The Smithsonian Channel gets up early. So this morning I set the alarm for 5:35AM Pacific Time, dragged my sorry derriere out of bed, tossed back a warm glass of watered-down apple cider vinegar, cayenne, turmeric, black pepper, cinnamon, and honey, and did a few minutes of oil-pulling (an ayurvedic practice of swishing organic sesame oil around in your mouth for fifteen minutes - gets the ol' chompers oiled and the throat muscles primed.) 

At six on the dot the two red LEDs on my Telos Zephyr (isdn codec) lit up and the cheery voices of Smithsonian producers filled my studio. Today's narration diet - "Titanic's Final Mysteries" - a 2-hour special which will air on the Smithsonian Channel April 5th & 15th on the one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking. Turns out, extreme research conducted over decades reveals that the cause of the smashing of the Titanic into the iceberg was….Well, if I told you, you might not watch. But it's safe to say that environmental deception was involved. 

My other life - storytelling in comedy clubs, Conferences, theaters & classrooms - continues apace. Just visited my old stomping ground  in L.A. - Allessandro School for Career Day, where I've been telling stories & reading books since 1993. Long-time Principal Lynn Andrews who's been told by LAUSD he could be making more money in retirement, refuses to retire because he's a hero, a champion of both the kids and his teachers. He has found more grant money, prize money, and aid for students & staff than any other school Principal I've ever heard of. And in his wool slacks & cardigans, Lynn stands guard over one of the most creative and constructive public school environments I've seen. Huzzah, Allessandro School Prinicipal Lynn Andrews!! Thank you for nineteen great years in your school; may we have many more. 

My first storytelling Conference gig took place last month on the campus of BYU in Provo, Utah. The Timpanogos Mid-Winter Storytelling Conference has been going on since 2006. Folklorists, college & high school teachers, storytellers and story listeners crowded the halls of BYU Conference Center the weekend of February 10, for two solid days of story workshops and storytelling concerts. Master tellers Donald Davis, Bil Lepp & Antonio Rochas wowed a packed house with their stories at Provo High School on Friday night, and super-tellers Donna Washington, Susan O'Halloran, Ilene Evans, Mary Hamilton, Karla Huntsman, Sherry Norfolk, and yours truly, told a wildly wide variety of stories to the crowds in the Conference Center Lecture Hall and the Provo Library - with themes ranging from skinless witches flying through the night, to racism in Chicago, to I Love Lucy actors short on cash. With tireless help from a large, cheery cadre of volunteers, the Conference came off without a hitch. I even made a few bucks selling my storytelling CDs and anthologies of short stories & essays at the merchandise table. 

I roomed in the mountains with members of The Well Arts Institute - a nonprofit arts-in-healthcare organization located in Portland, Oregon. Using creative writing workshops, art, music and theater, Well Arts helps writers, their families and caregivers, and their communities move toward wellness, hope, and meaning in life-changing health situations. http://www.wellarts.org

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF UNSEEN VOICES

One night under his cowboy-themed bedspread a young Bill Ratner carefully adjusted the steel needle on his older brother Pete’s crystal radio set. He put on the headphones, moved the probe across the tiny sparkling crystal, and he began to experience the invisible world of voices.
The next day as he sat watching an afternoon kids’ TV program a deep, commanding voice announced, “This commercial message will be sixty seconds long.” Bill held his breath as a 1953 Oldsmobile floated across the TV screen wending its way through forests and down bucolic country roads. When the commercial was over Bill sprinted into the kitchen and told his mother, “I know what a minute is. Sixty seconds!”
“Yes it is. How did you learn that?” his mother asked, wiping potato peelings from her apron.
“The man on TV told me.”
“Oh? What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. He was invisible!”
Thus began Bill’s quiet, studied obsession with unseen voices – not the kind that appear suddenly within one’s head (unless you’re an animation voice actor) – but the kind that appear invisibly inside mechanized plush toys, in carnival thrill-rides, over loudspeakers at baseball games, on internet homepages, on TV, on the radio, and in movie theaters.
At age nine Bill and his friends John Barstow and John Waterhouse strung kite string between two orange-juice cans and dragged the string across Humbolt Avenue in South Minneapolis until it was stretched taut. Perched inside John Waterhouse’s bedroom window Bill shouted into his orange-juice can, “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
“YOU DON’T HAVE TO SHOUT,” responded John Barstow from across the street. “Yes, I can hear you.” The immutable power of vocal transmission had hypnotized Bill and his friends.
Three years later Bill received a phone call that would change his life. It was a Saturday morning, and as he watched TV in his basement the phone rang. “It’s John Waterhouse on the phone for you, shit-head,” shouted Bill’s older brother Pete.
Bill picked up the phone and listened as John Waterhouse reported breathlessly, “We’re at Jim’s TV & Radio on Bryant Avenue. Jim just showed us how to solder a microphone cable to the volume control of an AM radio and turn it into a public address system. You can hear your own voice coming out of the radio.”
Bill was awestruck. Shortly after that transformative event he and his friends took soldering guns and proceeded to change entire households full of radios into public address systems. With rapt fascination they listened to themselves for hours on end. They swore an oath of allegiance, and together they established the Brotherhood of Radio Stations.
Inspired by his sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Close,  Bill founded WCLO Radio – Stereo AM 1230. With a five-watt Knight-Kit transmitter he broadcast throughout his house and into the vast outdoors up to a distance of at least three-to-four houses.
It has been a long and valiant ride. From acting in small, undistinguished black-box theaters in the Upper Midwest, to selling radio ads to beauty parlors in suburban San Francisco, from telling stories before a microphone in beer-fumed Hollywood nightclubs, to standing guard with his unions over the ever-tilting playing field of the American media marketplace. Bit by bilious bit Bill has risen from the hoi polloi into the Pantheon of American voices where, in his starchy white toga and ox-hide sandals, he can be heard honking out the hits, belting out his copy, turning on a dime. From unctuous sincerity to whispery gossip, from profoundly shocked moral outrage to the resonance of grave and ethical truth, from low bathroom humor to pitch-perfect patrician amusement, Bill gratefully, humbly, and proudly moves his lips in return for generous remuneration.
He appreciates your visiting this virtual portfolio.
  

L.A. Stories

As a Midwesterner (born in Iowa, bred in Minn.,) I’m humble enough to admit that New Englanders & Southerners originated storytelling in America. These days Jonesborough TN is considered ground zero; it’s the HQ of the National Storytelling Network http://www.storynet.org/ which is sponsoring it’s annual conference in Los Angeles this year where I’ll be telling a tale Friday July 30^th. NSN’s huge national membership ranges from librarians, to inspirational storytellers, to contemporary spoken word artists & memoirists like myself.

My scene here in Los Angeles revolves around story slams in nightclubs - judged storytelling contests where a pre-announced theme determines the night’s topic for the storytellers who throw their names in a hat. The premier storytelling competitions are under the auspices of The Moth http://www.themoth.org – a NY-based non-profit which sponsors both the hat-in-the-ring slams and celeb-driven curated events. Currently five NY-area nightclubs hold monthly Moth Slams and three in Los Angeles, and it’s spreading. Chicago has a Moth night each month, and curated Moth events have been held in Portland OR, and other locales around the U.S.  Atlantan George Dawes Green founded The Moth in NY  in 1997 inspired by nostalgic memories of friends & family swapping tales late at night as moths fluttered against the screen porch.

Storytelling and oratory are mankind’s earliest form of entertainment, and with contemporary practitioners & boosters like Ira Glass on NPR’s This American Life, Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, and The Moth’s new story radio show on 60 public radio stations plus its top 10 i-tunes podcast, the storytelling movement is spreading fast. And this is all good news. Even major Fortune 500 corporations have come to the Moth and asked if The Moth storytellers could help corporate execs “tell their story.”

Coming up in June, 2010 is the semi-annual The Moth Grand Story Slam Championship pitting ten Moth Story Slam winners against each other in a knock-down, drag-out judged story competition at L.A.’s premier rock’n’roll club The EchoPlex http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=a00e5e0f0c63a9c4c57b324b8&id=7c7083e6ee&e=5adee6ed4e

For background this New York Times article is informative. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/fashion/16moth.html?_r=2&scp=6&sq=the+moth&st=nyt

L.A. Times veteran Iris Schneider photographed & penned this portrait of storytelling in L.A.: http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2010/03/telling_stories.php