2011 HALLOWEEN STORY

We had a fine summer

how about you? Our festival gigs went fine, lots of library shows (the theme this year was "One World Many Stories"-- so much easier for us to fit into than, say, "Bugs") some recreation program gigs, and a good amount of resort work.

Our MA/CT/RI agent, Ellen Weiner, got us a bunch of nice gigs in libraries on Cape Cod, and the trip went well, we believe that we'll be going back next summer. Among our favorite gigs there were Orleans and Falmouth; really nice turn-outs of both children with a parent, and solo seniors. We liked Sandwich too, but alas they booked us for an evening show the same night Circus Smirkus was in town (we saw the sign as we drove up.) "What do you want to do tonight, dear? Go to the circus, or listen to the storytellers?" Sigh. So it was all seniors. We had a good time with them, and enjoyed the opportunity to present some different kinds of material from what we'd been doing the rest of the week, but we really missed the mix.

We just got done playing our last wedding this year. It was a good'un, beautiful day, beautiful couple, beautiful scenery, nice people, great hors d'oeuvres, big tip, and a big mound of leftover lox and smoked trout to carry home for a Sunday morning omelet.

The season brought the usual number of alarms and excursions with the (so far, knock wood) usual benign resolutions. At one point this Spring we feared Leanne wouldn't be able to tell stories anymore because of a persistent and recurrent throat and lung condition, but that seems to have resolved into an allergy that responds to the standard drugstore remedies. So, ok. I was afraid I'd lost my number one concertina-- this happens about once every five to seven years-- but kindly people found it and took care of it until I could pick it up, again, thank god.

We grew, picked, and froze over 50 pounds of green beans. (Good thing we like green beans.) Our wild blackberries were out of control, but not much has come from our raspberries as yet. The zucchini plants developed powdery mildew from the wet spring and overenthusiastic subsequent watering, but they performed anyway, enough so that we'll be thawing out stuffed zucchini boats for dinner at least into January. Bumper crops of basil and asparagus. Costco had such good brussels sprouts last winter that we didn't bother planting any this spring; now they don't carry them anymore; we're hoping they'll start carrying them as Thanksgiving approaches. Our old un-maintained apple trees for the first time have big ripe apples on them in fall-- they've previously always lost them by the end of August. Hot peppers are still producing, and we just potted and brought in our pet plant, a three-year-old "superchili." It's our favorite kind of pepper, a huge producer of short plump red hotties that freeze beautifully. Unfortunately it's a hybrid, and they've stopped making them. We're holding on to this one plant as long as we can.

Greyhound Molly is overall in reasonable shape, but she's getting doddery, and her leg hurts in the morning. The upside is: through massage, she's finally discovered the pleasures of physical contact. (She was quite special-needs when we got her off the track, sometimes screaming like a wounded rabbit when touched.) Now, every morning and randomly through the day, she actually requests-- sometimes demands-- a rubdown. Of course, the downside is, she's old and frail. A couple of months ago, Leanne and I were watching a greyhound feature on Animal Planet, and they said it so cheerfully: "Greyhounds can live to be twelve years old!" Molly just turned 13. Oh dear oh dear, it's the hardest part of having a dog.

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Orange cat Sammy, on the other hand, is in his prime. An agile hunter, he is considerate enough not to bring home live things, or any birds at all. He becomes very affectionate at dinner time. It's real affection I'm convinced; he can't help it if he gets food and love mixed up, happens to the best of us.

Almost any afternoon this summer we could go down to our south garden strip and see Sammy curled around the catnip bush, with his butt on a piece of sun-warmed slate and his head buried deep under the leaves. Such days are drawing to a close for this year. Here he is on one of his favorite winter perches.

 

I occasionally use this newsletter as an excuse to write

SOMETHING ABOUT STORYTELLING

1- JUMP TALES

We'll generally toss in a short one of these for any given Halloween show, along with the more substantial fare. Knowing how to do this right is like being able to do a good magic trick, the audience finds out that it's not all bull, that you actually know how to do something impressive. As with magic tricks, they're not so impressive when you know how they work, and I wouldn't want to do them *all* the time, but people do like them especially at this time of year. They're like jokes in that you can't bluff your way through, they either work or fall flat, depending on whether or not you can elicit a physical reaction from your audience; an honest laugh for a joke, an honest "yikes" for a jump tale.

They're still in oral circulation, told in social situations by people who do not consider themselves "storytellers," in the same way you can hear jokes told by people who do not think of themselves as comedians. They're real folk tales, propogating and varying through anonymous oral transmission. You can find them in books but that's not where they live; and they don't reveal their true nature until they enter the ear, by way of somebody who understands how they work.

Thanks to Mark Twain's setting, ia The Golden Arm is probably the best known of these in America. Less historical examples include Teeny Tiny Woman, Johnny I'm on the First Step, Big Toe, and Taily Po.

How they work: The teller builds up an increasing degree of fearful anticipation, then makes a sudden aggressive noise, provoking the startle response, a reflex we share with bats, birds, and butterflies. It's such an immediate and powerful reaction, it's actually triggered before the incoming signal gets past the brainstem.

This "jump" is the whole point of the story. If the teller has done well s/he will see the listeners flinch back. In larger audiences, you may see a visible wave move through the crowd. On one memorable occasion --first night of a new junior high age overnight camp-- I saw that wave actually carry folks out of doors and windows. You'll hear something too-- Mark Twain called it "a yelp"-- and faces will show surprise and its close relative, fear.

surprise

fear

Then comes the real pay-off: an instant or two of dead silence followed by a joyful noise of laughter and loud chatter.

It's like a roller coaster-- a long "uh-oh" climb, followed by a sudden terrifying (yet safe) rush.

As in all kinds of storytelling, capable performers need to rely upon the primal communication elements that underlie words: tone, cadence, rhythm, connections made through eye-contact, facial expressions, gestures and physical posture. These constitute the animal "language" that precede language both in evolution and individual development, and are the hallmark of effective colloquial speech.

Such elements (like the micro-expressions pictured above) are fleeting and instinctive, and almost impossible to prescribe. When applied deliberately they can appear unpleasant, inauthentic and alienating. (Think of a forced smile.) So it's probably best not to get too specific about such things when beginning to learn a particular story: concentrate on getting the meaning out, effect by effect, as strongly as you can, and in time they'll flow naturally. But do watch for them and stay open to them; we need to free our natural expressive powers in all dimensions.

Berkeley storyteller Tim Erenata has written of listening to a gifted foreign storyteller perform one of these tales in an unfamiliar tongue; even without words, the jump came through.

If you click on this link
"Dead Man's Liver"
you can read a pretty good example of a jump tale I used to tell a lot, with notes on how to make it work. I heard it from a junior high kid in Manchester Vt, about 25 years ago; he said his uncle told it to him at deer camp. I rarely tell it anymore, but it's a great story for student storytellers to learn..

(In fact, school-children all over the world have stumbled onto that webpage and used it to help them win school-wide storytelling contests. I know this to be true, because over the years at least five or six of them have emailed me to find out what book it's in. The rules of their contests specify that local winners can't move on to compete regionally unless their material comes from a published book. I guess the web doesn't count any more than the deer-camp uncle would have, so the poor kids have had to stay home.)

Leanne and I recently played music for the wedding of a young woman who'd just gotten her PhD from UC Berkeley. She said she'd been in one of my elementary school residencies way back in the eighties. She remembered telling "Liver" in the final student-teller assembly, and she said "That was the only worthwhile thing that I ever learned, in all my years at that school. The only thing." (I don't think it was, really, I liked that school while I was teaching there. But I understood and could identify with her bitter tone. Such a desert of dry wasted time the school hours appear in memory, and we were all so thirsty!)

I still perform a Golden Arm (not Twain's) from time to time, and more rarely an effective but overlong first person Fraternity Hazing lie. Both of these I found in live contemporary oral tradition; they have a little more content working for them than the others, and a couple of extra tricks to help with getting a jump from an audience is (understandably) braced against it.

2- "UNJUMP" TALES

There's another kind of story that disguises itself as a Jump Tales, building up the same kind of fearful tension, and seeming headed towards a similar climax. But at the very end, instead of a jump, the teller delivers a humorous punch-line and releases the tension in a laugh. There's no agreed-upon name for this genre, but there's a lot of examples floating around in oral transmission.

They work best with 8-12 year old children, who share them with each other like jokes. The finales can seem flat and pointless to adults-- eg. "Blooooooody Finnnngersssss! BLOOOOOOOODY FINNNGGGGERSSSSS!" repeated over and over, setting up the punchline "Why don't you put on a band-aid, then?" Which reminds me (at least) that laughter is basically a social call, like monkeys hooting, and that you don't necessarily need cleverness for a big laugh, it's more a matter of setup and release.

Examples of the genre I have heard "in the wild," from children and adults, include Got You Where I Want You Now I'm Going to Eat You, The Ghost of Mabel Able, Red Red Lips, Bloody Fingers, Purple Gorilla, and The Ghost with One Black Eye.

Grade-school children exhibit ecstasies of pleasure at even the most foolish of these when it's well delivered, but I seldom tell them. I get more fun out of helping kids share them with each other, that's where they belong. But when Leanne and I perform a Halloween show for children who are old enough to like the idea of spooky stories, but still too young for even a mild fright, then one of these is just the ticket.

I'm pretty sure I'll tell The Ghost of Mabel Able at the 6:00 show in Bristol, for example, if you want to see how it works..

Tim and Leanne

PO Box 522 Montpelier VT 05601

802 223 9103 | tim@folktale.net

OUR RECORDINGS SO FAR

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