That Time I Cried On Stage (and how I dealt).
The first few times I practised the story, I totally fell apart. Alone in my apartment, I couldn’t speak for sobbing. A few months ago, I took a course with my storytelling teacher, Sage Tyrtle. Our final class was a live show, where we would each tell the story we’d been working on. Except… I…
One of the greatest moments of the last four years.
“I hear what you’re saying.”
He pressed his lips together, and squinted a little in suspicion. “But why? Isn’t that just Misery Porn?”
I was working with my friend Chris on a story he was going to tell at my live show. Chris (who I’ve written about before, here and here) is one of my favourite storytellers of all time, and I’d been excited to sit down with him.
The story is about him reading to his dying mother in hospital. He’d done a version of it at another storytelling show a few weeks before – and there, had played the whole thing for laughs.
As we sat down and talked through the story, I convinced him to pull in the sadness of the situation. To mire us in the grief that he felt, before the funny reveal comes.
Now, he was asking why.
One of the things…
