Luciana was our Toastmaster of the Day. She conducted the meeting very cheerfully and efficiently. She had asked the speakers what their favorite festival was, so since we have members from all around the globe there was input from Moldavia, Brazil, the U.S. , Holland, Philippines, China (not to mention downtown Valladolid).
Anselmo was out first speaker, who executed Project 2 (Organize Your Speech) with a very piquant speech called “Desire, Sex and Love” that had our Toastmaster of the Day rolling around in stitches. He took us through the different “breathtaking emotions that explode within us”…
The next speaker to brave the podium was Lilian with a Project 7 speech (Research Your Topic). Her speech was entitled “Something about sharing the economy” which took us through crowdfunding, AirBnB, car sharing and the importance of trust.
Raquel, Anselmo’s evaluator commended him for a very brave speech but suggested he kept his energy going throughout the speech.
Jim, Lilian’s evaluator, thought it was a good speech but that Lilian should avoid looking at the wall and ceiling for inspiration and that there weren’t enough statistics. (Somehow he got on to the subject of the President of the US….I wonder why)
Eric doing Table Topics impressed us with a blue file with lots of pockets that contained words and a question. His three “victims” (Jaime, Bobby and Julian) had the “opportunity” of answering the question using five of the words.
Carlos, evaluating Eric, congratulated him on the original idea and preparation, but he felt the exercise had been rather complicated.
Maria, our Grammarian then started wrapping up the meeting. She berated us for not using the word of the day enough which was “nuance”.
Alex A. gave us our times, berating two of our speakers for running off at the yellow light when they still had one minute to go.
Bobby our visiting DTM from China and General Evaluator, said how much he had liked both us and the meeting. He complemented Luciana on successfully bridging the gap between the speakers and the audience. He then came to the defense of Lilian, pointing out that in his opinion she had in fact done plenty of research which was visible on the graphs she handed out. This had enabled the audience to get the point even better but he felt the content of her visual aids had been overlooked by her evaluator. Luciana was delighted with the present he handed her for our club at the end of his evaluation and Bobby left the stage wishing us all a very happy Year of the Sheep.
Jaime, our President, reminded us of our Speech and Evaluation competition on 4th March and Raquel closed the meeting.
And, not only we discovered Anselmo’s favourite toy as a kid, but he also shared with us his favourite book; because, the meeting agenda contained a first short talk known as “Book of the day”. Anselmo related how “Our Ancestors” by Italo Calvino made a long-lasting impression on him, since the first time he read the book: “I thought what Don Quixote must have thought”. Prepared speeches are always the core part of every Toastmasters meeting, and on February, 4th we recorded them for the first time.
Music, music was in the title of Pilar’s speech “What music means to us”, but mainly in the content: she explained her feelings towards this artistic expression, scientific facts related to music, she played the guitar and she sang, even including the Word of the Day: Fringe. Our Grammarian José was shocked.
