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Last chapter is competition
By JOHN BALZ, Times Staff Writer TAMPA PALMS -- For the past few weeks, 10-year-old storyteller Morgan Cheek has been hard at work adding final touches to a story she started perfecting nearly a year ago.
If all of this sounds like a lot of work for a made-up tale that lasts five minutes, understand that storytelling is not an easy craft -- especially when there is something at stake. For Cheek what is at stake is first place at the National Storytelling Youth Olympics to be held in Fresno, Calif. this week. Out of several thousand entrants, judges from around the world selected 18 finalists. "I'm expecting tough competition," said Morgan, touching her lucky necklace, which is her great-grandfather's wedding ring melted down into the shape of a star. Morgan's story is "The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle," by Margaret Mead, about an old woman never happy with her surroundings. The woman lives in a vinegar bottle and asks a nearby fairy for a bungalow, then a cottage, then a castle. When she demands to become "empress of the world," the fairy sends her back to the vinegar bottle. Happiness comes from the heart, not from the home, scolds the fairy. "(The judges) like to have stories that end with a moral," said Morgan's mother, Debi Cheek. Like a good storyteller, Morgan has changed small portions of Mead's tale to fit her personality. The bungalow is a thatched-roof Seminole Heights home with roses growing up the wall. The cottage is townhouse in Boston. The castle is Cinderella's Castle at Disneyworld. Although Morgan has never told stories before, she has plenty of performing experience. Debi, 36, recalled Morgan singing to restaurant customers waiting for a table. Now a student at Lee Academy for Gifted Education, a private school in North Tampa. Morgan performs in community theater productions and sings at festivals, private parties, and the Florida State Fair. An avid book-on-tape listener, Morgan says the skill of storytelling is much different. "They're reading from a script," she said. "In storytelling you really have to get into the feeling, get into the emotion because you have to memorize the story. You always have to think about how the characters look." Morgan's first taste of story telling came at a library workshop last spring. She entered the Tampa-Hillsborough County Storytelling Festival and reached the finals. She became a finalist again at the state level and moved on to the National Youth Storytelling Olympics at California State University, which offers a storytelling degree. Props and costumes are not allowed and Olympic judges will grade the finalists in seven categories including body language, story originality, and performance spirit. As she prepares for the competition, Morgan also is honing a new story for next month's countywide storytelling festival. This year she chose a modern-day twist on the venerable classic Rumplestiltskin. In it, the miller's daughter, desperate for attention, hires a public relations guru to spread her tale of spinning straw into gold to the local press. She is flooded with marriage offers, but cannot come through on her wild claim. And the moral? "You can't believe everything you read in the papers," said Morgan. - John Balz can be reached at (813) 269-5313 or at balz@sptimes.com.
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From the Times |
