On The Stoop at Centerstage

The floods is threat'ning 
My very life today 
Gimme, gimme shelter 
Or I'm gonna fade away

 --“Gimme Shelter”, The Rolling Stones

As the saying goes, “Everyone has a story.” Though more often than not, they remain untold. It’s simply a matter of modern life. A thousand things a day, we invest ourselves in future and present concerns. Stories, economically, have little place in either.  Which is not to say that we don’t desire to hear them; all that’s needed is a place and time to be set aside.

Baltimore’s The Stoop provides such a place and time. A forum devoted to stories – of Baltimore and by Baltimoreans – The Stoop brings stories into venues where they can be heard and it’s been at it for a long time. On the iTunes podcast page, The Stoop has over 300 stories available.

This past Monday night at Centerstage, The Stoop, in partnership with Earl’s Place, hosted Gimme Shelter: Stories about finding, creating, and losing a home.

Laura Wexler and Jessica Henkin produced and co-hosted; music was by Small Sur; and stories by Joe Chalmers, Faith Ward, Scott Dance, Tonier Cain, Luke Wesby, Julie Hackett, and Meg Adams.

Each speaker is given around three to five minutes on stage. This limited time plus lack of notes presses the speakers into being economical and essential without sacrificing spontaneity. The format gives rise to simple profundities, all the more believable because they originate from believable, sympathetic persons open and vulnerable before an audience.

Meg Adams told of her time living at the South Pole Station in Antarctica, her frozen clothes and highly-flammable living quarters. Of this extreme remote locale she said, “It is still a place I consider to be a home of mine.” In closing, Adams imparted, “I have faith in that home-feeling to exist even in the most remote ends of the earth.”

Luke Wesby, a lifetime Baltimore native, spoke of his experience of drug addiction, homelessness, recovery and his eventual homeownership. His turning point in addiction came when he was part of a five car pileup. He said he felt that at the time he “could not set still, so God set me still.” He recovered at Earl’s Place and eventually went on to own his own home. Looking back on his past life in contrast to his present he said gratefully, “Thank God I don’t have to live like that.”

Scott Dance related the story of how his family’s house in Timonium came to be. His Grandfather, Dick Hall who played for the Oriels, emigrated from Mazatlan into Baltimore. He built a house in Timonium and Dance fondly remembers the house as being a fixture in his childhood. Over the course of his life, the house was passed onto his parents, and then after a divorce, sold to a third party. He remembers that the “buyer loved the house very much.” Adding, “Whenever my grandmother wants to see it just one more time they let her in.”

Julie Hackett, now having worked for both the U.N. and the W.H.O, imparted a story of her family’s great difficulties in keep a home while she was young. Though she “felt that she came from a normal family,” she was taken out of school one day by her vice-principal, driven home and found “the façade of safety came crashing down.” She saw all of her belongings, her family’s belongings out on the curbside. Evicted, she said, “I entered the longest period of uncertainty in my young life.” Following that she went from one grandparent’s home to the other. Eventually her family arose from the turmoil and managed “not to be erased by the power of homelessness that destroys so many families.”

Part of The Stoop’s format involves audience member’s stories. Three are chosen by raffles to relate a story. Laura Roth Gormly, Ryan Wionko, and Holly Burkett were called to the stage in succession.

Gormly told her story of living and working on an orange farm. She lived uncomfortably in “wooden boxes infested with all manner of poisonous insects, cockroaches.” Walking one day with a friend she came upon an old abandoned house. Her grandfather, a constant cigar smoker, died on that same day, and so she was intrigued and touched to find in the house a wooden box of cigars and a lighter. Smoking a cigar from the box, she felt she was “made of cognizant of being a quest of the world.”

Wionko, not a native of Baltimore, but recently relocated here, related his having moved constantly, feeling that he never needed anything in particular and so simply moving along from place to place, gaining new experiences. Eventually finding himself in Baltimore, he fell in love with a woman in New York, think now, “Home is wherever you are that’s giving you what you need the most. Right now, for me it’s love.”

Burkett grew up on “a funny farm.” Her family’s was a supervisory care home for the mentally impaired. Schizophrenics populated her home life. Growing up she felt that her family was very strange and envied the Walton Family-like qualities in other homes. Eventually she came to understand that her family “really is like the Walton Family.” That family is about “the lessons instilled in us…. home really is where the heart is.”

Following the speakers from the audience, Joe Chalmers told of how his house was transformed into a kind of ad hoc foster home for kids semi-abandoned by their parents. His son began bringing in wayward kids from school and around the city. “Most people’s kids bring home stray puppies and kittens, not my kids, they brought home stray people,” said Chalmers. People began referring to him as “The Dad of Hanover”. The kids living in his home, lacking functional parents of their own, called him Dad or Father. “For all the craziness we had” he felt like it was still a family, a true home.

Faith Ward’s family has a cabin in the Adirondacks that serves as a kind of refuge from NYC. Her Grandfather built it in 1910 in a traditional style. Over his life the family would spend time there, convening and sharing. Her Father spent his last weeks there, comforted by the familiar surroundings. One of his last acts was to create a trust centered on caring for the house, keeping it alive.

The last storyteller of the night was Tonier Cain. Early on in life, growing up in Annapolis, she was surrounded by sexual assaults in a broken home. She said, “I created a belief system that I’d never be anything, never amount to anything.” Her siblings were split up into foster homes and she eventually became addicted to crack-cocaine and lived “underneath the bridge the governor had to drive over to get to his mansion.” Through a series of fortunate events, she learned to live differently. “When my belief system changed my thought process changed.” Through Habitat for Humanity she acquired her own home that she helped to build, saying, “We turned it into something you see in a fairy tale.” This shelter broke, she said, “the intergenerational curse in my family.” Of her own daughter, she wonders optimistically, “If it’s true that we learn by our environment will she give the same thing she’s been given?”

Overarching the night was the feeling of optimism and diversity among the story tellers. The meanings of shelter and home are as numerous as the stories about them. This multiplicity of experience is exactly what The Stoop is great for. Hearing the diversity of experience first-hand, distraction free and devotedly, opens up new understandings. One ultimately walks away from such a night with a new sense of humanity and possibility. We can go then about our thousand things a day and invest ourselves a bit more expansively.