Hi Everyone,

I have some bad news. For the first time in six years I have to cancel this month’s Fresh Ground Stories. I just found out my mom has to have a tiny machine put inside her heart this Thursday so it keeps beating in way we like it to keep beating. I don’t let much get in the way of running FGS but pacemaker has suddenly shot to the top of the list of things that are more important.

But we’ll be back with our regular show on April 28th so keep working on your stories if you were planning on telling this week. The theme will be the same so you don’t have to change anything.

Theme: http://www.meetup.com/Fresh-Ground-Stories/events/229429995/

I do have two really cool opportunities for everyone as a way of making up for this. A couple of storytelling shows reached out to me recently asking me to send them tellers. One of them is a very popular live show and podcast called Risk! (yes, the ! is a part of their name)

They are coming to Seattle in April to do a show at the Vera Project and wanted FGS tellers to pitch them some story ideas. If they like your story you’ll get to be part of the show. I’ve listened to the Risk! podcast for a long time and I would love to be in one of their shows. This is a great chance to stretch a bit and see if you can meet some out of town storytellers and maybe even get to be in a show with them. I pasted the text of their email below so you can find out how to send them a story and ask them any questions you might have.

I was also contacted by Mike Lawson down in the Bay Area. He runs the podcast 12 Minute Stories. It’s a really interesting concept. You record your story on your phone or computer and then email it to him. Then he produces it, adding music and whatnot, and plays it on the podcast. He also puts the finished version on the website http://www.12MinuteStories.com.

Check out the website if you’re curious what the produced versions sound like. I don’t know Mike personally but I like the idea of someone else producing a story for me and it’s always fun to be on a podcast.

Contact him directly from his website. If you do send him a story let us know how it goes. I’d love to post the podcast link to your story on our FaceBook page 🙂

I’ll be posting all the info I have for both these shows on our FaceBook page as well:

https://www.facebook.com/Fresh-Ground-Stories-316944020508/

That’s all I have for you guys right now. I’m sorry I have to cancel this month’s show. This is the first time since we started in 2010 that I’ve had to do this. But we’ll be back in April and I’ll be able to tell you guys all about something called Atrial Fibrillation.

Don’t forget to check out the Risk! info below

Paul

freshgroundstories@gmail.com

PS – For those of you who know me the mom I’m talking about is actually my step mom but I’ve known her longer than I knew my bio mom so she’s kinda got mom status now. That makes three moms for me if anyone is counting. Only two speak English, one is Canadian and one was on Bewitched. I’ve had lots of great women to learn from!

Risk!

We are currently casting storytellers for an upcoming show in:

Seattle, WA on Thursday, 4/28/16

@ The Vera Project

Warren & Republican Ave N

RISK! Is a live show and podcast “where people tell true stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public” hosted by Kevin Allison, of the legendary TV sketch comedy troupe The State. RISK! has featured people like Janeane Garofalo, Lisa Lampanelli, Kevin Nealon, Margaret Cho, Marc Maron, Sarah Silverman, and regular folks from around the world, dropping the act and showing a side of themselves we’ve never seen before. The RISK! podcast gets over a million downloads each month. Slate.com called it “jaw-dropping, hysterically funny, and just plain touching.”

RISK! is not like other storytelling shows. It’s “where people tell true stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public.” We encourage our storytellers to step out on a limb, be brutally candid and emotionally raw. This is an uncensored show where taboos are tackled and people talk about things they ordinarily might not share in mixed company, but might save for their therapist.

To hear some of our stories, go to http://risk-show.com/listen

For more information about what we look for in story pitches and how to submit, go to http://risk-show.com/submissions/ and send us your pitch by 3/31/16 to be considered!

Please let the performers in your community know about this exciting opportunity as soon as you can, and let me know if you have any questions!

Thank you,

Cyndi Freeman

When I was a kid growing up in Anchorage in the 70s I always knew there was something different about my mom. She talked loud and fast and everyone said she had an accent though I could never hear it myself. She wore clothes she made herself but since she never used a pattern everything she made turned out to be a poncho. She looked like the Outlaw Josey Wales.

Of course if you have a weird parent sooner or later that weirdness is going to transfer to you. For me, it started with the strange and foreign foods I would bring to school. Sometime in third grade I discovered I was the only kid in Turnagain Elementary who had a bagel in his lunch box. The other kids had no idea what a bagel was and assumed my mom was punishing me for something by sending me to school with the World’s Most Tasteless Doughnut.

Some of the most puzzling moments were when I realized we actually spoke a different language at home. It resembled English but it was sprinkled with certain words that no one in the neighborhood had heard before and that I had only heard on shows like M*A*S*H and All in the Family.

Once in grade school I tried to explain to my teacher Mrs. Hill a character in a book I was reading. I said, “He’s a shlemiel.”

Mrs. Hill said, “A what?”

“A shlemiel.”

“A shimmel?” she said.

“No, not a shimmel, a shlemiel. You know, a shlub, a nebbish.”

“Honey, are you ok?”

A week later I’m in speech therapy. No, I’m kidding. Mrs. Hill didn’t send me to speech therapy but she did probably think I was having a seizure.

After a while all these little moments of being different started to wear on me. I was already smaller and weaker than all other kids but now I was eating food no one else would touch and speaking gibberish. Were we from another planet? I had a vague idea this was all connected to New York City where my mom grew up but the only experience I had with New York was watching the skyline during the opening of Taxi.

Then one day when I was 10 or 11 I was reading this little book of stories my mother had given me. The first story was called, “Remembering Needleman” and it began with this line, “It has been four weeks and it is still hard for me to believe Sandor Needleman is dead. I was present at the cremation and, at his son’s request, brought the marshmallows, but few of us could think of anything but our pain.”

I started laughing uncontrollably. I was the funniest thing I had ever read. The book was “Side Effects” by Woody Allen and I could not put it down. I had never seen writing like this before but at the same time it felt like it was written just for me. I remember laughing non-stop until somewhere around page 30 when I stopped suddenly, looked up, and said, “Waitaminnit! Are we Jewish? ARE WE JEWISH?!?!”

I ran downstairs to my mom.

“Are we Jewish?”

She looked at me like I just asked if we were made out of rocks and railroad ties. She said, “Of course we’re Jewish.”

“But I thought we were Baha’i.”

The story I was raised with was that a few years before I was born my mother had converted from Judaism to the Baha’i Faith and had moved to Alaska as a missionary. I had no idea that you don’t stop being Jewish any more than you stop having shingles. Once you get it you got it for life even if the only time you see it is when you’re under stress.

The strangest thing of all was that everyone else seemed to be as clueless I was. My mother was never known as The Jew of 29th Street. If anything, she was known as the Crazy Lady from New York who Talked to God. (This is true. The Catholic kids next door always peeked over the fence when my mom was stomping around the back yard yelling at God. Their mother, Mrs. Dugan, used to tell them that Mrs. Currington had a very special relationship with God and that was why she could use certain words when she talked to him that no one else was allowed to use. Later, in high school, I heard Peggy Dugan using one of those words but she wasn’t talking to God so she may have found a loophole.) No one around me knew the cultural references of Yiddish, bagels or my mother’s constant reminiscing about something called “locks” which I later discovered is spelled “Lox.”

It’s been 40 years since I first read “Remembering Needleman” and discovered why my mother and I were so different from everyone else. I’ll never forget that moment. I wish everyone could have a moment like that. It was one of the few times in my life when just for a second the world made sense.

My son and I have talked a lot throughout his life about his grandmother and what she was like. Once, many years ago, he asked me if he was Jewish. I said, “No, your mom has to be Jewish for you to be born that way.” Then he said, “But genetically the blood of the Jew runs in my veins, right?”

I said, “The Blood of the Jew? You think you’re some kind of Jewish Highlander? There’s no Blood of the Jew. If your mom was Jewish then you’re Jewish. That’s it. If you want to convert you can but it’s going to require a lot homework and I think we both know how you feel about that.”

Is there a moral to this story? Yes. Talk to your kids. Tell them where you’re from and why you are the way you are. If you don’t they’re just going to make stuff up and tell their friends that you’re crazy and speak in tongues.

And that’s the kind of story we’d like you to bring to our next show: I Didn’t See That Coming – Stories of surprises.

Tell us about a time when you were caught off guard. What happened? How did it change you? Did it force your life to take a sharp left turn or did it just make you see things a little differently from then on?

The rules for stories are below but you know the kind we’re looking for: true stories that happened to you that still mean something to you days, months or years later.

Remember to practice out loud on friends and pets and keep it under 8 minutes.

Rules & Guidelines: https://freshgroundstories.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/storytelling-rules-and-guidelines/

I hope to see you at our next show on Thursday, March 24, 7:00pm at the Roy St Coffee and Tea.

Paul

freshgroundstories@gmail.com

In the spirit of inspiration I’m sharing my new favorite Moth story smile emoticon I love how Jeff Simmermon tells this story of anger and confrontation actually getting all ragey while he tells it.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the show Thursday. We had a great bunch of stories and we even ended on time! As always we learned some important stuff.

Jake showed us that hummingbirds don’t always get the tsunami warning.

Elliot told the sweetest story ever of getting CARE packages from his favorite writer while he was in Afghanistan. I don’t know what you put in your fan letters, Elliot, but could I talk you into writing Tom Robbins or Sherman Alexie? I’d love to have them come to the show one day. Clearly you have some strange power over best-selling authors.

The weirdest and most exciting thing we learned is that Seattle has some very intuitive bus riders. If I ever get on the 28 to Green Lake and the guy across the aisle looks at me and says, “Your anxiety is pinching your soul!” I am going to stay on that bus until he tells me what he means. Lynn, you have to tell me what route that was. I have questions and I can’t afford therapy right now.

One of the most touching stories of the night was from Obie. He told the beautiful story of traveling alone through Laos and meeting an old man who lived through the American bombing of his country 30 years earlier. Obie, thank you for reminding us that if you’re willing to open your heart human beings can come together no matter what happened in the past. That story should be told in every town from here to the U.N.

Thanks to everyone who go onstage that night and shared a story: Lynn, Obie, Elliot, David, Jake, Chris, Sumit, Em, Sea, Nic, and Cavan. Special thanks to our two first-timers, Nic and Sumit. Sumit, I let you sneak onstage with a poem that night but next time you gotta bring a story, ok? I know you have one in you. I could tell from your poem that you probably a lot of stories in there. We would love to hear them.

Before I let you go I want to remind of a great little music and storytelling show at the Jewelbox this Sunday, March 6 at 7pm. It has 5 tellers (I’ll be hosting) from our show and 3 musicians playing music between the stories. It’s called Words and Music and it’s the only show I know of that has this combination of song and story. Here’s the link for more info:

http://www.seattlewordsnmusic.com/

The recording from last week’s show came out fine so I can give each of the storytellers a copy of their performance if they want it. I only give them to the people who told a story and it’s only the audio of their own story. Most performers don’t want their personal stories online so that’s why I only give copies to the people who told them.

If anyone wants to to tell a story but is a little nervous about how to get a story in shape for the stage, Bill Bernat runs a wonderful monthly workshop in Ravenna. It’s free and friendly and all you need to do is bring a story to work on. Here’s the link for more info:

It’s Bill’s workshop so if you have any questions email him through the meetup site.

Next month’s theme is Surprises. I’ll get the official invite out in a few days but I wanted to let you know what it was so you can start thinking of a story.

I hope to see some of you this Sunday at the Jewelbox!

Paul

freshgroundstories@gmail.com