Looking Ahead with a New Story.

 

spring is showing itself around here!
welcome!!!

Since the 1970s I have worked with various album formats - from scrap-books to digital movie to oral history and personal stories - as a way to capture and keep the stories of my family and personal life.

Now I am working on a new personal story. These stories are like albums for me - reviewing memory pictures are like sorting old photos and arranging them on an album page to tell a story from the past. 

I hope that my work encourages others to capture and record - in writing or recording - their stories.

A glimpse of the new story - write up from the press release.

" Love Notes"

Happily Ever After is a matter of perspective.

A 1954 blind date between an 18-year-old nursing student and a fresh faced Johns Hopkins medical student launched Ellouise and Jim on a lifetime together.  

Love Notes, a one--widow show performed by Ellouise Schoettler, is a funny and touching journey of a 57-year marriage traversing through the peaks and valleys of the marriage vow. 

Death? It's not a clean break.

I have been thinking about this story and writing notes about it for almost a year. Now I am going public with it.

The story will it premiere June 4  at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, VA

It is scheduled at Stories in the Round, Hagerstown, MD in August. It will be one of my performances as Storyteller-in-Residence, International Storytellers Theater in Jonesborough, TN in September and at Tales in the Village come 2016 Valentines Day. 

I love the discipline and excitement of shaping and telling a new story. This one is going to be funny and heart-warming but it is difficult to thread through all the days of our long marriage and pick out the incidences I want to include. This is the tough part of a "sentimental journey."  

Tears go along with the working-it-out stage as well as lovely memories. 
57 years slipped by so quickly. 
Hardly time to savor and appreciate all the blessings.