End of Fall Contest Sets High Expectations for Spring

 

The Fall 2020 Speech Contest was special.  Our two FSTM contestants, Jeanne Resen in Humor and Karen Alexander in Evaluation, represented us very well.

Jeanne is a humorist extraordinaire.  She'd set the bar high back in the late summer with her stage shenanigans in a Pathways speech.  She'd incorporated feedback and came back with an even more entertaining speech.  Jeanne continued to refine and never gave a revision by rote; it always seemed fresh and aglow with new ways to engage laughter.  Her main two stories were wonderfully told.  Her opening, too, was inviting and funny.  Her ending was easily the most dramatic and laugh-inducing of any I've ever seen (and I've seen lots of humorous contest speeches over the past seven years). 

One difficulty with Zoom is that there is no laugh meter for the audience.  A judge cannot truly measure the speech's fullest rating in two important areas:  audience response and effectiveness.  A judge is subject to influence only from what is observed on the flat screen.  Jeanne the actress would have worked the big stage.  As it was, the first and third place finishers could stay seated and elicit humor to satisfy those in the judgment seats.  Dada merited at least his second-place finish for his stand-up routine as a monk the past 40-odd years.

 There is no better education for a speaker than to keep refining a speech with different audiences and different techniques.  A close second is to evaluate speeches and see how your evaluation stacks up against other seasoned evaluators.  The best set of evaluators I've observed in our whole division is the team of Alicia Hughes and John Bowen.  They share two clubs together:  Blue Ridge Toastmasters and Advanced Toastmasters of Asheville.  John is the senior mentor but Alicia, with her amazing energy, is rapidly gaining ground.  Both exude enthusiastic encouragement for their speaker but allow over a minute of thoughtful recommendations, those hard to formulate grows.

Karen is the epitome of the gracious, soothing evaluator.  She makes the speaker pleased with his or her effort and accepting of a couple of tweaks to improve upon the next go round.

Four Seasons is fortunate to have both Karen and Jeanne to help set a high standard for performance and inspire us all to continue growing and learning.

We look forward to our next local contest in the spring, for late February to early March, with speeches in the inspiration category and, perhaps, table topics.  In the spirit of the showman, the intellectual, and the unstoppable heart, Don Emon, we will award a trophy that was formerly Don's to the winner of our own International Speech Contest.  This will begin the tradition of a trophy being passed on each year to the winner.  So, be thinking of being an entrant, whether a contestant or team member behind the scenes to help make this the best contest yet, and, hopefully,  NOT on Zoom.