Three days before one of the biggest shows I’ve ever produced, one of my performers called with bad news. She’s an up and coming comedian and her agent insisted she be somewhere else Saturday night. Then a day before my show, another performer emailed to say she was very sick and had to pull herself …
Continue reading “Zen and the Art of Producing Storytelling Shows”
When I decided to start producing my own storytelling show on Long Island nearly three years ago, someone asked me about my wildest dreams for its future. “I’d love to sell out the Tilles Center,” I said jokingly. Now, nearly three years to the day that I launched my show in the basement of Turn of …
Be authentic and don’t memorize. We all have built-in bullshit detectors and know when a speech is canned. Don’t worry about “ums” or “ahs” or if you forget something in your story. Your audience will be engaged in the narrative, and won’t care. Make sure your story is a story and not an anecdote. It …
Last night I was reminded, once again, why listening to and telling stories is so powerful and important. The Story Collider brought together a group of five women to tell very human stories about a charged topic, abortion. Two of the storytellers are members of Doctors Without Borders and shared chilling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting …
It’s a warm summer night in June, and I am standing under a tent before 100 or so strangers with just a microphone in front of me and a bare stage behind, telling them a story. It’s the story of how two days after giving birth, I am horrified to learn that my daughter, Lily, …
Two and a half years ago, I discovered The Moth on NPR. I instantly fell in love with the art of storytelling, and yearned to tell my own stories. And once I screwed up the courage to get up on a stage, I never looked back. This week, my wildest, seemingly unreachable dream has come true. …
Continue reading “Stories – Sometimes a wild dream comes true”
After two miscarriages and a difficult third pregnancy, in June 2000 my twin daughters were born. Rather than breathing a sigh of relief, however, I was faced two days later with the news that one of my babies was born with a serious heart defect and would need open heart surgery to survive. I told my story …
Until I saw his picture flash across my TV screen a few days after 9/11, I had no idea that Mike was a priest, or that he had died in the terror attacks. Like most of us who lived and worked in New York City, those first few days and weeks were a blur. Shocked …
I recently returned from the National Storytelling Network’s annual conference in Kansas City with an evangelist’s desire to bring ALL of my storytelling friends into this community. I joined the board in December without knowing too much about the organization, other than it’s been around for a long time and is focused on providing guidance and a …
A few weeks ago, I celebrated 29 years of sobriety. It’s been almost three decades since I last snorted a line of cocaine through a rolled up dollar bill, guzzled vodka tonics until I felt the numbing warmth slowly spread through my body, or woke up from a blackout covered in my own vomit, shuddering …