The second Wednesday morning of every month, Monmouth's Buchanan Center for the Arts hosts the meeting of Old Friends Talk Arts (OFTA). This time around, one of my favorite instructors from my dissolute years at college, Esther White, spoke of her treks to Jonesboro, TN, for their International Storytelling Festival.
Mrs. White has always been an engaging speaker -- her lectures were some of the very few for which no effort was required on my part to stay awake through -- and this morning proved no different. She began by offering the crowd (nearly double its normal numbers) a little background on the town of Jonesboro and on the Festival.
She indicated she had attended the event since the third year of its existence, and told of the exponential growth of the Festival, from her first visit in 1984, when there were, perhaps, 800 in attendance, to the most recent crowd of more than 20,000. That's quite a burden for the Tennessee's oldest town, normally populated by just over 2,000 regular residents. Initially, the events were scattered throughout the community, and one could roam about and catch the majority of the storytelling by simply keeping alert and moving about. Now, more than twenty years later, the festival is set up with, as she described, "five to seven circus tents", each with rows of seats, and established schedules for the storytellers at each location. Opening evening, Friday, the tellers each offer a sample, twenty to thirty minutes of their styles of work, at the "olio", and that gives the visitor the opportunity to decide what most interests him or her. Saturday, it is wisest to "stake out" and claim a seat (she brings her own cushion) in the tent with the most tellers in your area of interest, according to the printed schedule. Mrs. White indicated that, once you leave your seat, it will be taken by somebody else waiting eagerly in the wings.
After her introduction to the place and setting, Mrs. White listed a few of the more prominent, nationally or world-renowned storytellers she had heard, from two Illinoisians (Jim May of Spring Grove and Sid Lieberman, from Northwestern in Evanston) to South Carolina's Donald Davis and Alabama's Kathryn Tucker Windham. She told the audience that, at the festival, the have many and varied types of storytelling, from family history to humorous to traditional to ethnic -- and ethnic is widely diverse, as they have voices of Cuban, African, African American, Native American, and Caribbean, as well as some newer participants from Asia.
She pointed out that, while storytelling is an art, "You are surrounded by stories."
Mrs. White related a tale in which she had noticed that a great, giant hosta plant in her front yard had been shrinking, leaf by leaf, over a short course of time, and she had no idea what might have been causing it, so she asked her friend, Marilyn, to watch out the front window to help find out. After a while, Marilyn called her and said, "Look out your front window!"
Esther looked out.
There, at the base of the hosta plant was a tiny vole -- what some folks around here call a "field mouse", for its short-tailed, long-pointy-nosed resemblance to a common house pest. The little vole was nibbling away the base of the plant and stealing a leaf from that hosta!
Esther promptly made her way to the local useful supply store, Farm King [my own personal favorite place to shop], since they were the likely place to have what she needed to get rid of voles. She walked up to one of the young men who worked there and asked him where she could find something to get rid of voles, and he said, "we have that, but I think you mean 'moles'. We have moles in Monmouth." She tried to correct him, and he began to describe the moles: "You know, about that big," holding his index fingers about four inches apart, "long nose, long tail...."
Mrs. White continued to debate him, and a second employee of Farm King was brought into the discussion, who also insisted she was looking for something to get rid of moles. "We have moles in Monmouth." Then, a third, older, more experienced-looking gentleman interrupted the debate, told Esther he knew "exactly where she needed to look, and what she needed". He led her a couple of aisles away, to where the rat traps, D-Con, and such were shelved, and, as they were looking, he told her, "By the way, I think you mean 'moles'. We have moles in Monmouth."
Fortunately, just about then, she spotted a product whose label indicated it would kill "mice, rats, voles, and armadillos." She showed it to the gentlemen, who were all suitably impressed and surprised. As she made her purchase and was on her way out from the store, she turned to ask the men, "By the way, do you gentlemen know... what's an armadillo?"
Mrs. White received a burst of laughter at the end of that tale. She then reminded us that the stories we share often prompt other people to share their own memories, their own stories. She closed by reading Kathryn Tucker Windham's The Bridal Wreath Bush, and concluded a few minutes before the end of the hour. She had about a half dozen questions from the crowd, including one request that she share the story of a Christmas letter she had once written (she had mentioned it briefly, earlier in her presentation, without giving details).
All in all, Esther White's presentations and lectures have never disappointed and usually inspire me.
Now, I feel the need to go back and rework some of the stories I've written for my nephews and niece.
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