Entertainment

Local amateur dramatic societies often have people who will come and perform for a very small amount.

Or, have you had one of those people who bring round wild animals of one sort or another? DGD had a chap bring 'scary things' for her birthday party. But he would adapt his theme to whatever you wanted. He had a birds of prey theme, a spiders and snakes theme etc.

There must be a local choir (they get everywhere!) or your local history group. We have a Speakers Club in our town and some of their members will do 'gigs'. The National Trust provide speakers as do the local Dogs Trust. Local artists might be persuaded to give a chat or Q and A session.

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Local libraries sometimes have lists of speakers, but beware - these are sometimes mind-bendingly awful, judging by some of those who have come to speak to our U3A monthly meeting! Rotary/Inner Wheel/Townswomen's Guild (et al) members might have recommendations.Also beware of the speakers that are listed as 'humorous' as many of those are best described as 'corny'. Do I sound disillusioned?

Another thought - are there any local authors that you know of? They are often very happy to give a talk about how they plan a book, characterisation, how they started etc. Of course they also hope to sell a few books .....

Lots of good suggestions for which I thank you all....but could I just make the point that "a retirement community" is not a care home! We may end up there, but we're not there yet!

You could contact your local library or museum to ask if they have such a thing as a "reminiscence box". They'll either let you borrow it or send a staff member to give a talk. You could also make a PowerPoint presentation of various old pictures. These things were very popular in the care home my aunt lived in.

Contact the local music school, dancing school or community centre and see if they have any budding musicians/dancers who would like an audience to practice on.

Our choir go and sing once a year at the Old People's Home. We are a church choir, but we put a hotchpotch of songs together, some secular, some religious. The old folks join in when they can. Even if you could only get hold of a purely church choir, people of our age and above love singing the hymns. They're often the only songs you remember all the words to.)

If your local Guides or Scouts are doing a Gang Show (do they still do that?) maybe they would like to go "on tour" with it, and do a potted performance for you.

Ask the local Amdrams if they have some short sketches up their sleeves, or could put some together.

Visit some local "open mike" sessions and see if there are any suitable artistes there (comedians, songsters, conjurors...)

Also there is a thing called the Toastmasters who train up amateur speakers; these are not necessarily informative, although they may be entertaining.

I organised a talk by our local Blood Bike group which was very successful with my group of ladies because it really made them rethink attitudes to motorcyclists. These are motorcyclists who transfer blood, plasma and now, I think, organs between hospitals and even by relay across the whole UK. They fund it all themselves often at big rally. If there is a group near you someone will certainly be happy to come along to talk to you

I am a member of the local Macular Society and we meet once a month. We have little money and the only people we pay are charities and that is only around £25 for an hour's talk.

I approached the manager of the local bank and he spoke to us about scams- not necessarily bank scams and it was excellent.

The local police will also come and give a talk as will the fire service. Good luck.

Badenkate - thank you for those suggestions. This is all new to me so I'll check the local paper and follow up with some other groups.

Humbertbear - those are all good ideas, most of which we already have in place. While we are quite good at entertaining ourselves, we also like the idea of bringing in others to do the work for us ... something different and stimulating.

Could you all watch a movie together? Why not have a games evening? You can buy games quite cheaply in charity shops and children's games are good fun. How about Trivial Pursuits. And I just had another idea that only needs a die, pencil and paper - A Beetle Drive.
Could you put together a quiz evening if different people take a round each?
How about collecting photos of celebrities when they were young and see who can identify them (or pictures of yourselves as babies).
Hope these help.

Groups like WI, Rotary, Townswomen's Guild - any local groups you can find in your local paper or notices in the library or similar - will have contact people and they are generally quite happy to pass names on.

Badenkate - They sound like interesting speakers, but I have NO idea how to find them. The online links to "after dinner speakers" are for agencies who deal with big name speakers who are out of our (financial) league. How does your supper group find its speakers?

There are lots of speakers if you look around who charge much less than this. I belong to a supper group and recently we've had someone who talked about the history of pub signs, someone spoke to us about their trek to the North Pole, another one was about George Formby. Talk to other groups in the area - they can usually recommend speakers. Another one might be from your local radio station.