THE CLOCK STRUCK PRISCILLA 9/20/13

Hey- I'm still alive, still stuttering, and am ready to blog again. I had no idea this would turn into such a long break but I guess it was what I needed. 
     A Birthday Blog is the perfect way of re-starting. I just wrote 52, and have attached 50 & 51 to it. The three share a common theme so they can be read as a group. The Birthday Blogs are very short and very Priscilla.  I'm working on the finale to STUTTERVILLE now and will be finished soon. I promise.--- Gary,  a.k.a. Stutterpuss

     I'm turning 50 tomorrow. Well, I'm turning 50 at exactly 4:40 A.M. That's the time I was born, and it's the time my mother calls every year to wish me Happy Birthday. She doesn't have to set an alarm clock because her vagina instinctively remembers and wakes her. I'm woken up instinctively too, by my arms and legs thrashing around trying to escape out of my bedsheets. 

    When I moved to the West Coast into a different time zone, the Birthday phone call got more complicated. My mother's vagina and my thrashing limbs became out of sync from the three hour time difference. It forces her to do either addition or subtraction when she wants to call on my Birthday, which is enough to confuse her every year. Sometimes the call comes three hours early at 1:40  A.M. Sometimes it comes at 2:40 A.M. when she thinks its only a two hour time difference. It's astounding how many years she has made some kind of error in her time calculations.I even made up a poem for her to help keep the times straight in her mind:

              Gary takes a morning pee
            three full hours after me. 

     Unfortunately, it relied on her either remembering the poem itself or remembering where she put it, which has proven to be too much to expect.
     So off to bed I go with my cell phone right next to me. I may not know exactly what time the call will come, but when that phone rings at 40 minutes past something, I'll know who it is.

                                             *
     
           I grabbed my ringing phone in the dark.
       "Happy Birthday Pooh!. It's 7:44 here so  I know it's  4:44 there. Proud of your ol' Mom for finally getting it right?"
       I chuckled into the phone before I gave her the news. " Ma, I hate to tell you this, but I was born at 4:40, not 4: 44. That was the one thing you've gotten right all these years."
      " Are you sure? I could swear it's 4:44. I even have it written down here so I would call at exactly the right time," she said with certainty.
      " Sorry Ma. I know you tried but it's definitely 4:40."
      "  Oh shit," she groaned. " You're right. I just remembered what 444 was. It was the number of my flight coming home from Africa. I was reading it when I added it to my scrapbook last night. It must have stuck in my head. That's what happened,"she laughed at herself, then groaned a little more in exasperation. "It always happens when I see two numbers that are close." .
     " It was only one '4' off.  You came close at least," I laughed.
     " You're never going to believe this but something inside was telling me to call you at 4:40"- (that would be her vagina)-" but I just sat there staring at the phone until 4:44 because I was so sure that was the right time." 
     " Ma,  what makes it  so special is how you manage to get it wrong so often. It's all part of the call for me. Don't worry about it, it still counts," I chuckled then yawned. " Ma, I have to hang up and sleep a little more. Thanks for the birthday call. Love you.Goodbye." 
     " I love you too. Bye-bye, Pooh."

 The lesson of this little story is an obvious one: Never ignore what your vagina is trying to tell you.

===============================
     

  At the time I turned 50 last September 20th, I wrote THE CLOCK STRUCK PRISCILLA to explain how each year on my birthday, my mother Priscilla attempts to call me at 4 :40 A.M., which was the exact time of my long-ago departure from her vagina. No matter how hard she tries, she is always thwarted by either time zone changes, alarms set too late, phone numbers dialed incorrectly, misread penciled-in numbers, wrong area codes, and by her greatest enemy of all, simple math. 

    The three hour time difference between East and West Coasts has continued to vex her since I moved here 17 years ago from New York. 
      Last year she called thinking my birth time was 4:44 A.M. instead of 4:40. This meant I would have had to spend an extra four minutes trying to get out of her vagina. I assured her she was wrong, horrified at the thought of how much  more psychological damage four extra minutes stuck inside her would have caused me.
   When I turned off the lights and left my phone on, I wondered when the call would come. At 1:05 in the morning, the phone rang and I fumbled in the dark to answer it. It was my Nameless Booty Caller, or NBC. He must have gotten encouraged when I answered the phone, but was quickly discouraged when he heard "Mommy?" 
     I fell back to sleep but shot up from my pillow when the phone rang again. This time I had my glasses under the pillow ready so I could see who was calling. The caller I.D. read 'Priscilla' so I quickly answered it before the call went into voicemail.
     "Mommy?"
     " Happy Birthday Pooh!"
     " What time is it?' I immediately asked, dying to know if she screwed up again.
     " It's 7:40, which means it's 4:40 there, right?" she asked with guarded excitement.
     " Congratulations Ma, you got it right!" I cheered her in the darkness.
     " I promised myself I wouldn't get it wrong on your 50th birthday," she said, proud of her great accomplishment. 
     "Ma, what did you just say?" 
     " I said I didn't want to get it wrong again. Like you always say I do."
     " How old am I again?" I asked with  suspicion in my voice. 
     " You're 50 Pooh. The big one."
     " Oh Priscilla," I laughed. "You just gave me the best birthday present."  I paused a few seconds to laugh more and enjoy the moment. "I don't know how to break this to you Mommy, but I'm 51 now, not 50. That was last year."
     " Gary that's impossible. I would remember you turning 50. I counted it out on my fingers to make sure. 1962 plus 50 equals 2012. And Mitchell is two years older so he's 52."
     " Ma, I was born in 1961, not 62. So I'm 51 and Mitch is 53."
     " Oh my God, I can't believe I got that wrong. I never got that wrong before," she groaned. " I give up already. It's impossible."
     " Ma, the more times you get it wrong, the better the odds are of you eventually getting it right, " I laughed again. 
     " Why do all my children think it's so funny? It's hard remembering everything. You try having three children whose ages keep on changing," she defended herself as if this was a common dilemma that all mothers face. "It would be much easier if ages didn't change so often. Birthdays never change. That's why I'm so good at remembering them. I don't even have to write them down. How about some credit for never forgetting any birthday of any one's in this family."
     "It's true Ma. That is without doubt your specialty."
     " So don't laugh at me every year. You know I try."  
      " Ma, I love when you don't get it right. It's the highlight of every birthday,"I smiled in the dark. 
    " Next year, I'll get it perfect," she vowed.
    " If you do I'll never speak to you again, " I warned before saying good night and thanking her for the call again.
    " Goodnight Pooh, I love you."
    " I love you too."

 =============================================

         It's 12:09 A.M. on September 20, my birthday. This is the one day a year I allow myself to write about my mother's vagina. Luckily, her vagina is not on my mind a lot, except for seeing it every time I've closed my eyes for the past 42 years, ever since she did her naked bicycle pumps and jumping jacks  in front of me when I was 10. But this is not the time to complain about her vagina. This is the time to celebrate my mother's vagina. I want to thank it and salute it. After all, it was responsible for My Great Escape, as I call it ( I think a movie was made with the same name).

THE LIGHT, THE WONDERFUL LIGHT!

       The Birthday Call is the greatest tradition that my mother and I share. As a matter of fact, it is our only tradition. Nothing else survived from all the years of fighting and being apart. I guess this is why it's so significant in both our lives.

     The fact that she gets it wrong every year is it's own tradition within the tradition. She has always been very clear with herself that her ineptitude has nothing to do with her heart, and that her love is a very powerful force even without having much talent or skills. She remembers every one's birthday so easily because her heart has a tremendous memory, much bigger than her mind's, which is relegated to remembering time zones and other facts that are boring to her.

      Before I went to sleep, I checked to make sure my phone's battery was charged and the ringer was set on high. I didn't want to chance missing the Birthday Call. I was actually excited about it. It's funny, I never thought I would say that about any phone conversation involving my mother. I've grown to appreciate the calls more just for the immense amount of love that I have absorbed from them even when I didn't want to.

    

                      *

      Well, just like broken clockwork, she fucked up 

again. 4:20 A.M., 20 minutes too early. A premature Birthday Call. But this time she was able to blame her new husband, Joe. She said it was his fault for waking her up at 7:20 instead of 7:40, like he was supposed to, so he could leave earlier. She was scared she would fall back to sleep after he left and not call when she wanted to. The whole thing made no sense to me, especially at 4:20 in the morning. 

     The important thing is that she was true to form and was able to somehow  fuck up the Birthday Call again. She kept the tradition going and didn't ruin her streak. And who knows, maybe all her Birthday Call blunders have brought me good luck over the years. 

    Imagine if she finally gets everything right when I turn 53, and suddenly  everything and everyone around me starts to unravel. How frightening. Luckily, it would take a perfect Birthday Call to see if that would happen. Personally, I think there's a better chance of being hit by an asteroid.

A BIRTHDAY CALL BLUNDER FOR
EACH YEAR I'VE BLOGGED. 
GO PRISCILLA GO!

                                             

 

To Whom It May Concern-

Please excuse Gary's tardiness. His dog Felon ate his blog.

     My mind has been elsewhere, rare as that is, with the first anniversary of Brian's death on April 14. This was followed a week after by the death of  my best friend Scott's mother, Janet Brandis ( which I will write about in the near future). Then this weekend I spent sitting, unfortunately on the toilet and not at my computer, with certain stomach problems (which I will not be writing about in the near future).
     I owe you the grand finale to  'STUTTERVILLE', and now that I am off the toilet and back at my computer, I'll get it finished as soon as I can.  Truly, Stutterpuss.
   
   

THE PETER PIPER PAPERS: STUTTERVILLE PART III

     It was costing $3000 to have the worst time of my life. That's one thousand dollars a week for 21 days of punishment.  I should  have figured anything called the Precision Fluency Shaping Program at the Hollins Communication Research Institute was not going to be at all fun or easy.

" Hard work and long practice
 can be oh such a bore,
with just the wave of two arms
you'll stutter no more! "

   No magic spell could save me. There was no way to cheat, no shortcut to take or detour to make. This was a problem because making detours and cheating happen to be essential to stutterers. It's part of what makes us so sly when it comes to changing the rules of verbal engagement. 

     The head speech therapist, Ross, and the rest of the staff of the Precision Fluency Shaping Program, or PFSP, knew all the 'tricks of the trade' used by stutterers and wouldn't let us get away with anything. We weren't allowed to avoid, substitute, or disguise any sound. It was like Fat Camp, except the staff just cared about what came out of our mouths instead of what went in.

                                       

The Basics:

The vocal cords
(or what looks like a vagina in my throat). 

    One of the first things I learned is that there is a vagina in my throat that I can't control. This vagina, also referred to as the voice box, has vocal cords that vibrate evenly and smoothly when speech is fluent. When I stutter, my cords vibrate improperly and clamp together, trapping a sound.
   This trapped sound is referred to as a 'block'. Imagine, if you will, my voice box is not a vagina anymore but instead is a wrestling arena. In this arena, a 'blocked' sound is in a Full Nelson until it breaks free and escapes.

  





























   
                                                The pressure that is built-up by each block varies, making some of my stutters bigger and more obvious. Those are the ones that are painful for other people to watch in person or listen to over the phone. When the sound is finally released, the force behind it can be quite explosive. This creates what is called a 'hard-onset'. This is not to be confused with a hard-on, which also can be quite explosive at times. It might help to think of a hard-onset in terms of a manhole cover being blown off or a volcano erupting, which, like a stutter is uncontrollable and quite a sight to see.

   




   

A block and a hard-onset were simple words turned into important concepts, and neither were tolerated by Ross. We were taught to identify these two tell-tale signs of stuttering so we could be sure to never be caught doing them.  

 Sharp, jagged sound waves
of hard-onsets that look like
 broken fangs (above),

compared to the sound waves
 of the 'gentle-onset' 
that fall perfectly into place 
in a flawless formation of
flowing peaks and valleys (below).

   'Gentle-onset' helps to control the initiation of sound. Each sound starts off as a very low amplitude vibration of the vocal cords. The amplitude gradually increases as the vocal cords vibrate more quickly, until the loudness peaks. A gradual decrease in loudness immediately follows until the sound ends at the same amplitude level that it began.

   This fundamental action of fluent 

speech occurs naturally in those of you who don't stutter. In your case, the vagina in your throat is calm and relaxed without you having to make any effort or give it even one thought. Your vocal cords allow  sounds to rise and fall with unwavering uniformity, similar to the superb symmetry of synchronized swimmers.    

   The gentle-onset is the gold standard of proper speech and the cornerstone of the entire Fluency Shaping Program. If we mastered it, the fluent world was ours to conquer.

                NORMAL SPEECH 
                 WITHIN OUR REACH!

 To master the gentle-onset, you must tame the gentle-onset. And to tame the gentle-onset, you must slow the gentle-onset. And I mean really slow. Words had to crawl before they could walk. At Hollins Institute, words barely crawled, at least at the beginning of the program. Each word was deconstructed into all it's different sounds. Then each sound was deconstructed into a beginning, middle and an end, lasting a full 2 seconds.

                                  The 2-second gentle-onset stretch

   For you to grasp just how torturously long the 2 second gentle-onset was, all you have to do is write down the word ' 'WATERMELON'. Then break it down into all the different sounds that make up the parts of it. The WA is two sounds, the W and the A, each lasting two seconds each, for a total of 4 seconds. The TE and the R are another two sounds equaling another 4 seconds. That's 8 seconds so far. Now add that 8 seconds to the 6 seconds from the three individual sounds of the M, the E, and L. The O and the N at the end is an additional 4 seconds, for a grand total of 18 seconds. Yes, 18 seconds just to say 'watermelon'! In other words, it would take the same time to count out loud to '18 Mississippi'.

                                       Watermelon said normally.

An 18-second long watermelon.

                                         

No picture of the 'therapy suites' was available 

but I did find this shot of break-time at a

Hungarian Maximum Security Prison

REDLIGHT DISTRICT  LOCK DOWN

       Ross assigned each of us a 'therapy suite', which was actually more like a 'therapy closet'. They were tiny rooms that faced each other with a narrow hallway in between. There was a built-in tabletop with a chair under it, with nothing else except a small, odd, black box sitting on the table facing the chair.

 

   It turned out that this black box, otherwise known as the Precision Fluency Shaping Program Voice Monitor, or PFSPVM for short, was going to be my new speech therapist. It looked like a basic ham radio. The built-in microphone didn't connect to anywhere outside of the box. There was no human listening on the other end, and no voice, machine or otherwise, to answer me back. The only interaction it offered was flashing one red nipple-shaped light bulb at me whenever I screwed up a gentle-onset. The Voice Monitor had the extremely precise and extremely annoying ability to detect any disruption of airflow or even the slightest hint of a hard-onset.  

  From the moment it first flashed it's red nipple at me, I knew this new plugged-in speech therapist and I weren't going to get along. Machines and I have never gotten along; I don't like anything that I can't charm or make laugh (another reason why I didn't like Ross).

    Hearing myself speak so slowly made it  hard  to focus and to even stay awake. It sounded like a Buddhist chant that seemed to echo in the tiny, bare room. Even though everyone's doors were shut, I could still hear the muffled drones of the other stutterers through the walls. It sounded more like a Tibetan monastery than a speech clinic. Occasionally I heard a loud accidental 'damn it!' or 'shit!' from someone else who, obviously frustrated with the Voice Monitor, forgot to curse with a gentle-onset.

       You would think that the worst part of the PFSP was being in the solitary confinement of my therapy suite while having to spend hour after hour  stretching out every conceivable combination of vowels and consonants for 2 seconds each. For me, having to leave my tiny room and join all the other stutterers at break-times was even more torturous.

      First of all,  I was  very disappointed in the group I got stuck with. I waited my whole life to finally meet other stutterers, and I ended up having nothing in common with them. There weren't any other Jews in my group, or  New Yorkers either, or anyone who was particularly funny, sexy or loud like me. What was most disappointing was the fact that there was not one other gay stutterer in the group. I was sure that there would be at least one, or maybe even a few.
   Having moved into Manhattan immediately after High School to study illustration at Fashion Institute of Technology and then moving into an apartment in Chelsea with my boyfriend Scott, I had become accustomed to there always being a gay presence around me. I wanted to be surrounded by gay people as often as possible to make up for all the lost time I spent with straight people my whole childhood. It was an entirely new reality that gave me comfort and strength. I had thought the days of me being the only gay person in a group were over. I didn't like the feeling I got when there weren't any other gays nearby. After all, it was 1982 and the gay rights movement was taking off, fueled by the start of the AIDS crisis a year earlier, and declaring one's gayness was a powerful political statement and tool.  

       I made a point of letting it be known that I was gay to Ross and to anyone else at the Hollins Institute who I felt the need to tell. When I was in my 20's, I  made it an issue wherever I went, and was happy to have it define me. I was creating an intentional distance between myself and straight people, even if they stuttered. Looking back now, it was probably the most inopportune  time for me to be in such a straight environment as the Hollins Institute in Roanoke. And the fact that I found my group as a whole to be particularly boring didn't help at all. I tried to join conversations during break-times  but I have never been able to fain interest. Hearing fluent people discuss sports, cars, the weather, and National Parks is boring enough, but hearing stutterers trying to discuss it is nothing less than a punishment. 

    What made it even worse was that all of us had to time ourselves as we had these boring conversations. Ross had given each of us a stopwatch that was to be carried at all times. He told us that we were to consider the watches to be   as important to our survival as pacemakers are to people who have bad hearts.  Whenever we were not in front of the Voice Monitor, we had to use the stopwatches to make sure that each sound of every word we said was still 2 seconds long. 

   Ross instructed us to use this 2 second stretch anytime we opened our mouths, even if it was for the most basic question or the most obvious answer. He refused to give any exceptions or 'time-outs', even if someone felt what they had to say was too important to be spoken slowly. We were not allowed to shorten sentences, abbreviate words or use the very handy 'never mind' or the even handier shoulder shrug.  Every sound had to be at the same slow speed.  Ross was like a very strict hallway monitor, except he was  patrolling our mouths instead of the halls. 

   These break-times were when Ross really could show what an asshole he could be. But looking back at it, the breaks also revealed what incredible patience he must have possessed. A lesser man would have gone insane having to listen to as many stutterers going through the Fluency Program as he did over the years. In his defense, the job of head clinician required that he be the asshole he was. In a way, being such an asshole helped to make him the best in the world at what he did.

      Ross never slowed his speech to match ours so conversations with him were very lopsided. Answering him took ten times longer than he took to ask the question. It made any conversation longer than I ever wanted to have with him. But those conversations seemed quick compared to whenever I got trapped speaking to another stutterer. Conversations that should have been finished in two minutes were taking a quarter of an hour. Each interaction turned into an investment. So much effort went into every response that I had to force myself to participate. 

   The first person would click the on/off button of his stopwatch and stare down at the second-hand trying to time each sound of the word he was saying. In the mean time, the second person just stood there waiting. When the first person timing himself was finished, he would click off his watch and look back up. This was the cue for the second person to click on his stopwatch and begin his response, looking down at his watch's second-hand while the first person now stood there and waited. You can imagine how unbearable this  become, at least for me.

   A stopwatch had always  represented the quickness of things, but at the Hollins Institute it became the guardian of slowness. It made me aware of how incredibly slow 2 seconds can be. All the clicking and quick ticking became the background music for all our conversations.

               

    By the end of the fourth day, I could swear I was still hearing faint ticking in my ear as I laid in the bed of my hotel room unable to sleep.  I  was  dreading having to go back to the Institute in the morning and face another full day of the Voice Monitor's  flashing red light and The Stopwatch Sonata. 

                                                   *       

    I had hoped by the next day I would be more inspired about the program, but being back at the Institute in my tiny therapy suite suffering through more hours of the Voice Monitor's silent, flashing judgements was becoming unbearable. Time inside the therapy suite was dragging more and more each hour. Remember, this was in the 80's before PC s, cell phones, and any other technology that nowadays keep us from ever feeling trapped and alone. Once that door closed, it was me vs. the Voice Monitor. There was nothing else in that room to distract or interest me. The only entertainment  I had was to repeat an 8-second "ffFuuUUUuuKkk yyYYYyyooOOoo," over and over to the Voice Monitor.

    My mind was everywhere except where it was supposed to be. I couldn't focus enough to continue practicing with the Voice Monitor. All I wanted to do was go to sleep. I could still hear the stretched-out muffled moans coming from the other stutterers as I put my head down on my arms folded on top of my workbook. But just as I was dozing off, Ross appeared on one of his random check-ins. He went from suite to suite at will, opening our doors without warning to keep us on our toes. I sprang forward in my chair just in towards the Voice Monitor acting like I was in the middle of practicing. He  stood silently against the back walland listened to me doing gentle-onsets into the microphone. He hardly ever commented on what was done well or what wasn't. He knew just his presence alone was enough to usually make everyone try their best. 

    " I told you the first week is the hardest, Gary. We start in the deep-end and then swim to the shallow part. This gets easier, but only if you do what you're supposed to do now. You still have too many hard on-sets, " Ross broke his silence and said.

    I wanted to complain to him but I knew he would make me say it stretched out with my stopwatch so I didn't bother. 

   "You should take this as seriously as you seem to take being a gay person. Your speech is as big a part of you as anything else, " he told me as he opened the door. 

     I sat stunned in my chair not knowing how to answer him.

  " And talk to more people at break-times. You don't have to enjoy the conversations or the people. That's not the purpose of speaking with each other here," he added, closing the door behind him and leaving me alone again with the Voice Monitor that was flashing it's red nipple at me.

    " He didn't mean speak to you more," I sneered at the Voice Monitor and unplugged it from the wall. "That should teach you," I grinned and stuttered at it.

       It flashed its bitchy red light to criticize my hard-onset without even being plugged in. 

        "How the hell did you do that?" I sneered at it again.

      I picked it up and looked at it's dangling plug, then turned the black box over to find that it ran on batteries as a back-up. " You bitch," I said, wishing it was alive for a moment so it could understand how much I truly hated it. 

THE PETER PIPER PAPERS: STUTTERVILLE PART II

                         
   

       There are currently 3,149,318 stutterers stuttering in this country. In 1982 when I went to The Hollins Institute in Virginia, the overall population of The United States was almost 80 million people less than today and there were only 2,316,664 stutterers, including myself. Oddly, I had no idea who and where the other 2,316,663 were. Up to that point, I had not come across even one of my stuttering brethren. Somehow, over two million of them had managed to elude me. It seemed, at the time, that there was a better chance of me coming across Big Foot.    

Towns used to have
the Town Crier, 
never to be confused 
with the Town Stutterer.

      It felt like there had been a force field around me that kept all other stutterers away. Wherever I went, I was always the only one who stuttered. Moving to new neighborhoods and changing school districts didn't help. The job of Town Stutterer was always waiting for me. It was a job that seemed to be solely mine for the simple reason that no other stutterers ever showed up to take the position for themselves. I couldn't quit or get fired from it, and it always traveled with me.

This held true from elementary school all the way through college and after, when I went to work full-time as a stuttering salesman at my family's used fur store.

     Thousands of women from all over the city and tourists visiting New York from around the country and abroad came to shop at our store each year. Among all these women were customers with every conceivable handicap you can imagine. Blind women, deaf women, women in wheelchairs without legs, other women without arms, midgets and giantesses. Every kind of woman except the one kind of woman I hoped would come in to buy a fur--- a stuttering one.  Destiny, it again seemed, would not let me meet my first stutterer. It made me wait until I flew all the way to Roanoke, Virginia. This is because Destiny is an asshole sometimes. But Destiny always has its reasons.

                            Welcome to the

                      ' MEET and R-R-REPEAT '      

        
       Each of our video interviews had been shot by the head speech therapist Ross individually and at different times, so I had not yet met any of the other stutterers who were there for the course too. We were all invited to a 'Meet and Greet' back at the Hollins Institute later that evening, which I decided to go to instead of deciding to kill myself after being forced to bear witness to the horror of what my stutter actually looked like on video.

    After waiting 21 years, the prospect of finally meeting other stutterers was overwhelming. For years I had tried to picture what my first encounter with another stutterer would be like, but not once did I imagine that instead of one stutterer it would be with a whole group of them.

    On the walk back over to the Institute, I envisioned the intense connections I was about to have and the life-long friendships I would be leaving Virginia with at the end of the three weeks with people who I hadn't even met yet. I already had plenty of friends back in New York and felt very loved, especially by my boyfriend at the time, Scott ( who has been my best friend for 34 years). But deep down I always felt that I was missing something important by not also having friends who actually understood my life as a stutterer.

     Only stutterers understand the  different levels of hope and desperation we go through, the amount of anxiety we carry, the comedy we have to create, the humiliation we have to ignore, the constant preparation and effort we have to make, the strategies we have to consider, and the tricks and compensations we invent and use. I also wanted a friend who could understand and appreciate the simple, great thrill stutterers sometimes enjoy when we get out difficult words. No fluent-speaking person in my life, not even Scott, could possibly understand these feelings, no matter how much they loved me. 

     I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I was also looking forward to, for the first time in my life,  seeing people stutter in front of me. I wanted to see what it looked like and how it sounded when other people did it. And on a more egotistical level, I was dying to see how similar I was to the other stutterers, and if there was at least one other stutterer who was just like me. Exactly how many gay, Jewish stutterers who were loud, funny, and sexy were out there in the world? And was there going to be any at the 'Meet and Greet' besides me? 

      From the moment I left my hotel room I was staring at random people in the elevator, downstairs in the lobby, and on the sidewalks wondering who amongst them were my fellow stutterers  heading towards the 'Meet and Greet' too. Of course it was impossible to figure out. Even a stutterer can't spot another stutterer just in passing. If you see a person coming towards you with a long, white cane you can pretty much assume they are blind; you can also usually spot deaf people in advance if they're doing sign language while crossing the street ignoring the loud sirens of ambulances and fire engines coming towards them. But there is nothing to help you spot a stutterer strolling down the street until we actually try to speak. That's what is so tricky about us ---we look and seem perfectly normal ---until we open our mouths. 
    
                                                   *                                                                                           

        As I was opening the door to the Conference Room I realized I was about to step into the first room, out of every room I had ever stepped into my entire life, where I was not going to be the only stutterer. I closed my eyes for the moment it took to press together all the memories of the thousands and thousands of rooms I had been in and the thousands and thousands of people I stuttered at who never stuttered back at me.

     The closest I had ever gotten to what I was feeling at that moment when I saw all the stutterers together was the first time I stepped into a gay bar, named Chances, four years earlier when I was seventeen and under-aged, armed with a fake I.D. and a big smile. There was the similar long overdue feeling of safety that comes from sharing something in common with a group of people. Walking into a room full of stutterers made me feel even safer. I might not have been able to use my good looks to protect myself as much as I did at a gay bar, but for the first time in my life I wasn't going to be judged by strangers for stuttering.

      All the chairs had been removed and none of the staff was there. The only things in the room was a table with different kinds of drinks against one wall and a podium with a white board on the wall in back of it that read:  

                                     Meet and Greet-6:00 P.M.

                                Introduction to Precision Fluency Shaping Program

                                                 by Dr. Ronald Webster- 7:00 P.M.

       The situation seemed to be intentionally set up for us to mingle and introduce ourselves to each other, something that stutterers generally don't rush to do. Without seats to escape into or staff to listen to, there was more pressure for us to start talking. 

    

                     MEET & GREETS FOR STUTTERERS USUALLY 

                TAKE A LITTLE MORE TIME TO GET THE PARTY STARTED.

   It started out silently with a lot of smiles and nods and cup sipping. This strategy lasted for a few minutes, and then something surprising started to happen. Being amongst ourselves emboldened some of my fellow stutterers to start conversations. I started hearing a few isolated stutters, like the first few kernels of Jiffy-Pop popcorn that pop before most of the others start popping. Soon almost everyone was 'popping', taking advantage of the chance to show-off their stutters for the first time instead of trying to hide them. 

    What was and still remains one of the most fascinating things about stuttering is that every individual person's stutter is caused by the same faulty physical mechanism (whatever that elusive cause might be), yet each of us has developed our own original convulsive choreography to deal with it, along with facial gestures and repetitive movements that made each of our stutters totally unique. I tried describing this back in September 2011 in KICK,KICK,STOMP,STOMP, ONE and TWO and CHA,CHA,CHA part 1    '...to help get a word out, I sometimes have to throw my whole body into it. Heel stomping, chair kicking, thigh punching, table tapping, head bobbing, eye twitching, neck whipping, shoulder jerking, whatever it takes. For a few really bad stutters, I've had to bounce up and down like I was on an invisible pogo stick. It's Modern Dance at it's most primal with choreography that even Martha Graham couldn't follow..'  Some stutters were spectacular to watch, others were heartbreaking to see; others were bordering on comical, and the self-flagellation of a few looked painful.

    Serving beverages to a group of stutterers was not the safest idea. Hot coffee or tea was especially dangerous when being held by a person with a stutter on the more 'athletic' side. The pile of napkins on the table was gone in half an hour, and wherever I turned, someone was dabbing up a spill from either the carpet or their clothes.        

    I hadn't said one word to anyone yet because I was so enthralled with just listening and watching. Each conversation I eavesdropped on turned out to be about Ross and the video-taping. Apparently, every stutterer there was as shell-shocked as I was over being filmed. The video-taping had had a demoralizing effect on the whole group, which was probably Ross' intention. He wanted to strip us of any tolerance of our stutters and reinvigorate our senses of humiliation and embarrassment that might have gotten lazy over the years, no matter how bad some of our stutters were. As long as he could make us hate our stutters and make getting rid of them our top priority, he didn't mind us hating him too. 

    Some of the stutterers there had heard stories about Ross even before they arrived. It turned out that Ross' unwavering stoic seriousness was legendary; according to stuttering folklore he was once a severe stutterer himself, a fact  which I myself can't confirm or dispute. The one thing I could confirm was that the whole group seemed to be quickly bonding over our mutual and immediate dislike of Ross. This goes to show that nothing can unite people faster than sharing a common handicap or hatred.

     The big question everyone had for each other was what words were the most difficult to say on the video. An older man (which to me back then meant someone in his late forties) with silver in his hair and beard, explained that his worst stutter happened when Ross asked him his profession. The man curled in his lips together and squeezed his eyelids shut each time he tried to get out the word "paleoanthropologist", which he was finally able to puff out of his mouth after his lips gave way and opened.

    Another man not as old and a little less distinguished looking held his hand up in the air in a fist moving it up and down over and over like he was pulling on a broken cord trying to get a bus to stop. He was also snapping back his head at the same quick speed like he was catching peanuts being thrown rapid-fire at his mouth. "My name," he finally said. After that he had to tell us his name,which took almost 45 seconds. His lips looked sewn together as he tried to say the 'B' of Bartholomew, which unfortunately he was named.  And then he had to tell us that he went by 'Barry' instead, which took him almost as long as Bartholomew. 
     Like all stutterers, I knew the words and sounds that were my nemesis. This meant when Ross asked what the names of my family members were, I went into a free-fall of stuttering on the video. 
    "M's and P's are my worst," I jumped in, smiling at the little group. "And  my brother's name is Mitchell, my sister's name is Melissa and my mother's name is Priscilla." I said the entire sentence without one stutter, including the three names, which I had never been able to do in my entire life. "That's funny. I can't believe I didn't stutter on them," I said , not stuttering at all again. I rolled my eyes and laughed a little. "Wait, this is impossible. 'Mitchell,Melissa, Priscilla. Mitchell, Melissa, Priscilla, " I repeated, trying to make myself stutter. " That's so weird. I always stutter on them," I said bewildered and embarrassed by my sudden and unwanted fluency.
  " Are you being serious or is this a joke," the bearded man asked.
   "No, of course not. I'm being serious," I said with perfect speech. "Here, watch, 'F's' and 'W's' are bad too. Fedora, philharmonic, wisteria, warlock, water-polo, Fifty-five," I said  flawlessly. None of the men were smiling or finding it amusing in any way. " I don't know what's wrong, "  I said in all seriousness, for the first time in my life panicking that I wasn't stuttering. " This has never happened before."  Desperate to stutter at least once as proof to them, I started throwing out any words that I could think of that were hard for me to say. " Bewitched, molasses, marmalade , metamorphosis, mercury, Madame Curie, Tennessee Williams,  Mount Vesuvius, Pompei, potato, tomato, "  I rattled off without a hitch. Even 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow,' two words that to this day I avoid saying, came out easily. "This is so crazy. My speech is never as good as this,"  I tried to laugh it off again as the men turned their backs on me.
    My stutter, as usual, betrayed me, appearing when I don't want it to and vanishing the few times when I need it. That's how spiteful a stutter can be. I looked around and realized that I was the only one not talking to anyone. I was in the middle of the room all by myself. It horrified me for a moment until I remembered that I hate groups anyway.