April 11th meeting

Today we welcomed a new member to our club, River, who is a life coach and likes to act. We also had a visitor to our club today, named John.
The Toastmaster of the day was Paul, who talked about how adults can still have fun. He claimed that playing and having fun does not end with childhood but should continue throughout your life. At the end, to prove that adults can still be childlike, he threw cotton snowballs at us. Avital was the general evaluator for the day, and suggested the evaluations focus on the speaker, but also be general enough for everyone.
There were two speakers today, Dave and Lee. Dave spoke first on how he wanted to be an airborne ranger, and got his wings. He talked about how he was called a TURD, Trainee Under Rigorous Development, and they got to do a lot of exercising. They even were woken up in the middle of the night to do PT. After awhile, they got to learn how to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. During the jumps, the jumps got progressively harder. One day, Dave said he questioned whether he really wanted to go out of the plane in the darkness of night. After jumping out of that plane, and being stuck in a tree with his lines crossed for over an hour, he decided he no longer wanted to be a ranger. Peter was the evaluator for Dave's speech. He said that while Peter had heard this speech before, he liked how Dave brought his life into each of his speeches, and complimented Dave's storytelling ability. Another thing Peter said is that he liked how he added the whimper and sound effects to the story.  One thing he warned against is rocking while he is talking to the audience.
Lee spoke about the pinewood derby that happened this last weekend. He brought in a box of pinewood derby cars to help demonstrate what the derby is like. In the speech, Lee showed how each of the kids gets a car building kit, and what that looked like. Next he showed how they would piece together the cars. After that, he took several cars from his box to show what the cars could look like. Some of the cars he brought were made by his children, and some were examples from other people. Lastly, he showed a picture of the different cars that raced last weekend. Lauralee was Lee's speech evaluator. She complimented him on giving so many examples and bringing us into his story with word pictures, like his example of a dad who brought in the car "his kid made" on a velvet pillow with tassels. Another thing Lauralee brought up was talking to the box while he was getting his examples out.
Laimons was the Table Topics Master, who asked about several topics. He asked Peter advice he would give his children about choosing a career. Peter said he had been asked by his daughter about what she should do. He told his daughter to do something that will sustain her and that she liked, at least a little. Later she could do something that she liked, as she split her time between the two activities. She now works with tracking atmospheric data, and plays in a jazz ensemble. John, a visitor to our meeting, was asked about singing. Laimons asked what makes a good singer, to which John said something about the person's voice needs to be unique and recognizable to make it in the music industry. He also said they need the basic features about singing, such as good pitch and being able to carry a tune. John won table topics today.