Area B4 Contest as recalled by Joan Ceuterick
Last Saturday, 7 members of Fonske Leuven drove in a car pool of two cars to Hasselt. During the B4 area contest, a few of us went there as contestants (Hilde, Pieter-Jan and Joan), contest chairs (Peter and Yoga), chief judge (Tatiana) and judge (Stefanie). Since our President had never been to Hasselt before and did not trust the Google maps estimated driving time, we arrived even before the organizing club. This gave us the opportunity to take a short walk before the contest, discover the suburbs of Hasselt and relax under the grey, foggy sky.
TM Hasselt convenes in an amphitheater: this puts the contestants really under the spotlights!
The hosts did a wonderful job with sandwiches, cookies and a wide variety of drinks before, during and after. Some contestants have their own way of preparing however and were asking for a beer which was unfortunately not on the menu.
We started out with the Dutch contest chaired by our B4 area director Peter Lepage. “To which year would you like to go back ?” , was the main question for the Table Topics. Hilde Pexters brought up some memories of a horse riding camp when she was sixteen which ended up in the hayloft. I spoke about my heroic bike ride from Leuven to Alpes Duez, but with a black out, I moved this mountain to Mont Ventoux. Yes , it is allowed to lie during a Table Topic! The winner Karl however was inspired by history and went back to 1740 – the year of the invention of the single blade razor in Sheffield.
Next was the Dutch humorous speech contest. Pieter Jan Drouillon made a comparison between a talent show and the search for top talented students at KU Leuven. Unfortunately Rik Torfs did not attend in order to fine-tune the selection process the next years. Renaat Toppetz introduced us to the three phases of a pregnancy: the making, the carrying and the delivery. He ended up in Sea Life with his wife for an underwater delivery. Backed by the experience of raising three children and with all proud moms and dads in the room, he took the trophy home.
The English contest was chaired by former district humorous contestant and TM Fonske Leuven member Yoga Saripalli. He did a great job in entertaining and warming up the audience before the show. During the Table Topics, he also tricked the contestants by letting them choose a question. I was about to file a complaint but then he convinced us that everybody received indeed the same question: “If you had a chance to speak at the United Nations”, what would be your single message. Since I was at the end of the queue, I unfortunately cannot tell you a lot but Ian Mc Beath suggested to have huge traffic jams in every city so that people would just stop and have a talk over a drink in a pub. Ian promised free rounds of beer and that probably tilted the decision of the judges in his direction.
The day was topped by three English humorous speeches
Karl Indigne of Gent shared his experiences of a sleep over with seven female teenagers: for all clarity, he was the host but slept at a different floor. At least that was the plan but he did not get a lot of sleep: one girl went missing and they all ended up in the emergency room in the morning. He topped of his speech with a “dirty dancing”.
Luckily, Ian came after him and showed us how to “Get Over It”. He was inspired by an invitation of a party for 18 year olds. Being twice that age, I did not get why he received that invitation however but it seemed to be an inspiring experience for him: hastags, MDMA, BMW were the buzzwords but reflecting now on the speech, I cannot remember anything about girls. You can read his story by just typing #getoverit.
I explained the road to become a DIC, a distinguished IKEA Customer. The number of laughs was the least of all speeches but let that just be the purpose of a humorous speech contest. So I ended at an honorful 3rd place. However I only can recommend everybody to participate next time because the old cliche still holds: there is more stress, so you go the extra mile and you raise the bar. And after all, it is a lot of fun to be on stage and entertain an audience.
For the bookkeeping, the results
Table Topics English
1) Ian MacBeath
2) Stef Kuypers
3) Joan Ceuterick
Humorous Speech English
1) Ian MacBeath
2) Karl Indigne
3) Joan Ceuterick
Tafelonderwerpen Nederlands
1) Karl Indigne
2) Joan Ceuterick
3) Hilde Pexsters
Humoristische voordrachten
1) Renaat Toppets
2) Pieter-Jan Drouillon