We're happy with the half-hour of TV we made for Burlington's channel 17. It's the best on-camera storytelling we've managed so far. (Though I now understand what some of our sponsors have said over the years about my default unkempt appearance.) We like the interview too. Click that thing that makes it full screen, at least for the length of the story, it's better that way.

I embedded it on the front page of our website. I hope to get it broken up into more manageable sections for social embedding. (Yes, I have started taking advice about this kind of thing.)

if you can, please come to one of the shows in our

VAMPIRE PRINCESS
CD-RELEASE TOUR

SEPT 2013

more to come

TOUR POSTER screen resolution (jpeg)

TOUR POSTER high resolution (4.5 MB PDF)

Feel free to
contact us
with any questions

Fri Sept 13 • Burlington
North End Studio A
294 N. Winooski Ave • 802-863-6713 • email
$8 • full show • discount CDs

Sat Sept 14 • East Warren
Rootswork • old East Warren schoolhouse
42 Roxbury Gap Rd, Warren • 802-496-2474
7:00 • $10 admission • discount CDs
email • googlemap

Sat Sept 21
• Shelburne (afternoon)
Shelburne Farms Harvest Fest (selected tales)
1611 Harbor Road • Shelburne
half-hour sets, 12:30 & 3:00
• Burlington (evening)
North End Studios (full show)
294 N. Winooski Ave • 802-863-6713 • email
8:00 • $8 admission, discount CDs

Wed Sept 25 • Montpelier
Buch Spieler Music
27 Langdon Street • 229-0429 • email
7:30 • $7 suggested donation or buy CD

Fri Sept 27 • Craftsbury Common
The Art House
1376 N. Craftsbury Rd • 802- 586-2200
7:00 • $12 adv/$14 door • discount CDs
email • googlemap

Sunday Sept 29 • Chester (afternoon)
First Universalist Parish
211 North Street (Route 103) • 875-3257
2:00 • $8 adults $5 youth • discount CDs
email • googlemap

GREEDY PRIEST

This is one of the 600 Russian folktales Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev recorded and published in his massive “Russkie Skazi”— “by far the largest folktale collection by any one man in the world” — before dying, far too young, poor & in trouble.

He patterned this work after the Grimms’, whose Household Tales was an international sensation.

But while the Grimms lost their father at a young age, and poverty was a recurrant problem, they always identified as middle class, and despite occasional setbacks they had many comfortable years as respectable academics..

The Grimms saw the purpose of their collection as an exploration into the soul of the German Volk, a survival of the epic form persisting among the peasantry. However, they seem mostly to have collected from folks of their own class-- many of them from French immigrant families-- or from their servants.

Afanasyev went to the peasants, which was always a suspect enterprise in the eyes of Czarist authorities. He had contacts with the revolutionary Alexander Herzan. (As would most of us, given the chance, a wonderful writer and good man.) Several of his smaller collections were banned for being blasphemous or obscene. He died of tuberculosis aged 45.

Look for this story in Russian tale collections under its usual title, “Crock of Gold.” Don’t bother googling that name, though, unless you’re interested in James Stephen’s Irish literary allegorical fantasy.

Vampire Princess

Leanne found this story in an old collection of Gypsy folktales. She read it to me in the car as we were driving home from Massachusetts.

I did a little poking around, and found that it was first collected in Bohemia in the early eighteen-hundreds, and published in a book of Czech Folktales in the middle of the 19th century.

You will find the story in several collections under the title “The Werewolf Princess.” Obviously, we changed the name. Why? Because we think it's a translation error.

• She doesn't act like a werewolf:
  • no extra hair or nails
  • moon unimportant
  • not wolfy
  • doesn't tear her victim
• She does act like a vampire:
  • lives in a coffin, in a crypt
  • pretty and seductive
  • "no sign of blood"
  • comes out at night

There's an old French folkloric scary-creature called "the Loup-Garou" (loo-garoo). It's usually translated as werewolf, but that's not strictly correct, in various places at various times the term has been superstitiously applied to a wide range of boogyman figures, many of which have little to do with wolves, or with current ideas of what a werewolf is.

Copyright information on one of the translations we used goes back to a French publisher. We believe (we’re storytellers, not scholars, so that will have to suffice) that the story was first written down from a Romany source, then translated into a Czech text, then into French, and finally into English. The translatation of Loup Garou from French into the English Werewolf is sometimes correct, but in this case clearly not true to the original story. She's a lot more like a vampire, arright?

* * *

Also, the beast in the woods was called "Four Eyes," not "Five Eyes." We changed that reasons which should be obvious. I think we got a Romany "Yakya Kengaro" back-translation correct, we tried at any rate.

* * *

A young gypsy violinist we know says he heard a version of this story from a great-uncle (or from some male relative at about that generational distance, he wasn’t entirely clear about the exact relationship.)The princess wasn’t in a chapel in his story, though, but rather some kind of temple. I asked him, Jewish or Islamic? He said, no, Roman.

His relative told him that the story started in Hungary, and that Gypsies carried it to the area now known as the Czech Republic. His relative told him the story has roots in historic reality. A king’s daughter died of plague, he said, and soldiers placed to guard her coffin began dying too.

* * *

When the story first came to our attention, this country was still smarting from the infamous “stop loss” program that was keeping soldiers in active combat long past their proper term of service, in the overstretched campaigns of Iraq and Afganistan. "Served his seven years in good faith, and now-- disaster!"

The most timeless stories can come through to us in such a timely way.