≈ Comments Off on See you this Thursday! Frienship is the theme but all stories are welcome this month :)
Hi Everyone,
I’m looking forward to our show this Thursday. I’m working on my own story and hope to have it in good enough shape to share. This month’s theme is “Connection – Stories of friendship” but if you have a story about anything else we’d love to hear it.
Every month has a theme but sometimes I go ahead and open the show up to any story that follows our usual rules. So that’s what I’m doing this month. Let’s just fill the night with stories 🙂
Here are the rules and guidelines if you haven’t seen them in a while:
≈ Comments Off on FGS: Connection – Stories of friendship
I’ve had a lot of adventures in my life and almost all of them have been with friends. Some of them were people who became friends during the adventure and some of them became ex-friends after the adventure. Have you ever been friends with someone who was completely unlike you? My stepmother Betty used to call those couples Mutt and Jeff.
When I was 20, my buddy Chuck yelled at a guy who was about to punch me in the face, “Nobody hits my friends!” Two seconds later that guy was on the ground looking for his teeth. I haven’t seen Chuck since I moved to Washington in 1995 but he’s one of the people I hope is at my funeral.
My buddy Mark and I spend as much time laughing about old adventures as we do trying to find new ones. I remember feeling terrible as I helped him move out of his house after his wife left him. A month later, my long-term girlfriend left me. For the next six months, I went over to Mark’s dingy apartment twice a week to watch The Wire. That’s how we both recovered from breakups we never thought would happen.
If I find myself on some adventure without a friend I guarantee you I’ll be calling one as soon as it’s over to tell them about it. And adventure is only half over if you haven’t told anyone about it. Sometimes I think a friendship isn’t over until you’ve talked about it with another friend.
March’s theme is “Connections – Stories of friendship.” Come tell a story about making a friend, losing a friend, relying on a friend, an adventure with friends, or anything else around friends or friendship.
Remember to practice your story out loud on as many people as possible and time yourself when you’re doing it. Please don’t get onstage if you haven’t practiced your story. The audience is giving you their time and attention. It’s not fair to them if you get up there and try to wing it.
All stories have to be under 8 minutes. Stories can be as short as you want but not over 8 minutes. Stories also have to be clean in both language and content. Send me an email if you have any questions about that.
I’m also happy to help anyone with a story they’re working on. Send me an email and we can set up a phone call.
See you on Thursday, March 20, at 7 pm, at the Chabad of Queen Anne – Magnolia. 1825 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109 (Remember, no non-kosher food in the building)
Thanks to everyone who came out last night and supported our tellers. We had our biggest turnout since we moved to the Chabad, 88 people! I suspected we’d have a good turnout from the number of RSVPs so I borrowed 20 chairs from my buddy Ruben, asked my girlfriend to drive those up, then shoved 16 chairs and the PA system in my car. What a shlep that was! But we made it and had just enough chairs for everyone. Anyone know if a Prius can pull a flatbed trailer full of chairs?
As many of you know, my favorite part of FGS is when we have new tellers show up. Last Thursday we had three new tellers and I’m so happy they told. They brought us stories from all over the globe. Sean told us about the time he got off the train in Moose Pass, Alaska for a quick ski into the wilderness and missed the train back. Do you know what it’s like to be caught at night in Alaska, miles from anywhere with no map, no phone, and an iffy sense of direction? I do because I grew up there so I understood exactly what Sean was going through as he skied toward what he thought and hoped was civilization.
Molly, another first-timer, told us about living with her boyfriend in NYC while acting in plays and enjoying her new favorite hobby, smoking. I have to tell you, Molly did make smoking sound pretty cool. There came a point, though, where she had to make a choice between smoking and true love. I’d love to tell you what she decided but then you wouldn’t feel a burning urge to come to our next show on March 20 to see how our next stories turn out. And I really want to give you a burning urge to come see the shows live instead of reading about them afterward.
Mary, our last first-timer, told us about moving from New Zealand to Britain and what happened when true love popped up in her life. It was a story about love, travel, and discovering that there can be more than one place where you feel you belong. Instead of giving one place up, she added another. Tūrangawaewae is the Māori word Mary taught us that night.
Big FGS hugs to our three new tellers. I hope you come back and tell more with us.
Our regular tellers were sprinkled all through the room that night. David shared a story about going to Russia to walk for peace in the late 80s and the good friends he made on that trip. It’s been years since those beautiful moments he shared with the Russian friends he made there and he still prays that one day they’ll be able to leave and he can see them again.
Gretchen told us what it’s like to stare down the barrel of a gun in the middle of the night. If you’ve ever met Gretchen, you wouldn’t think she had that kind of story in her. That’s good in a way. It means the experience doesn’t define her. But those moments never leave us no matter how well we’ve dealt with them. I know there were people in the room that night who knew exactly what Gretchen was talking about.
Bob told a story from one of his trail-running adventures where he met an overly honest three-year-old. Are there any other kinds? Probably not. I don’t know at what age we all decide to not say out loud what’s on our mind, but I know for sure it’s after three. Sometimes I think I still haven’t reached that age.
Kate, Bob’s sister, is also an accomplished teller and shared a story of a friend’s betrayal. We’re not talking about dating someone she broke up with or staying friends with someone who done her wrong. This was big. It involved lawyers, kids, and a lot of money. It’s always heartbreaking when you find out that someone you trust isn’t worth that trust. It’s even worse when it ends up in court. Turns out you never really know what the person across from you playing Mah Jongg is really thinking.
Deborah shared the story of finding out the difference between heartburn and heart attack. Apparently, one can sometimes feel like the other. Who knew? We also learned it doesn’t matter how much kale and chia seeds you eat. Heart attacks can still get you. Now I need to find a use for the three-pound bag of chia seeds I got at Costco last week. Deborah is one of the wonderful people I’ve met through FGS and I don’t know what I’d do if her husband had to call me and say I wouldn’t see her walk through our door anymore. Basically, what I’m saying is call your doctor if the heartburn doesn’t go away.
Cliff, one of our new regular tellers, shared a wonderful story of connection during Covid. Remember the people who volunteered at the vaccine places during those years? Cliff was one of those people. He met and helped thousands of people move through lines, get to where they needed to go and get what they needed. He didn’t get to have long, involved conversations with anyone, but he got to share some moments with human beings in need and it changed him. It was a sweet story of just the kind of thing I see so often at FGS but without the respiratory illness part. We show up, listen to moments from people’s lives that changed them, and go home feeling a little more connected to the world.
Brian shared a story of his old friend Norm back in Louisiana who was always there for him, even in death. In a way, it was the opposite of Kate’s story. It was an elegy to a man who few people knew outside of the little town he lived in. But he made a difference in the lives of the people he touched and what more can we ask of anyone, including ourselves? In my experience, the people who go out and do Great Things for the Commonweal are sometimes not pleasant to be around in real life. We need them, of course. But we also need people who make their own corner of the world a kind and loving place for the people around them. We can’t all bring down the Berlin Wall or create a polio vaccine, but we can all be kind and helpful to the people around us.
Emily closed our show with a story about how she cooked up batches of wine-scented body lotion to sell at farmer’s markets. Her mom thought this was crazy. Her sister did too. In fact, almost everyone did. Who wants to smell like they just plowed through a couple quarts of merlot? Well, it turns out the people in one western Washington town love smelling like that. Who are those people and where do they live? You’ll have to go the The Moth Grandslam on March 3 to find out. I’m so happy that Emily and Kate are both in the grand slam that night. Here is my promise to you. If you’re working on a story for another show, you are always welcome to tell it at FGS. Don’t worry if it doesn’t match the theme for that night. There aren’t too many places to work out stories in front of a live audience, so if you need stage time with a story that still follows our usual rules, you are welcome to tell it at FGS.
Thanks for reading this far. I know my thank you emails run long. It’s the last chance I have to thank the people who got up and told, and I want each of them to know their stories meant something to me.
Our next show in March 20. The theme is Connections – Stories of friendship. I’ll get the invite out as soon as I can. In the meantime, take care of each other. Call me if you want help on a story. Pop into our free monthly online workshop on Sunday, March 2 if you like. It’s run by two great tellers, Dave and Colleen, who give excellent feedback. It’s also a good place to meet other tellers and see how different people go through the process.
Don’t forget about our friends at 7 Stories in Burien this Friday. The suggested theme is “The Kindness of Strangers.” 7 Stories is run by good people who love supporting storytellers. It’s my go-to show for new stories I’m working on.
Bar Stories Live on Stage is another story show we love. They run multiple shows a month so check out their main Meetup page for times, dates, and places. Nick and Rebecca are lovely people and their shows are amazing.
I’m looking forward to seeing you this Thursday at FGS!
I’ve had a very storyworthy month so far and hope to work up at least one story I can share with you soon.
I’m going to try to connect a Starbucks barista, a guy from Reno, a new cell phone, and an overly friendly old man coming at me in nothing but his boxers. It’s been a great couple of weeks 😊
In the meantime, here’s a beautiful story I just heard that I hope will inspire you to work on one of your own.
I’m always happy to help anyone with a story over the phone. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story for us or not. And don’t forget about our free monthly online workshop. It’s run by two great tellers who can’t wait to hear your stories.
Write me directly at freshgroundstories at gmail dot com if you have any questions (meetup doesn’t always get emails to me if you just hit reply)
≈ Comments Off on FGS: Pivots – Stories of changing direction
Last week I was telling my boss about someone I worked with years ago who I just couldn’t seem to figure out. We did great when we were on our own but when we had to work together it was always a big mess.
I described it like this, “We’d get together and it was like a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich. Great on our own, but terrible together.” We both laughed at that image and kept laughing over who would be the mayonnaise and who would be the relish on our current team.
A little part of me was laughing even harder on the inside because while my boss thought I was a brilliant improviser, the real reason I had the PB&T image in mind was that I had looked at a note with that phrase on it the night before. For the last month, I’ve been gathering all the notebooks and scraps of paper I’ve written notes on for the last 15 years and transcribed each thought onto separate notes so I could catalog the ideas and find them later.
So far, I’m up to 800 notes and counting. The stack of 4×6 cards is almost 7” high. If my ridiculously complex alphanumeric bottom-up relational organizational index system works out I’ll have instant access to every joke, pun, story idea, and inappropriate thought I’ve had since 2010. Crazy to not use a digital system to keep track of all this? Crazy like a carnivora canidae I say.
Six months ago, after another sleepless night thanks to the siren glow of my smartphone, I ordered a flip phone. Not only was I spending too much time on Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/Etsy/eBay/Amazon/Craigslist/OfferUp/TypewriterClubLive/FountainPens4Sale/HowToGetRidOfMoles.com, but even worse was that I wasn’t spending any time writing new stories. Unacceptable!
So I hid the iPhone, got a flip phone, and went back in time to 1995 when you were doing great if you had a pager and a Palm Pilot. And you know what? The first morning I woke up without a smartphone on the nightstand, I rolled over and found 31 notes I’d written on little slips of paper in the middle of the night. Thirty-one new ideas to think on and write about!
I couldn’t wait to tell everyone. I’d just solved not only my sleep problem but also the world’s attention deficit crisis. Chances were good my face would be on the next quarter. “I am the Jonas Salk of the 21st century! I’ve cured polio of the mind!”
Turns out not everyone was thrilled with my new lifestyle. In fact, no one was thrilled about it. Not a single person. My girlfriend was upset that she couldn’t text cute Boston Terrier Instagram stories to me anymore. Some people were put out by having to email me links instead of texting them. Others were embarrassed to be seen with me text-yelling into my phone (only elves and fairies have small enough fingers to use a flip phone keypad). My girlfriend’s daughter said, “I’d like to send this funny photo to your phone but then I remembered you don’t have one.” Brutal!
But I stuck with it. Maybe because I knew it was helping. Or maybe because I wanted to show everyone that I was right and they were oh so very wrong.
I kept the iPhone for when I needed to answer emails and look things up, but most days I left the house without it. Slowly, friends stopped telling me to end the joke and get back under the digital yoke of despair. My son got used to me emailing him links instead of texting him. Marni the Girlfriend stopped rolling her eyes when I’d ask her to Google the “average airspeed of an unladen swallow.”*
There were definitely times when I wondered if I could go back to a smartphone and just not fall into the scroll hole. Every few weeks I’d take the iPhone to bed with me to “do some research” and end up spending three hours on Reddit reading the “How can I stop my Boston Terrier from farting in bed” thread. The next day I’d wake up after fours of bad sleep, and go back to Flippy the Monk Phone**.
I was still on the fence about Flippy and The LIfe Analogue until our show last week. If you’ve ever been to the show, you know that in between tellers, I spend a 15-30 seconds or so talking about the story we just heard, and then bring up the next teller. Last week, when I talked about how much each story moved me, I remembered three notes that I’d written years ago and managed to connect each one to a story I’d just heard. If those notes had been on a screen in a cloud somewhere I never would have remembered them. But since they were on index cards that I’d been flipping through that week just for fun, I did remember them. And I got to say something sweet and meaningful about some stories that deserved to be acknowledged that way.
So I’m sticking with Flippy. I’m on the internet eight hours a day at work and streaming movies and whatnot in the evening, but not being able to jump online when I’m bored for two seconds has been good for me. Having to crank up the laptop or pull my creaky old tablet out of my bag to get online is just inconvenient enough to make me think twice. I’ll let you know in a few months if this mindful life of exasperation has led to more stories.
And that’s the kind of story we’re looking for this month. Come tell a story about a time when your life changed directions. Was it a big change like applying to NASA after majoring in poetry at Vassar? Was it a small change like taking the bus to work instead of driving and making a bunch of new friends? Maybe it was just a change in how you see yourself. I can imagine a great story about a time when you went from fearful to confident and never looked back. Whatever it is, we’d love to hear it.
Whatever story you tell, remember to practice it out loud on as many people as possible and time yourself when you’re doing it. Please don’t get onstage if you haven’t practiced your story. The audience is giving you their time and attention. It’s not fair to them if you get up there and try to wing it.
All stories have to be under 8 minutes. Stories can be as short as you want but not over 8 minutes. Stories also have to be clean in both language and content. Send me an email if you have any questions about that.
I’m also happy to help anyone with a story they’re working on. Send me an email and we can set up a phone call.
Last week, I gave a small notebook and pencil to someone at the show who was struggling to come up with a story for next month. I’m going to keep doing that. From now on, I’m going to give a small notebook and a pencil that says, “Write more, scroll less” to the first person in the audience who raises their hand. No need to ditch your smartphone. It’s just something to help you keep track of all the great ideas you have during the day when you don’t want to open your notes app to write them down.
See you on Thursday, February 20, at 7 pm, at the Chabad of Queen Anne – Magnolia. 1825 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109 (Remember, no non-kosher food in the building)
Paul Freshgroundstories at gmail dot com
* https://www.sleke.io/faq I stole the line about the swallow from this site, where I just ordered a new phone that lets me access email and a few other communication apps.
**** This no-smartphone thing is definitely a struggle. I don’t want anyone to think I’m telling everyone to do this. I’m doing it out of desperation and with the full knowledge that certain things, like parking in Seattle without an app, are a nightmare. I have to bring the iPhone with me every time I drive into the city. I also have to bring it with me on show nights because I need to see messages people send me through Meetup.
**** Since it is a pain in the tuches to not be able to access links, I’m getting a different phone in March that will automatically forward texts with links in them to my email. So send all the IG puppy videos you want. I’ll just see them when I get home 🙂
Fresh Ground Stories 