Last Wednesday, Mercury hosted a special event with ART as the theme. The room was full of creativity, energy and happiness. Peter Henrich, our Division Governor, said that this was the best meeting he had ever been at in the entire division! We are incredibly lucky to have such talent within our club.
Moreover, Peter presented Alin, Area C2 Governor 2013-2014, with a certificate and praise for qualifying as Select Distinguished Area.
Our Toastmaster of the Evening Renko gave a fabulous introduction about art. Showing a picture of Kim Kardashian, he “wondered” who can call himself the artist: the photographer, the digital artist, plastic surgeon or Kim herself. His way of speaking appealed to the audience and made us laugh. He finished his introduction with a quote from the French Impressionist Edgar Degas: “Art is not what you see but what you make others see”.
Not only was Renko well prepared, but all the functionaries. They made the audience sing, laugh and have fun. Below are some poems:
The introduction of our Listener Petronela:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue
Don’t make any “em”, “ah”, “ums”
Or I will catch you!
Filler words or crutches,
Even repetitions I´ll haunt;
So be careful, don’t overuse
The “Ah Counter” will count!
The introduction of our Camera Operator Eliza:
As a camera operator,
My job is to record the videos, for later.
The prepared speeches will be saved together
With the Evaluation and the Table Topic Session.
Your speeches then will be uploaded to your Facebook profile,
No, just kidding, just the Dropbox file.
And the introduction of our General Evaluator Matthias:
Breakfast for champions they call it
Get some feedback and stay fit
I’m the General Evaluator
I will give you feedback later.
The speech section was fantastic and all four well prepared speeches were about … art :).
Marina gave her speech CC #5 entitled “The Price and Glory of Mastery”. In her speech, she praised Michelangelo and his mastery in his painting of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo achieved mastery by sacrifices, one being his health. She also mentioned that nowadays we are mostly mediocre in a lot of things, we know a little bit of everything, but we do not have the feeling that “you are irreplaceable at what you do.” Her core message was that we should work to become so good in our area that we become irreplaceable at what we do, and in such a case nobody can throw us off the platform.
The second speaker was Jeremy, who delivered his CC #5 speech entitled “The Art of Having Stuff Done for You”. He told us about five easy points to make someone else want to do our job: getting people to pity us, become famous, flattery, delegation and, if these do not work, pretend someone else did the work which will make us feel better. His speech was fabulous, well written and witty.
The next speaker Manjana delivered her speech #5 from the advanced manual Speaking to Inform entitled “The Eye of the Beholder”. She showed us how changeable fashion really is, going through a small history of women’s dresses. Her core message was that even if fashion can enhance beauty, fashion is not beauty. She closed her speech with a wonderful quote of Audrey Hepburn: “The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It’s the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows and the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years.”
The last speaker Brent delivered the #5 speech from The Entertaining Speaker manual entitled “The Most Beautiful Piece of Art of All”. He shared with us a personal story about how the most beautiful piece of art, the Aurora Borealis, the Northern lights, changed his life. His younger daughter got her name Aurora.
