April 2008 South Main Monthly

South Main Monthly Vol. 3 No. 4

South Main Speakers, District 56, Club 8609

April 2008

The mission of the Toastmasters club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth.

In This Issue

• President's Corner

President’s Corner

• Anniversaries Renay Jacob, Ranjith Poduval, Vivek Rajan

• Calendar of Events Tennis/Wii Tennis Grand Slam Tournament Division International Speech and Evaluation Contests

• Features “Clown School 101” by Erika Parrish “Destination Marfa, Pop. 2,121 + 1” by Vivian Li Photos from Special Evaluation Education Session

• Ask the Master How to get a standing ovation?

The South Main Monthly is a monthly publication of the South Main Speakers Toastmasters club. We meet every Sunday at 1:30 p.m. in 10305 South Main Street (Houston Chinese Church), Room 411. For more information, please visit our website at: http://groups.msn.com/southmainspeakers If you have any comments, contributions, or suggestions concerning this or future issues, please send them to [email protected]. Thank you for reading! -Vivek Rajan, Editor

April Grand Slam! By Vivian Li, CC What a way to start out our grand slam month of April with the excellent Education Session on evaluation and the magnificent speeches heard at the area contest from the last days of March still lingering on our minds. Congratulations to Jian Wang for placing 2nd in the Evaluation Contest, and yours truly for placing 3rd in the International Speech Contest! Thank you to all who participated and consider competing in the fall contests, they’ll be here before you know it! Kudos to Jan Poscovsky and your VP-Education Jian Wang for successfully leading an enlightening and important education session on how to give effective evaluations. Most of us may have joined Toastmasters to improve our public speaking skills, but we all soon learn how integral good evaluation skills are to our personal development too, from giving constructive feedback to a colleague to choosing which restaurant to eat at for lunch. And now on to what's in store for us this month. Many thanks to Grace and Bob Hu, who have generously invited us to their home to hold our inaugural Grand Slam Doubles Tennis/Wii Tennis Tournament! I hope many of you will be inspired by the beautiful weather to practice your swing for this event on April 20. Sign up to participate with our lovely Toastmaster for this event, Mary Deng. And make sure to bring your friends, it'll be a great opportunity to introduce more people to Toastmasters!

Anniversaries

Renay Jacob, ACS, CL, celebrates his five-year anniversary with South Main Speakers this month! April 20: Grand Slam Tennis/Wii Tennis Tournament

Ranjith Poduval celebrates his first anniversary with South Main Speakers this month!

Vivek Rajan, CC, celebrates his two-year anniversary with South Main Speakers this month!

New Member Spotlight Last month we had a new member join our club! Please give a warm welcome to our newest member – Gufeng Xu.

Interested in playing tennis? Our club is starting a tennis tournament for the first time this spring! On the 20th of April, we’ll have a regular toastmasters meeting at Grace and Bob’s house, and it’ll followed by a tennis doubles tournament! And don’t worry if you are not a tennis player, we are also having a Wii tennis tournament! Cheerleaders are also needed. If you are interested, sign up with the event Toastmaster, Mary Deng, at [email protected].

Survivor Membership Contest Update What an exciting game! We have a lot of people fighting to win the grand prize of a $100 bucks (also 2nd place $30, 3rd place $15) and it’s still anybody’s game! Here are the twelve top leaders in no particular order: Annie Brenda Mary Jeanne Renay Bob Grace Shabnam Steffan Jian Francis

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Clown School 101

Clown Basics What is a clown? What is a clown? A clown is basically a walking, breathing Looney Tune character come to life. A clown is willing to humiliate himself in order to exalt his audience, whether it’s an audience of one or one thousand. A clown is a beacon of love, life, and joyfulness. There is a difference between a comedian and a clown. Comedians say and do funny things; clowns do things in a funny way. What are the requirements to be a clown? Do you enjoy making people happy? Do you like working with people, particularly children? Do you have a sense of humor? Does seeing people smile and laugh with you and at you make you feel good? If you answered "yes" to most of these questions, then you are good clown material. To be a clown, it has to come from your heart. It’s your job to bring joy to people's lives. A word of caution and this is very important. Clowns make things funny at the expense of themselves, never at the expense of others. If there is ever a bad thing to happen such as getting a pie in the face or getting sprayed with water, it must happen to the clown. Choosing a clown name For many clowns, choosing a name comes naturally from the character they want to portray. For others, it comes from a nickname. But you want your clown name to be unique, distinct, and special. Regardless, find a name that fits your character and that you are comfortable with.

By Erika Parrish

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must be true to your character. As with your make up and costume, you may fine-tune it or change it over time as you become more familiar with your character. Balloon Art & Silly Tricks

Erika as Bubbles the clown

Look like a clown You could easily spend a fortune on fancy costumes and spend a long time applying makeup. Or you can begin by wearing over sized clothes or clothes that just don’t match. Remember, it's not the clothes, or the make up, that makes the clown. It’s what's inside that comes shining out that makes the clown. Your clown comes from you. Perhaps it's a part of your personality you normally repress, or one of your favorite traits that you magnify a thousand-fold. Perhaps it's a part of you that you fantasize about. Perhaps it's several of these combined. Whatever it is, for it to be clowning, it must be funny, and it

You don’t have to go to Clown school to learn how to make balloon hats or animals. I learned from reading books! A great book to learn how to make basic balloon art is: Captain Visual’s Big Book of Balloon Art. It has step by step instructions with lots of pictures. Again when it comes to silly tricks, you don’t have to spend a lot of money. There are lots of tricks you can do with a just a deck of cards. I personally love silly stuff. Once I had a clown bake sale and claimed to be selling brownies out of an Easy Bake Oven. It was nothing more than a sandwich bag filled with foam brown letter “Es! Get it- BROWN “E”s!!!!

More balloon art

Balloon hat designed by Erika

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located in the Swiss Alps. Ever since visiting Napa Valley in California, I have started having an appreciation for the many varieties of cheese and their distinct flavors. And I don’t mean just American and cheddar. Destination: Marfa, Pop. 2,121 + 1 by Vivian Li, CC As I am inching closer and closer to the dreaded life milestone of being a trigenarian (I know this arcane vocabulary goes against what I’m supposed to already have learned from the CC Speech Project 4: How to Say It, but this is not a speech), I’m forced by various people (ie parents) to reevaluate the direction of my life and if it’s going toward a “goal.” But life goals today are not so clear cut as they might have been in my parent’s, I mean past generations. In this generation (where are we at now, Gen Z or back to A?), the proverbial house with a white picket fence will no longer do. That’s boring, we want more.

Davis Mountains (at sunset) surround Marfa

My short term goal is to become an art curator at a museum and organize exciting exhibitions. My long term goal however, weighs on the eccentric side. When I retire one day from my life as a successful art curator, I would like to become a cheese connoisseur and run a cheese hut among the community of over a hundred cheese huts

James Dean on location during filming of Giant

If that long term goal doesn’t pan out though, or if I find that hut life doesn’t suit me, my back up goal is to stay closer to home and take up residence in Marfa to open their first ever Chinese restaurant. “What is Marfa?” you might ask. Located about 10 hours west of Houston, Marfa is actually a destination for everybody—thrill seekers can get their fix doing hang gliding over the beautiful mountains, people looking for the paranormal can search at night for the famed Marfa Lights, film buffs can visit the James Dean paraphernalia located at the original film set where they shot locally the movie Giant, star gazers can go to the state-of-theart UT Austin MacDonald Observatory, artsy people can enjoy the internationally renowned museum of installation art at the Chinati Foundation as well as the 20 plus galleries in town, and people who just want to be left alone and/or weird without anybody knowing it can just go to Marfa and be.*

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Installation artworks at Chinati Foundation

These are just a few of the many offerings of a small town with a population of just over 2,000 people and only one stoplight. Several people—artists, writers, and the quirky—restless of the urban and suburban lifestyle have especially since the 1990s been attracted by the offerings of this pristine desert town in west Texas and flocked to Marfa to add to the charm to this precious treasure out in west Texas. Coffee drinkers can find an excellent cup of joe at the Brown Recluse that is run by Austin expats. Then follow that with an amazingly tasteful breakfast at the Austin Street Café operated by ex-New Yorkers. Then have lunch at the legendary, yet non-descript Pizza Foundation, where the too-good-to-betrue-in-a-the-middle-of-nowhere-WestTexas pizzas are personally hand-tossed by ex-Rhode Islanders. Or you can go to the mobile lunch counter called the Food Shark, parked right outside the town’s bookshop, to devour their famous delicious Marfalafal.

In this quiet but at the same time dynamic town though I saw one thing oddly missing—the quintessentially all-American Chinese restaurant. This seemed like such a shocking lack in such a hip and cool place as Marfa. So in case my cheese hut dreams in the Alps go unrealized (chances are they will), bringing Chinese food to Marfians will be my alternate ultimate life goal. But in the meantime, I encourage you to visit Marfa, it’s worth visiting more than once, especially once my Chinese restaurant opens.

Prada Marfa store alone on the side of the highway

* Though those who are avid shoppers of Prada might be disappointed to know that the one Prada store in town (or for hundreds of miles around for that matter) is forever closed, though the wares of purses and shoes are proudly on display. This is an art installation of a real Prada store built in the middle of nowhere on the one highway through Marfa. Merchandise was donated by Prada to the artists.

The Food Shark attracts food lovers from all over

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Evaluating with Jan Jan Poscovsky, DTM, Division M Governor, and VP-Education for Master Evaluators Toastmasters, among the many other hats she wears, gave a special education session on effectively giving evaluations during our March 30 meeting. Everybody enjoyed her speech on evaluations and her evaluation of the volunteer evaluators afterwards.

Jeanne and Steffan, volunteer evaluators, enjoy a laugh

Jan giving her speech on evaluations

Volunteer evaluator Renay listens pensively to Art

Our test speaker Erika delivering her speech

Our test speaker Erika delivering her speech

Jan and Jian, who coordinated with Jan the successful session Brenda and Jian getting tips from Jan afterwards

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Ask the Master Dear Master, 3. After I give speeches at my Toastmasters club, I get applause from the audience, but what do I need to do to get a standing ovation? — Sincere Student Dear Sincere, 4. To get a standing ovation, your speech has to be outstanding, but it’s something that is achievable with some practice. I will give you a few tips that you can incorporate in your speeches to help you get a standing ovation. Apply them in all your speeches until it becomes your second nature, and then a standing ovation is sure to come your way! Here are the tips: 1. Have something interesting to say. This is 80% of the battle. If you have something interesting to say, then it's much easier to give a great speech. If you have nothing to say, you should not speak. End of discussion. It's better to decline the opportunity so that no one knows you don't have anything to say than it is to make the speech and prove it. 2. Focus on entertaining. Many speech coaches will disagree with this, but the goal of a speech is to entertain the audience. If people are entertained, you can slip in a few nuggets of information. But if your speech is deathly dull, no amount of information will make it a great speech. If I had to pick between entertaining and informing an

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audience, I would pick entertaining-knowing that informing will probably happen too. Understand the audience. If you can prove to your audience in the first few minutes that you understand who they are, you've got them for the rest of the speech. All you need to understand is the trends, competition, and key issues that the audience faces. This simply requires consultation with the host organization and a willingness to customize your introductory remarks. This ain't that hard. Overdress. Never dress beneath the level of the audience. That is, if they're wearing suits, then you should wear a suit. To underdress is to communicate the following message: “I'm smarter/richer/more powerful than you. I can insult you and not take you serious, and there's nothing you can do about it.” This is hardly the way to get an audience to like you. Tell stories. The best way to relax when giving a speech is to tell stories. Any stories. Stories about your youth. Stories about your kids. Stories about your customers. Stories about things that you read about. When you tell a story, you lose yourself in the storytelling. You're not “making a speech” anymore. You're simply having a conversation. Good speakers are good storytellers; great speakers tell stories that support their message. Pre-circulate with the audience. True or false: the audience wants your speech to go well. The answer is True. Audiences don't want to see you fail--for one thing, why would people want to waste their time listening to you fail? And here's the

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way to heighten your audience's concern for you: circulate with the audience before the speech. Meet people. Talk to them. Let them make contact with you. Especially the ones in the first few rows; then, when you're on the podium, you'll see these friendly faces. Your confidence will soar. You will relax. And you will be great. 7. Speak at the start of an event. If you have the choice, get in the beginning part of the agenda. The audience is fresher then. They're more apt to listen to you, laugh at your jokes, and follow along with your stories. On the third day of a three-day conference, the audience is tired, and all they're thinking about is going home. It's hard enough to give a great speech--why increase the challenge by having to lift the audience out of the doldrums? 8. Ask for a small room. If you have a choice, get the smallest room possible for your speech. If it's a large room, ask that it be set “classroom style”--i.e., with tables and chairs--instead of theatre style. A packed room is a more emotional room. It is better to have 200 people in a 200 person room than 500 people in a 1,000 person room. You want people to remember, “It was standing room only.” 9. Practice and speak all the time. This is a “duhism,” but nonetheless relevant. My theory is that it takes giving a speech at least twenty times to get decent at it. You can give it nineteen times to your dog if you like, but it takes practice and repetition. There is no shortcut. As Jascha Heifitz said, “If I don't practice one day, I know it. If I don't practice two days, my critics know it. If I don't

practice three days, everyone knows it.” It's taken me twenty years to get to this point. I hope it takes you less. Part of the reason why it took me so long is that no one explained the art of giving a speech to me, and I was too dumb to do the research. And now, twenty years later, I love speaking. My goal, every time I get up to the podium, is to get a standing ovation. I don't succeed very often, but sometimes I do. More importantly, I hope that I'm standing and clapping in the audience of your speech soon.

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