This is another speech I’ve given at Valley Toastmasters, and it’s part of Competent Communicator manual, project #5: “Your Body Speaks“.

As a reminder, the objective of the project are:

• Use stance, movements, gestures, facial expressions and eye contact to express your message and achieve your speech’s purpose
• Make your body language smooth and natural

With that in mind, here’s the speech:

My friends have many nicknames for me it seems, and today I’m going to tell you a story about how I got one of my nicknames: The Mac Daddy! (In case you didn’t know, Mac Daddy means in modern slang “a proper man”.)

The beginning of the story I’m sure will resonate with some of the men in the audience: you wake up one morning and realize with horror that that very day, it’s a special day for your partner/wife/girlfriend or for the 2 of you together – be it a birthday or an anniversary – and you completely forgotten about it until that very morning!

Sure, I get on the phone and arrange for flowers, a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant, champagne and the whole bit (I feel the champagne bit always gives it a bit of extra: when the server comes over and pops the cork, the bubbly fizzing.) But I still feel this particular occasion deserves more than that – so what else can I do? I look around the room desperately looking for ideas and in this scanning process I encounter… the dressing table! That very morning, like many others, my girlfriend spent a significant amount of time there, in front of the mirror, applying her makeup. So a light bulb goes on in my head: makeup! She would love that!

So I set off to figure out which of all the multitude of items on her dressing table she uses regularly and are running low – those must be the ones she uses a lot and if I buy those, she would definitely be pleased. So I start pulling drawers and looking in every little round container, and big container and squarish round thing and tube with black stuff in it – until I build a small pile of such “things” which seem to be running low.

I look at the names on these containers and they all have the same one pretty much “Mac” written allover it. “Must be a cosmetics shop” I figured. I quickly go onto Google, and find out that indeed, there is a Mac shop close by, so I throw them in a bag and head out to the shop.

I turn up in the Mac shop and put the bag with all these in front of the lady at the cashier and say “I want one of each things”. She looks in the bag and starts pulling the items one by one and calling to me: “So we have one mascara, one eye shadow, blemish, cream foundation, tinted moisturizer, one sheer foundation, one oil-free foundation, shimmer foundation, eye liner… “ and the list goes on and I have no idea what half of this stuff is but I stand there and nod in acknowledgement. At the end she asks : “Would that be all?” – enough to make me wonder “Hang on, should I buy more? Is there anything missing?” But I overcome my panic and say yes —  she tells me the price and I hand over the credit card.

A few minutes later I’m driving back home with a bag full of Mac products which I still don’t understand nor can I really recall all the names but I know damn well that my girlfriend uses these and will love all these products.

Later that evening before we go to dinner I present her with the bag of Mac cosmetics – she is in total awe of my gesture and after trying on pretty much every single product she picks up the phone and starts texting all of our friends: “OMG, you wouldn’t believe what Liv bought me…” and goes on to tell all of our friends the story and the contents of the bag from Mac. And at this point, the very first reply she gets back from our friends is this one liner: “Well what did you expect, he’s the Mac Daddy!”

And ever since that day the name stuck – all thanks to a bag of cosmetics from Mac!