Meeting Notes - August 11

The Middlesex County Toastmasters met on Thursday, August 11th, at Luther Ridge, Middletown.

Members Present: Tom Alvord, Anne-Marie Cannata, Jennifer Cimilluca, Margarita Giraldo, Charnaie Gordon, Helena Grey, Steven Grey, Jonathan Herron, Kay Jeyapalan, John Keppler, Jacqueline Kirwan, Michael Nicastre, Sally Nicastre, Emily O’Brien, Michael O’Brien, Ramesh Padavala, Murali Pemmaraju, Michele Rousseau, Judy Thompson.

Guest Present: Adam Herman.

Our Sergeant-at-Arms, Jonathan, opened the meeting and turned it over to the club President, Kay. Kay thanked Murali and Michael O’Brien (the evening’s Toastmaster) for organizing the meeting amidst last-minute changes.

Our Toastmaster for the evening was Michael O’Brien, and our theme was “Get Motivated!”

Our Wordmaster was Charnaie, who used the game “Hangman” to present the Word of the Day, “Actuate” (to incite, or to put into action).

The Invocator, Tom, read us the poem, “The Dash” by Linda Ellis.

Our Humorist, Michael Nicastre, told us a joke about Mary and Maude, two women who met outside the gates of Heaven.

Jacqueline, our Table Topics Master, gave questions about motivation to Jonathan, Steven, Judy, Anne-Marie, Margarita, and Michael Nicastre.

We had four prepared speeches:

Our guest Adam, gave a speech called “Broken Politics in America”, which he will be presenting in a college class. His speech was evaluated by Anne-Marie.

Sally presented a speech from the CC manual (Project #5, Your Body Speaks), “Good with the Bad, and Bad with the Good” was evaluated by Ramesh.

Helena’s speech, “The Waiting Game” was Project #2 in the CC manual (Organize Your Speech). Her speech was evaluated by Murali.

Michele gave a speech called “Do you Need a Life Coach?”. Her speech, Project #3 from the CC (Get to the Point) was evaluated by Emily.

Our General Evaluator was Jen, assisted by the Timer (Tom), Grammarian (John), and Ah Counter (Charnaie).

Jen noted that the meeting started on time with the room set up very nicely (in a horseshoe shape, the best use of the room at Luther Ridge that we’d ever had). There was a table with the duty roster for future meetings, guest book, and more, nicely laid out. Charnaie had a fun way to present the Word of the Day (the game of Hangman). Jen liked that Michael read out each objective from the CC manual for each speech, so the group knew what to listen and watch for during each speech. Jacqueline was careful during Table Topics to try to call on those who didn’t have other roles in the meeting, and coordinated with the Toastmaster to stay on time. It was apparent there was coordination between speakers and evaluators before the meeting, so the evaluators knew which areas were of especial interest to the speakers. Anne-Marie and John stepped into roles at the last minute, and it was nice to see the CL manual emphasized (Jacqueline mentioned that Table Topics speaker is a role for some CL projects, and CL manuals were seen being passed around during and after the meeting). The podium was left empty a couple of times – a speaker would sit down before the Toastmaster or Table Topics Master came back up to the podium.

There was one piece of closing business – the club received a ribbon for our banner after we “Beat the Clock” by having five new members join the club between May 1st and June 30th.

The meeting ended shortly after 9pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Jennifer Cimilluca
Middlesex County Toastmasters Club