a fish tale

So I mentioned in my last Toastmasters post that I had signed up to be topicmaster for the Table Topics portion of the next meeting. Well, the next meeting was Wednesday. I was fresh back from my trip to Savannah and waited the next couple days for an email from the Toastmaster regarding the theme of the meeting. This email came Tuesday in the the form of a plea from the Toastmaster for someone to step in for him because he forgot that he was supposed to be Toastmaster and he also had forgotten that his company was having their annual golf outing on the same day. So I picked my own topic....fairs and festivals....and set to work.

We had talked about props at the last meeting so from my theme of fairs and festivals I came up with a carnival game of Go Fish for Your Question. It's harder than you think to come up with five decent questions on a topic.

Here are my five.
1. When I was a girl I belonged to a 4-H club. I baked a cake and sewed a skirt that I entered into the fair. What skill or talent do you possess that may make you consider entering something into the fair?
2. There are so many kinds of fairs and festivals...art, music and film for example. If you could host a festival, what would it be?
3. Fairs and festivals have entertained folks for centuries. If you could go back in time and live in a different era, what would that era be and why?
4. It seems that you can get any food fried at the fair. I've even heard of fried Coca-Cola. If you had a food stand at the fair, what food would you offer fair-goers?
5. I remember how exciting the midway was to me when I was a child. What is your favorite game, ride or activity at the fair?

Table topics is designed to make people think on their feet. We had two speeches scheduled for the day. One of the speakers cancelled so all we had left was Kevin McCue from my village of Williamsville and our District 65 of Toastmasters who is a finalist in the Toastmasters International Speech Contest. Yes, he has made it all the way to finalist in a worldwide speech contest and he was trying out his speech on us. I had plenty of time for all five of my questions.

I started with my little spiel about how summer is the season of fairs and festivals so I chose that theme for the meeting. Then how based on this theme I had derived(word of the day that I easily worked in and got points for because I was going to say came up with before finding out that derive was the word of the day)a carnival game of Go Fish. "This is a game of fate and chance" I barked. "Fate because you determine your own fate by fishing for your own question and chance because you get a chance to express yourself and win a prize. So step right up Ladies and Gentlemen. Who would like to take a chance?" I really did have prizes....disposable mechcanical pencils.

People stepped up, fished out their question, handed it to me. I read them the question and they gave a little 1 to 2 minute speech on it. Some people really seemed to enjoy the fishing process and acted out the part of snaggging a fish.

So again this went over well. I received many compliments on a job well performed although everyone receives a lot of encouragement in Toastmasters so I'm not going to let it give me a swollen head. But I do feel that I did well and isn't that the point?