Do Tell

This past Thursday night, the Literati bookstore put together a Word of Mouth event. The basement of Literati was a pleasant place to be on a chilly fall night: softly lit, full to the brim of cheerful storytellers and spectators, and stocked with apple cider and a cheese plate (important).The theme of the night was ‘great expectations,’ and the format was randomized: people who wished to tell a story wrote their names on slips of paper and submitted them to an authoritative black hat, from which they were randomly drawn and announced by an animated master of ceremonies. The storytellers seemed to be nervous at first, but the audience generated a reassuring atmosphere of respectful engagement, and laughter or groans greeted stories of unfulfilled or confounded expectations. One performer told us how he was duped out of his money in a bizarre smuggling scheme in India; another engaged us in her high school game of ding-dong ditch gone wrong in the Upper Peninsula (in an adorable UP accent); and yet another explained how he managed to spill coffee on Justin Timberlake. In the warm glow of the dimmed lights, we absorbed these stories as confidence and performance, as entertainment and art.

I recognized a surprising number of people at the event, mostly from my experiences living in the Residential College and cooperative houses, but every story I heard was new to me. I thought about how stories gradually surface over the course of a relationship, about how we generally don’t hear the stories of an acquaintance all at once, but rather gradually, and in proportion to the building of trust and friendship. We’re often nervous to casually give up something so important to us – the turning point of a childhood, the insane coincidence, the hospital stay, the religious experience – because we’re afraid that we’ll fail to capture our audience’s attention, suffering rejection in a change of subject, or because we’re afraid of what comes afterwards: the change in perception, the return in confidence, the intimacy. These stories both require real attention, and carry subsequent baggage.

I love personal story-telling as a performance because it’s both high and low stakes. When we call what often happens casually, between two people, a ‘performance’ we expect both more and less. The story needs to be more interesting, engaging, and Worthy of Our Time when we don’t know the person telling it. But along with these raised expectations, there is no conversation, no expectation of a demonstrated response, no consequential familiarity or relationship-building. It’s less personal, but the one-sidedness of a storytelling performance really frees both the audience and the performer to get lost in a story – to just talk, to just listen.

Thursday night at Literati, a storyteller named Noah explained how disappointed he was by his childhood purchase of ‘sea monkeys,’ the novelty aquarium pets that are in actuality little more than squirming specks but which, he explained ruefully, he had expected to grow up into sentient, playful beings. I’ve heard people complain about their sea monkey experiences before, but as he told his story, Noah did much more than complain about a crappy product. He explained how he had thought of himself as a scientist like Jane Goodall, how he kept a journal of his pets’ nonexistant activities, how he tore off bits of an eraser and threw them in the tank, hoping the unresponsive crustaceans would play with them. As I listened to Noah’s story, I remembered how ridiculous and weird existence could sometimes seem to the serious child with serious expectations, learning about the world’s chaos. As it turns out, almost all stories about ‘great expectations’ sooner or later introduce chaos – even the storyteller whose expectations had been fulfilled by a great night in Ithaca emphasized how crazy, how chaotic it was that his plans had been successful. What are the chances?

The show was over sooner than I wanted it to be, my sister wanted to go home, and I had to do homework. Still I lingered outside, saying friendly goodbyes to familiar faces, thinking about expectations.