Other People's Stories

Last night I attended a live storytelling event in the next town over. It was held at a restaurant with a brand new theater facility attached to it. The seats were crammed close together and were quite hard and generally uncomfortable. "These better be some damned distracting stories," I thought to myself, wanting to avoid another night of horror like the one I endured at the Venice opera not too long ago when a broken spring in my chair annoyed the heck out of my butt for two hours.

A personable, gender-fluid emcee got things started by explaining that each storyteller, or "teller" as they are called, would take the stage and wow us with a true story based on the night's theme, "Grilled." Since the word has various meanings, it was up to the individual teller which way to go with it.

Grills.

Things started off slowly. The first young woman's tale had nothing at all to do with being asked a lot of questions by an authority figure, or cooking on a grill, or the grill of a car, or even the shiny metal, sometimes gold, covers that some hip-hoppers wear over their teeth that are called grills. There was no grilling in it anywhere, by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway, despite a pleasant stage presence her story was boring, going on far too long and with virtually no punch line at the end.

Thankfully we were on to the next, a spunky woman who looked like Annette Bening. She had a great personality and told a story about an actual grill she had bought back when she was in the Peace Corps in Romania. She had a great style about her, and her story was full of laughs. It was pretty much all about the grill and grilling, with the grill getting too smoky, a neighbor getting angry, the food not cooking well, etc. She was my personal favorite.

Next came a handsome young man in his thirties who talked emotionally about having grown up with a stutter and how he conquered it by taking a three-day intensive class in Ireland. On stage last night he stuttered only mildly, in fact hardly at all, and he got a huge round of applause when he was done because he had overcome a handicap. People love stories about overcoming handicaps. Still, he said nothing grill-related.

A middle-aged Norwegian woman with a hint of a foreign accent who had converted to Judaism years ago told us about being "grilled" by immigration officers one time when she traveled to Israel. Okay, fine, it was interesting to a point, but enough is enough! Finally she wrapped it up by alluding to the current immigrant crisis we are facing today in this country and so immediately became a crowd favorite, the crowd being 85% gay, 90% liberal, and 99% Trump-hating.

The last guy was the most polished and had won many awards on the storytelling circuit. He was instantly endearing and told us all about his fear of flying and how he finally overcame it by reading a book entitled Soar: The Breakthrough Treatment for Fear of Flying. (I have already ordered a copy.) A grill was not involved in his story either, causing me to wonder anew why the emcee had mentioned at the outset that the evening's theme was "Grilled." Still, it was an amusing way to pass the time on a Thursday night, and for only ten bucks. The best part is that I may learn how to conquer my own fear of flying just because I went.