Last summer I visited a club up in Kirkland, Washington which I knew from the past met in the top floor of a church. When I arrived there were a lot of people in the basement and I wondered if they had moved rooms, but since I didn’t know anyone I kept walking.

When I got to the TM club, still on the top floor, I spoke with one of the new members, a very nice fellow from Africa. I asked him what the other meeting was. It turns out it was Alcoholics Anonymous! He told me the first time he came to Toastmasters he went to the AA room by mistake. He hasn’t been in the US that long and didn’t know AA was, so he sat through the meeting thinking it was TM before someone set him straight. It’s good he was serious about speaking and not an alcoholic!

More seriously, I watched the people stream out of the AA meeting since it wrapped up at the same time as TM. (For all my interest with evaluating speakers, doing it at an AA meeting would be too crass even for me.) It was interesting to see how alcoholism cuts across society. There was this woman there covered in tattoos talking about how her boyfriend got into a knife fight (I’m not making this up) and there were yuppie middle aged women, too. The two groups didn’t have anything to do with each other.