The field research for this article was done largely in and around Portland, Oregon. If Portland is representative, there is no such thing as a typical AA meeting. Within the city there are as many kinds of meetings as there are communities. There are special meetings specifically for lawyers, doctors, women, gays, lesbians, and even atheists. There are meetings for the rich, and meetings for the poor. There are meetings in English, Spanish and other languages. Some of the groups gather in the basements of churches or in the meeting rooms of public buildings. Other groups own or rent their own buildings and have been operating continuously for many years. The meeting most often attended in anticipation of this writing is housed in a ramshackle addition to an old Victorian house which lies just out of the industrial area on Portland's east side. The meeting room holds about forty people and is furnished with a menagerie of donated tables, chairs and couches. Four times a day, every day of the year, a chairman sitting at a school teachers desk at one end of the room announces the start of another meeting of the Twelfth Avenue chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Twelfth Avenue group is not typical. It seemed, however, to have been fairly immune to the influx of treatment center jargon that has appeared throughout AA since insurance companies, psychologists and hospitals took over the job of drying out financially solvent alcoholics. The members self-righteously call it old time AA, and some of them are old enough to remember when alcohol treatment meant a cop, a nightstick and the drunk tank. In this particular group people seldom begin speaking with the words, "I'm Bob, and I'm and alcoholic." If they introduce themselves at all, no one responds with a gleeful, "Hi, Bob." The chairman calls the meeting to order at exactly the time it is scheduled to start. The serenity prayer is said, the twelve steps and twelve traditions are read, and the chairman then alternates between reading from the Big Book and calling on people to share their experience, strength and hope. The chairman is not permitted to make comments or tell his or her own story from the chair, and no one is permitted to comment upon what another member has said. For ninety minutes the participants listen to each other and to readings from the Big Book. Stories are told. People confess. The members repeat AA cliches and interpret passages from the Big Book. Tales of drinking and despair, in one way or another, always come to a fairly happy ending. Amidst all this, drunks manage to get and stay sober.

One of the common admonitions given to new attendees at an AA meeting is the warning that the meeting is not the program. What one attends is a meeting of the fellowship. The program of recovery is "found in the pages of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous." The guts of the program are in the twelve steps.
Orrin R. Onkin :)
http://loris.net/aapragf.html