Meeting Minutes – 04.23.2020

Lights! Camera! Action!

The gregarious members of Silicon Speech once again took to the internet last night to polish their on-screen performance skills. Lisa Bono set the tone with her Thought of the Day based upon the French word S.A.I.N. which loosely translates to that thing we’re all struggling to hold on to during these days of self-isolation. Azita Sachmechian was our online Toastmaster and she did a masterful job guiding us through the Agenda which featured two great speeches.

The first speech was a terrific Icebreaker by Lauren Clayton centered on the idea that, “The story you tell yourself is the story you live” and how we all can write and rewrite our own narrative. Lauren’s story includes the time she spent in high school twirling flaming batons; a rare skill and something not everybody can claim in their narrative.

Lauren was followed by Armando Yee and a fascinating California history lesson based on the book The Gold Rush about a time, long ago, when you could actually pick up gold nuggets while wading in the American River. Ah, the good old days! Speeches were followed by insightful and supportive evaluations by our Evaluation team headed up by Marina Romanova and including evaluations by Len Kung and Karan Bavandi.

Our Table Topics Master was Sam Nazarian who started with a question for Shar McBee about her favorite picnic food. Shar answered with a very interesting story about what would definitely not be at her picnic, tofu turkey. This was based on a time when that particular dish was served at a picnic and things didn’t end well. It’s amazing what we learn at these meetings.

Then, Sam went deep with a number of philosophical queries that left us all searching our souls for what could pass as a plausible answer. Great practice for a time when we may be asked to riff on a Rumi quote. All in all, it was another great online event!