by Farlan Dowell

Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow Toastmasters, fellow guests: I’ll save you the suspense of reading to the end of the blog entry and just tell you now, this was an Earth Day meeting, like no other, we had it all: Old School Toastmasters, Taupe suits, the unveiling of the new Santa Monica Place, anthropomorphic table topics…Robert, our wayward Grandmaster returning after a short hiatus with a beard! – I mean, what more can you ask for?

Nita Lane Smith, our distinguished President got us off to a superb start with her high energy, enthusiastic approach – and set the tone for the entire meeting.
Dazelle took the reins as our Old School Toastmaster after a heck-of-an-intro by Nita. Dazelle regaled us with her personal experience in Toastmasters, looking ever-so-professional in her Taupe suit, she talked about how she started way back in 2000, and has found this to be a wonderful group where people come together with a common purpose – to communicate, and this evening we come together to remember that we need to preserve and sustain the earth so we can pass that on to generation to come. She also chided us for being slackers – I’m not sure what that was all about, but I think it was directed towards David Fetterman, as we don’t receive nearly enough emails from him.

We had a knock-out lineup of evaluators: Richard Kim was timer (“Everything is timed because our time on this earth is finite”), Aye Aung was our eager grammarian, and gave an extremely thorough Grammarians report, and, uh, Karrie was our er ah counter. A fine job done by all, including Nita who kicked us off as JokeMaster.
Gary, our esteemed charter member, and the alchemist of club 638, was on point this evening providing a Table Topics session that even Mother Nature would have been intimidated by. The questions were actually a lot of fun, and everyone who was asked, was very creative and clearly had a chance to improve their impromptu speaking skills.

After a short break, we got underway with our prepared speeches, and had a great lineup: Bob talked about the Santa Monica Place and the trials and tribulations of building a 10 acre complex, which he is heading up, Alex, our second speaker, complained that there were no tennis courts in India (while spreading a very valuable message: take a risk, you never know where it will lead), Michelle talked about Chickens (not a typo) which was very informative, and Gary Binas, in preparing for the 2010 International Competition gave a fantastic speech about learning from your mistakes. Kudos to all the speakers on a great job! The level of speaking at our club continues to be second-to-none.

We then had evaluations of the speeches, which is always valuable in reinforcing what was good, and also pointing out opportunities for growth. Maarten, David, Robert and Farlan were evaluating this evening with the head honcho, chief evaluator Laverne, leading the evaluation team with an effective commentary on how the meeting went down, summary: it was all good.

And now to the news you really care about – the winner s of the evening: Jon won for best Table Topics, Robert for best evaluator, and Gary Binas for best speaker, who was kind enough to acknowledge the great job that Alex did on his second speech – and passed the ribbon to him! In a show of good faith, Jon gave his ribbon to the waiter, and Robert planted his ribbon into the earth – sending it back to its home. A bizarre twist, but apparently that’s how we roll over on the West Side. Happy Earth Day!
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By Farlan Dowell