Story Share: Startling Life Tales
We the People Warwick held their fourth Story Share, bringing 12 people with unexpected stories to Mountain Lake Park.
International travel and time travel were provided without planes, trains, movies or social media at Mountain Lake Park on a recent evening. We the People Warwick merely provided microphones to a dozen people for five minutes each for their fourth Story Share event, hosted by the group’s founder, Beverly Braxton. When their name was drawn from a basket, each took the stage to tell a story about some revelatory moment, whether strange, sad, funny or otherwise life-changing, providing unusual glimpses of human interiors.
A woman whose work is animal control described saving a cat stuck in a chimney by calling in her husband and others to break into the side of the chimney. Another woman told of saving her heroin addicted daughter by calling the police and getting her to a rehab facility, a save that has lasted. Another woman told of her son’s death and coincidences that helped keep her connected to him.
As for international time travel, Raluca Gold-Fuchs remembered being 12 years old in 1989, in Bucharest, Romania, when a call from her father directed the family to abandon their house and go to stay with friends—he was in trouble. She trekked, terrified, through bloody, body-strewn streets trafficked by tanks, as the communist government collapsed. Several weeks after her arrival at the refuge, her father appeared.
“We were safe. We were free,” she said.
Village of Warwick Mayor Michael Newhard told of living in a Paris walk-up apartment in the 1970’s next door to an eccentric older woman, who, unable to hear well, played the piano off-key, as he sat listening on her crumbling chair or in a theater owned by dancer Isadora Duncan’s brother, Raymond. The woman had left her husband to follow him.
Michael Needleman told of getting on a plane after smoking marijuana and being arrested. However, his arrest turned out to be a result of his resemblance to a suspected hijacker. Frightening in a different way was the childhood experience of a woman who got lost in the woods and slept on the ground there overnight.
Wayne Patterson described yet another kind of perspective confusion in his experience with a Pakistani man who drove him to doctors’ appointments. Patterson said he always spoke slowly about his medical condition, expecting the man to not understand. Eventually the man was revealed to have been a doctor in Pakistan, now pursuing medical licensing in the U.S.
A woman described the childhood joys of living on a farm with goats, chickens, a bull who romped with her and a horse who wouldn’t let her fall off. Another woman recalled the joys of getting dry stonewall construction certification. A man told of how he realized he had been eating Altoids and carmel corn to collect their containers for his work as a “maker.”
“I’m an emptyist,” he said.
“As I sat there and listened to these short story-nuggets, mostly from people I had never met, I laughed a lot, held my breath several times, gasped a couple of times, and once, almost cried, said Geoff Howard, We the People Warwick member.
“In-person storytelling creates a multi-dimensional bond like nothing else,” said Beverly Braxton.
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