A Night of Storytelling is Saturday August 21

On Saturday night, the Highland County Arts Council is sponsoring “A Night of Storytelling.”  Highland community members will be using different styles to tell their stories at the performance.

Norma Reynolds is one of the storytellers.

“We actually have three storytellers, one musician and two little dramatic skits that are on the program,” says Reynolds.  “We’re all amateurs with one exception.  The musician who will be helping us out on that day is Rick Hill and he is by far not an amateur.  He’s a fantastic musician and he’ll be telling his stories in song.  The storytellers that are doing them as regular stories are Jim Sherman and my husband Bucky and I.  And the dramatic skits, there are two of them, Bucky and I are going to be in one, but Jack Herold, Mary Ann Rogers, and Emma Harman are under the direction of Caroline Smith.  They’re going to do another little drama.  So, we are telling stories in traditional storytelling style and also in music and in drama.”

Bucky and Norma started out by telling stories to their grandchildren and it grew from there.

“Bucky and I moved to Monterey twenty-one years ago, so we’re still newcomers, but we love it,” says Reynolds.  “And we actually got into storytelling after we retired.  And we did a program that involved that and we have followed some really fantastic professional storytellers and watched them and they’re wonderful.  But we decided that we could, in our own way, do that.  We’ve enjoyed very small audiences, usually we’ve told some stories at Douthat State Park, we’ve told some at Church, we’ve told them in a couple of library settings and so forth and we even had for awhile a story telling off the back porch informal gathering here, but just for fun.  The stories run the gamut.   I think a lot of people know about ghost stories and can image that and tall tales.  There will be a mixture of different kinds of stories there during the performance.    Bucky has not practiced on me the stories he’s telling, so they’ll be new for me.  He is probably known in the community among his friends for his tall tales and maybe fractured fairy tales would be sort of a genre for him.  I like to do voices in mine and I tell a mean ghost story.”

“A Night of Storytelling” is Saturday, August 21, at 7pm at the Church at the Old Oak, 3898 Meadowdale Road.  Admission is by free will donation and it benefits the Highland County Arts Council.    Audience members will be asked to wear masks and practice social distancing.  Family and friends can sit together as groups.

The Highland County Arts Council is a supporter of Allegheny Mountain Radio.