Toastmasters

I joined Toastmasters a few years ago with the hope of improving my public speaking skills. I have always been impressed by people who seem to be able to effortlessly pull this off, regardless of the question or subject matter. And while I believe that we all have it in us to learn the skill, no matter how you slice it, it is pretty universally considered a difficult task: In survey after survey, fear of public speaking regularly clocks in at number one, even ahead of the fear of death.

Because of my steady diet of CSPAN, I’ve been exposed to many rock stars of the craft. Bill Clinton ranks near the top, feeling peoples pain publicly, while feeling up women privately; I am similarly impressed by Newt Gingrich. Both of these leaders somehow have been able to maintain an unimpeachable true rapport with their audiences, regardless of inner turmoil. Or perhaps there is no turmoil – is this the secret?

Toastmasters meetings are typically structured around two major speeches, with the remainder of the time filled with shorter public speaking opportunities (e.g., Table Topics, where you are given a chance to speak off-the-cuff for a minute or two on a provided topic), official evaluations of speeches, and reporting by appointed members on grammar employed and time consumed by participants. The flow is emceed by one of the club members, dubbed the Toastmaster for the night.

At one of the meetings I attended, after the Toastmaster had given his opening remarks, he introduced a couple of “visitors”: people who were interested in improving their speaking skills and wanted to see what these meetings were all about. We all nodded and smiled at them in appreciation of their willingness to take on a challenge more frightening than death.  Then our Toastmaster introduced the first speaker and stepped away from the podium, giving her the floor.

She spoke eloquently on the subject of same-sex marriage; it was from the heart, an impassioned plea about fairness and compassion. It was so well done that I remember it not only for the well-constructed arguments, but also for the way she effortlessly (and without a single “ah” filler word, a technical no-no in Toastmasters) delivered complete paragraphs without a single stumble. I was already sympathetic to her point of view, and her delivery left me completely convinced of my position. As the speech ended, there was a rousing applause, and none louder than mine.

After each one of these speeches, club members put down their thoughts (encouragement, opportunities for improvement, etc.) on slips of paper and later pass them to the speaker so that they might benefit from several independent viewpoints. But I was struggling to provide anything – I was impressed by the speech on so many levels – and ran out of time to complete my evaluation before the next speaker started up. I continued to think about what to say as the next speaker began, which turned out to be a speech about growing up in West Texas.

As he spoke about the dry and barren landscape, my mind was preoccupied with the lush, emotionally-charged imagery of the previous speech. But my short-term memory can only hold a small number of concepts simultaneously, and only if they are important enough at a base level; in this case, the pool was eventually whittled down to “sex” and “Texas”, as if my mind had chosen near-rhymes to fit in my compact (yet imaginative) brain. Seeded by these two words, my thoughts drifted to an old story about sex and a Texan, Lyndon Johnson. Early in his career, he was engaged in a bare-knuckles brawl of a congressional campaign and he told one of his aides to disseminate the story that his opponent had sex with pigs. The aide reputedly responded, “Christ, Lyndon, we can’t call the guy a pigfucker. It isn’t true.” Johnson responded, “Of course it ain’t true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it.”

As the second speaker concluded, again I was presented with the chance to put my thoughts down about the first speech, but I thought it would be inappropriate to bring all of this up – I would be hard-pressed to explain in just a few short sentences why it related to her speech. Indeed, any attempt to draw parallels between Lyndon’s impeccable logic and hers on the basis of these two words might seem forced, a post-rationalization of a wandering, fecund mind.  And, since I hadn’t really been paying attention to the second speech, I had nothing to provide there either. I settled on “Great job – I really liked the ending!” for both of them and hoped they wouldn’t compare notes.

Once the speeches were finished, it was only a matter of time before we got to the Table Topics section of the meeting, where we were invited to speak on the subject of Christmas. This, for most people, is challenging because of the fear of spontaneously making a fool of oneself in front of a large group. This is in spite of the fact that we all know how to talk, and when someone asks us a question, we all know how to generate sentences that are at least partly connected to whatever has been said – we do it all the time in everyday conversation. Not everything we say may be Hemingway or Faulkner, but it is usually intelligible and people aren’t typically dropping their jaws in judgment of the stupidity of it.

Nevertheless, no matter how much I tell myself this, I remain skeptical, and here’s why: There’s an old (perhaps apocryphal) story that my mom once told me about how, during the eighties as the Japanese were enthusiastically embracing Western traditions, through garbled cross-cultural communication, Santa Claus began showing up mounted on a cross as a decoration. This memory comes and goes, but called on by the Table Topics Master and under the pressure of the expectant crowd, it filled my mind and I imagined myself, after an impeccably-timed delivery of the story, the recipient of well-deserved adulation, like Newt before a packed house of fired-up Republicans after delivering a punch line full of red meat.

The illusion firmly implanted, I leapt from the verbal high dive: “I have listened with great interest to the proceedings about Christmas. It’s a wonderful time, where families come together and celebrate. And sometimes there are places that, new to the holiday, have come up with their own unique spin on things, perhaps driven by confusion about who the major players are. I don’t know if there is any better example of this than the story I once heard about how in Japan they sold ornaments with Santa nailed to the cross!”

A hush fell over the crowd – it seems the pool was empty and my rapport with the audience was eminently impeachable – and I was beginning to feel the vertigo that comes with the loss of the balance mechanism of the inner ear. Apparently what I thought of as so funny was totally bizarre to them, and, in an attempt to clarify that there was humor in this, channeling Forrest Gump, I added, “And that’s all I have to say about that!” and walked back to my seat under a sea of nonplussed stares. Of course, Toastmasters’ etiquette being what it is, even my effort elicited some polite applause.

The rest of the meeting was a blur. The Jokemaster presented the following: “What do you get if you deep fry Santa Claus? Crisp Cringle!”, and he was rewarded with loud guffaws from the audience. The timer read the times for all of us that had participated, and there were nods all around about the lessons to be applied next time. The Ah Counter brought the bad news.

And then everyone passed out slips of paper with their reviews of the speakers, including me. I’d gotten them before and I’d come to learn that these things were generally less about scathing criticism and more about encouragement. Alas, our two visitors knew none of this and went about their evaluation in a workmanlike manner, and, after reading through my stack of “Great job!”-themed slips, two stood out: the first read, “The presenter had a dry mouth, and it was distracting,” and on the second was written, “Did you say that because you are Japanese?” Laughing inside, my bravery was rewarded.