All Y'all

Shannan Hicks is our first-ever wild card storyteller. The idea behind the wild card storyteller is simple: prior to intermission, audience members who'd be interested in telling a story with little to no warning toss their names into a hat. At the end of intermission, a name is drawn. That person tells a 10-minute story on the night's theme (in this case, womanhood) with all of 30 seconds to prepare. To place this in context: most of our storytellers have three to five weeks to prepare. Shannan had 30 seconds.

Robin Williams, a Bossier City-based marketing executive who shared her story at "All Y'all: Under the Influence," had less than 12 hours to prepare her story for the stage. As an alternate storyteller for the evening, Robin was called up when another storyteller backed out. Considering that her story deals with overcoming oppressive social anxiety and fear of public speaking brought about by the cruelty of a figure in her past, live storytelling was no small challenge for Robin.

Annie Andersen thought that she was pretty bad, but when she was cast in the Oxygen Network's hit reality television series Bad Girls Club, she realized that there's bad --- and then there's really bad.

Do you believe that some cosmic force holds us accountable for all of our past behavior? That if we’re good, we’ll be rewarded, and if we’re bad, we’ll be punished? “Mistakes Were Made” storyteller Cookie DuBois’s story, “Space Dracula,” made us wonder whether her trajectory was some sort of example of a person having to pay off some debt to the Universe before they could be happy.

John Durbin's story, “From the Ground Up,” involves the highest of stakes. His story was recorded at our September 2014 live storytelling event, “All Y'all: Under the Influence.” It's a tale of overcoming not only drug addiction but also the cumulative weight of one's mistake-ridden past.

Chuck Smith has been waging an epic battle to become “squirrel-free.” Any southerner knows that squirrels and similar rodents can be a plague upon an idyllic yard as they jostle from limb to limb in trees. We recently visited Chuck for a cup of joe at Rhino Coffee and to hear a little bit about the history of the 100-some-odd squirrels he’s captured and relocated “far away enough that a squirrel would really need to be determined to come back.”

Randall's story, which we've dubbed "The Articulated Dream," unfolds in his sexy Texas drawl, explaining he and Molly's decision to uproot themselves from Austin, Tx., and "start anew" in Shreveport, La.

What if you met a beautiful person at a party, swept them off of their feet and the two of you eloped to a remote city in Mexico with 121 churches and wild packs of chihuahuas roaming the streets? "New 'Round Here" storyteller Limbert Fabian and his wife Marta ran away to Mexico to get married, climb pyramids and eat yogurth.

Judy Williams shares her story of working, at age 26, with legendary filmmaker, actor, playwright and multimedia prankster Orson Welles (writer/director of Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, among other staggering cinematic works of genius, and creator of the notorious 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds).

As a salesman, Bruce would drive to places with poetic names like Paris, Texas and Stuttgart, Arkansas, offering pharmacies exclusive discounts on drug products sold by Morris and Dickson, his employers.