. Just recently, she attended a Total Immersion Language weekend given by Irish language enthusiasts and is in the process of getting her EU accreditation to be a teacher of the Irish language anywhere in the world.

Great speeches by our Irish Catholic girls!

It would have been hard to follow two such excellent Icebreaker speeches if it had not been for our Shane, who turned the tables in Table Topics and had us debate for and against 6 issues, in pairs, since his topic for the day was controversy. First off, Ann and Fran debated the pros and cons of rebuilding New Orleans. Fran won this round with her geologically sound reasons for not building on this fragile site, although Ann made a thoroughly reasonable plea to keep our city in the middle of our country, and our gumbo and our jazz. Secondly, Neil and Carol squared off on the vegetarian issue. Neil was not corny at all, and impressed us with the importance of bean healthy, and said lettuce not forget the protein in legumes. Carol countered with "Got Beef?", and said there was nothing better than a good rare steak. But steak took it on the shoulder this time, corn and beans winning out. Shane decided to make things a little more lively, so Daniel argued the pros of public nudity. Clothes are a shackle, said Daniel, and noted a class at Berkeley, where one student appeared nude. Stephanie pointed out how unpleasant it would have been to sit in his sweaty seat in the next class, and that the risk of sunburn should preclude such activities. They ended up in a tie-should we wear just shorts and go barefoot for awhile? Chris and Gary next debated the legalization of marijuana, Chris for the intellectual and emotional broadening of our horizons, Gary against marijuana because it is basically smoking, thereby harming our lungs. Chris came out ahead, although, after eating the green bread she gave me, I cannot remember for certain! Lastly, Imelda and Mary Caroline faced each other on the issue of SUVs, Imelda arguing that they were a wonderful, useful vehicle in which you could transport so many children at one time and Mary Caroline that, actually, they were usually only transporting only one child, and that they were a pretty disgusting thing. Two passionate Irish women arguing it out-came out a tie! Mary Caroline and Fran tied for Most Eloquent, Daniel and Stephanie tied again for Most Humorous, and Chris took Most Interesting. Note: Everyone received at least one vote.

Our Evaluation Team then did its work. Gary credited Mary Caroline with a moving and very honest and eloquent speech about-speaking, and Carol complimented Imelda on telling us about herself, while at the same time introducing a research theme, and doing such a good job of both. Daniel performed a stellar job as first-time Wordmaster Grammarian, Fran gave timely reports on timing, and Neil chastised us just a bit for a little more lip smacking than ah-ing.

We closed our meeting with an explanation of our October 11th meeting, which will be a "Backwards Meeting". This means that we will start with the Last Word and end with the Call to Order, doing everything in reverse order. This will work out in the following way, for example: If you are the Wordmaster-Grammarian, your end of meeting report will be given first, and you might say that Carol, Shane and Sharon were the only people to use the word of the day, which might be "deciduous". Then Carol, Shane and Sharon will have to use the word "deciduous", but no one else may. If you are evaluating a speech, you might say that the speaker spoke too loudly. Then, the speaker will have to talk quite loudly. For timing, if the timer says you spoke for 1.5 minutes for table topics, that's how long you need to speak. And so on. If you have a role, be thinking how you can make things fun! Our Table Topics Master, Carol Reiss, will be letting us know afterwards what our theme for the day was.

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