Welcome visitors and members! Listed below our Club Announcements is our latest weekly meeting snapshot to give you a flavor of the challenging, thought-provoking, and FUN times to be had at a Contrarians Toastmasters meeting.

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We had another great meeting tonight, started out by Nick welcoming our long-time guest John while playing word association games. Quick, what is the first word that pops into your mind while reading this? Ling gave us the opening thought about gay marriage, setting the theme for the night. She also informed us that Delaware has just recently become the 11th state in the US to legalize gay marriage and there are also 8 states that have banned gay marriage. Tony, our toastmaster, then led us through the rest of the meeting.

We heard the first icebreaker speech from Lynn, who told us about her experiences growing up during the 1960's and the great life experiences that came from that. In the second speech of the night, we heard about the roles and duties of the VP of Membership officer role from Jeff, who encouraged all members to run for office and help make all guests feel welcome at our club. 

CJ performed the role of Table Topics Master for the first time, fabulously handling a controversial and politicized subject - Gay Marriage. We heard about gay weddings, the term "legal union", the effects of a gay marriage on raising children, the conflict between a pastor's duty and government sanctioned gay marriage, the politics of gay marriage, and whether gay marriage benefits society or not. 

Our General Evaluator was Mark, who pointed out areas of improvement for the order of business during the meeting and gave feedback to everyone. Banafsheh gave the evaluation for Lynn, and Josh gave the evaluation for Jeff. 

Tony then ran the awards ceremony - congratulations to Lynn for winning Best Speaker, Amir for best Table Topics, and Josh for Best Evaluator.

Our fearless leader Nick, then closed out the meeting with a reminder that club officer elections are in 2 weeks, and that week is a fun-filled meeting consisting of 100% table topics. We learned that Nick holds the Contrarians record for consecutive meetings attended for almost an entire year, way to go!

See you next week,

-Josh