Elysha and I are looking forward to hosting our first live storytelling show since February 2020 at The Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT on August 18, 2021.
The show will be outdoors, but it’s our first step to returning to normal life once again.
We can’t wait.
You can purchase tickets here:
https://www.hillstead.org/event/speak-up/
I have a long and storied past with the Hill-Stead Museum. Over the years, I have officiated and DJ’d many weddings on the grounds of the Hill-Stead, taken poetry and writing classes with renowned writers in their barn, and spent many a night under the stars listening to poets perform as a part of their famous Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.
In fact, the last time Elysha and I were at the Hill-Stead, it was to listen to poet Billy Collins perform back in the summer of 2017.
That evening was especially memorable for two reasons:
A sudden downpour caused us to hide under our blanket in a feeble attempt to stay dry.
More memorable, I had a cracked wisdom tooth earlier that day. I was taking Tylenol and Advil to manage the pain, but it wasn’t working. Halfway through the reading, the pain became pretty unbearable that I had tears in my eyes. We were sitting with another couple at the time – people I didn’t know all that well – which made things pretty awkward in addition to the indescribable agony.
I sat on our blanket and whimpered quietly.
The pain became so bad that while listening to Billy Collins read, Elysha called a dentist for help.
She knows everyone.
An hour after the reading was finished, well past the dentist’s bedtime, we were standing in his kitchen as he wrote a prescription for a more powerful pain medication.
I remember him wearing pajamas, but that might not be accurate. Maybe it was just sweatpants and a tee shirt.
From there, I took my prescription to a 24-hour pharmacy, where I finally received the pain medication and some blessed relief.
This was doubly important because my procedure to remove the wisdom tooth wasn’t scheduled until Monday, and I had to teach an all-day storytelling workshop with Elysha the next day.
At one point, I accidentally took too many pain pills and found myself unable to stand while teaching.
This was also the workshop where a formally incarcerated person asked me, “So where did you do your time?”
When I informed the man that I had been in jail before but never in prison, he said, “That’s funny. You have a prison look about you.”
Given the pain I was still dealing with at the time, that compliment came at just the right moment.
