A recap of this weekend’s Speak Up event, plus an update on the future of Speak Up

Thanks to everyone who came out to Speak Up on Saturday night. The event was an enormous success, with an enthusiastic, standing-room only audience of more than 200 people.

Real Art Ways decided to move our show into a much larger space for this most recent event, and for the weeks leading up to the show, Elysha and I were nervous that we wouldn’t have enough people in attendance to fill it. Doors were supposed to open at 7:00 on Saturday night but by 6:50, every seat was filled and people were finding places along walls and dragging benches into the space to create seating.

We couldn't have been more thrilled. Or relieved. Thank you for the support.

Many thanks to our storytellers as well, who were amazing.

Julie Threlkeld told us a terrific story about finding her first college roommate.

Bill Wynne told us a story of how a boy from New Jersey became an award-winning Hawaiian singer.

Charly Weiss reminded us that even after more than a decade of teaching, teachers can still learn a lot from their students.

LB Muñoz told a powerful and tragic story of how the loss of a friend changed her life forever. 

Trish Milnamow told us a story about her lifelong battle with nicotine addiction.

Barbara Klau offered us a hilarious and poignant view of what it is like to grow older in a world filled with body piercing, tattoos and more.

Okey Ndibe regaled us with amusing and thought-provoking stories about Nigerian culture shock in America.

It was truly a spectacular show. 

If you weren’t able to make the show, our next event is November 9 at Real Art Ways, and while our lineup of storytellers is not entirely settled yet, the storytellers who we have booked so far are fantastic.

If you would like to pitch us a story for the November 9 event, you have until Friday to do so. Email your pitch and your bio to speakupstorytelling@gmail.com.

We’re considering a couple of possible changes to Speak Up that we would like you to consider and comment on if you have an opinion:

1. Our first two shows were free, but we are considering charging an small admission price to future Speak Up events. The proceeds from this admission would be used to:

• pay for advertising and promotion
• cover our costs for each event
• pay for the design and construction of a website dedicated to Speak Up (rather than the Facebook page which we now operate)
• Pay for the production of a podcast where these stories could be later broadcast for people who are unable to attend an event
• Help to cover some of the costs that Real Art Ways incurs for each show

If you have an opinion on what that admission cost should be, we would love to hear from you.

2. Based upon feedback, we are considering moving the start time from 7:00 to 7:30 or 8:00 in order to allow people to eat dinner before the show.  If you have thoughts on this, please let us know.

3. I am considering teaching 6-week storytelling workshop to help build the storytelling community in the Hartford area and give storytellers the skills and confidence to take the stage and tell a story of their own someday. The workshop would culminate in a storytelling event in which the participants would have an opportunity to perform in front of an audience of their friends and family. If you might be interested in a workshop like this, please let me know.

Thanks again for all the support, and we hope to see you on November 9th!

        

She’s in preschool and already criticizing God

As a reluctant atheist, it will be interesting to watch how my children’s belief in God develops. Part of my hopes that they are able to find the faith that eludes me, but part of me would understand if they struggled with religion as I have.

Yesterday my daughter seemed to walk this line perfectly.

Clara:

God made the world, Daddy. And then on the seventh day, he was so tired that he rested.

She paused for a moment then added:

I wouldn’t rest on the seventh day, Daddy. I’d play. I’m never too tired to play. Silly God.

The kind of love that I was probably too much of a jerk to experience firsthand

I can’t help but wonder if my sister and I ever spent time like this when we were little.

I don’t think so, which makes me so sad for me and my sister and indescribably happy about the love that my children share.

Maybe there just weren’t enough pictures taken when I was young to capture moments like this, but I suspect that I was more rough-and-tumble with my sister than sweet.

The Patriots are proof-positive that perspective is hard, if not impossible

A friend and fellow Patriots season ticket holder sent this to me yesterday in one of the weekly email exchanges that we have prior to every game.

I thought it summed things up perfectly:

Tom Brady’s career record as a starting QB now stands at 139-39, making him the first quarterback in NFL history to be 100 games over .500.

In fact only twelve quarterbacks in NFL history have even won as many as 100 games. Pretty amazing – it’s the equivalent of going 13-3 for 10 straight seasons.

Think about all the wins we’ve witnessed, many firsthand, and yet the losses are burned into our memories like they only happened yesterday.

    

Assuming a supervisory role

I told Clara that we needed to find the remote control if she wanted to watch Arthur. “Can you help me find it? I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “You go look for it, and I’ll make sure you’re moving fast enough. Now go! Fast!”

She’s still in preschool, and she’s already adopting her father’s obsession with delegating responsibilities whenever possible.

It’s also possible that she’s more Machiavellian than I thought. 

 

A good old fashioned book mobile!

Look what we found in the midst of a poorly advertised festival in downtown Hartford last weekend:

An actual book mobile!

Operated by Penguin Books, it was a joy to see for both me and my daughter, who immediately picked up a book from the children’s section and asked her mother to read to her.

We need more of this. We need a lot more of this.

    

Sunday Assembly, an atheist's version of church, seems a little too good to be true.

Sunday Assembly, an atheist's version of church that is growing exponentially, seems a little too good to be true. 

The idea is simple: it has all of the community spirit, engagement, and inspiration of a church without any of the religious aspects. Each service has at least one guest speaker, from economists to poets, a moment of reflection and, above all, repeated entreaties to get to know the rest of the people there.

Add to this already near-perfect format a combination of “mini-rave” breakout sessions, ‘80s power ballads, competitive games and mass karaoke, and Sunday Assembly becomes almost impossible to imagine.

I think I may have to see it to believe it.

I have a friend who says that for him and his family, God stands for the Great Out Doors, and this allows him to honor and worship what he believes is most important by playing golf, tennis, kayaking or hiking on a Sunday morning.

Not bad, I’ve always thought, but this might be better. 

I think I would still prefer a round of golf or a Patriots pregame tailgate to Sunday Assembly, but if there is snow on the ground and the golf courses are closed or the Patriots are playing out of town, this might be a reasonable alternative.

Speak Up storyteller: Okey Ndibe

On Saturday, Elysha and I will be producing our next Speak Up storytelling event at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the evening is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

Doors open at 7:00. Stories begin at 7:30. The event is free, and no ticket is required.

Eight storytellers will take the stage and tell true stories on the assigned theme. During this week, we will be featuring each storyteller here in order to give you a peek at what to expect on Saturday night.

We hope to see you there! 

________________________________

Okey Ndibe is a former Fulbright Scholar and currently a visiting professor of Africana literature at Brown University. He earned an MFA and PhD from UMass, Amherst.

He is the author of the novels foreign gods, inc. and Arrows of Rain. He also co-edited a book titled Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa. Since 1999,

Okey has written a column on Nigeria's political, social and cultural affairs that is widely syndicated by Nigerian newspapers and numerous websites. His unsparing stance against official corruption in Nigeria earned me inclusion on a government list of “enemies of the state.”

A widely traveled lecturer and raconteur in Nigeria, Okey frequently give lectures and readings in Africa, Europe, and on college campuses in the US and Canada. In 2010, the Nigerian Peoples Parliament elected him as speaker.

My 3 best pieces of parenting advice

A reader recently asked me for parenting advice. She is pregnant, reads my blog regularly and would like to know what are some of my best parenting tips.

I was honored by such a request, though I know that some might think it crazy to ask for parenting advice from me. I’m certainly not an expert on parenting, and some might even say that I’m the last person to ask this kind of question, but I’m not without experience.

I’m an elementary school teacher who has been teaching children for more than 15 years.

I’m the father of two children and a former stepfather who raised a stepdaughter from the ages of 6-16.

So yeah. I have some experience with kids.

I wasn’t exactly sure what my best parenting advice would be, so I scoured my blog for posts on parenting and found three that I think are my best:

Raising my daughter is a piece of cake, and there’s a good reason why I say this as often as possible.

It’s fine to be a slightly insane parent. Just don’t pretend that you’re not.

How to sleep train your child.

All are slightly controversial to one degree or another, but I stand behind all three posts just as much today as when I wrote them years ago, and I’m fairly confident that my wife would do the same, but with less bravado and certainty.

And if the proof is in the pudding, just look what I have to show for it?

God must be so angry about this.

Teenage pregnancy rates have dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded in the 73 years that the government started collecting data.

The reason for this dramatic decrease?

Not a decrease in teenage sexual activity. Those levels have remained stable for the past two decades.

Not abortions. Those rates have been flat for the past 15 years.

The decrease in teen pregnancy is the result of increased contraception use.

Speaking to NBC News, Dr. John Santelli, a professor of population and family health at Columbia University, attributed the change to a greater emphasis on getting effective contraception to teens, especially long-acting methods like the IUD.

Just think:

No rise in teenage sexual activity. No rise in abortions. Yet historically low levels of teenage pregnancy.

It’s practically a miracle.

Except it’s not. It’s just contraception, which has resulted in fewer unwanted pregnancies (and the resulting economic devastation) without any other significant changes in teenage behavior.

But if you’d listen to some, the idea that teenagers have better access to contraception and are using contraception in greater numbers signals the end of days. The four horsemen of the apocalypse. The crumbling of the very bedrock of our society.

God must be so angry about this. 

I’m not as concerned about the link between contraception use and God’s wrath. but then again, I am not a right-wing, religious ultra-conservative who believes that abstinence (and the inevitable pregnancies) is the only acceptable form of contraception, and that any other use of contraception prior to marriage (or even thereafter) will send you straight to hell.

And don’t fool yourself. There are a lot of these people out there.

For them, the news that teenage contraception use has increased (and teen pregnancy has dramatically decreased) without an increase in abortion or even sexual activity must be devastating.

I love news that makes crazy people crazy.

Speak Up storyteller: Barbara Klau

On Saturday, Elysha and I will be producing our next Speak Up storytelling event at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the evening is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

Doors open at 7:00. Stories begin at 7:30. The event is free, and no ticket is required.

Eight storytellers will take the stage and tell true stories on the assigned theme. During this week, we will be featuring each storyteller here in order to give you a peek at what to expect on Saturday night.

We hope to see you there!

________________________________

Barbara Klau is a Hartford native who has been involved in music and theater for over 60 years. Among the roles she has played are an aging Broadway star, the wife of Noah (the ark-maker), a New York socialite unwittingly involved in a murder and a grandmother determined to match her granddaughter up with the neighborhood pickle man. She has acted, sung, and even tap danced her way through life, but tonight is the very first time she has appeared before an audience like this – telling a story about herself.

Speak Up storyteller: Trish Milnamow

On Saturday, Elysha and I will be producing our next Speak Up storytelling event at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the evening is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

Doors open at 7:00. Stories begin at 7:30. The event is free, and no ticket is required.

Eight storytellers will take the stage and tell true stories on the assigned theme. During this week, we will be featuring each storyteller here in order to give you a peek at what to expect on Saturday night.

We hope to see you there!

________________________________

Trish Milnamow is a writer and storyteller. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. Her work explores issues of class, gender and resiliency.

She has been published in the Philadelphia Daily News, The Promethean, and Poetry in Performance and has participated in poetry readings and storytelling shows. In addition, she writes screenplays with her writing partner.

Extremely susceptible to advertising

My daughter is four year-old and has watched almost no commercial television in her life. Other than the occasional sporting event or a snippet of news in the morning, we never watch television in the presence of our children, and our children only watch PBS or similar, commercial free, educational programming.

Occasionally, though, one of these shows are sponsored by a product, and that product will air a commercial just prior to the show. My wife and I have discovered that perhaps because she has been exposed to so little advertising in her life, Clara is extremely susceptible to the messages contained in commercials. She has criticized our choice of stain remover, requested a new brand of diaper for her brother and become fascinated with the idea of glow-in-the-dark overnight pull-ups.

Yesterday, she asked me this:

"Dad, the commercial said that Wittle Weeg moms can fight tough stains. What’s a Wittle Weeg mom, and do you think my mommy can fight tough stains, too?"

It might be time to expose her to a steady diet of advertising, in order to inoculate her from its influence before she learns to read and trips to the super market become impossible.

 

Speak Up storyteller: LB Muñoz

On Saturday, Elysha and I will be producing our next Speak Up storytelling event at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the evening is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

Doors open at 7:00. Stories begin at 7:30. The event is free, and no ticket is required.

Eight storytellers will take the stage and tell true stories on the assigned theme. During this week, we will be featuring each storyteller here in order to give you a peek at what to expect on Saturday night.

We hope to see you there! 

________________________________

LB Muñoz is the Vibe Manager at Real Art Ways. Born and raised in Windsor, CT, LB has lived throughout the country, returning 10 years ago to her Greater Hartford roots.

She attended Emerson College in Boston as a Musical Theater major before finishing her studies in Education at the University of North Texas. LB, with artist Anne Cubberly and community leader Steve Mitchell are the forces behind Hartford’s Night Fall, a free, annual community performance celebrating seasonal change held this year is Pope Park on October 12^th at sunset.

LB can also be found in various Connecticut high schools as a Diversity Educator for the Anti-Defamation League. As a facilitator for the “Names Can Really Hurt Us” program, LB endeavors to empower students to fight hatred and intolerance by embracing their differences.

Unfair assumption #15: Married couples who keep their finances separate are more likely to have seriously flawed, less fulfilling relationships.

Married couples who keep their finances separate are more likely to have seriously flawed, less fulfilling relationships. Also, as a compendium to the first unfair assumption comes this bonus unfair assumption:

As agreeable as a couple claims to be about their financial division, there is almost always one person in the relationship who is not entirely comfortable or happy with the arrangement.

Unfair assumptions? Yes. Of course. Hence the title of the post.

I’m sure that there are many couples who divide their finances and are perfectly happy.

But it’s also an assumption that I have been making for a long time and is now supported with research showing that the more a couple pools their money, the happier that marriage tends to be.

These effects seem to peter out at some very high level -- if you keep 5 percent of your income to yourself in order to have a little bit of discretionary spending, it won’t make you any less happy than you’d be if you pool 100 percent. But people who pool 80 percent are happier than those who pool 70 percent, and so on. People who keep it all to themselves are the least happy.

Always nice when science supports one of your harebrained ideas.

I actually feel bad for couples who don’t pool their money. Not only does this arrangement strike me as logistically insane and almost certain to cause resentment at some point in the marriage, but I believe that in most cases, it represents an underlying crack in what is supposed to be a unified, rock solid partnership.

You’re either in this thing together or you’re not.

Check that:

I don’t feel bad for the couples who don’t pool their money as much as I feel bad for the person in the marriage who secretly wishes that they would pool their money but has agreed not to. In my experience, it’s almost always the woman who laments the arrangement, and she is almost always a little sad and a little stressed by this financial division.

She may tell her spouse that she is not saddened. She may assure her spouse that she supports the arrangement fully. But behind closed doors, in the company of a friend and confidant who is not requiring her to maintain her own checking account, she frequently says otherwise.

Honestly, I have no idea how this division of finances even works. What if one spouse runs out of money? Or spends foolishly? Or loses his or her job through no fault of their own? What is one spouse suffers unexpected losses in the stock market or is sued after running over a little old lady’s dog?

Does he or she borrow money from their spouse?

Actually, I know of one instance in which this actually happened. A husband’s business was losing money, and he was suddenly unable to pay his half of the household expenses. Rather than being evicted from his home, he borrowed money from his wife, presumably interest free.

But if your borrowing money from your wife, why be married in the first place?

Unfair assumption? Yes. Absolutely.

But based upon my limited experience (and now a little bit of science), absolutely, positively true, too.

Speak Up storyteller: Charly Weiss

On Saturday, Elysha and I will be producing our next Speak Up storytelling event at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the evening is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

Doors open at 7:00. Stories begin at 7:30. The event is free, and no ticket is required.

Eight storytellers will take the stage and tell true stories on the assigned theme. During this week, we will be featuring each storyteller here in order to give you a peek at what to expect on Saturday night.

We hope to see you there!

________________________________

Charly Weiss recently fulfilled her lifelong dream to become a “Nutmegger” by moving to Connecticut from Massachusetts, where she taught elementary school for 14 years. During that time, she has taught over 250 children how to read, created a science program designed to provide supplemental science instruction after school, and through a mixture of witchcraft and science, brought a dead iguana back to life.

Currently she is the unpublished author of several children’s books, an avid runner and swimmer, a Little League coach and a Mom. She lives in Guilford with her husband Larry and 2 rambunctious little boys, ages 5 and 3.

Speak Up storyteller: Bill Wynne

On Saturday, Elysha and I will be producing our next Speak Up storytelling event at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the evening is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

Doors open at 7:00. Stories begin at 7:30. The event is free, and no ticket is required.

Eight storytellers will take the stage and tell true stories on the assigned theme. During this week, we will be featuring each storyteller here in order to give you a peek at what to expect on Saturday night.

We hope to see you there! 

________________________________

Bill Wynne is Director of New Product Development for a not-for-profit educational products and research organization.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, Wynne is an avid reader, an occasional writer and enjoys home remodeling.

He is also an award-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist specializing in the traditional music of the islands of Hawaii. Bill currently lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife, Cherylann, and their two children - a dog, Vannah, and a cat, Samantha.

Last day of summer 2013

It’s officially autumn. While I can still walk out the door in a tee shirt and shorts during the day, the mornings and evenings are now jacket and jeans weather. More than one tree in the neighborhood has begun to change color. The NFL is in high gear. The newness of the school year has melted away, replaced by the routines that will dominate the next nine months. 

Autumn is a fine season. It may be my second favorite season.

But it is not summer.

For the first few weeks of September, even as I return to the classroom and resume teaching, I can convince myself that the last vestiges of summer remain. I can still sneak in moments during the day and week that remind me of the warm and glorious months that we have just left behind.

That pretending is no more. This is autumn. Another summer has passed.

I’ve been saving these photos for this day. I’ve been saving them for autumn’s arrival. They remind me of my joyous past and what will come again.

             

Speak Up storyteller: Julie Threlkeld

On Saturday, Elysha and I will be producing our next Speak Up storytelling event at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the evening is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

Doors open at 7:00. Stories begin at 7:30. The event is free, and no ticket is required.

Eight storytellers will take the stage and tell true stories on the assigned theme. During this week, we will be featuring each storyteller here in order to give you a peek at what to expect on Saturday night.

We hope to see you there! 

________________________________

Julie Threlkeld performs frequently in NYC in live shows like Ask Me Stories, Talk Therapy Storytelling and the RISK! Show – whose creator and host, Kevin Allison, describes her stories as providing "the meat in a sandwich of bleak." She also performs standup comedy.

Julie has written about anxiety for the New York Times’ Opinionator and about the world of professional distance running for Runner's World and Running Times.

Julie lives in Westchester Country, NY and is very active in NYC's rapidly growing storytelling scene. She publishes her stories, performances and other creations at modernstories.com and publishes a weekly newsletter of resources for storytellers at modernstoriesstuff.com. She also tweets A LOT at@juliethrelkeld.

For money Julie is a freelance copywriter/editor, content strategist and social media doer. Future creative plans include more oversharing in storytelling, possibly in the form of a longer work consisting of interconnected stories on a theme.

Siri on the NFL and MLB

I was on my way home from a sports bar after watching the New England Patriots beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

My wife was in the kitchen, making dinner, and wanted to know who had won the game. She turned to her iPhone and asked Siri for the score.

I loved Siri’s responses:

 

I also loved Siri’s report on the Giants versus Panthers game, as well as her answer to the question, “What is your favorite NFL team?”

 

When I asked her if she liked the New York Yankees, her answer was just about perfect: