Table Topics Tornado on 25 July (meeting 1027)

With some excellent advice from Ianon on Table Topics last meeting, and the Table Topics Contest on this week, it was the perfect time to have a Table Topics Tornado!  Everyone gets not one, but two opportunities to participate, and there were visible improvements between the first and second rounds.

Table Topics Tornado is a game where each person gets chosen at random to speak for approximately two minutes on the topics of the Table Topics Master’s choosing.  Then each person gets to evaluate the person who speaks after them, so it is not only a great opportunity to practice speaking, but a great opportunity to practice evaluation.  In the second round, a second Table Topics Master choses speakers in a different random order, and then the speakers evaluate the same person they evaluated in round one.

Peter was Table Topics Master in the first round, with a range of interesting questions including “Is something funny a way of being serious?”, “Do things go wrong at the last moment?”, “Is a cough something you cannot help, or something other people do to torment you?”, “What is the language of friendship?” and “Does money talk and is the secret to hold it long enough to hear what it is saying?”.

Keiko was the second Table Topics Master who put each of the speakers in a situation they needed to describe a reaction to.  These included “When you opened the door, what happened?”, “Mirror, mirror on the wall…”, “Mum, Mum!” (tug on the leg), “Money. You open your wallet and you have a lot”, you receive an award for “Best Australian”, “You have an invitation to meet Tony Abbott at Parliament House” and “Here is your new bike!”.

It was a pleasure to hear the more experienced members speaking – Ann with her grand gestures, Peter with his captivating tone and pace variation, Dominic with his insightful observations and detail and Keiko with her passion.  But, best of all was seeing the newer speakers performing so well.  Lili spoke confidently on both of her topics, but Nicole wins most improved showing us a glimpse of her future as a highly engaging speaker.  Also, guest (and soon to be member), Esther amazed us all with her natural speaking talent.  I (Karina)  had a great opportunity to speak about my children – twice!

Thank you to Ann for organising the Table Topics Tornado and Peter and Keiko for making it so fun.  Also thank you to Nicole our new Sargent at Arms and Dominic, our new President.

Our next gathering is this Friday 8^th August and it will be our Table Topics and Humorous Speech Contests.  Almost everyone in the club are contestants, so we would welcome any audience who would like to come and see what it’s all about.