IN BRIEF

✦ Six guests answered one question: what's something you've always wanted to try, but haven't yet?
✦ Toastmaster Kathleen Hurtubise opened with her own dare — a one-way ticket to Thailand, faced head-on against a lifelong fear of language.
✦ Miwa's "Life Is a Yarn" won Best Speaker, built around a metaphor and a moment with her daughter that stuck with the room.
✦ Christine, one of tonight's guests, won Best Table Topics on her very first visit.

SIX guests walked in and were asked the night's real question: what's something you've always wanted to try, but haven't yet? Skydiving. An extended stay at a temple. Flying a plane. A marathon. Toastmaster Kathleen Hurtubise built the whole night, "What If You Dared?", around that gap — between wanting and doing. She opened with her own: dyslexia, a real fear of language, answered by buying a one-way ticket to Thailand to teach English. Her takeaway carried the meeting — courage isn't the absence of fear, it's the difference between "not me, not tonight" and "it's me, it's tonight."

Miwa Thompson Best Speech

Miwa built her Ice Breaker around a single image: life as a ball of yarn. It has different colors. It runs long in some places, short in others. Handled with care, it becomes something beautiful — and just as easily, it gets tangled, which is where friends come in to help pull it straight again. She described herself plainly as a workaholic who still shows up for family dinners and evening walks, carrying a quiet, ongoing worry about whether that's actually enough presence for her kids.

Then came the moment the room remembers: her fourteen-year-old daughter shared an essay about life with her, unprompted. Miwa's own reflection was disarmingly honest — she couldn't picture doing the same with her own parents at fourteen. She took her daughter's essay not as a milestone to check off, but as a sign that maybe, despite the tangles, she's doing something right.

Evaluator Noe Perez admitted Miwa's speech re-energized a night he'd nearly skipped for work, praising how consistently the metaphor held and the emotional weight it carried by the end.

"First Stand Up" — Anna, on fifteen first dates
Anna’s first attempt at stand-up covered fifteen first dates, five of which made a second — including a no-show explained by "a very long call," a date who joked she seemed happier to see his dog than him, and one that closed with "how has nobody wifed you up?" Evaluator Michelle Wen praised the vulnerability of the topic and how actively Anya has taken on roles since joining, suggesting only more deliberate movement toward the podium.

Table Topics Master Agasthian Ponnambalam opened with Brené Brown: "We can choose courage or we can choose comfort. You can't choose both." Then he put the room to the test.

Christine — a guest, on her first visit — was asked what if she'd dared to ask her work crush on a date; she recalled a smart, introverted classmate from a research group years ago, remembered fondly all these years later. It won her Best Table Topics on the first night anyone in the room had met her. Sharmaine, asked about daring to fail publicly, described going from not athletic at all to Hyrox competitions today, by way of pandemic runs near a Toronto lake.

Also answering the dare: Alexander (a case for a louder stage persona among his introverted coworkers) and Michelle (the dream job might just be the search itself).

Jeremy rode the bench through his entire freshman year of college soccer; a new coach changed the context, and he became a starter and eventually an all-star. Miwa used to feel embarrassed asking questions at work, until she realized she was the one keeping presenters honest. Kush named "Enter the Sandman" as his walk-up song, from the night of his first-ever stage performance as a drummer. And Juan, asked to pick an instrument, pitched karaoke night instead.

Also in the chain: Noe (prevailing with Team B in Arts), Carlos (marching-band rivalry in Hialeah), Tim ("fortune favors the shameless"), Jay (Rambo as an imaginary marathon coach), Catherine (Good Will Hunting as her underdog movie), Luzee (Dragon Ball, and the idea that community builds heroes), Albert (a preference for flawed protagonists over impossibly pure ones), Ari (fake-it-till-you-make-it works on stage, not in high-stakes rooms), and Anna (no go-to karaoke song yet, but two singing lessons a week and counting).

BEST TABLE TOPICS
Christine (guest, lower left)

BEST EVALUATOR
Noe Perez (upper left)

BEST SPEAKER
Miwa Thompson (pink shawl)