Thank you everyone who came out to the show last Thursday. We had so many first-time tellers! My favorite part of each show is when someone who has never spoken in public gets up and learns how good it feels to share a story. Of course we couldn’t do it without such a patient and supportive audience so special thanks to them as well. You guys always bring the love to the storytellers and that’s why we’re able to keep doing this.

Every month at FGS we learn a little more about the world and this month was no different. This time we learned that pick-up artists are now calling themselves life coaches. We also learned that they like to hang out at The Gap. Most importantly, we learned that Kath will do almost anything for a story. Kath was one our first-timers and even though I never encourage people to do something crazy just for a story I’m secretly hoping something weird happens to her in the next couple of weeks so we can hear about.

We also learned that Nadia did her part to end the Cold War by disguising herself as a punk with a neon blue mohawk and sneaking up to the Czech border to share a smoke with a friendly Soviet border guard. We can only imagine how different the world would be today if Madeline Albright had walked into some of those peace talks wearing safety pin jeans and a Dead Kennedys t-shirt. Nadia was another first-timer and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t hunt her down after the show and tell her how much I liked her story. Nadia, if you’re reading this, we’d love to have you back.

I also wish I could have told Hannah how jealous I am of her relationship with her mom. Hannah was home-schooled until college which means for the first 12 years of school she had to spend every hour of every class with her own mother. Can you imagine? I’m an only child and I know if my mom had home-schooled me she would have reminded me every year that once again I graduated at the bottom of my class. Hannah, whatever your mom did she did it right. You may think your story is about the time you met Obama but I think of it as the time Obama met you.

There were lots of other great stories that night but I gotta wrap this up so I can get ready to hop on a plane tomorrow morning. The recording turned out fine but since I’ll be in Canada for a week I won’t be able to get anyone’s recording to them until next weekend. Only the people who told a story can get a copy of it. Most people don’t want their personal stuff out there on the internet so I only give out recordings of single stories and only to the people who told them.

Next month’s theme is Journeys. Journeys, of course, can be physical, emotional, spiritual, almost anything. It can last a day or a decade. If you’ve ever been on a journey that changed your life somehow we’d love to hear it. Our next show will be July 28 at 7pm at Roy Street Coffee. I’ll write up the official invite when I get back in town but you can start thinking about it now. Rules for telling a story are below:

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

Thanks again to all our storytellers: Bill, Hannah, Elliot, David, Gaylin, Barb, Deborah, Jake, and first-timers Nadia, Arden, Kath, Ingrid, Katy.

See you on July 28!

Paul
freshgroundstories@gmail.com

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick reminder that our next show is this Thursday at Roy Street Coffee. The theme is “Saying Yes – Stories of Jumping in.”

If you’ve ever done something that didn’t turn out quite the way you planned here’s your chance to tell the story J

http://www.meetup.com/Fresh-Ground-Stories/events/231709491/

Here are the rules and guidelines if you want to tell a story:

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

Before I let you go back to enjoying the weather I want to remind you of a couple of amazing things our regulars are doing.

The first is Bill Bernat’s one-man show called “Becoming More Less Crazy.” It’s funny and touching and beautiful and definitely worth catching if you love personal storytelling. Click on either of the links below for the full description.

http://morelesscrazy.com

https://thepocket.vbotickets.com/event/Becoming_More_Less_Crazy_Storytelling/12789

I also want to let you know about of our tellers who was recently interviewed on KPLU’s Sound Effect. It’s a tough listen, and definitely not for kids, but it’s a pretty amazing 12 minutes. Tim spent two years healing himself through the stories he told at our show and now he’s able to finally share them in other places.

http://www.kplu.org/post/face-face-evil-former-investigator-remembers-time-front-lines-sex-trade

That’s all for now. Let me know if you have any questions. See you on Thursday!

Paul
freshgroundstories@gmail.com

I have this friend who’s a body language expert. She used to work for the government training agents on interrogation techniques and how to read non-verbal clues. Now she runs her own business and goes on cable news shows to explain what Putin’s funny posture means or what Jennifer Lawrence is really saying when she picks her nose and rolls her eyes. It’s a pretty sweet gig she’s got and it’s always fun to hang out with her in a bar and play, “What’s going on with them?” with couples I point out to her across the room.

Anyway, I was on the phone with her the other day and I was pestering her with questions like I always do about this stuff. Can you really tell when someone is lying? What should I do with my hands in a job interview? How does your husband feel about being married to a human lie detector?

At one point she tells me about this little move that often means someone is hyper-focused on consequences. And she perfectly described what I was doing right at that moment! In fact, it’s a thing I do all the time. And I’m totally over-focused on consequences! I’m not going to tell you what this move is because I don’t need people telling me every time I start tic-ing out. But I can say with absolute conviction that a large part of my life has been spent calculating all the possible consequences of every decision I make.

I’m sure if I wrote down a complete timeline of my life a good therapist could point out where every tic, twitch and habit began and how it helped me get through whatever weird event was happening at the time. I won’t go into how even after all these years I still I have to count the number of stairs to the parking lot to my front door (8 x 2 which is different than 16). And I’m not going to explain how sometimes I have to take a breath in just the right way before I can ask a stranger in the grocery store if I can reach around them to grab a turnip. In fourth grade I drove Mrs. Karabelnikov crazy because I had to make a secret high-pitched whine while she wrote on the blackboard. I never told her who was making that noise because I knew she wouldn’t understand that I would die if I couldn’t make that sound whenever she picked up a piece of chalk.

What I can tell you is that the King Daddy of all these annoying habits is my baseless conviction that doom is around every corner. Not a day goes by when I don’t convince myself that I’m going to lose my job, hurt my friends, or contract some sort of respiratory illness that puts me in an iron lung. In the coal mine of life my canary is always dead.

If these thoughts just stayed in my head and didn’t affect how I walked though the world I could handle it. But inevitably they manifest themselves in a single word that I’ve used more than any other in my life.

No.

No, I don’t think so. No, I can’t do that. No, I better not.

I’ve said no so many times I feel like I need some kind of physical therapy to learn how to say yes. I can tell you exactly how many times I’ve said said yes since 2010. Three. Once when I decided to keep Fresh Ground Stories running after the woman who started it had to move out of state for work. Another time was when I swallowed my fear and agreed to host TEDxOlympia and coach all the speakers. The most important yes I ever said was when I finally broke down and asked for help one night when all the fears I’d kept inside came roaring out of my head and pinned me to the floor of my apartment.

But that’s all I got. Three yes’s since 2010. I’m trying to teach myself to say yes more often but it’s hard to turn the emotional Titanic around once you’ve built up speed.

This is where you guys come in. I’d like to hear stories about what happened when you said yes. Come to FGS on June 23 and share some stories about how saying yes to something turned out for you. I don’t even care if it turned out bad. Just saying yes is powerful in its own way and even if everything went off the rails afterward you must have learned something if you’re still here to talk about it.

So that’s the theme of this month’s show: Saying Yes – Stories of jumping in.

Here are the updated Rules & Guidelines for telling a story at the show:

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

Remember to keep it clean, practice out loud on friends or pets, and make sure it’s under 8 minutes.

I hope to see you at our next show on Thursday, June 23, 7:00pm at the Roy St Cafe.

Paul
freshgroundstories@gmail.com.