I performed in another storytelling event on Saturday, huzzah!

The rundown:

* James Morgan: started out by saying that Laurie suggested he plan something out next time. “Usually I just drink a glass of wine or three and say stuff...” This was followed by “Bad things happen in threes, good things happen ONCE.” Which is a good point. He then talked about going to Africa with his grandfather, which had the immortal line “Generally, if there’s three white guys in a car, they’ve ruined something.”

* Karen Daly (runs the Sacramento storytelling guild I never go to because it’s at a elders home and has events at like 2 on a Saturday): started out by saying she didn’t need a microphone because in Toastmasters you learn how to throw your voice. Then a guy in the front row said, “What?” She talked about adopting a random chicken that showed up in her yard and chased her cat. She originally fed it tuna(!) because the Internet said to, and it laid eggs in her spider plant.

* Brandon Spars: “Fairy tales can be true, just at a different level.” He was saying that his students said they prefer real life/Moth-type stories to folk tales and that was his response. He then told a story about how his grandfather in Missouri told him that Indians were up the creek, and how as kids he thought he saw them, as well as seeing an abandoned car. When he said this at his grandfather’s funeral, everyone laughed and his grandmother said, “That was your grandfather’s car! He was too cheap to take it to the junk yard. He just drove it into the creek! Your grandfather, he just had you under his spell.”

Later, while he was in college, Brandon was taking organic chemistry and hating it, and read Siddartha and got the bright idea to have the river “talk” to him, so he decided to try it too, especially after someone told him, “Brandon, you just know.” He ran into a guy calling himself “Wino,” and then babbled on and on and on about his personal life until Wino just walked off. Then he got chased by a hog. Then he ran into Wino again, and “I certainly had not done anything to dispel the notion that I was not mad as a hatter.” Did you hear the voice of the river? “I spent the whole night being chased by a hog.” Eventually Brandon just switched to English instead.

Ten years later, he brought his kids to the river and told them there were Indians, and then he got lectured on how you’re not supposed to say that any more by one of his kids, which shocks me not. Then when they wandered farther in, they found an actual Indian-Indian guy who was a programmer from Mountain View who was buying an ashram in the area. “Now that was an Indian.”

* Mike Poe: told a story about how he tried to blend his own horseradish and when he took the lid off and smelled it, it made his lungs freeze up. He laid down on the floor, where his 14-month-old of course jumped all over him and eventually knocked his lungs back into commission. Thoughts he was having while this was going on: “My son is going to know his father died under completely absurd circumstances,” and “I should write a note to explain this situation,” and “Storebought horseradish is not that bad.”

I am happy to say that they cut the break and had it shorter, though some folks still disappeared again. I don’t get that.

* Joyce Ormond: told a story about being obsessed with Tom Mix as a kid, getting official Tom Mix spurs, and then trying them out on her horse. The horse did not love that.

* Brandon returned, semi-retelling a story I’d heard from him before about his evil cheating college girlfriend that he went to Sumatra to “be with,” except he got sent to a teaching gig in the boonies and wrote her a bunch of love letters, and she disappeared with some other guy after a week and the family that moved in afterwards loved those love letters. This time he threw in some extra details about the bus over there and being seated next to a woman who threw up on him the entire time, trying to get food away from her so she wouldn’t eat it, and then a spider monkey tries the same thing n a restaurant.... and then he gets mistaken for her husband, so he feels obligated to be her “volunteer husband.”

I went after that, doing my auditions story. I changed up the ending from the last time I did to update how many auditions I’ve done this year (nine, including yesterday) and how many plays I got into (two!) and I also thought up a really good line that I threw in.

I read some book by... uh, the Godwinks guy, I have some random book of his I found on a free table somewhere and I felt the urge to read it a few nights ago, and there was a story about how his wife is some impersonator/voice artist of some kind and she got asked to do Tiny Toons for Spielberg, but when she went into the audition, her voice totally shut the hell off for a WEEK, enough to do her out of the job. Then she went to go see a Broadway show (Catskills on Broadway) and afterwards ran into one of the actors in the show who said that the lady in that show was leaving and he wanted her for the part--so she didn’t get that job so she could get a better job. I relate to that story!

So I added this into mine: “I’ll probably never know why the professor behaved in the way that he did. I can only conclude that it happened because that is what threw me off the path of where I thought I was going and threw me onto a path I never would have known about, meeting people I would never have run into otherwise.”* I think people really resonated with that last bit, from the nods in the audience.

* and if one of them eventually becomes my boyfriend, this will REALLY seem like it was meant to be on that score, you know?

Rebecca, a chick I know from improv, was in the front tonight and I could see her face when I mentioned that I was never going to get on an improv team there. After the show was over I talked to her and she said she hadn’t been over there too much either recently, and then she said she wanted to do some stuff on her end and we swapped numbers so she could let me know if she puts on anything.

* Nick from New Jersey (I forget his last name, I think he was a last minute throw in, but he was at a previous show) talked about the shit he’d gone through at the airport just this week and how getting a discount plane ticket was just not worth it, especially with United sending his luggage all over Reno, LA and SF. After this, Cherie the emcee said her husband used to fly for United, but retired “when it was still a good airline.”

* Mike Poe returned again to tell a story about being in Vietnam, using TV to teach launch procedures for missiles, explosions, animals all over the damn place, and “I had just been hit by a deer. It hit me.” He said he didn’t tell anyone about the incident for 20 years and when he did, he had to get drunk. I'll bet.

After it was over, one lady came up to me and said, "If that story is mostly true, you are one of the bravest people I have ever met." I'd say that's some low standards and "mostly?" kinda confused me, but I appreciated the compliment.

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