In the US the 23rd May is the lucky penny day. To choose this day as theme for our Toastmaster evening was a creative idea from our Toastmaster of the evening Alexya.
Wow. Our club is growing. We had the pleasure to vote in two new members to the club, Pio and Paul. Welcome to you both. You are a great contribution to the club. Paul, who is located in New York, even managed to join the club in person. Thanks, Paul for coming all the way. It was so good to get to know you in person.
Sybille welcomed our three guests Gianluca, Valentin and Nadja who participated well in the course of the evening. Alexya explained the agenda and introduced her team: Poorana took the role as General Evaluator, Oliver was the Grammarian, Sybille functioned as Ah Counter and Pio took the times. Oliver spontaneously introduced the word of the day: flabbergasted, which was used 8 times in the evening.
The table topics questions were presented by Jeff which were in line with the theme of the evening.
1. Do you believe finding a penny will bring you luck or do you consider it as nonsense?
Paul shared with us how a series of positive actions helped him to reach the airport in time. For him luck is a blessing.
2. There are many national days, e.g. barbeque day, children’s day, etc. If you could choose your own national day what would you pick?
Pio’s choice would be the gratitude day. We should all be more content with the circumstances we have in our life.
3. In what way has luck made a difference in your life?
Nadja has a partner who is always lucky. To be with him has given her lots of luck.
4. Quote by Thomas Jefferson: “I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work the more I have”. Do you agree with this quote.
Valentin does not agree. Hard work cannot promote luck, and one can end up working too much.
5. How do you think the tradition of finding a lucky penny had developed? Sybille refers to the past when a penny had some worth and some people struggled hard to earn it. For them finding a penny really was great luck.
We had one prepared speech. Sriram talked about his griefing process after the death of this mother and how he got an answer to two questions that have haunted him ever since by a grief councellor.
In this very emotional speech Sriram excelled at a great number of rhethorical devices. Great pauses. Change of positions when different persons were talking. Excellent message. Caroline had a hard job to evaluate Srirams excellent speech. It was hard to find something to improve. Maybe he could have skipped the statistics he used as intro to his speech.
The award session was restricted to the table topics. The best table topic speaker was Paul.
“Don’t minimize the importance of luck in determining life’s course.” —Alex Trebek(Thanks to our President Sybille for this great recap.)
Join us for our next meeting on the 13th of June(on-line meeting).
Best Toastmaster greetings,
Jeff, Mannheim Int. Toastmasters
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Here is a photo of the meeting:
