"Vamsi, we forgot to tell you. There will be a countdown from 10 and then you guys enter. Best Of Luck!"
The biggest stage yet, for me to fall forward.
Preparation: I gathered all the stage time I could before the big Annual meet - speaking,rather pitching, to a bunch of newcomers for Toastmasters ; doing a book reading session for the book club of Ford et al. The script had to be reworked over the weekend as one of the fellow MC had to drop out. In a way it made life a bit easier. Kavitha, mentor and fellow MC, and I kept fiddling with the script till the day before the Annual Meet.
"You take the humorous part. Let me do the "official talk" - said Kavitha
I agreed. Participating at the couple of levels for the Humorous contest made me adept to the voice modulation to bring out the laughter.
The biggest challenge for both of us was the dialogue part. As a Toastmaster, pausing during a speech comes in natural after a time. But waiting for the other person to finish and have a dialogue within the speech; making sure that the pause when the dialogue shifts from one person to the another looks like a conversation.
The other one was the wordings in the script. Unless it is yours, you can never get the delivery right! As the lines i wrote found space in her speech and hers into mine, both of us kept getting stuck in the same place time and again in our practices. But somewhere we knew that when the mike is under our chins, all these creases will be eased out!
Aftermath: " You guys were simply unbelievable " - HR folks remarked after the initial round. Everything went like a breeze. The hand movements, stage presence and dialogue transition were smooth. Making the audience respond to the excitement or respond to the jokes with laughter was always the challenge and thankfully no grace marks were needed to pass the test!
True, as any performance goes, it could have been a bit bitter. The delivery could have been more authentic; facial expressions could have been better. Toastmasters sitting in the 2500+ strong crowd could easily pull out the errors but the overall feedback was very positive.
Before the start of the event, both of us were unusually calm. No butterflies and I was more concerned about my get-up ; something I shun most of the time. I figured out the reason
later - we were not doing the MC stuff for our personal recognition. We wanted to set the stage for Toastmasters to conduct events of such magnitude!
And we were fairly successful :)
The biggest stage yet, for me to fall forward.
Preparation: I gathered all the stage time I could before the big Annual meet - speaking,rather pitching, to a bunch of newcomers for Toastmasters ; doing a book reading session for the book club of Ford et al. The script had to be reworked over the weekend as one of the fellow MC had to drop out. In a way it made life a bit easier. Kavitha, mentor and fellow MC, and I kept fiddling with the script till the day before the Annual Meet.
"You take the humorous part. Let me do the "official talk" - said Kavitha
I agreed. Participating at the couple of levels for the Humorous contest made me adept to the voice modulation to bring out the laughter.
The biggest challenge for both of us was the dialogue part. As a Toastmaster, pausing during a speech comes in natural after a time. But waiting for the other person to finish and have a dialogue within the speech; making sure that the pause when the dialogue shifts from one person to the another looks like a conversation.
The other one was the wordings in the script. Unless it is yours, you can never get the delivery right! As the lines i wrote found space in her speech and hers into mine, both of us kept getting stuck in the same place time and again in our practices. But somewhere we knew that when the mike is under our chins, all these creases will be eased out!
Aftermath: " You guys were simply unbelievable " - HR folks remarked after the initial round. Everything went like a breeze. The hand movements, stage presence and dialogue transition were smooth. Making the audience respond to the excitement or respond to the jokes with laughter was always the challenge and thankfully no grace marks were needed to pass the test!
True, as any performance goes, it could have been a bit bitter. The delivery could have been more authentic; facial expressions could have been better. Toastmasters sitting in the 2500+ strong crowd could easily pull out the errors but the overall feedback was very positive.
Before the start of the event, both of us were unusually calm. No butterflies and I was more concerned about my get-up ; something I shun most of the time. I figured out the reason
later - we were not doing the MC stuff for our personal recognition. We wanted to set the stage for Toastmasters to conduct events of such magnitude!
And we were fairly successful :)
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