My Theme this April is “My Muse Says…”
The Story Spark for this story was – Recipe.
The writing prompt I took was – A recipe for success or failure.
The following is what my muse said I should write.
R – A Recipe to Remember
It was a simple recipe. Go to the dinner venue. Gather the small children around me. Tell my stories and sing my songs. How much simpler could it be? I’ve done it hundreds of times before. It was a simple recipe for success.
There’s a difference between being in a classroom, on a stage, or in an auditorium, doing a concert when all the adults and children are focused on your performance, and doing a performance in an environment with adults and children having differing agendas going on at the same time.
Doing a concert in a dining hall, while people are eating and talking, is one of those times that this recipe might not work.
As a storyteller, it is easier to maintain focus and energy when you have the audience with you. It is easier to get participation. You can read those audience members who are fixed on you and adapt your telling to their reactions, both physical (joining in at the requested times, and following your directions…) and unconscious (a twinkle in their eyes, smile upon the face, tightening of their bodies during anticipated harrowing events…)
This is not true at a dinner event.
First, you have the adults at their tables, chatting away, clinking their silverware and plates, etc., which is both a distraction to the teller and a setting the poor example for their children that respect for a performer is not important. It’s more important to chat with friends.
Someone once said, “If you’re not modeling what you’re teaching, you are teaching something else.” How true that is.
The children in your audience are distracted, too. “Well, if my parents are chatting with friends, it’s okay for me to. I can’t distinguish what he’s saying anyway, it’s too noisy.”
Then again, if the parents are eating or drinking and the children are not, the kids’ focus may be on food and comfort. “I’m hungry, do I have to sit here? Why do the parents get to sit at the table, and I have to sit on the floor?”
Telling stories at venues where adults are just there to supervise has similar issues. “I guess the performer is in charge of controlling the audience. I might as well work on my lesson plans for next week, or mark some papers, or see where my colleague wants to go for lunch.” Again, setting what kind of example?
There was that one evening performance where I was in a small gym telling stories when the organizer of the venue actually stopped me in the middle of a story to remind the noisy parents, who were gathered around the back of the gym, that they needed to be quiet while I was performing. There was this group of girls sitting in front of me, chatting away. As I continued my interrupted story, I kept performing, not wanting to stop the flow of the tale, when I noticed that one adult left her group in the back and circled behind me. I made the assumption that she was a parent of one of those talkative girls in the front and that she was going to non-verbally tell them to be quiet.
I only found out later that she was one of the parents of the girls in that group. The organizer of the event shared with me a picture he took of the woman at the time, trying to get her daughter’s attention so she could take a picture of her. Ahh, another great model of success.
A simple recipe…not all the time. Following that recipe for most of my tellings was pretty simple. I performed, engaged the audience, and received appropriate appreciation for what I did.
But, as any performer can tell you. If you want to have success, don’t rely on one recipe for it. Be willing to adapt to the situation and improvise the ingredients on the fly. And should the recipe fail at any given time, as all recipes tend to do, don’t give up. Just create a new one and tell on.
