Remember my post a while back about Toastmasters? I thought about dropping in on a meeting of my local chapter to check it out, but had been putting it off for several weeks now.

Well, fate stepped in and intervened yesterday morning. I happened across a brochure for adult education classes at the local high school, and noticed that one of the offerings was a ten-week class called "Public Speaking with Confidence," sponsored by another local chapter of Toastmasters! Kismet, I decided. So I enrolled and last night was my first class.

It was really fun! Initially, there were four of us in class: a born-again Christian couple in their 60s who have been married for forty-two years, a married-with-kids guy in his early forties who works for Lockheed Martin, and me. There were also four members of the Chester County Toastmasters who will be taking turns facilitating each class. About an hour into the class, each of us partnered with one of the Toastmasters and were interviewing each other in preparation to speak about our partners. Suddenly, the fifth member of the class walked in, a little out of breath.

The jaws of the four females in the room, including mine, dropped to the floor. He was fricking GORGEOUS! Like Abercrombie-male-model gorgeous.

You know what happened next, right? Grinning stupidly, my female Toastmasters counterpart stood up and told him to be my partner. I could hardly make eye contact with the guy, he was THAT good-looking. Not to mention he's apparently a rocket scientist. Since I interviewed him for the first speech, I learned the following facts about him: He is 31 years old, married for almost five years with no kids. He graduated from Drexel with a mechanical engineering degree, but works as an area manager for Enterprise Rent-a-Car, supervising 30 employees. He's very athletic. Oh, yeah--his dad was a professional soccer player.

Anyhoo, getting back to the class itself, I had the opportunity to speak three times already last night. The last occasion was for something that the Toastmasters refer to as a "table topic." Basically, the facilitator gives the general topic, but each person does not know exactly what they are going to talk about until right before they speak. It's an exercise in improvisation. The other goal is to reduce or eliminate the use of speech fillers such as "um" or "uh" or "like." Don't laugh--it's much harder than you'd think. We rely so much on those fillers that most of us don't even realize when we say them.

The facilitator announced that last night's table topic was "color." She then asked me to speak about the color blue. Somehow, I managed to riff about blue for almost two minutes, with a minimal use of fillers--don't ask how. I was scared to death but plowed through it.

Should be an interesting nine weeks...

Labels: accomplishments, pretty, Toastmasters