Announcing August’s Theme: “New Beginnings”

But first, a story of my own

Before we dive into the theme, I wanted to quickly touch on my inspiration for … well, all of this.

I’ve been telling stories forever. Technically, so have you, and so has your friend, and so has everyone else in your life who uses language to communicate. It’s what makes us uniquely human, and if you catch me on a philosophical day, I’ll tell you that it’s what has allowed us to survive for so long.

But the stories I’m talking about now, and what fueled the creation of Salem Story Series, are ones that happen on stages. For more than ten years, I’ve let my soul leak out of me and into a microphone, in various stage-based formats: competitions, radio spots, a featured teller spot to introduce a Valentine’s Day segment, and even as part of Stories from the Stage on WGBH/PBS (which you can watch here, if you’re interested!).

Discovering the stage

My love affair with storytelling began with a pityingly long day of work in downtown Boston, 13 years ago. I was new in town and was becoming desperate to find some semblance of a community, so I did what most nerdy Boston millennials did in the mid-2010s: I wandered into Trident Booksellers for my monthly perusal of the wares and saw a flyer for a story slam produced by MassMouth (sadly now defunct—thanks, COVID).

“It was, dear reader — it was completely and blessedly full of nerds…”

‘Weird name,’ I thought. ‘Will probably be FULL of nerds.’ It was, dear reader — it was completely and blessedly full of nerds, and all of them were trained to a lit-up stage at the front of the house on the second floor, happily yakking away. A woman with long, gray hair and a beaming smile strolled through the little tables we were assigned to, passing out little slips of paper.

“Going to tell a story tonight?” she asked my table mate, whom I was randomly paired with, and I. We both looked at each other, looked up at her, and then laughed nervously. “Well, I’ll just leave these here anyway.”

The gray-haired lady dropped a few sign-up slips that she informed us would enter our names into the “hat” (which was more like a little box) and that if our names were called, we’d need to go up and tell a 5-minute story. She pointed to the resources that littered the table about how a story should work, start-to-finish, and then she ambled away to the next group.

I gulped, audibly enough so that the guy sitting across from me chuckled.

“Gonna do it?” he asked, his own pen poised over the line where we were to write our names.

“Uh…” I was struck by something during my dull, noncommittal utterance. I wanted community. I wanted to break up the doldrums of work. I loved nerds, being a card-carrying one myself. Resolved by whimsy or courage (does it really matter which?), I answered him by writing my name on the line.

“Oof, haha, well, good luck,” my table mate replied, his own pen slipping from his fingers, paper unsigned. “I’ll be cheering you on.”

The stories were incredible

The storytellers were so, so good. How could these people be amateurs? Every single person somehow unleashed a gripping tale about the night’s theme: “New Beginnings.” But sure enough, despite each of them hemming and hawing when their names were drawn and looking the way kids do when they’re told they need to go to the principal’s office, these brave souls got up in front of a room full of strangers and told incredible tales.

“There’s not a chance in all nine Hells I’m going to be called on tonight…”

‘Wow,’ cooed my internal monologue, as the gray-haired lady made her way back to the stage to draw the next round. ‘I’ll definitely come back! There’s not a chance in all nine Hells I’m going to be called on tonight — that hat was FULL, boy howdy, haha. FULL to the brim with slippies. I’ll just order anoth-‘

I sort of blacked out before I finished that word because somewhere on planet Earth, I heard:

“Shay will be our first storyteller after intermission,” rang the voice of the gray-haired woman, whom I later learned was the executive producer of MassMouth, Norah Dooley. “And that’s all for the first half, folks! See you in 15!”

My stage debut

I opened my mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it again to put the beer I was nursing to my lips, and then put it down. The guy at my table was battling his own internal struggle, likely trying to determine whether it was polite to laugh at a stranger who just found out he has to go to the principal’s office.

Fifteen minutes of intermission flew by, and I don’t really remember them. I just knew I needed to have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, with some sort of hook that made the audience care. NO BIGGY, right? NO BIGGY AT ALL. NOPE. HAHA.

The lights dimmed, the spotlight came back on, and Norah took to the stage again. She put her hand against her brow the way people do when they’re blocking out the sun, presumably so she could scan the crowd for her next victim — me — and then when we locked eyes, she intoned, “Shay. You’re our first teller for this half. Come on up!”

I don’t remember sitting four miles away, but I was definitely feeling every step. My mind was hammering itself with the instructions on how to tell a good story that I read during the lost 15 minutes, and I had concocted this fabulous memory of when I moved to Boston from a tiny town, all kinds of excited to meet new people, learn the ropes at my new job, and the little niceties of small-town-to-big-city transitions.

“In undergrad, I needed money, so I did what every boneheaded writing center employee does: I applied to be a nude model. And got the job.”

When I got on stage, my guts twisting into knots, I watched for Norah to signal that the timer was starting, the way I watched all the victims do who came before me, and when she gave me the jolly thumbs up, I took a deep, steadying breath, smiled at the crowd that had somehow blossomed into four billion people, and said,

“In undergrad, I needed money, so I did what every boneheaded writing center employee does: I applied to be a nude model. And got the job.”

Uh. Where did that come from? What do I do now? I’m telling THIS story? Here I am, standing in front of a room full of nerds, and I’m now covered in sweat, my beginning, middle, and end nowhere in sight anymore because I randomly decided to DEMOLISH my plan…

Curious to know the rest of this story?

Come hear it live at the FIRST EVER Salem Story Series on August 25th at 7p, at Gulu Gulu Cafe in Salem!