BRINGING ON AN AUDIENCE

I didn’t tell stories at the festival on the September long weekend this year. Back in April, when it was necessary to decide, I reasoned that I shouldn’t, given that David would be really busy due to the fact that this is an election year, and I can’t really get to Fort Edmonton Park without his help. It was reason enough, and I didn’t even anticipate the fact that he would still be working on the kitchen floor by the time the September long weekend rolled around. It’s really okay, I said to myself. You won’t have to spend your summer memorizing stories. What’s more, your family and friends will thank you for not making them pay their own way into Fort Edmonton Park just so you’ll have an audience, I said to myself. Audiences for your stories at the festival tend to be mainly comprised of people who owe you a favour. After coming two years in a row, they don’t really owe you a favour. I was very comfortable with the decision. If you tell stories at the festival, they do expect you to help generate an audience.

I didn’t think much more about it until early August, about the time I would normally be learning stories for the festival, about the time when I started wishing I had some reason to get started on some new stories. We would run into people and have conversations and they would ask if I’d be telling in Fort Edmonton this year. They weren’t people I have ever owed a favour, so they wouldn’t have been on the pressure list. They were accidental audience members from other years. There are always a few accidentals, people who come because they are have a volunteer job to do, or because their feet are tired from tramping around the Park, or because they are telling stories right after you and they want to get a feel for it. Sometimes you don’t really know how the accidentals got there, but later you start running into them in grocery stores, accidentally.

Then, as the September long weekend approached, the used-up-all-your-previously-owed favours crowd started making inquiries. Just wondering what day you’re telling stories, they said. Usually you let us know, they said. And I found myself justifying myself to them, and encouraging them to go to Fort Edmonton Park anyway, when they really should have been thanking me for letting them off the hook.

It’s a good feeling, kind of, to know that they didn’t really hate it, and hadn’t already thought up a good excuse not to go this year. It will help me drum up the courage to invite them to come to the café in November, where they will have to pay a cover charge, and arrive an hour early to get a seat, and buy food while they wait. By then I am hoping to owe them a favour or to.