Our March chapter meeting last night had 18 people in attendance. We welcomed returning member Bryan, who returned to us after a 6 year hiatus. Happy to have you back!

Our ice breaker question of the night was “who was your favorite TV character when you were a kid?” and the diversity of our chapter shone through immediately, with a multi-decade-expanding roster of characters that included “The Three Stooges”, “Hulk”, “Pee Wee Herman”, a ninja turtle (Donatello if you were wondering), “Bart Simpson”, “Lizzy Maguire”, “Steve Urkel” and “Curious George”… but possibly the best answer came from Russ who said “when I was a kid we didn’t have TV” –which made the room burst into laughter.

After, we briefly talked about our fun Color Run last weekend -(AMAZING!)-, our spotlight of the month Daron Bolat, and reminded everybody of our upcoming Chat n’ Chew: Mavericks edition on April 11th, 7:30p. We have a few tickets left if you are interested, please contact us!

With that we moved to our topic of the night: Stuttering in the Media. 

Stuttering comes across our TV screens and movie theater screens every now and then. With King George VI from The King’s Speech, Jimmy from South Park and Alan Turing from the movie Imitation Game as just a few examples of characters with a stutter in recent memory, we posed the following questions:

– What do you feel when you see these characters?
– Do you feel identified with them or with how stuttering is portrayed?
– Did you see those depictions as a positive, negative or neutral? 

That sparked a lively conversation, that highlighted a variety of opinions.

Finally, we broke into small groups to get a little more personal, discussing “How do you portray your stuttering in social media?”

What did we discover? That some people don’t talk about it at all, a few of us share an article here and there, and some of us are very open about stuttering in every facet of life.

Another enlightening meeting.

Thank you everybody.
See you in a few weeks for the MAVS game!

Dallas NSA