Attend a storytelling event in New York City, like the Moth, and you’re guaranteed to hear seasoned professionals of the storytelling circuit delivering polished, well-rehearsed tales. You’re also likely to wait in a long line just to get in, or shell out as much as $35 for a ticket.
But at an event in Red Hook in May, everyone was milling about under a maple tree just thick enough to keep out the light rain, wondering if they had a story to tell even minutes before the night started.
Sabine Bernards was talking about her mom: They had spent the past few days together, drinking IPAs in brown bags in Brooklyn Bridge Park, getting matching tattoos while the 25-year-old Bernards listened to her mom recall life as 1980s punk rocker in Sweden. Just regular mother-daughter stuff, right?
Maybe it was the few cups from the BYOB wine supply, and a few passes over the table full of impressive picnic potluck snacks like deviled eggs and quinoa salad, that made her realize she had a story good enough to entertain the crowd at the Shed, an off-the-radar storytelling salon held in a Red Hook backyard.
She walked up to the microphone under the tree strung with white lights and told a rapt crowd of about 30 the first time she saw her punk-turned-housewife mom as a real person. She was 8 years old, and her mom played David Bowie’s “Fashion,” turning it up “as loud as our 1995 speakers could possibly go.”
“One of my life’s goals was to tell as many stories as I possibly can,” she says afterward. “This is all I want to do with my whole life: tell stories and drink wine and hang out.”
The Shed invites such personal reflection — even from people who don’t consider themselves professional storytellers. Started by four friends in 2012, the salon has grown in popularity, and just returned to its Red Hook birthplace after going to different indoor venues for the winter. The Shed ditches the formality of other similar events for a folksiness not often seen in the era of viral YouTube videos — even if it does keep a 500-member e-mail list.
The setting is as integral as the stories: Visitors to the Red Hook home pass through an actual shed into the backyard, where co-hosts Katie Cooper and Sarah Tay live. An antique metal bingo ball cage is used to select the order of performers; some stroked a pet rabbit in the crowd throughout the night. An occasional truck breaks the silence beyond the red picket fence, but mostly the neighborhood is free of the urban chorus of car alarms and sirens.
“Coming down here always feels like sort of a special, magical night,” says Chrysanthe Tenentes, 34, a digital consultant and editor who co-founded the Shed with Cooper, 33, Jason Fried, 40, and Audrey Evans, 31. “With so many things in New York, people are not just going somewhere for the night but they’re floating about between events. But if you come to Red Hook, you’re here for the night.”
Anyone can volunteer to tell a story, usually about seven minutes in length. Some — like frequent Moth champion Adam Wade last month — come with stories prepared. Others get inspired on site.
“It’s not being dominated by people who want the stage,” Evans says. “It’s an open door and people walk through it.”
One of them was Debbie Higgs, a 23-year-old from Mountain Lakes, NJ. Her mom had just passed away a few months before, so Higgs unearthed a story she had told few others: She had an abortion in college, on her mother’s advice.
“One of the landmark most important decisions I made was to share with my mother,” tearing up as she recalls the tale. For her, telling the story was a way for her mother to live on.
“I really wasn’t nervous,” she says afterward. “I did feel like it was a supportive place.”
The next Shed is on Friday, June 20 with the theme “Mixed Signals.” RSVP here: theshedstorysalon.org.