Conversation for Entertainment

1. Results of Last Week's Poll

2. Nugget: Conversation for Entertainment

Create Your Own Conversation Caf© for Entertainment.

You can easily create this social event. Here's how to arrange an evening of entertaining conversation:

1. Identify 6 to 10 friends you think would enjoy conversing with others. Choose lively, interesting, verbal people Don't invite people who are closed-minded, argumentative, or withdrawn.

2. Find a congenial place to meet, like a living room or small meeting room. No restaurants -- too much clatter.

3. Serve something light, like coffee and soft drinks and perhaps a dessert.

4. Create an assortment of topics and questions that would interest your participants. (It's best to avoid volatile political or religious topics.) You can find many topics online at quotation sites, and you can find many others on the conversationcafe.org site. I've found provocative quotations like these two work very well to comment on and share their experiences about:

"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." --William James

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." --William Butler Yeats

5. The fastest way to find a topic. Open an ordinary dictionary to a random page, then pick the first English noun on that page. (I just opened a collegiate dictionary to page 318. The first noun was diabetes, which could make for a lively conversation about health, obesity, etc. The first noun on page 905 was porpoise.) Talkers get creative with randomly selected topics.

6. Go over and get agreement on basic "rules of the road" like taking turns, speaking briefly, not interrupting. If someone breaks a rule that's they've agreed to, the host reminds them.

Ask one volunteerto draw a topic card and begin, then allow 10-15 minutes for the group to talk about that topic. Then have a different person draw a topic. (Random drawing of topics is fair and encourages spontaneity.) During one gathering, you'd probably talk about 3 to 5 topics. Use this format: Discuss 2-3 topics, take a snack break, then discuss 1 or 2 more.

These guidelines are only suggestions. The host and guests can decide how many topics and the time for each.

Volunteers stand up and briefly describe three life experiences they've had. Two are true, one a lie. After each shares, the audience votes on which is the lie. My own example:

"I once worked as a stand-up comedian."

"I've worked as a rough-neck building an oil pipeline from Canada."

"I was once stationed near the Afghanistan border with Pakistan.

The audience is polled and each person votes on the one they think is a lie. Using both nonverbal clues and what they already know about the volunteer, they try to decide which is the lie. (My lie:I never worked as a stand-up comedian.)

Each round takes only a few minutes, and this game is lots of fun.

If, at the end of the evening, participants are pleased and would like another such event, agree on a host, a place, and a mutually convenient time.