By Adriane Quinlan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 26, 2006

Here buzzes a roomful of talkers with no one to listen.

On Thursday morning at 8, some 1,600 practiced public speakers chat amid the whooshing air conditioning of the Hilton Washington, gathered for the 75th annual Toastmasters International Convention.

They meet and greet, guffaw, nod heads of salt-and-pepper hair and do the real communicating with their hands.

Once, these smooth talkers would rather have lain in the coffin than given the eulogy. To boost their confidence, these onetime shy kids joined Toastmasters, the nonprofit club that sits its members around a table where they're pushed to deliver speeches in front of peers who count how many "uhs" they let fall, how well they incorporate gestures, humor and props. (A speaker once gave out slices of an onion to show how he could be "surprisingly sweet.")

There are no classes, only the simple act of speaking to the group. After a year, even the most timid among them learn to flash business cards like baseball cards and shake a man's hand like they're tugging him ashore.

Members can move up through a system of rankings. The top ranking is "Distinguished Toastmaster," and nearly all attending the convention have achieved this honor -- but they continue to attend local chapters for the social atmosphere or the opportunity to give back to others.

Or just because they now love to speak. These are the program's bubbliest and brightest, the success stories who can lead a corporate meeting with the grace of a dancer. (Toastmaster Josef Martens took ballet to improve his hand gestures.) They come from Japan and Kansas. They bring husbands and wives (once called "Toastmistresses," though the president's wife is the "First Lady"). For $520, members come to the convention for a lineup of self-improvement lectures, award luncheons, a flag parade and a grand finale on Saturday morning, the World Championship of Public Speaking. On the stage of the Hilton's International Ballroom, the globe's 10 best Toastmasters face off with prepared speeches for the coveted world champion title.

But despite all the backslaps, a grim reality becomes evident: The average age in the room might be 65. Toastmasters is not cool. Last year, for the first time, membership in North America decreased, by 1 percent. In the VIP room, musing over the situation, Executive Director Donna Groh, 56, admits that "a lot of young people think we're the old boys' club."

"You have to be 40 to be a Toastmaster," says 16-year-old James Brady, who hung around the hotel all day, bored, dragged here all the way from Naas, Ireland, by his Toastmaster father.

Actually, members can be as young as 18. And since 1973 women have been eligible to join. So why the reputation?

"Buickization," wrote Steve Brandon, an accountant and member, in June's Toastmaster magazine. "In Buick's case, its popularity fell because its traditional clientele aged and younger generations did not replace the steady attrition of the older customers. . . . I have seen the older generations consistently overrepresented in Toastmasters, and I wonder what fate will befall Toastmasters in two or three generations."

Young people still visit Toastmasters to get over the jitters -- but once that's done, they usually cycle out of the club. "A lot of people leave after one or two years," says Groh.

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.