Speakers hone stories for Cape festival

Starting Friday, downtown Cape Girardeau may be filled with ghosts, lesbian cowgirl folk singers, 85-year-old medical school graduates and female serial killers, among other characters.

The tales at the second annual Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival begin at 9 a.m. Friday. Four national and four Midwest storytellers will be featured.

Storytelling hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Each artist invovled comes with his or her own story.

Andy Offutt Irwin uses funny stories "to talk about life. That's why we're humorists and not comedians."

The Covington, Ga., native has mastered the ability to deliver a series of short, credible, funny and touching portraits of small-town lives -- often seen through the eyes of Aunt Marguerite Van Camp, an 85-year-old recent medical school graduate.

"She's my central character and a widow," he said. "Sometimes we hear from her dead husband."

Van Camp's observations on life may shock but rarely offend.

"I try to exaggerate enough so people get the idea that it's fiction, but darned if people don't come up to me and say 'I'd love to meet Marguerite,'" he said.

After talking to Irwin, it's not clear if he really did meet a lesbian cowgirl folk singer who was too embarrassed to curse in front of Aunt Marguerite. The story sticks with you, though.

Retired art teacher Sue Hinkel is the most familiar with Cape Girardeau, driving from her Pacific, Mo., home 30 miles from St. Louis to meet with local art teachers and shop for antiques.

"I've got a story I can't wait to tell," she said about Cape Girardeau's festival, offering a hint: It's about a female serial killer who lived in Missouri. Hinkel calls her version of the story "The Scourge of Meramec Valley."

Hinkel's stories are drawn from family legends, often with a twist at the end, and the lives of notable artists, a few of them bawdy.

"I will gear the story according to the audience," she said.

Bobby Norfolk used to stick his nose in a book to avoid talking to people. The St. Louis native's stuttering was a hurdle in making friends until he reached 10th grade and landed in a drama class.

"Whenever I would perform, the stutter wasn't there," he said. Now, 34 years of speaking fluidly has given him a resume that includes stand-up comedy, opening for such acts as B.B. King and Roberta Flack; a journalism scholarship and stints writing for two St. Louis newspapers and a magazine; and a decade as a park ranger at the Gateway Arch, where he watched his first storytelling festival and got hooked.

"I didn't seek storytelling, it sought me," he said.

Though he said he finds himself in "sort of a Zen mode" while onstage, he said the bedtime stories he used to tell his son had the opposite effect.

"The kid was wired," he said. Visitors to his tent this weekend can expect the same.

Bil Lepp hails from Charleston, W.Va. He tells humorous tall tales and funny stories "about the stupid things people do," he wrote in an e-mail to the Southeast Missourian. "My stories are like that arch up in St. Louis -- masterfully engineered, beautifully built and sorta useless."

He started telling stories as part of a family tradition, based on "listening to my grandfather lie at the Thanksgiving table."

Mostly he does it to get people laughing. Ask why his first name has just one L instead of two.

"My son likes to say that since the last L is silent, I never used it and it dried up and fell off," he said.

Barbara McBride-Smith of Tulsa, Okla., started winning awards more than 10 years ago for her ability to spin stories. A seven-time featured speaker at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., and the International Storytelling Festival in Washington, D.C., she has spoken to crowds in places as far away as Greece and Turkey.

Telling tales is just one of Joyce Slater's occupations. The Kansas City, Mo., native has acted since grade school and now teaches drama at an alternative high school. She has run a playwrighting festival for women for 15 years, as well as a chicken storytelling festival in Kansas City. Slater said her stories span the tastes of all ages, but "I really love to do ghost stories."

She never memorizes the text and is comfortable changing gears to suit her audience.

Kim Weitkamp of Christiansburg, Va., grew up performing, became an accountant and returned to performing.

"My mom and dad would have me do Barbra Streisand and Elvis impersonations, and then I'd tell a story," she said. "My mom would say, as people were laughing, 'Well, that's not how it really happened, Kimmy. Tell another one."

Now a grandmother of two, Weitkamp said laughter has the power to break barriers between people and open them to universal truths and that storytelling "is the remedy for the funk the nation is in."

Rosie Cutrer of Topeka, Kan., mixes her folktales with original family stories and poetry. She watches her audience for their reactions.

"I don't know exactly how to describe it but they have their eyes on you and seem to be going on the journey with you," she said. "But I think that most storytellers will tell you not to look for too much. ... Don't make judgments as to how an audience is responding. Just accept whatever they are giving you."

pmcnichol@semissourian.com

388-3646

http://www.capestorytelling.com/

Pertinent address:

Cape Girardeau, MO