Transcriber: Dan Meyer Reviewer: Desiree Kramer
Hi.
Well, I'm going to tell you a story about magic
and about the magic of stories,
or I should say the stupid magic of stories,
because I know stupid magic.
I collect spectacularly misguided experiences like stamps.
Like, take when I was in my early 20s,
the stupidest of all the ages,
I was climbing my first mountain ever, like the tallest peak in the Sawtooths.
And as we neared the top this storm cover came in,
and our hair started rising up to meet the atmosphere,
and you could feel this electric thickness in the air,
like the palpable weight of it.
And instead of being rightly terrified of being struck by lightning,
I just ran my hand through the air instead,
and these sparks went off in between each finger,
and I just felt like I was magic.
And then everything blew over anyway,
so I ended up just being awestruck instead.
(Laughs)
And I really never felt anything like that until "Story Story Night."
It's this live storytelling program I co-created six years ago,
where people from our community get together
and they tell true stories on a theme, live and without notes.
Our first show ever "Busted" -
We thought we would have like 25 people,
we thought it would be kind of a small thing.
And then I looked outside the window before our doors opened,
and you could see there was a line going down the stairs and around the corner,
and we ended up using every single chair in that venue,
it was packed side to side.
And then the stories started,
and they were raw and electric and amazing.
And I felt that again,
that weight in the air, the energy in it,
I didn't know before that day that you could feel people's emotions,
even when it's totally pitch black,
and people are silently holding their breath,
you can just feel it, what they're thinking,
and it feels like sparks of illumination, it's amazing.
But, I have to admit, I'm not going to lie,
the first two years of that program,
we were pretty stupid.
We would know that a story could be electric,
but sometimes they would just fall flat and we had no idea what to tell people,
because that stock advice like, "You need a beginning, middle and end,"
when you're alone on stage with a mic and your thoughts,
and a crowd of people just waiting for magic to happen.
It's terrifying.
So one day I was just sketching it out
and thinking about what a story really needs, you know.
It needs a turning point moment,
when everything kind of was surprising and changed for you.
You need build-up scenes, that kind of just lead right to it,
and then you need a take-away that brings it all back.
And then I had this realization.
I call it an "Einstein light-bulb moment",
but a pretty basic non-genius one, you know,
that a story is not a static triangle with a beginning, middle and end;
A story is a wave.
A story is a force of nature that just sucks you in,
so it rises up in a series of build-up scenes
that only serve to elevate the tension.
And you just kind of get swept away
in the emotion and drama and action of it all,
and all of that buildup is rushing head-on
towards this one turning-point moment when the action crests,
and the greater meaning of the story just kind of crashes over you,
in one great splash.
And then it's calm again.
And eventually you make it back on shore,
and there you are just sipping a mojito, like,
watching the waves, man.
That's a story.
So really a story -
You ride a story like a wave, and the audience rides it with you,
and it's a total thrill ride.
And for "Story Story Night,"
that has helped our program so much since that time,
because now we can just be like,
"Oh, just pick out a surprising moment,
and then launch, build-up, turning point, take away, land."
Super easy, anybody can do it.
(Laughs)
So, but even armed with this story wave,
and better and better shows,
and sold-out shows and ever widening venues,
we, four years into the program -
we were drowning to be honest.
I don't know if you've ever started, accidentally,
an amazingly successful, artistic phenomenon,
but it's super not-easy to keep up with.
(Laughs)
So, I felt like we were always chasing behind this wildly successful program,
when, beneath our skirts, you know, we had no real legs,
like, we didn't have a non-profit status, or paid staff,
or good Excel spreadsheet skills.
So, the numbers just stopped adding up,
and we were all totally exhausted and we were just about to shut it down.
And then we got -
We got a spam email.
It was from, I think the Prince of Kazakhstan or something,
and he's like, "You won $30,000."
And I totally ignored it obviously, until a full solid month later,
a colleague of mine, a friend in the arts -
He said, "Isn't it amazing that grant we got?"
And I was like,
"Oh, okay, that spam was really nice!"
It was amazing.
So they didn't just give us actually just that straight-up cash.
They gave us what they called "value-added support",
which basically meant they were flying us
and all these groundbreaking projects from around the country
to an island in Florida for a week for free.
OK!
(Laughs)
It's amazing.
So we ended up landing in this island, Captiva Island in Florida,
where Robert Rauschenberg -
he's an artist, he made his art in these stark white studios
that were beautifully lit, surrounded by wild nature -
And I learned that Rauschenberg,
or Bob, as I call him because he's my spirit uncle now -
(Laughs)
He would make art using these found objects that he would find on the street.
And it would be brilliant and beautiful.
And I feel like that's what stories are made of too.
They're these things that we've picked up throughout our lives
because they were shiny, or because they were strange,
or because they were beautiful,
because they just happened to be there, you know, just to wash up at our shore.
And we put this on this epic collage of who we are,
so we can later just stand back and stare it at all,
still captivated.
And late at night, at this event, we would all go to the beach
and drink hard alcohol and champagne which is really stupid,
so, giving you a tip:
don't do that.
And I would just sit with all these amazing creators
from across the country and hear their stories.
And hearing about how they also put their hearts and guts and soul on the line
every day for the projects they believed in,
like made me feel less alone.
And we happened to be there
when this sweep of bio-luminescent plankton was coming in.
And we went swimming in the dark in the Gulf of Mexico,
and when you ran your hands through the water,
a thousand little sparks would just fly off your fingers.
It's amazing.
And above us the Leonid meteors crashed through the atmosphere.
And we just floated there,
just captivated,
by the magic of nature,
and by the nature of magic.
And it was the perfect story.
Thank you guys so much.
(Applause)