Asheville Shout-Out

I have to say, I hate it that this story happened in my (first) hometown, but you've gotta love Asheville women. She followed him in her car?!?

Last-Minute Gifts Not Found at the Mall

Some local-ish vendors I'd recommend:

Yee-Haw Industries on Gay Street in Knoxville, TN for gorgeous (and one-of-a-kind) letterpress posters, journals, stationery, and fine art prints

Mast General Store on Gay Street in Knoxville, TN for retro candy, Appalachian kitsch, and outdoor gear, plus a two-pack of cozy Christmas socks for $9.99

Boones Creek Potters' Gallery on Boones Creek Road in Johnson City/Jonesborough, TN for beautiful locally-made pitchers, plates, jewelry, wooden spoons, and ornaments

James-Ben Gallery in Greeneville, TN for ceramics, woodcraft, prints, and handmade toys

All of these spots have yielded up a treasure-trove of outstanding last-minute gifts for me in years past. Not that I'm a last-minute shopper or anything. I'd love to hear more suggestions so I can post them earlier next year.

Merry Christmas to all!

Doc Watson at the Down Home

If you haven't been before, go to this show. Either one of them, actually; he plays an early one and a late one. He's amazing, and we can't go this year, and we'd love to experience it vicariously through you. We saw Doc play at the DH a few years ago, and it was a wonderful live music experience that will be hard to ever recreate. Then we saw him again at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco with hundreds of thousands of people who celebrated his performance with a jubilant standing ovation (and when you're lying on a blanket on a beautiful day in Golden Gate Park, you know a standing o. takes some effort). And you can see him right here, in Johnson City, with a hundred other people, from just a few feet away.

If you haven't heard his Legacy collection (a 3-disc set), I can't recommend it strongly enough. It's full of Docs's favorite songs and stories, which are gently encouraged and curated by David Holt, his frequent collaborator. We met George Winston in Chattanooga a few years ago, and I asked him what album he would listen to if he were stranded on a desert island, and the Legacy collection was his number one choice. That's when I bought it for my dad as a birthday present, and took it from him after he listened to it a couple of times, and my dad hasn't seen it since.

Marquee of the Week

I've seen this one many times before, but it's a classic.

Shame looks down

Worry looks around

Faith looks up.

From Highway 11E in Washington County. Where else would it be from?

AppyLove goes National

Not really. But I did participate in an AP interview about the Storycorps Project, one of my favorite things in the whole world, which was picked up by USA Today as well as several of our local papers. Even though the quotes in the article don't do justice to the overwhelming goodness of my grandmother's buttermilk biscuits, I am really lucky to have gotten to talk about interviewing her; it was a singular and humbling experience. In a world of instant information, constant contact, social media, and viral videos, it's transformative to sit and listen to someone from a completely different generation talk about the way things used to be, or to sit and listen to someone you've talked to your whole life tell you things you never would have known otherwise.

If you don't listen to NPR, you can find out about the Storycorps Project, which was founded by MacArthur fellow Dave Isay, here. Happy listening.

Cookeville-Bound

It's been a banner year for Greeneville Football all the way down to the middle school level. The kicker for the middle school team is one of my students this year--a beautiful and hilarious soccer girl whose kicks (legend has it) were so powerful, the football team recruited her after the ball she was kicking kept leaping from the soccer field to the football field.

And this weekend, Greeneville High School is headed to its first state championship football game in Cookeville. There is a sweet little video about it here. If you love friday night lights in general, there's also a well-crafted NPR series covering high school football around the country here.

Kenny Tedford, Storyteller

Eighth graders sit, legs crossed, on an outdated linoleum floor, their eyes riveted on Kenny Tedford, a 56-year old storyteller and a graduate student in ETSU’s world-renowned storytelling program. His tales come to life with humor, movement, and sound effects, and today he’s telling the kids about a young girl named Alice, who convinced Abraham Lincoln he’d look more presidential if he grew a beard.

Kenny finishes his story with a trademark word of inspiration to his audience. “You can do anything you set your mind to, just like Alice. Even one child can make a difference,” he says. The kids lean in, transfixed. “Just be careful how you tell someone they’re ugly.”

The cafeteria rings with laughter, but as the story comes to a close, no one claps.

Instead, the kids raise both hands above their heads, twisting them back and forth. Kenny bows. They are acknowledging his performance with American Sign Language applause, because Kenny Tedford is deaf.

The two hundred hearing children in the cafeteria know how to show Kenny their appreciation because he teaches them the sign before he begins his tale-telling. “I’m deaf,” he says. “Love it.” The kids giggle, mostly because it’s unheard of, at their age of thirteen, to both acknowledge and embrace your own flaws, and they instantly fall in love with Kenny for his candor and self-deprecation before his story even gets off the ground. As he explains the sign for applause, he asks, “Can you hear me back there? ‘Cause I can’t hear me up here!” The kids laugh, and practice applauding, their skinny teenage wrists twisting at the ends of their long, gawky arms.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Growing up in the fifties, Kenny explains, he was placed in classes for mentally handicapped students, left in the back row with what he calls a “magical crayon” that helped him embrace his creativity, even though he was trapped in a silent world. As his teachers and parents realized the extent of his true abilities and he was moved into mainstream classrooms, his flair for drama and humor revealed itself, and he was recognized as a child with a gift.

His talent for making others laugh has come in handy through the years, with life throwing one obstacle after another in his way. His parents both died within months of one another when he was in second grade. The woman who became his foster mother died before his senior year of high school. It was hard for him to be motivated to finish school, but he credits his foster mother’s own determination as well as his strong faith for his decision to complete his high school education. He says that he became a Christian as a junior in high school, and his spirituality gave him strength. “When my foster mother died, I was mad at God,” he quips, “Even though I had only known him a year.” Even in discussing the tragedies of his childhood, his irresistible, inspirational sense of humor is evident.

After high school, Kenny’s path took the unexpected twists and turns of an entertainer’s life, each bringing him closer to his current work as a storyteller. He received a bachelor’s degree in theatre at the University of Tennessee, worked for the office of the Governor, became a comedian and a motivational speaker. In the meantime, he fought personal battles with heart problems and is a ten-year cancer survivor.

For a time, Kenny traveled and spoke to crowds with his friend Marty, a quadriplegic entertainer. Through humor, the duo spoke to people about determination, respect, and the will to overcome, until Marty was killed in a car accident. Sometimes, when Kenny starts feeling depressed about his deafness, he says, he can sense Marty’s admonition to get over it. When he talks about Marty, in fact, it’s hard to tell whether Kenny will laugh or cry. In the end, he sums it up this way. “Marty was always with me in his wheelchair, and we talked to people like that, and we could laugh at each other.” He knows now, he says, “that anytime I’m talking to people, telling a story, he’s standing with me now. Not in his wheelchair, but standing with me.”

The devastating trials of loss and struggles with his own health frustrate Kenny less because of any penchant for wallowing—he doesn’t have one—but because there is so much he wants to do, and such limited time in which to do it. He tells me that there are hundreds of thousands of deaf children in the United States, but only two psychiatric counseling centers that specialize in providing support to children with hearing loss. One of his dreams is to establish a faith-based center to address this need. He imagines a future of traveling around the world to tell stories to the hearing and non-hearing, and expanding his audience through audio recordings, print, and film.

In the next year, Kenny will finish his graduate program at ETSU. He’s got big plans for life after graduate school. His first is a capstone project, an interactive storytelling production based on the life of his grandmother, Birtie Tedford. He talks about following her around everywhere as a young kid, because, he says, “I had never seen anyone so wrinkled.” In the show, he'll perform as Great Granny Parker. The character will work as a theatrical vehicle to deliver stories about his own childhood—its graces and grinds. He envisions the first production here in the Tri-Cities, with his audience of children around the rocking chair, snapping beans while the yarn spins around them, weaving them into a world where Kenny Tedford, a child born without hearing, grew up to tell the greatest stories of all.