Years ago I was with a friend. We’d traveled to Oberlin College in Ohio to listen to a storyteller perform on stage there. We’d never seen him, but he came highly recommended. As we sat in the auditorium, a janitor came out and set a chair in the center of the stage. Then he returned with a cushion and a lamp. He plugged the lamp in and turned it on and off a few times, testing it. As he was bent over he looked out at us and gave a little wave. A few people laughed. He told us that no one ever tells him anything and he wondered why we were there. Someone called out politely that there was a storyteller who was going to perform, hopefully soon. He looked at a few people in the front row and mumbled that his father used to be a good storyteller. That when he himself was growing up, for better or worse, he was the cause of his father having stories to tell. He then apologized and said he’d be moving on as soon as the show was ready to go on. He said, ‘But there was this one time when my parents had a big party at their home and he’d ended up trapped on top of the roof’. We were five minutes into his story before we all realized that he was the story teller. (more…)