Storyteller Thursday - one day late

Last night, I went to Touchstone Theatre's Christmas City Follies XII.  This has become a Christmas tradition for my Mom, my sister, Christine, and I.  Every year, we invite a different friend to join us and this year it was my co-worker and partner in crime (past), Suzanne. 

The Follies are a Lehigh Valley tradition, a vaudevillian collection of comedy sketches, musical pieces and local lore lampooned.  Every year, we wonder how they will top last year's production and every year the ensemble cast produces something wonderful.  This is not a greeting card Christmas at all, but it feels oh-so-merry-and-bright.

And, what does this have to do with storytelling?  Well, Mary Wright is one of The Follies cast members and she is also a super storyteller!

Mary is a tireless proponent of education through the arts, working with theater groups at area high schools, running storytelling and creative dramatic workshops and retreats.  Besides all that, she is an all around nice person!  She tells stories based on her own life, and the lives of her fore-mothers.  She has developed story/theater pieces for arts organizations.  She and Cora Hook, another local theater and storytelling star wrote produces and starred in Two Cronies, a marvelous show on the women's coming of age through "the change".

Back to The Follies - the show runs Thursday through Sunday until December 18th.  Get your tickets now!

Storyteller Thursdays

The organization of this blog continues.  Today is Story (or Storyteller) Thursday.  And on Thursdays, I will features a story, a storytelling activity or a storyteller.

Today's storyteller is Kristin Pedemonti, an energetic, lively, big-hearted woman who is the founder of Literacy Outreach Belize.  Since 2006, she has donated programs to 33,000 children in Belize and has spearheaded donations of funds and books to the more rural schools in this small Central American country.

Pedemonti's storytelling usually includes audience participation, with costumes, funny voices and even funnier faces.  She is a joy to watch.  She has a wonderful manner, handles outbursts from the sudience with humor and aplomb and ofter makes them part of her stories.

She's a globetrotter as well, performing all across Europe, the US and South America.  In 2011 she won the coveted National Storytelling Network International StoryBridge Oracle Award.

Check out Kristin's website and visit her fund-raising site to enable her to return to Belize and train more teachers and teens in storytelling and story creation skills.

Icefall

Last night, as my daughter-in-law lay counting her contractions, I thought I'd share the storyline of Icefall by Matthew J. Kirby.  After all, in Icefall, the narrator, Princess Solveig, finds meaning in learning the role of storyteller, or skald.  She uses her stories to calm angry warriors and soothe the sick.  At one point, she tries to frighten her family's enemy with a story.  How could I, a storyteller, not love this book?

My DIL asked me, "Are you still reading kids books?"  I think, she meant, "Now that you are retired..."  But kids' books are my passion.  With books as well-written, exciting and, yes, even thoughtful, as Icefall, how could I not "still read kids' books"?

(BTW, my DIL, after 26 hours of labor, gave birth to the most perfect baby girl in the history of time - which is what I guess all grandmothers have said throughout the history of time. THEY were all wrong.)

I forgot to take my camera to the hospital today so I cannot prove to you how perfect my new granddaughter is.  So here is the cover of Icefall, as a poor substitute. 

Here is a little more about the book.  Solveig has been sent with her older sister, Princess Asa, and her younger brother, Crown Prince Harald, along with a handful of retainers and warriors to an isolated holding at the end of a fjord to wait out their father's most recent war.  Winter freezes them in.  A company of berserkers and their father's skald or court storyteller, soon joins them.  And then treachery strikes.  Who among them is the traitor?  Will they survive the winter?  Sprinkled with Norse mythology throughout, this is an exciting, well-written novel for middle school age and up.