"TODAY BROUGHT HUMOUR ALL THE WAY!"

HUMOUR ALL THE WAY!

It’s well known in Pania circles, that we love humour and fun, while also being serious about what we do. Our meeting on 5 April was no exception as both speeches today were specifically humorous, which seemed to infect our members with the laughter bug.

Naturally, it takes someone to infect others and that task today fell to our long-time humourist, Graeme who chaired the meeting. He met and greeted everyone with his usual friendly and sometimes cheeky humour – this immediately ensured we were in a humorous frame of mind at the start of the meeting.

First up was Tamara, who read the Mission Statement with a large smile accompanied by energy, vigour and passion!  Toastmaster Graeme quickly gave apologies from Darryl, Jane, Russell and Sandy, then correctly asked for them to be moved, seconded and received.

The formalities over, Graeme invited Patrick to introduce first speaker Carol.  Patrick explained the purpose of Carol’s speech - Humorously Speaking manual, assignment # 1, Warm up your audience.  He followed with a warm invitation to deliver her speech titled ‘Cowboys and Mexicans’.   This speech assignment requires the speaker to open with a joke, so Carol promptly donned her Stetson and immediately began with a very funny and slightly risqué joke. She followed with a hat change, a Mexican Sombrero of course, as she delivered story after story, all relevant to the occasion of a family member’s significant birthday.     

Patrick evaluated  Carol’s speech –somehow he managed to write his notes in between the laughter and delivered a credible and useful evaluation.  In completing his evaluation, Patrick was also  completing another step of his Pathway, which was subsequently evaluated on-line by the General Evaluator.

Whether by design or not, our second Speaker, Mike, was given an excellent warm up with Carol’s speech and the group was ready for something special. Jen warmly introduced Mike, who recently won our Area D2 International Spech Contest.  This was an opportunity to refine his speech and test it on a live audience. His topic and title is deliberately not included in this missive as we don’t want to give anything away. Mike’s speech is highly entertaining, yet also contains a current and appropriate message on a topic that is definitely not humorous.

Jen demonstrated her professionalism by chairing a group evaluation – the best way to give Mike on point feedback. Jen handled the open session extremely well, allowing everyone to have a say and repeated the given suggestions which helped Mike digest the helpful comments.     We sincerely wish Mike the very best on 14 April when he travels to Taupo for the Division D finals.

Table Topics were delivered by Linda who once again showed her prowess in creating interesting topics and an overall theme of cultural differences. She framed each question around those differences, such as food, dress, mannerisms etc, yet was also able to frame them so that the selected speakers could put themselves into a specific cultural space to explain what they would do in that instance. All speakers were able to answer very well and again, touches of humour were included.

The Table Topics session was evaluated by Craig, who expertly congratulated Linda on her introduction, explanations and choice of topics. He also gave each speaker something valuable to take away.

Kristy, our first-time timekeeper today, expertly managed to keep track of times  and delivered a succinct, appropriate report. 

To close, this was a highly enjoyable meeting and all members would have left with a raised level of endorphins! There’s nothing like a healthy dose of humour to help us on our way!

A sincere thank you to everybody who contributed to the programme, and that was everybody today!!

As mentioned, we wish our two contestants well in the Division finals in Taupo on Saturday 14th April, Mike in The International Speech Contest and President, Marc in the Evaluation Contest.

Can we bring home to the Bay both Trophies again as we did last year?? YES WE CAN!!

LAUREL