Minutes from Friday, April 25, 2025
Sunrise Toastmasters
This week’s meeting started with a warm welcome from our President, Toastmaster Kerstin Haase. She commented on her sensation of going backwards and the importance of diversity and the fact that as more is brought to the table, the greater results that may be achieved. This led us into our moment of silence in recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality. Kerstin concluded with reminders such as use of the bias flag as a tool toward becoming conscientious speakers before turning the meeting over to our Toastmaster of the Day, Toastmaster Dave Burr. Dave welcomed our returning guest Kim Robinson and introduced the word of the day “cliche”. He noted that the term is often associated with mundaneness or lack of originality, but was choosing to focus on cliches used by his grandmothers. These oft repeated phrases were meaningful to him as a child, and still are today. “You are so scrumptious, I could just eat you up!” and “Let’s go out and have a gay day!”
Toastmaster Bettina Ross introduced our first speaker, Toastmaster Stiles Burr who intentionally chose to challenge himself to a pocket speech, not preparing until 6AM(!), and presented on the topic “All that glitters is not gold.” He related this to his career in professional sports, where there is seemingly no shortage of glam, glitter, and bling. He helped us see beyond the glitter, by describing his personal career and the years of hard work and surpassed mental challenges to reach his current position, inserting a meaningful cliche with which all are familiar, “burning the candle at both ends”. Stiles further illustrated this point by referencing the players who spend their careers on the bubble, always living out of a suitcase, and contrasted to a non-player colleague and friend who despite working in the biggest league in the world also drives an Uber to make ends meet. He concluded with a life lesson he has learned, noting the importance of appreciating the hidden gems in our lives over the glitter.
Toastmaster Anu Parvatheni introduced our second speaker, Toastmaster Savannah Murphy. Savvy spoke on the topic “The path most traveled,” illustrating the point by harking back to years spent at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and a central location on campus known as “the brickyard”. This is a highly foot trafficked area of brick walkways surrounding a lawn which had a dirt path through its center, an obvious manifestation of the preferred pathway. She intriguingly compared this to linguistics, mentioning the transition of certain words into common usage though not considered grammatically correct at one time. Similarly this relates to the world of pronouns. “He” or “she” is considered proper English but we often use “they” or “their” as vague pronouns, when we may not know a person or their opinion on a matter. A historical reference was made that these same pronouns had been proper English in the times of William Shakespeare and Thomas More. Savvy concluded by noting that NCSU ultimately chose the path most traveled, bricking over the foot worn dirt path, and the hope that we will see an evolution of acceptance in our language as well.
Table Topics was led by Kerstin, who focused on our theme of cliches. Toastmaster Tim Murphy noted his not so great love for his mother’s use of “up and at ‘em” as it meant leaving his warm bed for the cold basement. Kim felt there is something to be learned in everything and Matthew, relating this to mountain biking, was in agreement that “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” Toastmaster Summer Murphy felt “fake it til you make it” was indeed good advice and was illustrative of the need to keep moving forward. Tina Joe, as a self proclaimed optimist found truth in “every cloud has a silver lining,” but noted that doesn’t mean you will see it.
We then moved onto the Breakfast of Champions, speech and meeting evaluations. Toastmaster Kendra Hiatt served as our General Evaluator, turning it over to Tina Joe to complete Speaker 1 evaluation and then to Anu to complete Speaker 2 evaluation. Summer and Tim filled the roles of Grammarian and Timer.
Food for thought:
The person who planted the fruit tree may not be the person who gets to enjoy the fruit.
There are no losses, just lessons.
Take two, that’s what Noah would have done.
Roles for Friday, May 2, 2025 are as follows:
Toastmaster- Kerstin
Speaker 1- Anu
Speaker 2- Tim
Table Topics- Summer
General Evaluator- Stiles
Evaluator 1- Tina Joe
Evaluator 2- Abdulrahman
Timer- Dave
Grammarian- Norris
