Storytelling

This semester, as I've mentioned before, I'm taking Storytelling. This is perhaps one of the most fun classes ever. Last night I told for the first time. We have to each tell a story three or four times during the semester - each time for an increasingly more aged audience (in our heads, at least. We only really tell to our professor and the eight other people in the class).

So last night I told to a preschool (3 1/2 - 5) audience, and I told Lon Po Po A Red Riding Hood story from China by Ed Young. Well, what I told was based on that version, but it was quite a bit different by my own design and also quite a bit different because we told from memory, not with the book in our hands. I got into it. I'm one of those people who will go ahead and make a fool of myself (which is fantastic for being a future children's librarian), but will secretly obsess about acting like an idiot in private. It's a bit of a crazy way of doing things.

ANYWAY! If you can't ramble in your own blog, where can you ramble, eh? Telling was fantastic. I know I messed up once, but everywhere else I just felt like the story was flowing from me. My audience laughed genuine laughter multiple times - and right when I wanted them too! Nonetheless, after I was done, I was terrified that I'd messed everything up, gotten the story a bit wrong, moved waaaay too much, etc. The Professor, though, was abso-freaking-lutely fantastically glowing in telling me how wonderful I'd done, etc. She said (and this amused me) that I had done a great job in differentiating the three sisters in my telling. In my head I had a definite idea of Shin, Tao, and Paotze. I knew them, but in my practicing, and I thought in my telling, I hadn't done anything in voice or body language to show this differentiation. Maybe I just internalized it so much (I over practiced for this) that it came through anyway. One of my classmates commented, "Are you a dancer?" to which I responded, "I used to be." "It shows," she said. "You just have a way of moving that's graceful and beautiful. It was fantastic just watching you tell."

Anyway - I'm happy. I fell all good about a future as a children's librarian. I feel like this is something that I can spend the rest of my life with. That's a great feeling.
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