With My Tales Between My Legs

With My Tales Between My Legs: A coward quits storytelling, then returns as a fool

Bernie Libster

Maybe it’s calling them “stories no one else tells, or would dare to,” which may sound egotistical, or deranged. But my website’s been up and running for two months, complete with the aura photo taken at the Sound Healing Conference in Santa Fe in late 2006 showing those lovely shades of blue and green and dark blue around the throat. Maybe those colors are out of style. Maybe the 5 days’ worth of beard I started to grow to conceal the sudden rash makes me look slightly, well, sinister. But after nine years as a sometimes paid storyteller, I’ve pretty much concluded that storytelling isn’t the right creative outlet. Maybe the stage is just too dangerous karmically. Didn’t my lawyer- turned-palmist tell me that the destiny I was born into, shown on my left hand, was to be a self-centered, second rate actor and die of a heart attack on stage at the age of 53 and be utterly forgotten. Of course I’m way past that age now, and my right hand says, apparently, that I’ve learned to care about others, which has cost me some talent but made me more, well, a better human being.

It’s not that the stories I’ve chosen to tell aren’t curious. It’s just that there’s blood on them. No, I don’t stab myself during performances. But they are all taken from my own life, make that lives, and they’re not sweetly anecdotal. Maybe people like anecdotal. Or maybe some other time-tested approach would have worked better. I’ve read a fair number of myths and sacred stories, Hindu, Buddhist, Japanese, Christian, Sufi, Arthurian, among them. Why not settle down and tell stories that have recognizable “meaning” so people can benefit from their “universal truths?” Why did I persist in telling stories about my visits to Polaris and the outer reaches of the universe when only one person in a thousand might respond? In order to explain, I’ll have to resort to a story.

Way back in this life, in the mid-1960s, an actor friend talked me into taking a workshop with the illustrious Gene Frankel, who had already produced a string of Broadway and off-Broadway successes. (Well, okay, a Theosophist astrologer also told me I had dramatic talent from lives as an actor; maybe he knew my palmist.) My only theatrical experience in this life was the high school senior play, but off I gamely went. One evening, Gene told us about a 19th century Irishman who had risen to fame. The man lacked the raw material of theatrical greatness. He was short, physically unprepossessing, didn’t have much of a voice. He pondered long and hard and eventually came up with the only possible solution for him: “I will show them my soul.”

I didn’t last very long in the class. With my limited skills, there was no way I could keep up with my fellow thespians, many of whom had dreamt of life on the wicked stage all their lives and had worked toward it, and worked hard. My attempts at directing using a play by the towering poet W.B. Yeats didn’t help either. But I have never forgotten that actor and the words he lived by. So when I had a vision of Jesus laughing on the cross at the moment of his death, I told the story, complete with the laughter, even if it freaked people out. When I saw myself as an ancient Greek high priestess I relived the intimate details, even if I don’t look Greek or feminine. When I visited Polaris and saw giant cathedrals made of pure light, I described them, even if I couldn’t name the architect. I packaged the whole thing as Tales from the North Star, thinking I’d draw some New Age weirdos. Nothing. When I heard a loud voice coming from everywhere telling me “Everything is as it should be” in the midst of my despair over the first Iraq war, I revealed it even if it agitated my fellow peace agitators. When I fell in love with a very young woman who had been my brother in 6th century North Africa I told it, even though every time I told it I felt foolish, and heartbroken. (When one person did ask me to record this for a friend who’d apparently committed an equally foolish act it was the first time I’ve ever felt that one of my stories could be, in a favorite buzzword of tellers, “healing.”) The rest is silence. Nobody’s calling. Or emailing. Or writing.

There is a poem by my pal Yeats—who, incidentally, I’ve met; met William Blake, too, on Polaris—called To A Friend Whose Work has Come to Naught. The final lines go like this:

Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known, That is most difficult.

Obviously secret exulting doesn’t suit me. The other day my friend Rivka Willick listened to my complaints and told me about professionalstoryteller.com, said it was free, that I’d have nothing to lose but the time I spent composing postings on the chat room bulletin board. Within an hour of signing up, my good ol’ Tejas friend Tom Taylor, another wonderful teller, contacted me, and we resumed our old email friendship. Tom advised me, “Post something, see what happens. Maybe you’ll find a kindred spirit.” (He also told me he loved the title of this thing. Hey, praise is the most powerful narcotic out there, not that I’d know about the other stuff.) A few days later Rivka and I met at the local Starbucks. After an hour’s chitchat (was I stalling?) we got down to business. Rivka shared her extensive research on and experiences with fringe festivals (she’ll be attending at least one and is considering several others). She also assured me that fringes might offer the audience I dream of for my kind of stories but warned that I’d have to do some spadework to find them--and even more work to turn myself into a theatre company, which is apparently what one must do to appear in fringe festivals. Since she’s one of the most fearless tellers I know, I took her words to heart, even if giving up requires a lot less work. We also kicked around the quote from the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas that I’ve had pasted on my monitor for years just for times like these: If you bring forth what is within you, What you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you What you do not bring forth will destroy you.

In the give-and-take with Rivka and Tom I felt the first glimmer of hope in ages that I might have something to offer as a teller. Look, rather than accepting defeat, here I am posting this. In the spirit of that great Irish actor whose name I’ve long forgotten, I am showing you my soul.

Wanna make somethin’ of it?

C 2008 Bernie Libster