She was introduced and she was excited and launched into things well but 3 minutes into her schtick it happened. She stared up at the insanely bright klieg lights, shifted her weight to one foot and got real quiet. She grinned. The clock ticked. She said: “okay, that was for effect.” Everyone laughed in relief. But then she got quiet again but this time she winced, massaged her head with her left hand, attempting to coax the words out but only smiles came. Strained smiles. Other comics in the audience sensed the reality of her situation and began blurting out corny filler jokes and riddles, to give her time to recover if she could. She couldn’t. In a resolute tone, like she was being dismissed from the spelling bee, she said: “Yeah…I think I’m going to have to end this early”, and walked off, stage right. The applause was enormous. She shirked off the sympathy thunder and slinked off into the darkness until no one could see her.
Could be worse. When you have too much caffeine you can suffer an interruption in peristalsis. This makes you quiet too.
“The primary peristaltic wave forces the bolus of food down the esophagus and into the stomach in a wave lasting about 8-9 seconds; this wave will travel down to the stomach even if the bolus of food descends at a greater rate than the wave itself, and will continue even if for some reason the bolus gets stuck further up the esophagus.”When it’s stuck, you can only talk in short bursts. You can try drinking water, but it just fills up in your espophagus making you think of the times when you overfill the fluid reservoir in your car and it leaks all over. And you think maybe if you continue filling, you’ll die. You try jumping around, using gravity/physics to move the mouthfull downward and meanwhile your body thinks maybe the food is going to exit through the “front door” so it starts producing copius amounts of saliva. And if a friend is with you they can’t understand the problem and since talking is only permissible in short bursts you can’t aptly explain what’s happening to you. What’s the cure? Time. You pace/sit/jump/wait for 7-15 minutes and it’s gone. And the next meal you have is a chewed a lot more than usual.
Toastmasters is an international club (I’ve seen classified ads while in Ukraine, London, Brazil) that’s why they have a globe in their logo. Public speaking is a global fear. The club’s mission statement is to start coping with it. They do this by making you do it. You take turns giving speeches and you have words you have to use during the meetings and they host liar contests. And anytime you say anything at their meetings, it’s met with thunderous applause. They make you feel like some charasmatic headliner or a candidate for whatever delivering the most hortatory speech ever. They also try to rid your word flow of extraneous interrupters/pausers like “uh” and “um” and “like”. They do this with alligators. Before meetings they hand out little toy alligators that “CLICK”. If you are talking out loud and stammer with an “um” you’ll hear a smattering of CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. Their facial expressions always seem to match their little invasions. Pinched and playful scowls, mostly. They don’t know that it’s sort of fun to be CLICKed at and I can remember at least once while talking during a meeting I was invited to, faking an “um”.
Who was the comic? I would go see her in a second. We learn more about people in the spaces between the words.