We had a great first evening at the Peach State Storytelling Festival. I got there in time to sit in on the Southern Order of Storytellers business meeting and hear from our new president, Mary Williams.
The evening concert had three regional storytelling acts introduced by eloquent emcee, Barry Stewart Mann, who set things up with a very brief tale of the relationship between Shaow and Light.
Shannon Turner told of her adventures as a 14 year old discovering her aunt's romance novels, and reading them on the floor of the walk-in closet, and then all the wonders of Readers Digest. Her boyfriend from summer camp actually wrote her. And it's still the best love letter of Shannon's life. He traced his hand on the letter and asked her to place hers where his had been and remember when those hands had been clasped. I'd say that boy was dangerous! That aunt and another aunt, her sister, whose childhood fall left her handicapped were important to Shannon's life in different ways. Fishing one day with her family, Shannon managed to lose her grip on a stringer full of fish.
As a grown up the she saw selfishness and duplicity in some family members as well as finer attributes in others. She closed the tale wondering what had happened to those fish, tethered as they were. Did they learn to swim together, or did they die.
Tracy Sue Walker closed us out with her eloquent and melodious voice, beginning and ending her program with song. I think I enjoyed hers most of all, despite the fact that I had heard versions of each of her stories.
The first she personalized by setting it in last winter's "Snowpocalypse" along the Chattahoochee in North Georgia. Three male hunters, lost in the snow came to the wide Chattahoochee. The first prayed for strength and stamina to swim the swift, frigid waters, and after much effort struggled across. The second added a request for equipment to help him across, and was given a canoe. He barely managed to cross, with great effort, the raging stream. The third added intelligence to the prayer. He was made a woman, checked a map, and walked across the bridge just downstream!
Her second story was about Copper Annie who unwittingly married the devil.
Tracy Sue finished up by singing one of my old favorites: The Farmer's Cursed Wife, inviting the audience to join in the chorus after each silly verse.
Hope I can sleep now. I had coffee to keep me awke on the drive home. Now I need sleep.
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