In my teens and twenties I was a big Bob Dylan fanatic, regarding his lyrics with awe, as a kind of gospel. Then he wrote that song "Forever Young." Woah! I thought. There's a setup for bitter disappointment. Hasn't he heard of entropy? And in fact, as time went on he did seem to
take on a certain bitter, disappointed quality.
Part of my attraction to the storytelling path was the way it seemed to lead to
a graceful, purposeful old age. My formative ecstatic experiences with the spoken folk tale were given to me by old people: my grandmother when I was a kid, Sarah Cleveland at a folk festival when I was a young adult. I thought, maybe I'm kind-of faking it now, but I bet I
could be good at this,
even be cool, by the time I get to be an old guy. (Assuming I made it that far, which did not seem all that likely.) At least, I thought, an old storyteller doesn't necessarily look like a damn fool, he's not like some
grandpa trying to play rock and roll.
I was wrong about granddaddy rockers looking stupid, BTW, it turns out they can be as cool as the old bluesmen of my youth.
But I was right about being an aging storyteller. For Leanne and me, at least,
it has been a fine way to grow old. Especially around here, our storytelling has become a part of
generations of people's mental universe. We love it when people
come up to us to say "I remember you from when I was" or "the first time we saw you;" it's great.
New material comes harder these days, it's true, that's not so great.
And there's no spare energy to squander. I used to have a kind of rock and roll style myself, gushing with excess energy, just shooting it out all over the place. That style can be-- I guess sometimes was-- effective. But now the shows are more contained, subtler, like jazz or the blues. Better understanding,
more technique. Much more relaxed.
There's a power to the youthful voice it's true. But
age has power as well. A good folktale has an authority earned by passing through centuries, and some of that authority
shines onto a long-time storyteller as well.
I've always found it easier to tell folktales to people who were younger than me. When I was young, that of limited my natural audience. Nowadays, not so much.
We're perfoming without much stuff, these days.
It's a natural part of aging. Like most young people, we started out with very little stuff.
By middle age we had pretty much all we really needed, but continued to acquire more and better stuff. Exiting from the far side of middle age, we began to realise, by god, this is Too Much Stuff.
So now, at least in our professional life, we're looking to thin the pile, lighten the load, shed some excess, strip down to fundamentals.
* * *
When I began performing tales, I brought no stuff at all. If I had a small group, I sat close and waved my arms. If I had a big group I ran around and shouted; given a big space to perform in, I
ran around the whole area, filling it all with noise and action, drenching myself with sweat. Energy and enthusiasm were my strongest cards. In a big gym, unuamplified, with hundreds of kids, this style of performance was reasonably effective, though it took quite awhile before I learned to modulate in more intimate settings.
Bit by bit I started carrying stuff with me to shows:
concertina, harmonica,
a couple of rope tricks. I had a couple of chalk-talk routines, so I
needed newsprint, markers and tape for when there was no chalkboard.
A chair my sponsor provided
broke under me during one of the vigorous parts of my show-- I think I was demonstrating a little devil rocking himself to hell-- landing me onto my ass with a thump. Big hit with the audience, but not an effect I wished to repeat. Another time, an important library seemed unable to provide me with the kind of
hard, armless, regular-height chair I needed. It was a big community event, they were semi-reluctant hosts who had never seen my tech sheet and did not feel responsible. I made a fuss -- "Somewhere in this library there has got to be a library chair!" spoken with a panicked intensity easy to misread as anger-- until somebody found me what I needed. The result was a reputation I didn't want, as being very difficult and abraisive. So I started bringing along my own kitchen chair and a high wooden stool that could act both as a place to put my coffee, and a second level.
I joined up with Leanne; my show became our show. We began carrying around her harp,
with its case and bag of spare parts. And another chair, of course.
When Leanne moved up to playing a big floor harp, we
bought a new dolly and a used minivan. (The dealer was amused when we took over the desk in his office to make little piles of the quarters and dollar bills we'd collected playing music on Church Street.) For short time there was some extra room in the van, but it filled up soon enough.
A rug. It helped define the stage area, so I stopped running around so much. It also helped with crowd-control for floor-seated children. (Sit all the way up here, next to the rug, children. Keep your legs off the rug, chlidren.)
Theater lights and light stands. You're always lit, well or badly, might as well have it good every time.
Turn off those nasty flourescents midway through the show to warm and deepen the mood. Turn them off right away to keep the parents from talking to each other in the back.
An elegant (but heavy) carved wooden screen Leanne spotted at a yard sale. Carry it in, set it up behind us for instant class and additional focus on the performance location, It also cleaned up whatever kind of problems there might be behind us: clutter or empty space or an ugly wall, lending a pleasant living room ambiance to
our frequently problematic locations.
A sound system. We much prefer working without it when conditions are right, but when you need one you really need it, and it's not wise to rely on whatever the sponsor says he can provide. A good one, so the harp sounds good and our voices aren't tinny. Vocal and instrument microphones.
Lots and lots of
cords, big heavy bags full: cables for connecting PA components; long power cords for each of our four lights and our two powered speakers and mixer;
lots of additional power cord to bring in the electricity, often from a long way off, when the outlets aren't where we decide we want to perform.
Backups of all kinds: batteries, bulbs, power strips, cords, instruments, strings, etc.
It takes a minimum of an hour, working full speed, to pack all this stuff in and set it all up. The harp In alone sometimes takes almost an hour to get in, unpacked, acclimatized to the room, and put into reliable tune. And you need to leave extra time for the occasional broken string. If we need to set up sound, that's at least another half hour.
Troopers of all kinds sometimes say "we're in the moving business really." But it all was worth it, because we could tackle almost any situation and make it work, and because with storytelling, situations that don't work are awful.
I loved having all that stuff, it really paid off, over and over. I
even liked the preshow workout, running back and forth with heavy gear and putting it all in place; the combination of deadline-fueled aerobics and weight-bearing exercise really got the juices flowing, after sitting so long in the car. Packing up afterwards, maybe not so much fun, but I finally learned to accept it as part of a healthy and productive routine.
Then we stopped being young, stopped being middle-aged, and now I got to tell you, nowadays it's too much. We're
running on empty before the show ever begins.
Sure, we can pound coffee, we drill deep down into our emergency energy reserves,
we've continued to satisfy our audiences. But
after last our last few full setup shows, we didn't feel elated or even ok, we felt crushed. And then we had to do the rest of the job: packing up, loading, driving, putting away.
A little over a year ago, as we drove home from one of those shows, we agreed that was
probably the last time we'd work like that. And we were right.
But then we did some performances with no setup at all, we just showed up with concertina and
uke. One was a show for adults, then a little while later one for mixed ages, each with maybe 35 people, close up, filling small rooms,
no setup required.
And we contributed a segment to a variety benefit: big room with lighting and amplification provided by the sponsor.
Each time, when showtime came we were raring to go. Nothing to do but perform, nothing to think about but our material and our audience. They all went great, boardering on magical.
So that's how we're working from now on.
There will be
some situations where we cannot guarantee a good show. We will not perform in those situations.
The bad news is: we're no longer schlepping the harp. We know many of you will miss it-- heck, we miss it-- but we do not miss the aggravation (of which there is more than you can believe), not at all. Life's too short. We'll still make music with concertina, uke and voice. But the harp has been less and less of a factor in our shows anyway, and it's just too much to keep up with.
Good news: we're happy.
Bad news: I guess we'll have come up with some new promotional materials, posters and photos and such. (We have harps for sale, by the way, in case anybody's interested.)
Good news: we will be charging sponsors less for local performances (within a hundred miles) with small audiences (under fifty, filling the room) with decent acoustics (no heavy echo, reasonably free of noise from appliances, heaters, etc.)
Classrooms, libraries, parties, coffeehouses, church groups-- come and get us!
