First Strike

Contest season has come around again in the world of Toastmasters. In the last cycle, I did not do overly well with my International speech (which is a standard speech that commonly is inspirational or otherwise dramatic), which is not surprising. Not being especially at ease with such emotions in life, how could I be expected to marshal them to my benefit in a speech? More surprising was that I did poorly in the Table Topics contest. That's just improv, which should be my area.

In the cycle before that, it was evaluations again (I think) which I did not go far in, and humorous speech, in which I was lucky enough to win it all. I hope to duplicate that success this time with a speech that is rather promising in a contest that matches my strengths tolerably well. Without going into too much detail, I spun a yarn of the Marx Brothers inventing laughter to combat ghosts in depression-era New York.

I placed second this time with my evaluation, which I'd feared went over time. I guess it must not have, but I do think I hurt myself by not wrapping up more neatly at the end. Happily, I did better with my Tall Tale, with which I placed first. That went well beyond my expectations, which were just to finish without forgetting anything or going overtime. I had not bothered to even think about the speech until the day before, and I didn't come up with more than a general idea or even practice once until the morning of, maybe a couple hours before the speech itself.

I'll go on to the next round in September, and hopefully I'll enjoy the same luck. I'll have the benefit of having done it already, and since I was lucky enough to triumph with a pretty rough execution of the idea, I'll be able to sharpen it up in order to better contend against the best of four or five clubs. God willing, I'll have a good run, but it's the process that is worth something and less the outcome. Besides, if I lose I'll just get asked to run the raffle for more contests than I otherwise would, and that's fun too.