Storytelling is, of course, the oldest tradition there is (prostitution notwithstanding). But even back in the ancient and tribal days, it was professionalized. Elders or tale tellers or bards sorted themselves out from the rest of the pack and became the safeguards of its myth and history. Stories, after all, have a form to be mastered—beginning, middle, end, at the very least—and a true story is a long time in the honing.
Back Fence PDX, which just rounded over a year of events this Wednesday at the Mission Theater, democratizes the form a bit, opening it out to nonprofessional storytellers of all types but also more practiced folk from the blogosphere or comedy scene, with the stipulations that the story not be memorized, nor told publicly before, nor exceed 10 minutes. Most of all, they must be true. The format? Seven people tell stories. That’s it. Still, what’s on offer here are not honed stories rich with craft, but rather glimpses into other lives, a bit like This American Life but live and in person, completely unedited, and much more performative than is usual on that show (most speakers adopt a sort of stage persona within seconds, a hook to let the audience relate). The result is generally less fully formed story than it is enthusiastic anecdote, a juicy nugget that kind of trails off mumblingly at the end. “So, um—that’s the story.”
This time around, the theme was “Temporary Insanity,” which is the seed of any possible good anecdote anyway, and it was one of the strongest Back Fence nights I’ve seen thus far; not one story really lost its way before sputtering out, and all of the speakers (performers, really) seemed to have taken notes from the past year of events and so they shucked and juked, engineered dramatic pauses, put on deadpan vixenry, shot left-field jokes (Bridget Pilloud, on sudden leg cramps during sex: “That’s why I put a banana in your lunchbox every day! So this shit doesn’t happen!”)
The most engaging performer was likely Matt Smith, with his long story about testicular surgery in Japan, getting an erection while shaved by a nurse, accidentally buying the wrong hundoshi (Japanese loincloth), etc. The best fish-out-of water line belonged to Nathaniel Boggis’, when upon moving here from the South he apparently got in a fight over a Cat Power record. And I paraphrase: “Seriously, who gets drunk, does a lot of drugs, and then puts on a Cat Power record?”
But the price of admission was justified in and of itself by the simple phenomenon of 14-year-old Eli Hirsch, who genuinely, personally frightened me, because I realized that when I’m 40 or so, coming out of my first divorce and trying to find a new life in a new city, his 23-year-old poreless face will be there across the desk, saying, “So… why do you think you deserve this job?”
Seriously, at the age of 13, he filled Crystal Ballroom with people willing to actually pay to see his high-school band. That’s some serious marketing, there. When he walked out onstage, his first line was, “So I’m 10-years old,” which was an unintentional punchline for the mostly 30-something audience, before launching into a mildly sociopathic narrative about faking a stomach cramp with enough dedication that he bypassed the needs of legitimate emergency-room patients and almost ended up with a tube stuck somewhere way past his colon. He then manipulated the doctors and nursing staff into actually feeling sorry for him after the jig was up. And this he did for absolutely no reason, knew the symptoms, knew the buttons to push to keep adults on his side, fooled everyone who wasn’t his parents. To his credit, he felt bad about it later, but still: I swear to God and Man, I glimpsed my future, and it’s Eli Hirsch denying me a job. I’ve never been so depressed in my entire life.
Anyway, for links to vids of past performances, click here.
Hey Matthew,
Glad you could make it. It was a great evening, for sure.
Thanks!
Melissa
Eli Hirsch frightens me with his ability to take a joke too far. I love how he got so far into his story before he let us (and his mother) know that he was faking it.
He frightens me as well…I am sure he will fire me too one day.
Gary (faher to Eli) Hirsch