On Monday night, around 15 students gathered together inside the WestCo café to listen to the folktales of Tom Lee, professional storyteller. Sitting modestly on a stool in front of a graffiti-stained wall of the café, Lee briefly introduced himself to the students before beginning his tales.
From Chester, Connecticut, Lee had performed on a college campus only once before, at UConn few weeks ago. This was his first time performing at Wesleyan.
To the surprise and delight of the students, the perpetually-locked doors to WestCo’s tunnels (located outside of the café) were propped open. Lee took pleasure in the eeriness surrounding the café that night.
“That is such a folktale thing,” Lee said, referring to these “forbidden corridors” being mysteriously unlocked for a single night.
The first folktale that Lee told originated in Scotland. Taking place “once upon a time,” of course, the tale involves a jealous Queen who resents her stepdaughter’s beauty. The Queen’s hen wife, the woman who delivers the eggs to the palace (always a sinister figure in Scottish tales, Lee explained), offers to help her, saying that “beauty, like a jewel, can be stolen if the thief is clever enough.”
Ever a clever thief, the hen wife manages, through the use of her cauldron, to transform the princess’s head into the head of a hideous sheep. The Queen’s own daughter, Kate, is appalled at her mother’s behavior and leaves the palace where “cruelty wears a crown” to find a new home with her sister.
The sisters are allowed to move into another palace on the condition that Kate will find a cure for the King’s dying son. By spying on the prince for three nights, Kate discovers that the prince sleepwalks at midnight to a strange ballroom within a nearby hill where he is forced to dance until he nearly dies from exhaustion. In this same ballroom, Kate overhears the henwife, who is there telling stories with two other hags, explaining the cure both for Kate’s stepsister (to hit her over the head three times with a certain stick) and for the prince (to feed him three bites of a certain goose). Kate succeeds in curing them both. The tale ends with the double wedding of Kate and the prince and the stepsister and the prince’s older brother, all of whom live “happily ever after.”
After this story Lee explained more about his history with storytelling. While living in Scotland and making a living by cooking fish, Lee began to translate Grimm fairy tales in order to learn German. One of his friends, captivated by his narration of “Rapunzel” (one of the Grimm tales he had translated), encouraged him to tell stories professionally. He began by performing in London pubs and then moved back to the United States to perform for children.
“Everything I really learned about stories I learned from telling them to kids,” Lee said, explaining that with children one must continually shift between comedy and drama in order to hold their attention.
Lee said that he has about 500 different folktales in his memory from which to choose. Though he began his career by telling only Grimm tales, the gifted storyteller now knows folktales from all over the world, including those in the African and Native American traditions.
Spellbound by the first story, the audience pressed Lee to tell another. He decided to tell a story which he had not told in ten years because, like the atmosphere surrounding WestCo café, it reminded him of the Blair Witch Project.
“It’s a horrible story,” he said, “I have no idea why I’m telling you the story, but it’s the one you’re gonna get.”
The story was a Grimm tale involving a Blackbeard-esque sorcerer who kills each of his mistresses when they disobey him by going into the room where he stores the slashed bodies of his previous girlfriends. The sorcerer is finally outsmarted by a young woman who sneaks into the forbidden room without the sorcerer’s knowledge, brings her two sisters (who had lived with the sorcerer before her) back to life by piecing their limbs together, and then disguises herself as a bird to escape the palace.
Lee told the folktales simply, embodying his characters without exaggeration or excessive drama. He sold his CD, “Telling Stories,” after the performance, telling students they could pay whatever they wanted for the CD, even if it was only $1.
The students responded to Lee enthusiastically.
“I’m not really familiar with the storytelling medium,” said Vincent Vecchione ’07, “[but] I wish there were more events like this [at Wesleyan].”
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