Dreams and Nightmares

Despite it being a very dark and stormy night with predictions of snow on the hills, our Spinnaker Toastmasters are a resilient lot. Rather than staying home by the roaring fire, we chose to attend our 19 August meeting, and the addition of an extra heater helped keep the room warm and toasty. We even welcomed one online guest.

Chairperson Megan had a few last minute changes to deal with, and in the end we had two formal speeches, plus table topics and evaluations. Since it was World Photography Day Megan asked members to submit their favourite photo showing an aspect of their week, which were displayed on the screen and discussed. This was a great hit and added to the liveliness of the meeting.

Grammarian Jocelyn chose the word “serene” as her word of the day, which was quite the opposite to what was going on outside! However many speakers managed to insert “serene” into their speeches or comments.

Table Topics Mistress Dale chose “Dreams and Nightmares” as her theme, where speakers had to pull out of the bag either “your biggest dream” or “your worst nightmare”. Nightmares won on the night with 6, and dreams 2. On the Nightmares team, Junior described watching a horror movie, Quentin hated being on a delayed plane circling offshore, Jacqui described pushing Ron on a wheelchair through Singapore airport, Angela said getting stuck on the floor and being unable to get up was a problem, Darril fretted about arriving at an examination late and not finishing it, and Ash thought the worst when the doctor said “he’s in ICU”! On the Dreams team, Ron loved seeing all his children married, and Dieter described sitting under a waterfall in Natal as a boy and would love to revisit the place of his childhood.

Evaluator Dieter thought that having two options for table topics was a genius move and he gave each speaker something to work on for their next speech. He was awarded the Best Contribution Award by General Evaluator Jacqui. Best Table Topic Speaker was Angela.

Speech 1 by Katina entitled “Again” was a childhood story of driving from Germany to Greece with her parents, and constantly asking for a fairy story to be retold by her mother. Evaluator Angela said Katina “really nailed it” and “we were all enthralled”.

Speech 2 by Ron was entitled “The Toastmasters Promise – why are we here” but it was actually a set of three negative stories about illustrating that the virtues of the Toastmasters “Respect Integrity Service and Excellence – R.I.S.E.” were not upheld by people in the retail sales industry. Evaluator Ash said we could feel and relate this to our own lives, and Ron’s ability to jump from character to character in each story as situational roleplay was excellent.

General Evaluator Jacqui said it had totally been worth it to come out to a meeting on a dark and stormy winter’s night and she had enjoyed all the speeches and evaluations. She just reminded the speakers to give their evaluators details of their speech ahead of time so they can do the best job of introducing and evaluating.

If you would like to see how Toastmasters work and join in our fun antics, then let us know on spinnaker@toastmasters.org.nz. We’ll invite you to our next meeting on 2 September and send you an agenda. Don’t be shy, we are a friendly enthusiastic group of people who work hard to produce quality meetings, speeches and evaluations.