April 23th

The Toastmaster of the day was Christa, as a first time toastmasters! She had a busy schedule, with two ten to twelve minute speeches. During the meeting she told us about some of her first, like her first time going on a boat for work, and being sick. The general evaluator was Lee, who said that one thing our evaluators need to work on is making sure that we are using the sandwich method when evaluating since both evaluations lacked a balance of good statements and constructive criticisms.
There were two speakers, Peter and Lauralee. Peter speech on a fictional business he was "running" to give an example about the mindset of ruling through overpowering your employees, and intimidation. His theme was motivation in the tongue and cheek speech. He used three baseball bats to emphasize his speech. In his speech, he talked about calling business owners to have them buy into his product. Peter also talked about how it does not matter how his "employees" made the deal, but they needed to make the deal. Laimons was the evaluator for Peter's speech who said he would have liked to hear the steps of a business plan he was presenting. One thing Laimons did say was he added humor into a speech that could have been boring, and that he used the bats as a good prop.
Lauralee was the second speaker, evaluated by Dave. In her speech, she talked about the soul of Spain, and how the music is the heart and mind of a country. She went back through history to show how Rome had taken over the country for six centuries, and then the Moors took over for another 700 years until Christopher Columbus came to America. After giving a brief history of the country, Lauralee showed examples of their music. Because of the Moors, flamenco music came to be as a combination of Moorish scales from the Moors, and Greek scales from the Roman influence, a combination found only in Spain. Another example she gave was how the Catholic church employed several musicians, who travelled back to Rome and brought their ideas to Spain, creating songs like Ave Virgo Sanctissima (Hail Holy Virgin). Dave was her evaluator who said that she did not make enough of a connection between the history of Spain and why it was relevant to the music. He also said that he did not like how much time she spent on the history of Spain because the music was the topic of the speech.
There were no table topics today because of the length of both speeches. John, a prospective member, stepped in as timer today. Brian was the grammarian of the day.