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I
am a storyteller. Many of my stories have been
seeded by childhood experiences and
relationships in Gainesville, Florida where I
was raised. The daughter of a Nazarene preacher,
many of my stories are about life in the
parsonage, life with older brothers and life as
a contest. The winners go to heaven and losers
go to hell. My stories expose the simplistic
ideas promoted by Christianity’s elitist
notions, its refusal to think beyond a literal
and incomplete reading of scripture and its
doctrines which have been hardened into concepts
that leave no air to breathe for living
creatures.
In January of 2009 I attended a solo performance
workshop led by the Memphis theater company,
Voices of the South. There I told the true story
of my innocent participation in a racially
motivated beating of my black neighbor. And
about how that incident, and my subsequent guilt
about my participation in that injustice, has
defined much of my self understanding through
the years, and how the story has guided my
therapy sessions for nearly forty years,
punching its way out of the confines of my own
personality and psychic wounds. Throughout the
workshop the story inhabited a form it hadn’t
before: a play. It became my first solo show,
For Goodness Sake.
I collaborated with one of the workshop’s
instructors, David Prete. Together we wrote the
script, and Prete has directed the play in all
its incarnations. It is my hope that
For Goodness Sake will, in some way set
free the memory and life of the black boy who
was beaten and jailed, not because of any wrong
doing on his part, but because of the color of
his skin.
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