I
want to tell you about the Bay Area Storytelling Festival I went to a
couple weeks ago, but I want to start off with a story: A long time ago,
so long ago I don’t remember which storyteller it was, a teller went to
a prison to tell stories to the inmates. He knew it would be a tough
gig, so he thought long and hard about his opening sentence. It was,
“You are all here because somebody didn’t believe your story.” It turned
out not to be a tough gig after all.
So
here we have the folks on the Aid Flotilla saying the Israelis landed
armed on our ship in international waters so we had to defend ourselves
with what we had, sticks and knives. And here’s the Israelis saying the
ships were heading towards Israel with who-knows-what in the holds and
we needed to stop them. When they attacked us with sticks and knives, we
had to defend ourselves with what we had, which was guns. And here’s
President Obama, who I think would like to reprimand Israel as he ought
to, but he is president of a country that did basically the same thing
they did when we invaded Iraq because they had who-knows-what weapons of
mass destruction.
And here’s the storytelling festival:
Here
I am at the Tilden Park Nature Center introducing storyteller Connie
Regan-Blake to the volunteers, board members and tellers from previous
festivals who get to come to the Friday night kick-off of the Bay Area
Storytelling Festival. This is the volunteers’ time to hear the featured
tellers, because during the festival they are awfully busy. I’m being
watched over by a stuffed bobcat and I’m holding a sweet pea sprig I was
given because, as festival artistic director Gay Ducey
said, “She’s the one who said, ‘We should have a festival! I don’t want
to organize it, but somebody should.’” Gay did, and the rest is
history. We celebrated our twenty-fifth festival this year. That adds up
to a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated people. And here’s Connie,
who told at our very first festival at Fort Mason in San Francisco:
Here’s the outdoor part of the festival at Kennedy Grove, with Hawaiian performance poet Kealoha bringing a fresh young perspective:
Every
year volunteers make a quilt for the festival and it’s raffled off to
help with festival expenses. Here’s Martha Shogren, one of the festival
founders and long-time quilt organizer, showing off this year’s quilt,
with a silver theme for the 25th festival:
Rain
was predicted for the weekend, but it held off until about a half hour
after the festival finale Sunday evening—that’s Willy Claflin on guitar
and I’m in the back row behind Gay, who’s at the microphone leading us
in “Happy Trails.” In the background, you can see one of the three
performance tents. All day Friday the three tents were full of
schoolchildren. These performances were sold out this year (over 600
students grades 3-6) so teachers should reserve early for next year.
Contact Robin Wilson (robinyeewilson [at] aol[dot]com) if you are
interested.
Next up, the San Francisco Free Folk Festival
this weekend at Presidio Middle School in San Francisco. The Children’s
Music Network will be hosting a Round Robin Concert (sounds like a
hootenanny to me) on Saturday from 4 to 6. I’ll miss that because I’m
going to sing at a friend’s party in the afternoon and I’m going to see
Alix Dobkin in the evening at the Montclair Women's Cultural Arts Club. Oops, need to read her new book,
My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the
Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement before I go!
©2010 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
THEREBY HANGS A TALE
