Storytelling

It started with a post on Facebook. It was for a job as communications director. I clicked on the link and it turned out to be a job opening at the legendary Appalshop. Since 1969, this amazing nonprofit has documented and celebrated the life, culture and voice of people living in Appalachia and all of rural America. Appalshop is based in Whitesburg, Kentucky and houses an art gallery, 150-seat theater, a community radio station, a regional archive and media production and training facilities. Appalshop supports rural communities’ efforts to achieve justice and equity and solve their own problems in their own ways.

I’ve never been to Appalshop, but I’ve heard so much about Appalshop for so many years. To me, Appalshop represents the reality that you can be rural and progressive, that you can be rural and embrace diversity, that you can celebrate your past and welcome, and participate in, an evolving future. Appalshop is the embodiment of just how wonderful, strong and poetic Kentuckians, and all rural Americans, can be. I love talking to AmeriCorps members who have served in rural Kentucky, including outside Appalachia – they go on and on about the people there and what it was like to help them with education issues, environmental issues… and I’d see the understanding in their eyes: they get what makes the state and the people special when they are at their very best. 

Appalshop is the kind of nonprofit I wish existed in different places all over the world, in a form appropriate for the local area, to celebrate the unique rural life of so many, many different places, which have their own heritage worth celebrating – their own unique takes on food and music and how they relate to their natural resources. When we travel by motorcycle, we want to stop in little towns, not big cities, and whether that’s been in Hungary or Bulgaria or Poland or British Columbia or Idaho or just about anywhere in Oregon, it’s often been as wonderful as a twisty, scenic road we’ve enjoyed.

My heart raced all day thinking about that job posting. Oh, to be in a position to apply for a job like that, to uproot my life yet again and go several hundred, or even a few thousand, miles away yet again for a dream job that pays so little in a beautiful place I’d love to be. If I were 20 years younger and alone…

As much as I love Appalshop, I’m not willing to trade my husband and current home for it. I’ll just keep hoping I win the lottery so I can give it lots of money someday. 

I clicked around the site, reveling in all they do, listening to the WMMT radio station for a while. And then I saw a title and a photo. Red Fox/Second Hangin’.

And I burst into tears.

A memory flooded all through me, of my Dad insisting on taking me to Henderson County High School for a theater touring company. Some kind of play. But with no props or scenery. storytelling. Three men. I was skeptical. But my attention never wained that night. I drank in every word of that story. I was astounded at the magic of three men just talking.

I’d seen Red Fox/Second Hangin’. At my Dad’s insistence. I had forgotten the name of the play. I assumed I’d never remember it.

I was a mystery to my Dad – and a disappointment to both parents. They just couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to dress the way they wanted me to, to dress like the other girls. Other than some unfortunate experimentation with blue eye shadow, I wasn’t really interested in makeup until some time at college. Didn’t want to join Cotillion, didn’t want to join a sorority, rolled my eyes at the idea of participating in Junior Miss. Didn’t date – instead, went out with a pack of friends, if I went out at all. Walked out the door on some Saturday nights for midnight showings of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” looking like their worst nightmare. Watching “Star Wars” over and over and over and over when it came on HBO. Silence in response to my parents repeated insistence that I could make a lot of money and have a great time being a public relations director some day for Peabody Coal Company or some other similar company – me, their daughter who, at 11 years old, wept at the idea of my Mom applying for a job with Union Carbide (she didn’t get the job, FYI). Dad was desperate for me to be friends with certain girls from certain families – I resented giving up a night of watching a foreign film or Monty Python on the local PBS station to, instead, hang out with someone I really didn’t like at all.

But Dad knew I loved theater and musicals. He made me watch The Sound of Music. I hadn’t wanted to. He was right: I loved it. He took me to the Executive Inn Dinner Theater in Evansville, Indiana for performances of South Pacific and Ten Nights in a Barroom, and arranged beforehand for the main actress in each production to talk to me about working in professional theater. He’s made a HUGE deal about a local theater company mounting a production in a conference room at the Ramada Inn in Henderson – it was A Light in the Forest, a play he didn’t know, by an author he’d never heard of, but it was live theater and, therefore, I had to go. I was the only kid in the audience.

And once upon a time, he’d taken me to see the Red Fox/Second Hangin’ storytellers. And I had forgotton the name, but not that night. I had always wondered if I would ever remember the name of that show.

Now, I won’t have to.

If you want to watch it, it’s free on YouTube.