First Person Arts

Founder and director of First Person Arts, Vicki Solot, sometimes goes on vacation, but she never travels without her love of true stories from real life:

It’s my fourth trip to Belize, but the first time I’ve thought much about the skinny, barefooted children you see selling beaded jewelry, hawking papaya chips, helping to load luggage or roaming the streets or the beach.  They aren’t in school, though school seems to be in session.  Their sales skills are good – they know how to pull at your heart strings.  It’s hard to resist a kid who needs money to buy medicine for his sick mother.

At eight, Abner was one of those kids. His father had walked out on the family, leaving his mother alone in Guatemala with four young children to care for.   With few opportunities for employment, she went to Belize to look for work.  When she found a job, she sent for Abner and his five-month old brother, but with what she was earning, she could only afford to bring the two of them.  The others had to stay behind to be raised by an aunt.

“I quit school in third grade,” Abner tells me.  “The teacher was prejudiced toward me because I was dark-skinned and Guatemalan.  She picked on me all the time, so I just walked out.”

That’s when he went to work – helping out in the produce market — working every day from 6 AM until into the night and earning only $80 Belize ($40 US) each week, which he gave to his mother to help cover the family’s living expenses.   He has worked continuously ever since – in various markets, on a farm (a job he walked away from – literally — because the farm-lady worked him to the bone but never paid him) and eventually in construction.

At eleven, he learned the tools of the trade that ultimately led him to Captain Morgan’s, where his story finally took a turn for the better, thanks to the support and encouragement of its owners Karen Riley and Ernie Olmstead.

Captain Morgan’s is a gorgeous resort on Ambergris Caye off the coast of Belize that includes time-share units and a booming, new development of condo residences.   Captain Morgans also owns a lumber mill on the mainland, where they mill all the wood for the residences, and a farm where they grow produce for the resort’s restaurant.  They employ more than one hundred fifty people, many of whom have been with them since they opened the resort 15 years ago.

Abner, a soft-spoken, heavy-set young man in his mid-20’s has worked there for five years.  He started out as a construction worker, then developed skill as a tile craftsman.  At first, he was responsible for laying tiles for floors, shower stalls, counters, etc.  Now, he designs them as well, incorporating explosive patterns and innovative installation techniques for outdoor fountains, customized hot tubs.  Any surface that can be tiled is, it seems and they all contain evidence of Abner’s artistry. This year, he will travel to Miami with Karen so he can have a hand in the tile selection.  He is modest about his talents, but Karen boasts for him.  The beauty of the resort is testimony to his achievements.

Though he works exclusively for Captain Morgan’s, he runs his own business and employs five workers, including the younger brother he grew up with in Belize.  Although he needs help preparing contracts and invoices, due to his lack of formal education, by Belize standards, he is quite successful. He bought his own house and rides a swanky motorcycle.    Recently, when his mother was hospitalized, he was able to pay her medical bills out-of-pocket.  This summer, he flew his whole crew to Guatemala to spend a month building her a new house — at his expense.

It was a labor of love, no doubt — and I’m sure the tile work is exceptional!

You can get a little taste of Belize yourself now that the online portion of First Person Arts Auction is open.  The auction will run through November 6, 2008, concluding live at our “First Taste Festival Preview Dinner” at Ristorante Panorama on November 6, 2008. (Click here to purchase tickets!)

Proceeds go to First Person Arts to support our annual Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art, our monthly StorySlams and Salons, and our artist-in-residencies and Community Writing Program.  Auction items range from exotic vacation getaways to activities and gift items guaranteed to delight and surprise.  So, get in on the action and start bidding!

Regular Salon-goer, friend of First Person Arts, and owner of the storytelling site Philastories.org, Michael Feagans attended a Digital Storytelling Workshop (at the Philadelphia Center for Digital Storytelling) recently and produced the following moving account of his relationship to his father and his father’s life as a black firefighter in Philadelphia at Engine 11:

You can hear more from some of Philadelphia’s black firefighters at philastories.org.  If you’d like to try your hand at creating your own Digital Story, the First Person Festival offers an introduction to the form in Storysmithing 101 (other options during the session include writing and oral storytelling).

Phawker’s got a nice excerpt of some memoir writing from 19 year-old Colleen Reese, a barista at the Starbucks in Montgomery Mall.  It’s called “How I got to Starbucks: A Teenage Memoir of Midlife Crisis”

BY COLLEEN REESE By the time it was over, high school finally made sense to me: Clean lines were drawn between the extraordinaires bound for leafy private colleges and the Joe Regulars headed to state schools; between the part-timers headed to community college and the free spirit do-gooders who would travel the world and eventually settle down for a little missionary work in Uganda or whatnot; and let us not forget the sons of working class shlubs doomed to endless summer apprenticeships with their neighbor’s landscaping companies. And, as predicted, they all moved on in logical directions.

…

Read the rest at Phawker.

Mathematically speaking, it’s true, a 19 year-old’s midlife crisis would be about age 9.  Keep your chin up Colleen.  Some of us make it out of Starbucks alive.

Here’s a charming anecdote from Julie Cohen’s blog $650 apartment for $650:

This morning I had to tell a police offer, “SHE STOLE MY SWIPE!”

Want the story?

Ok.

I was late for work. The subway station I enter doesn’t have a booth with a metro worker (i..e no one to help you) or a regular turn-style. It has one of this scary cheese-grater type entrances like this:

So the person in front of me was having trouble swiping her card. I didn’t wait long enough for her to swipe again (late for work) so when I swiped mine, it let her through and barred me from entering. I have a monthly card so I’d have had to wait 15 more minutes for my card to clear before I could use it again and actually get onto the subway.

Luckily, there was a police man walking away. This is one of those few occasions I was happy to see a cop.

I ran up to the grate and realized that I didn’t quite no what to say. She hadn’t stolen my card, per say, so in my saddest voice I tried to get the cop to turn around and help, “That lady accidentally stole my swipe and now I can’t get on the subway!” He gave me a look that was something like I-Never-Thought-These-Would-Be-The-Sort-of-Favors-I-Would-
Spend-My-Days-Granting,

and then he let me through.

***

Ok, there is a reason I don’t write memoir.

Oops, too late!

Cohen titles every post on her blog with a different almost-plausible name of a small press:

On the Lam and Eating Pie Press

When I Try and Turn Off My Phone It Calls My Dad’s Doctor Press

My Press Will Increase Your Adoring Fans Press

You get the idea.  If you live in New York City, $650 Apartment for $650 is pretty much the best place to get daily information on poetry readings and other nifty arts&culture stuff.

Angela Madsen is a paraplegic from California who recently completed a trans-Atlantic crossing via two-person rowboat and is now training for the Beijing Paralympics here in Philadelphia:

My journey to Beijing and the Paralympics

I haven’t written in a while and my friends have begun to worry about me. I could write an entire chapter on my experiance here so far but I am just going to summarize. I set out for Philladelphia quite a while ago and it has not been going so well. Some parts have gotten better and some things are just plain stressfull. For those who do not know, there is more to my life than being a disabled veteran, than ocean rowing, running an adaptive rowing program or even surfing. I have competed on our national adaptive rowing team since 2002 and my US rowing partner since 2002 is Scott Brown. Scott lives and works in Philadelphia. Since we don’t recieve a great deal of money, sponsorship or support as disabled athletes I decided to relocate to Philadelphia for training with Scott. This enables Scott to remain employed while we train. We get on the water before he goes to work and then again after his work. It just seemed to make more sense than both of us leaving our home, our family and our work to train. Scott and his wife Sandy are appropriately appreciative of the sacrafices I have made for our national team and for our sport.I searched on Craigs list, called the Disabled Veterans Organizations, the Veterans Hospaital and even affiliate churches to my church in Long Beach to find an accessible room or apartment to rent here in Philly and had no success. After living in my van for almost 2 weeks I finally found a place to live. After spending 67 days in the small boat at sea with no plumbing, living in the van is a piece of cake. The van, by comparrison is a mansion with its many amenities , I could do it easily, but why?

. . .

Read the rest of the story on Angela’s blog: RowofLife.net

Blognettes are true stories blogged around the web and excerpted (unedited except for length) here at the First Person Arts blog. See (or blog yourself) a compelling, funny or revealing true story? Send us a link, and we may feature it as a Blognette!

The mavens of “sketch documentary” at Shmitten Kitten (I think I might know a “puppy pimp“, by the way) also collect reader-submitted stories. This one’s a doozy:

On Halloween, I decided to be Spongebob, so I went out and got a HUGE authentic foam costume. It was more for crashing into annoying bikini-clad I’m a-cowgirl/naughty cop/nurse/fairy sorority bimbos at parties than anything else. So the costume was a hit and after much party hopping West Philly-style, I managed to fall down stairs, twice–although both times I saved my beer with no spillage!–and also got puked on by one of the aforementioned bimbos. [Ed. note from Anna: It's sounds like me at my sister's wedding last year. Hey-O!]

So I wasn’t so cute by the time I blacked out because my knee was bleeding profusely from the second stair fall, and my yellow costume was now a certain shade of brown. When daylight broke, I awoke to find myself on a couch in some strange bedroom. To my horror, it was a fraternity house, and THANK GOD no one was sleeping next to me, as I had the worst hangover in the history of my alcohol-consuming career.

In full Spongebob attire, I tried to gather my things and figure out where the hell I was. I only managed to find one heel–yes, I wore stilettos and a mini skirt with my Spongebob foam costume. I started to go outside and stumbled down the stairs in one heel, with dried blood streaks all over my legs, puke and beer stains all over my costume and raccoon eyes from sleeping with my make-up on. Little did I know that the annual Powelton Village Clean-Up was going on, which is when every fraternity, sorority, and student organization on Drexel’s campus walks around West Philly/Drexel picking up trash.

It gets worse from there…

This one bears retelling at our “Worst Ever” Story Slam in August, but in the meantime, if you’ve got a true story that needs telling–in a couple of photos, 5 minutes of video, or 1500 words–make an impression at impressions.firstpersonarts.org.