Who’s your alter ego? The theme of this evening’s meeting certainly led the audience to learn a thing or two about their fellow club members! Maria, our dynamic Toastmaster for the evening, set those taking roles in the meeting the challenge of revealing what their ‘alter ego’ might be, before admitting to us that her own is the formidable Cruella de Ville! Ranging from the poetical Edgar Allan Poe (Mark) to the indefatigable Homer Simpson (Paul), to Colette’s spirited admission that her alter ego is a ‘female Bruce Lee’, there were certainly a few eye-opening revelations from the Vox Pop club members on the night!
Merrilyn led an animated and highly interactive topics session at the meeting with topics that were so good that they even encouraged a few of our newer members to take on their first topic. Well done to Madeline, Mick, Ximi and Jason for some excellent contributions on the night! We even learned from Madeline that she and the former Pope share something very important in common – they both sent their first tweet on the same day!
Staying on the issue of the papacy, the notion of whether the election of the next Pope should be done via Simon Cowell and the X-Factor as opposed to the traditional ‘white smoke’ method was hotly debated by Vox members. Maria proposed Ryan Tubridy as a judge on the panel for ‘Pope Idol’, while Jeremy tentatively suggested that Louis Walsh might have a keen interest in being on the judging panel. Watch this space – once Simon Cowell gets to hear of our proposal, anything is liable to happen!
Intergalactic matters were also discussed – namely the burning question that keeps most of us awake at night – i.e. whether there should be another sequel/prequel to the Star Wars series. Fergal left us in no doubt that there shouldn’t, although Ximi raised the point that we now have the technology to make the next Star Wars movie even more spectacular than the previous ones. Maybe George Lucas should go for it after all – as long as he casts Fergal as the next Obi Wan Kenobi!
From inadvertently eating other people’s snack bars on the train (Mark) to a passionate topic on the merits of team play in sport (Fiona), the topics session at tonight’s meeting certainly got an animated debate going among Vox Pop members. Well done to Jill, A.K.A Penelope Pitstop (!) for winning the prize for the ‘Best Topic’. I’ll never look at Formula 1 the same way again!
This evening’s meeting was made even more special by the reading from one of our very own poets – Fiona Fahey, who read one of her own poems to us entitled ‘Courage’. It was a powerful and moving delivery of a wonderfully evocative poem and I think it is fair to say that Fiona touched us all with her beautiful recitation.
As ever the standard of the speeches at tonight’s meeting was exceptional. Jill impressed us with her highly motivational speech on achieving her personal best in running in Sydney last year – and even showed us the medal which testified to her tremendous achievement.
Jenny gave a fantastic delivery of another motivational speech, enlightening us all on how to ‘change our cue, substitute a different reward’ and in so doing replace bad habits with good ones!
Finally, Nora’s superb speech with the intriguing title ‘How Delicious is the Winning of a Kiss at Love’s Beginning’ had all of us rolling in the aisles with mirth at her use of descriptive language and highly entertaining anecdotes!
Frank, Stephen and Dan gave some excellent evaluations of the speeches on the night. Congratulations to Stephen for winning the prize for the ‘Best Evaluation’!
Christine gave a great General Evaluation on the meeting as a whole and even added in a few tips for those of who weren’t doing roles to help us improve our speaking ability. But I think the most amazing piece of hitherto unknown information that was shared with Vox Pop members on the night, was the revelation from Dan that his choice of celebrity to be cast away on a desert island with, is none other than – Wonder Woman……the question is… does anyone have Linda Carter’s number?
Gemma Shannon, Guest Blogger
Gemma Shannon