The Old Saying

Toastmasters, a group devoted to public speaking skills, is holding its annual convention at the Hilton Washington. (By Adriane Quinlan -- The Washington Post)

In response, Toastmasters world headquarters in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., implemented a "strategic plan": conducting interviews with "youth leaders" and sessions with kid focus groups, whose findings Groh is "not at liberty to reveal."

It's a ray of hope. And so are younger leaders like Lance Miller, last year's public speaking world champion, who tells how within a few years, he landed a book deal, produced a CD set and expanded his Hollywood-based chapter from six members to 95.

"Does anyone have a club that straddles between life and death for a few months, and you hear a whoooooosh! gasp of air come from them?" Miller says, puffing out his face to blow out the air and rolling his eyes back like a corpse. The audience of 350 laughs, takes notes on scratch pads and laughs again. It's funny because it's true!

The middle-aged Miller, however, has the "secret recipe": face-to-face recruitment and clubs that are "less draconian" and more "FUN!" -- a strategy he hammers home via PowerPoint.

How did anyone remember anything before PowerPoint?

In all three conference rooms, pull-down screens sport life pronouncements. At one session, psychotherapist Janet Pearson promises to help Toastmasters "focus on another person's subtle physical and verbal cues," which she teaches by defining "rapport" as "the ability to put other people at ease."

But no one was at ease, as everyone was trying to read one another's subtle cues.

Miller, the public speaking champ, spent the last year on what he calls a swank "ambassadorship" that sent him to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to speak to corporations. But it's not corporate employees who should be taught these communication skills, Miller says, it's college students: "In school you learn too much theory, but you don't learn how to express yourself, how to get things done, how to plan and run a successful meeting. . . . There's a great market in youth."

A great market, and it's untapped, says Darren LaCroix, the 2001 champ, who bewails how "Toastmasters technology is outdated" and who, in speaking to young professionals, gives "a speech about how I became a comedian even though I wasn't funny." During the speech, he falls flat on his face, in painful physical Looney Tunes humor.

Oh yeah. We saw that on YouTube.

"What's YouTube?" LaCroix asks.

When Bo Bennett joined three years ago as the shy owner of a Web-hosting business, he found that the only Toastmasters technology besides hard-copy newsletters came in the form of an educational video that "still showed '80s guys with poufy hair and women with big glasses, like they just stepped out of a Michael Jackson video."

Last year, he launched the Web site Toastmasters.org, which now has 3,500 branch sites. "Ninety percent of the new membership comes from the Web site, especially younger members," he says during his lecture.

Onstage at Thursday's Golden Gavel Luncheon, Roger Baker, a Toastmasters director from Potomac Falls, introduces the keynote speaker. Baker quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes and John F. Kennedy, and leaves the audience with these solemn words: "Listen," he says, "until your brain is like a dripping wet towel and the water is squeezed all over the floor."

Even though his mike is on, you can barely hear him.

Everyone is talking.