Icons of the world: the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal, the Sphynx, Machu Picchu, the good, old leaning Tower of Pisa, the H&C Coffee Cup…
Posted by Alex on October 23, 2008, from Peoria, Illinois
“I love to laugh! Loud and long and clear…”
– Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins
I can hear laughter coming from across the parking lot at Metro Centre. It is Marlene Olson and her nanny Linda Blakey. Marlene has a flower in her hair and Linda wears a baseball cap.
“You’ve been the other half of me for a long time, caring for my kids when I couldn’t be there,” Marlene says to Linda.
Linda talks about the activities she spontaneously concocted in her daytime nanny duty at the Olson residence. “We used to dress up and play music on oatmeal boxes. We played Army and I would paint the kids’ faces green and they would slide down the stairs on their bellies.”
Linda also liked to make up songs on-the-spot. One such tune was “The Rainbow Song.” The three kids would stand in front of the refrigerator waiting for the light coming through the stained glass window to decorate their bodies with rainbows: “Got a rainbow on my shoulder, got a rainbow on my knee. Got a rainbow here for you and a rainbow here for me.”
Posted by Carl on October 23, 2008, from Peoria, Illinois
Community Partners: Peoria Players Theatre
Peoria, Illinois has become famous for its ability to most accurately represent a microcosm of the United States of America. Due to its diverse demographics, and perceived mainstream Midwestern culture, Peoria has often been used as a primary test market for a variety of products, services and policies that subsequently reach the whole of the U.S. Peoria’s utility as America’s litmus test was certainly not lost on the theater industry. During the days of Vaudeville, the phrase “Will it play in Peoria?” was coined as a reference to a show’s ability to appeal to the mainstream American Public. This mandate has undoubtedly lived on for 90 years in the care and keeping of the Peoria Players Community Theater.
In its 90th season, Peoria Players is the longest continuously running community theater in Illinois, and the 4th longest running theater in the U.S. Throughout its lifespan the stage has never gone dark for any season, even when faced with daunting obstacles ranging from economic hardship to national crises.
During World War II, the city of Peoria experienced a shortage of men, opting to cast mustache-laden 8th graders in lead male roles to remedy the problem. In the 1950s the creation of the “super highway” I-74 forced the company to move, with construction plans calling for the new transit artery to run directly through the space they inhabited. The 1960s found the Peoria Players in a leaking building and in a financial bind. A partnership was arranged with the Peoria Park District to transfer ownership, unburdening the Theater from the onus of maintenance, and allowing the group to focus more intently on filling the seats.
Posted by Alex on October 23, 2008, from Peoria, Illinois
Community Partners: Metro Centre
“All the rejection in the world can’t stop the power of a promise that you make to a loved one.” – Eric Brinker, Nephew of Susan G. Komen
At Metro Centre in Peoria, pink flags wave on top of parking lot lights. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but these flags stay up all year. Metro Centre used to be farmland, a place where Susan G. Komen, namesake of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, would go horseback riding. Now it is a community shopping center owned by Eric Brinker.
Eric came to the MobileBooth on one of the first crisp fall days to talk about how his family started Susan G. Komen Foundation. “Susan G. Komen was my aunt. She died of breast cancer at age 37,” Eric says. Susan had breast cancer in “the dark days” of the disease. “You didn’t talk about it. You called it the big C word. They weren’t providing treatment options that were anything more than barbaric. People thought it was contagious.”
Photo courtesy of Eric Brinker and Susan G. Komen for the Cure
Reading Rainbow: Reflections of Buffalo Booksellers
Posted by Jalylah on October 22, 2008, from New York, New York
Community Partners: WBFO
What with behemoths like Borders and Barnes & Nobles plying the masses with square footage, seats-a-plenty, embedded coffee shops and the low prices economies of scale allow, it’s difficult even for even literary locavores to patronize independent bookstores yet booklovers are still drawing up business plans and leasing storefronts. In fact, the New York Times‘ City Room blog recently spotlighted a few upstart booksellers while pondering their viability.
Well, StoryCorps already gleaned some insight into the subject thanks to Buffalo, New York couple Kenneth and Sharon Holley. Visitors to our MobileBooth in July, the Holleys, who met at the North Jefferson library where Sharon worked when Kenneth popped in to check out a book by John A. Williams, recounted two decades spent owning and operating the now defunct Harambee Books.
Posted by Jeremy on October 22, 2008, from Roanoke, Virginia
I’ve never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.
- Virgil Thomson
While the music scene in Roanoke may not be as visible as the scenes in other southern cities, like Athens, GA or Austin, TX, it is, for the inquisitive music lover, a rewarding discovery. One day, after checking out a matinee at the Grandin Theatre just outside of downtown Roanoke I found my guide sitting next to the popcorn machine. Peter Evans works at the theatre but he is also part of the Magic Twig Community, a homegrown arts collective that includes bands and side projects like Boys Lie, The Missionaries, Rootstone Jug Band, The Sad Cobras and Turbo P, and visual artists, Kelly Queener and Indianface. With the indie trifecta of the Plan 9 Records store, the Mystic Fortress rehearsal studio and the Water Heater art and performance venue, the Magic Twig Community might just put the Star City on the map as the next new music mecca.
I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
Posted by Nina on October 21, 2008, from Roanoke, Virginia
Community Partners: O. Winston Link Museum
“Not one in a million Americans ever again will ride a scheduled mainline passenger train behind a live and breathing steam locomotive. That time is gone. “
- liner notes from The Fading Giant
It’s impossible to ignore the train in Roanoke, the nightly screech of freight trains edging through town, the whistles that pierce the city’s hum throughout the day. Each morning, Whitney and I run across a bridge and peer down on the train tracks below, hundreds of boxcars full of coal form a line clear to the horizon. There hasn’t been a single morning when one of us hasn’t commented on the sight.
Bill Arnold was born 50 feet from the tracks.
From left to right: Kim Parker, Bill Arnold, Ellen Arnold
Posted by Katherine on October 21, 2008, from New York, New York
Community Partners: Other Countries
StoryCorps’ Community Outreach department partners with organizations all over New York to bring the StoryCorps experience to their members and to collect the stories of a diverse cross-section of our city. One recent partnership is with Other Countries, a peer-facilitated workshop for black gay men, founded in the 1980s during the height of the Black Gay Arts Movement.
I facilitated an interview at our Brooklyn office. Afterwards NYC Outreach Coordinator Andre Lancaster (himself a writer/playwright), hosted a clip-focused writing workshop where Other Countries writers listened to StoryCorps Griot interviews.
Posted by Alex on October 20, 2008, from San Francisco, California
Community Partners: The Contemporary Jewish Museum
Tina Olson and John Heinsius
A guy could get used to this. After my first week as a Facilitator at the San Francisco StoryBooth, I have already had the pleasure of meeting people with truly inspired stories. The interesting thing is, I have almost started to look back on their stories as if they have been a long lost memory of my own.
Of course, they’re not. They are Jack Heinsius’s memories of his mother from when he was a child, and Tina Olson’s stories of her father hiding in haystacks to avoid capture by German soldiers. They are Peter Nathan Roberts recounting the old Union songs his parents would have him sing at the dinner table when he was young. I never took a bus to the March on Washington in the 1960s as Peter did, nor have I ever started an organization to raise money for hungry children around the world as the Fredricks family has.
Posted by Jeremy on October 16, 2008, from Roanoke, Virginia
Community Partners: Refugee and Immigration Services
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.
- Lyndon B. Johnson
The people known as the Somali Bantu have endured centuries of discrimination and violence, and during the recent war in Somalia, the Bantu were again the victims of violence in that country. Of the roughly 20,000 Somali Bantu refugees in Africa and Yemen, some 5,000 found refuge in Tanzania. In 1999, the United States Government offered the remaining 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees in Kenya the protection they had been seeking for over 10 years. The refugees are being settled in over 50 cities in 38 states. Many of those refugees have made their way to Roanoke, Virginia. MobileEast had the pleasure of recording conversations between Rahmo Isse and her mother Rukia Hussein, who are both Somali Bantu, and Saadiya Guhad and her sister Faduma who are Somali.
