pedanther

At our Toastmasters meetings, we have a warm-up activity where one person starts a story and it travels around the room until everybody's contributed a sentence or two, with the last person (hopefully) bringing it to something like a sensible conclusion.

For this week's meaning, it was my turn to provide the story opening. The theme of the meeting was horse racing, on account of the town's annual week-long Race Round starts this Sunday, so this was my beginning:

It's a beautiful day at the races, and up here in the commentary box I'll have an excellent view of the big race. They're under starter's orders now... and they're off!

Bosom Companion is out in front... now Elephant's Child is ahead by a nose... Knick Knack and Knock Knock Joke are neck-and-neck... and trailing far behind is --

-- but wait! What's this?

The next speaker announced that one of the horses had balked at the starting gate due to a herd of cats on the track. As the story progressed, that horse threw his rider, took off down the track, jumped the fence, and wound up (somehow!) in the queue for the totes. By this point, we were down to the last few speakers, who switched focus back to the track, where the remaining horses were approaching the finishing line, and after some last-minute twists --

I should mention before we go any further that this is of course done entirely impromptu, people will often go on odd tangents when they're put on the spot (as witness the bit about the queue for the totes), and it's not often that a story will end up anywhere near where the original speaker expected it to go. The odds that it will end exactly how the original speaker hoped, assuming he was foolish enough to hope for a specific ending, are laughable.

-- after some last-minute twists, the final speaker announced the winner.

It was Feetlebaum.