kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Storyteller Storytelling shouldn't be just for children. Storytelling has been an ongoing thread in my life, it's always come back to find me when I've lost it for a while. I've told stories in some of the oddest places, at the oddest times, and had people come up to me three and five and ten years later to tell me what they heard. But it's not even a tenth of what I see when I perform...it's they who become my stories. There was the young yuppie eating his lunch at a ren faire, thinking that he was there to listen to stories for the sake of his little boy. He had round blue eyes, and he was the one who saw Beowulf, alone in the bottom of the swamp, afraid and without his shield companions, facing down the mother of his worst enemy. There was the woman who cried when Beowulf sailed across the sea, because she knew the ending of his story, and she thanked me when I didn't tell all of it. She was driving a scooter because she couldn't walk well, and was wearing a straw hat, and had a dragon painted on her arm. There was the little girl who made kung-fu fighting moves when the robber's bridegroom was hiding behind the wine casks in the cellar, and heaved a big sigh when the girl escaped through the forest in the dead of night. There was a tanned, bleached-blonde Stepford-wife type, who hung around through the entire french folktale about the magic rabbits, and laughed herself silly when the wooden clog-maker led them all back to the princess, conducting their dance with the magic wand. There was the older gentleman in black socks with an expensive camera and a science-fiction convention t-shirt who stayed to hear all about Wildcat and his pursuit of the great magician, Rabbit, who clapped his hands together when Rabbit conjured up a French fighting ship to terrify Wildcat. There's the rennie girl who every time she sees a performance of mine, asks for the sad ghost story of Molly Malone-- and her eyes are wet every time when I'm done with the last chorus of the song. There was the punk kid who sat in the back of the coffee shop and let his cigarette burn his fingers, because he had never heard the story about the man who fell in love with a faery woman, and gave her up becuse she would only be happy in the moonlight and the music. Children take magic for granted, I think. People read them stories and tell them stories, and then when they get to an age where movies and malls take over, they forget for a while... by the time they're parents themselves, they assume that stories are something they should read to their own children, and forget that they can also listen themselves. But it's never quite that simple, and if they're lucky, the stories call them back the way they call me. There's a Korean story, called The Story Bag, about a boy who loves stories--he saves them all up in a bag, and then when he gets older, he forgets about them. The stories are so crowded and uncomfortable in the bag, that they end up trying to kill him, so they can get loose and breathe and stretch. He escapes the assasination attempts, and when he realizes how he's forgotten about his old friends, he sets them loose to travel the world and light where they will. If you don't pass around the stories--if you keep them closed up--eventually they will kill you, I think. The saddest times of my life were times when I was not telling stories, when I forgot to give them away. It's easy to take the magic for granted when you're grown up and paying the rent and doing the sensible thing. 7:44 a.m. - 2004-09-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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