Saturday, May 31, 2008

A StoryCorps Adventure

Have you ever heard of StoryCorps? It's an amazing project "whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another's lives through listening."

Basically, you can record your life story, tell about a certain time in your life, record "life lessons" for future children, or words of wisdom to pass along to your family. What a cool idea!!!

StoryCorps has a booth at the library right now, so my friend A and I decided to make an appointment and talk about The List and about our FMRNS and our experiences with that. We decided that 5 years and almost 250 movies was definitely a good thing to get on a CD!

The session was 40 minutes. We took a copy of The List, and just talked! We started out talking about how we met (working at the library!), and how the movie night got started ("What do you mean you've never seen The Color Purple?!"). After that, we went through all the movies that we have watched, picking out a couple of the ones that really impacted us or we found particularly funny or moving. I tell you what - 40 minutes sure didn't take long!! We could have talked for hours. It was like time just stopped.

After the session was over, they took our picture (I'm ready for my close-up!). The woman who was in charge of running the booth told us how cool she thought what we were doing was, and that we reminded her of some of her favorite movies, and inspired her to see some of the others we talked about! See, movie night is all about inspiration and bringing joy! We also found out that our CD will be cataloged at the Library of Congress!!

We listened to the CD a couple days later, and it was even better!! There were moments while we were listening when we remembered what was happening in the booth at that time (like when I was waving my arms because I couldn't think of something to say!), and we LAUGHED!! Which made the whole experience even better. Those are the things that we are going to remember and we will be able to look back and laugh.

As you can probably tell, my friendship with A is one of the most important things in my life. To be able to do the StoryCorps thing with him (chronicling one of the coolest things ever - FMRNS) just feels so amazing - I don't even know if I could find the words to describe it.

Anyway, if you have a story to tell, want to interview your grandma, have some things you want to share with your unborn child, or just want to talk with your friend, PLEASE take this opportunity to get your thoughts on CD.

Find out all about StoryCorps at their website, where you can also Listen to Stories!

2 comments:

Carrie said...

I always feel like I would either have nothing to say or would talk WAY TOO MUCH. I've heard of this on NPR, I think. So besides the list, y'all didn't go in with a script? I think I'd have to have one, just to get the ball rolling, anyway. How cool are you!

Miss Lynn said...

Oh my gosh, I know all about this from NPR. That is so cool that you and A went and did it! Like Carrie, I always feel like I wouldn't have anything to say. But I never thought of going with another person and just "conversating" . . . what a terrific idea!

OOOOOOOOOW MY FAAAAAAAAAACE! :)