In my early 20s, after a year and a half in England, and four months in France, I returned to the United States and got a job at Camp Shenandoah in northern Virginia. The camp served boys with developmental disabilities. My partner that summer was a Christian Eagle Scout with conservative political beliefs. He was from Mississippi, and I am from Rhode Island. I've always been kind of scruffy, but Dan was neat and clean, even after a night in the woods with our campers. We could not have been more different, but we got along because we shared the same cynical sense of humor.

Once a week, each group of campers were required to put together and perform a skit for a camp-wide show. I found I enjoyed the challenge of creating something interesting with children who had limited verbal skills. I liked acting as narrator for our little stories and being in front of an audience.

At the end of the summer, a few of us went cave-exploring in West Virginia. Although we took the necessary precautions, we got stuck in a cave overnight. It wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds. The park rangers had told us to stay put if anything happened. They knew where we were going, and when we should have been back. Dan badly sprained his right ankle. So we had to spend the night. Food and water was not a problem, but we turned off our flashlights to save power. The cave was not completely black–it was a deep blue, like dusk on a November evening in Vermont. There must have been phosphorescence in the cave, but we just thought it was magic. In the distance, we could hear the sound of running water.

To pass the time, we told stories. I talked about my grandmother, Florence Stea, who grew up in Russia at the time of the Revolution. One icy winter morning, she set off for school. As she approached a bridge, she saw a group of Cassocks, the Czar's troops, marching toward the bridge from the opposite direction. Steam rose from the river and chunks of ice flew up in the air, tossed by the wild rapids. If she had continued to walk, she would have met the soldiers in the middle of the bridge. Some sixth sense told her to turn back, so she went home. 

My great-grandmother was a strict woman, and she believed that children should go to school, no matter what the weather. That day she made an exception to her rule. In the afternoon, my grandmother learned that a combination of the extreme cold, and the vibrations from the marching men, had caused the bridge to collapse. All the Cassocks died.

When I was in second grade, Grandma Stea sent me a copy of "Danny Kaye's Around the World Storybook." Each section of this big blue book with a red binding contained stories from a different part of the world. I read the stories over and over again, until I almost knew them by heart. The very first tale I ever told in public, when I was 19, was from Danny Kaye's book. 

"The Wonderful Pear Tree" is set in China. A wandering monk, using magic, teaches a stingy farmer a lesson. I love revenge stories, so I told it at an open storytelling evening hosted by Brother Blue at the Arlington Street Church in Boston. Nobody understood the point of the story, so I did not perform again for a few years.

That night in the cave, when we shifted from family stories to more traditional fare, I told tales from the around-the-world-book. I shared "The Light in the Window," "The King Who Believed Everything," and "Euwengulama." As the night wore on, I remembered more and more. I was not alone--the cave, the blue light and the flowing water released stories and memories that we had never revealed to anyone. It was as if a river of stories had started flowing in each of us. When the rangers came the next morning, we didn’t want to leave. "Can't we just tell a few more stories?" In the cave, that night, I became a storyteller.

Unfortunately, the cave story is not true. I did work with Dan and my grandmother did send me the book, but I have never been in a cave. Humans crave simple and straight-forward explanations of why things happen the way they do. I am now going to tell you the truth about my storytelling career. At this point, you have every right to question my veracity. After all, how can you know for sure that the cave story is not true, and the one I’m about to tell you is the made up one? I will have to convince you with the telling of the tale.

The story is a creation myth about a goddess named Pam Henderson who makes our world from her dead skin. My version is very loosely based on a Polynesian myth about a god who creates the world from his dead skin and then lets his brother put noses on the first man and the first woman. The brother puts the noses on upside-down.

The Polynesian myth was from Danny Kaye's book, so I thought about other stories from the same volume. I chose a couple of stories and told them at the next show, and then over and over again, to different audiences. I discarded what didn’t work and added things that did. Eventually I got confident enough in my abilities to start creating my own material. I also incorporated songs, poetry, and games into my show. 

Through it all, my grandmother's gift has remained important. One of my jobs as a storyteller, is to pass on that gift and keep the stories circulating.