South Main Monthly

Vol. 3 No. 4 South Main Speakers, District 56, Club 8609 April 2008

The mission of the Toastmasters club is to provide a mutually

supportive and positive learning environment in which every
member has the opportunity to develop communication and
leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal
growth.

In This Issue
President’s
• President's Corner Corner
• Anniversaries
Renay Jacob, Ranjith Poduval, Vivek Rajan April Grand Slam!
By Vivian Li, CC
• Calendar of Events
What a way to start out our grand slam month of April with the
Tennis/Wii Tennis Grand Slam Tournament
excellent Education Session on evaluation and the magnificent
Division International Speech and Evaluation Contests
speeches heard at the area contest from the last days of March
still lingering on our minds.
• Features

“Clown School 101” by Erika Parrish
“Destination Marfa, Pop. 2,121 + 1” by Vivian Li
Photos from Special Evaluation Education Session
• Ask the Master
How to get a standing ovation?
The South Main Monthly is a monthly publication of the
South Main Speakers Toastmasters club. We meet every
Sunday at 1:30 p.m. in 10305 South Main Street
(Houston Chinese Church), Room 411. For more
information, please visit our website at:
http://groups.msn.com/southmainspeakers
If you have any comments, contributions, or suggestions
concerning this or future issues, please send them to
vrajan@gmail.com. Thank you for reading!
-Vivek Rajan, Editor
Congratulations to Jian Wang for placing 2nd in the Evaluation
Contest, and yours truly for placing 3rd in the International
Speech Contest! Thank you to all who participated and consider
competing in the fall contests, they’ll be here before you know it!
Kudos to Jan Poscovsky and your VP-Education Jian Wang for
successfully leading an enlightening and important education
session on how to give effective evaluations. Most of us may
have joined Toastmasters to improve our public speaking skills,
but we all soon learn how integral good evaluation skills are to
our personal development too, from giving constructive feedback
to a colleague to choosing which restaurant to eat at for lunch.
And now on to what's in store for us this month. Many thanks to
Grace and Bob Hu, who have generously invited us to their home
to hold our inaugural Grand Slam Doubles Tennis/Wii Tennis
Tournament! I hope many of you will be inspired by the
beautiful weather to practice your swing for this event on April
20. Sign up to participate with our lovely Toastmaster for this
event, Mary Deng. And make sure to bring your friends, it'll be a
great opportunity to introduce more people to Toastmasters!
 Anniversaries
Renay Jacob, ACS, CL, celebrates his
five-year anniversary with South Main
Speakers this month!
Ranjith Poduval celebrates his first
anniversary with South Main Speakers
this month!
Vivek Rajan, CC, celebrates his two-year
anniversary with South Main Speakers
this month!
New Member Spotlight
Last month we had a new member join our
club! Please give a warm welcome to our
newest member – Gufeng Xu.
April 20: Grand Slam Tennis/Wii Tennis
Tournament
Interested in playing tennis? Our club is starting a
tennis tournament for the first time this spring! On the
20th of April, we’ll have a regular toastmasters
meeting at Grace and Bob’s house, and it’ll followed
by a tennis doubles tournament! And don’t worry if
you are not a tennis player, we are also having a Wii
tennis tournament! Cheerleaders are also needed. If
you are interested, sign up with the event Toastmaster,
Mary Deng, at suideng@hotmail.com.
Survivor Membership Contest Update
What an exciting game! We have a lot of people fighting
to win the grand prize of a $100 bucks (also 2nd place $30,
3rd place $15) and it’s still anybody’s game! Here are the
twelve top leaders in no particular order:
Annie
Brenda
Mary
Jeanne
Renay
Bob
Grace
Shabnam
Steffan
Jian
Francis
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 Clown Basics
Clown What is a clown?

What is a clown? A clown is basically a

School walking, breathing Looney Tune character

come to life. A clown is willing to humiliate
himself in order to exalt his audience,
whether it’s an audience of one or one
thousand. A clown is a beacon of love, life,

101 and joyfulness. There is a difference

between a comedian and a clown.
Comedians say and do funny things; clowns
do things in a funny way.

What are the requirements to be a clown?

Do you enjoy making people happy? Do you

like working with people, particularly
children? Do you have a sense of humor?
Does seeing people smile and laugh with
you and at you make you feel good? If you
answered "yes" to most of these questions,
then you are good clown material. To be a
clown, it has to come from your heart. It’s
your job to bring joy to people's lives. A
word of caution and this is very important.
Clowns make things funny at the expense of
themselves, never at the expense of others.
If there is ever a bad thing to happen such as
getting a pie in the face or getting sprayed
with water, it must happen to the clown.

Choosing a clown name

For many clowns, choosing a name comes

naturally from the character they want to
portray. For others, it comes from a
nickname. But you want your clown name to
be unique, distinct, and special. Regardless,
find a name that fits your character and that
you are comfortable with.
By Erika Parrish

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 must be true to your character. As with your
make up and costume, you may fine-tune it
or change it over time as you become more
familiar with your character.

Balloon Art & Silly Tricks

You don’t have to go to Clown school to

learn how to make balloon hats or animals. I
learned from reading books! A great book to
learn how to make basic balloon art is:
Captain Visual’s Big Book of Balloon Art.
It has step by step instructions with lots of
Erika as Bubbles the clown
pictures. Again when it comes to silly tricks,
you don’t have to spend a lot of money.
Look like a clown There are lots of tricks you can do with a
just a deck of cards. I personally love silly
You could easily spend a fortune on fancy stuff. Once I had a clown bake sale and
costumes and spend a long time applying claimed to be selling brownies out of an
makeup. Or you can begin by wearing over Easy Bake Oven. It was nothing more than a
sized clothes or clothes that just don’t match. sandwich bag filled with foam brown letter
Remember, it's not the clothes, or the make “Es! Get it- BROWN “E”s!!!!
up, that makes the clown. It’s what's inside
that comes shining out that makes the clown.
Your clown comes from you. Perhaps it's a
part of your personality you normally
repress, or one of your favorite traits that
you magnify a thousand-fold. Perhaps it's a
part of you that you fantasize about. Perhaps
it's several of these combined. Whatever it is,
for it to be clowning, it must be funny, and it

More balloon art

Balloon hat designed by Erika

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Destination: Marfa, Pop. 2,121 + 1
by Vivian Li, CC
As I am inching closer and closer to the
dreaded life milestone of being a trigenarian
(I know this arcane vocabulary goes against
what I’m supposed to already have learned
from the CC Speech Project 4: How to Say
It, but this is not a speech), I’m forced by
various people (ie parents) to reevaluate the
direction of my life and if it’s going toward
a “goal.” But life goals today are not so clear
cut as they might have been in my parent’s, I
mean past generations. In this generation
(where are we at now, Gen Z or back to A?),
the proverbial house with a white picket
fence will no longer do. That’s boring, we
want more.
Davis Mountains (at sunset) surround Marfa
My short term goal is to become an art
curator at a museum and organize exciting
exhibitions. My long term goal however,
weighs on the eccentric side. When I retire
one day from my life as a successful art
curator, I would like to become a cheese
connoisseur and run a cheese hut among the
community of over a hundred cheese huts
located in the Swiss Alps. Ever since
visiting Napa Valley in California, I have
started having an appreciation for the many
varieties of cheese and their distinct flavors.
And I don’t mean just American and
cheddar.
James Dean on location during filming of Giant
If that long term goal doesn’t pan out though,
or if I find that hut life doesn’t suit me, my
back up goal is to stay closer to home and
take up residence in Marfa to open their first
ever Chinese restaurant. “What is Marfa?”
you might ask. Located about 10 hours west
of Houston, Marfa is actually a destination
for everybody—thrill seekers can get their
fix doing hang gliding over the beautiful
mountains, people looking for the
paranormal can search at night for the famed
Marfa Lights, film buffs can visit the James
Dean paraphernalia located at the original
film set where they shot locally the movie
Giant, star gazers can go to the state-of-the-
art UT Austin MacDonald Observatory,
artsy people can enjoy the internationally
renowned museum of installation art at the
Chinati Foundation as well as the 20 plus
galleries in town, and people who just want
to be left alone and/or weird without
anybody knowing it can just go to Marfa and
be.*
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Installation artworks at Chinati Foundation
In this quiet but at the same time dynamic
town though I saw one thing oddly
missing—the quintessentially all-American
Chinese restaurant. This seemed like such a
shocking lack in such a hip and cool place as
Marfa. So in case my cheese hut dreams in
the Alps go unrealized (chances are they
will), bringing Chinese food to Marfians
will be my alternate ultimate life goal. But
in the meantime, I encourage you to visit
Marfa, it’s worth visiting more than once,
especially once my Chinese restaurant opens.

These are just a few of the many offerings of

a small town with a population of just over
2,000 people and only one stoplight.
Several people—artists, writers, and the
quirky—restless of the urban and suburban
lifestyle have especially since the 1990s
been attracted by the offerings of this
pristine desert town in west Texas and
flocked to Marfa to add to the charm to this
precious treasure out in west Texas. Coffee
drinkers can find an excellent cup of joe at
the Brown Recluse that is run by Austin
Prada Marfa store alone on the side of the highway
expats. Then follow that with an amazingly
tasteful breakfast at the Austin Street Café
operated by ex-New Yorkers. Then have * Though those who are avid shoppers of Prada
lunch at the legendary, yet non-descript might be disappointed to know that the one
Pizza Foundation, where the too-good-to-be- Prada store in town (or for hundreds of miles
true-in-a-the-middle-of-nowhere-West- around for that matter) is forever closed, though
Texas pizzas are personally hand-tossed by the wares of purses and shoes are proudly on
ex-Rhode Islanders. Or you can go to the display. This is an art installation of a real
mobile lunch counter called the Food Shark, Prada store built in the middle of nowhere on
the one highway through Marfa. Merchandise
parked right outside the town’s bookshop, to
was donated by Prada to the artists.
devour their famous delicious Marfalafal.

The Food Shark attracts food lovers from all over

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 Evaluating with Jan
Jan Poscovsky, DTM, Division M Governor,
and VP-Education for Master Evaluators
Toastmasters, among the many other hats
she wears, gave a special education session
on effectively giving evaluations during our
March 30 meeting. Everybody enjoyed her
speech on evaluations and her evaluation of
the volunteer evaluators afterwards.

Jeanne and Steffan, volunteer evaluators, enjoy a laugh

Jan giving her speech on evaluations

Volunteer evaluator Renay listens pensively to Art

Our test speaker Erika delivering her speech

Our test speaker Erika delivering her speech

Jan and Jian, who coordinated with Jan the

successful session
Brenda and Jian getting tips from Jan afterwards
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Ask the Master
Dear Master,
After I give
speeches at my
Toastmasters club, I
get applause from the
audience, but what do
I need to do to get a
standing ovation?
— Sincere Student
Dear Sincere,
To get a standing ovation, your speech has
to be outstanding, but it’s something that is
achievable with some practice. I will give
you a few tips that you can incorporate in
your speeches to help you get a standing
ovation. Apply them in all your speeches
until it becomes your second nature, and
then a standing ovation is sure to come your
way! Here are the tips:
1. Have something interesting to say.
This is 80% of the battle. If you have
something interesting to say, then it's
much easier to give a great speech. If
you have nothing to say, you should
not speak. End of discussion. It's
better to decline the opportunity so
that no one knows you don't have
anything to say than it is to make the
speech and prove it.
2. Focus on entertaining. Many speech
coaches will disagree with this, but
the goal of a speech is to entertain
the audience. If people are
entertained, you can slip in a few
nuggets of information. But if your
speech is deathly dull, no amount of
information will make it a great
speech. If I had to pick between
entertaining and informing an
audience, I would pick entertaining--
knowing that informing will
probably happen too.
3. Understand the audience. If you can
prove to your audience in the first
few minutes that you understand who
they are, you've got them for the rest
of the speech. All you need to
understand is the trends, competition,
and key issues that the audience
faces. This simply requires
consultation with the host
organization and a willingness to
customize your introductory remarks.
This ain't that hard.
4. Overdress. Never dress beneath the
level of the audience. That is, if
they're wearing suits, then you
should wear a suit. To underdress is
to communicate the following
message: “I'm smarter/richer/more
powerful than you. I can insult you
and not take you serious, and there's
nothing you can do about it.” This is
hardly the way to get an audience to
like you.
5. Tell stories. The best way to relax
when giving a speech is to tell stories.
Any stories. Stories about your youth.
Stories about your kids. Stories
about your customers. Stories about
things that you read about. When
you tell a story, you lose yourself in
the storytelling. You're not “making
a speech” anymore. You're simply
having a conversation. Good
speakers are good storytellers; great
speakers tell stories that support
their message.
6. Pre-circulate with the audience.
True or false: the audience wants
your speech to go well. The answer
is True. Audiences don't want to see
you fail--for one thing, why would
people want to waste their time
listening to you fail? And here's the
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 way to heighten your audience's practice three days, everyone knows
concern for you: circulate with the it.”
audience before the speech. Meet
people. Talk to them. Let them make It's taken me twenty years to get to this point.
contact with you. Especially the ones I hope it takes you less. Part of the reason
in the first few rows; then, when why it took me so long is that no one
you're on the podium, you'll see explained the art of giving a speech to me,
these friendly faces. Your confidence and I was too dumb to do the research. And
will soar. You will relax. And you now, twenty years later, I love speaking. My
will be great. goal, every time I get up to the podium, is to
7. Speak at the start of an event. If you get a standing ovation. I don't succeed very
have the choice, get in the beginning often, but sometimes I do. More importantly,
part of the agenda. The audience is I hope that I'm standing and clapping in the
fresher then. They're more apt to audience of your speech soon.
listen to you, laugh at your jokes,
and follow along with your stories.
On the third day of a three-day
conference, the audience is tired,
and all they're thinking about is
going home. It's hard enough to give
a great speech--why increase the
challenge by having to lift the
audience out of the doldrums?
8. Ask for a small room. If you have a
choice, get the smallest room
possible for your speech. If it's a
large room, ask that it be set
“classroom style”--i.e., with tables
and chairs--instead of theatre style.
A packed room is a more emotional
room. It is better to have 200 people
in a 200 person room than 500
people in a 1,000 person room. You
want people to remember, “It was
standing room only.”
9. Practice and speak all the time. This
is a “duhism,” but nonetheless
relevant. My theory is that it takes
giving a speech at least twenty times
to get decent at it. You can give it
nineteen times to your dog if you like,
but it takes practice and repetition.
There is no shortcut. As Jascha
Heifitz said, “If I don't practice one
day, I know it. If I don't practice two
days, my critics know it. If I don't

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