Toastmasters tonight

I was supposed to be evaluating one of the prepared speeches but a couple of our speakers can’t make it so things have been changed around.

Instead I’m Table Topics Master. It’s an interesting role… you get to stand up and, to a certain extent, be the focus of attention… but on the other hand you can’t let your creativity run riot. You have to set table topics questions which are fun and interesting but not too difficult – especially as we usually try to get our guests to come up and speak during Table Topics.

The first time I was TT Master the theme I set was “Spinning Bad News Into Good” and had people pretend to be politicians taking subjects like “an earthquake has just flattened downtown Vancouver” and tell us why this was good news. We can safely say it was one of the harder Table Topics sessions!

Tonight’s meeting theme is “New Beginning”… and what’s the ultimate “beginning”? Why, a birth of course! So I’m going to be presenting the names of several people born on the 7th August and asking people to talk about them. I’m not expecting anybody (apart from me!) to know who Alexei Sayle is – it’s more for people to just talk randomly for two minutes about what they imagine when they see the name they’ve picked. And then I’ve got 15 seconds of info to give after their speech about who the person actually was. I think it could go down quite well – wish me luck!