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Special Guest Returning
Special Guest: Michael Dart — Golden Gate Toastmasters (GGTM) alum and District-level Humorous Speech and Evaluation Contest winner, representing our club. Today, Michael serves as Executive Director at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and is a sought-after keynote speaker at major global conferences, co-author of “The New Rules of Retail,” and has been featured in Bloomberg, WSJ, and The New York Times. He’s coming back to GGTM for our Open House on September 16 — for a live Q&A where you can ask him anything, from his early days competing in this very club to speaking on the world stage today.
Bring a guest, and help spread the word. |
IN BRIEF
✦ Anna Turos ran her first meeting as Toastmaster of the Evening, still one of the club's newer faces — and Sharmaine decided on her Ice Breaker that same night, with no lead time at all.
✦ John won Best Table Topics at his very first meeting as an actual member, not a guest.
✦ The one exception to the new-faces trend: longtime member and past GGTM president Jay Yamamoto took Best Evaluator.
✦ Luzee Bautista’s small-talk speech won Best Speaker — a framework she'd already field-tested on the room back in August.
Dear {{First name | Fellow Toastmaster}}!
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Michelle opened with a Two-Minute Special on coffee — cappuccino her order, pour-over her second — before the night handed its real theme to people who didn't wait to feel ready for it. Anna Turos, who completed her own Ice Breaker just a month ago, ran the entire meeting as Toastmaster of the Evening — her first time in the role, taken on while still one of the newer faces in the club. Sharmaine decided to give her Ice Breaker the very same night, with essentially no lead time. And when her speech needed an evaluator on short notice, Amber stepped in to judge it — on top of already covering Note Taker for the evening. Bridging the Gap turned out to be less a theme than a description of what kept happening in the room. |
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THE FEATURE
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"How to Start Small Talk"
Luzee Bautista Best Speech
Regular readers may recognize this one: back in August, Luzee ran the room through her Four Cs of small talk — Cliché, Compliment, Commiserate, Curiosity — as a live workshop. This week, she turned the same framework into a full speech, and won Best Speaker for it. What was new: small talk, she argued, only works as a skill if you also create a safe space, respect the other person's comfort zone, offer enough detail to let things go somewhere, and reciprocate once someone gives you an opening. The four openers get you started; this is what keeps it going.
ALSO FROM THE PODIUM
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"Ice Breaker" — Yong Tang, on becoming a runner
Yong's favorite drink is water — he's run long distance since 2004, when he set out to find how far he could actually go. Five kilometers became ten, then a half marathon; today it's thirty and counting. Every stretch further taught him his limits were rarely where he thought they were. His closing line tied it to the room: running's challenge is distance, Toastmasters' is words — tonight was his first step into a new one.
Ice Breaker, Decided That Same Night — Sharmaine, "Please Leave the House"
Sharmaine grew up bored in Dubai, moved to Toronto, then back — shy, and slow to make friends in new places. Kids teased her at first, until a classmate's call about a missed assignment turned the teasing mutual, then genuinely funny, then into real friendship. She started going out, actually living somewhere instead of enduring it — much, she said, to her mother's despair, since her mother had spent years pleading "please leave the house." By the end, that had flipped entirely: "please come back." Amber evaluated it on equally short notice, alongside running the night's Note Taker duties solo.
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Table Topics: Bridging the Gap
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Round the new faces mixed with some familiar ones
Michelle (middle) ran Table Topics, keeping every question tied to the theme. John's (upper right corner) answer doubled as its own title — The Impossible Bridge, on arriving in the US for school with exactly one semester's tuition and no idea what came next. It won him Best Table Topics at his very first meeting as an actual member, having just joined. Wayne(lower right corner), guest, asked about a dream where he closed the gap between wanting to and doing it, landed on the exact thing Yong's Ice Breaker had just made the case for — he never expected to become a runner. Chris (middle right) who also newly joined GGTM already signed up as a timer and spoke about learning guitar as crossing the gap.
Also answering: Gautam (upper left corner), Agasthian (upper middle), Sunita (middle left) , Jay(lower middle), and Katie (lower left corner, green dress).
AND THE VOTES ARE IN
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BEST TABLE TOPICS
John (Right)
BEST EVALUATOR
Jay (Lower Left)
BEST SPEAKER
Luzee Bautista (Upper Left)
The Laurel Wraths, awarded by Anna TME
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THE CALENDAR
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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
Toastmasters GGTM Open House — bring a guest and help spread the word.
STILL RECRUITING
The District needs an Area Director — talk to Officer Team (See below) if interested.
ON GOING
Share Your GGTM Story — the survey is still open. Selected stories may now be featured on our website and social channels.
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