Highland County Arts Council’s Evening of Storytelling is Saturday, July 8, 2023

The Highland County Arts Council is holding An Evening of Storytelling on Saturday, July 8.  This is part of the Arts Council’s Second Saturday @7 series.   Storytellers for the evening include Jim Sherman and also the husband and wife team of Norma and Bucky Reynolds.

“I’ll probably tell two stories,” says Bucky Reynolds.  “I like to tell tall tales and sometimes Norma and I will do one together.  If you remember the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, where they had Fractured Fairy Tales.  An example would be, everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, well, we tell the story of the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig and Norma plays the pig part.  That’s the kind of thing that probably will happen, something along those lines.”

An Evening of Storytelling is Saturday, July 8, at The Church at the Old Oak at 3898 Meadowdale Road.  Grounds open at 5pm and you are invited to bring your own picnic dinner.    Drinks will be provided by the Arts Council.  The storytelling starts at 7pm.

“We never started out telling stories, it was probably fifteen or eighteen years ago, we went to a week-long program that was on the Golden Age of Comedy,” says Reynolds.  “We thought it was going to be something about vaudeville, something about early TV and so forth, but there was a storyteller there.  She told some stories and she had, oh I would say, two days for about an hour, she had information on how to tell stories and on the way home from that we said, ‘Gee, we could tell stories.’   So, we started out with our grandchildren just making up stories and telling them.  We did go to Jonesboro, Tennessee which is the National Storytelling Convention.  Many of the people who are storytellers that do it professionally were there and that was comparable to the Maple Festival, so to speak, as to how many people came and people would tell stories and we thought ‘Gee, we could do that.’  So, we’ve been telling stories now for whatever it is, fifteen years or so.”

An Evening of Storytelling is free, but donations will be accepted for the Arts Council.

“We consider ourselves semi-professional,” says Reynolds.  “We don’t get any money for telling stories. The only time we’ve gotten something is, we’ve told stories at Douthat State Park and when we do that, they let us park free.  So, technically we get $2.00 for doing that and one time Norma spoke to an alumni group and told stories and they gave her a potted plant.  So, we just like doing it and it’s fun watching people smile and laugh at whatever we do.”

You can learn more at www.highlandcountyartscouncil.org

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