Fired for storytelling at age 17!
The summer between my senior year in high school and my first year of college (when Rhode Island was still the costume jewelry capital of the world), I got a dollar-an-hour job in a jewelry shop, stringing pearls.
The stringers were all women. We sat at long wooden tables in a stifling factory room, deafened by the sounds of machinery in the next room, intoxicated by the smell of the fish glue used for making fake pearls, and we strung pearls. They came in three sizes, and the smaller the pearl, the more necklaces you had to string to make your quota . . . and your dollar. Conversation was at a minimum because of the noise, but mostly because everyone was so focused making their dollar.
During that summer, I read Gone with the Wind. Every day I would come to work and tell the ladies at my table the part of the book I had read the night before. (I had a loud voice!) As I told the story, I would get so energized that I would string faster and faster. But as they listened and got caught up with Scarlett and Rhett and Ashley Wilkes, they would string slower and slower and, pretty soon, I was the only one at the table stringing. Everyone else was listening to the story.
They fired me. They said I talked too much.
They fired me. They said I talked too much.
It’s true. I’ve always talked too much . . . and too loud. I taught high school English for seven years, and I never had one kid say to me, “What was that?” Teachers at the other end of the corridor had to close their doors because their students would listen to me.
And talking. I always had the desire, the need, to tell someone about what had happened to me, or what I had done, or what I had witnessed. That’s what made the world real for me. The telling about it. Otherwise, it was as if it had never really happened.
In 1970, I went to the University of Oregon for a graduate degree in theatre and found out I could act. Now, I could tell not only my own experience, but the experience of a character as well. And in doing that, I could reveal the essence, the complexity, the beauty of the human soul.
I moved to New York, did some acting, tried some stand-up. I liked stand-up because of the connection with the audience you didn’t get in theatre, but the hours got to me. One night, by the time I got on stage, there were four people left in the audience and they spoke only Japanese. There was a lot of nodding and smiling, though.
Back in Rhode Island, I saw Judith Black’s Banned in the Western Suburbs , and it stopped me in my tracks. She was telling stories from her own life, beautifully, artfully. It wasn’t theatre because she was talking to the audience. But it wasn’t stand-up either because it was so much more than set-up-punch-line. It was something else, the best of both worlds. It was STORYTELLING. And I wanted to do that!
So I began my career as a storyteller. And all I have done – teaching, acting, stand-up, telling stories in the pearl shop, talking too much, talking too loud, making people laugh -- all of it has brought me here -- to storytelling. We were made for each other.
