Story Salon is Los Angeles’s longest running storytelling venue. What began as an alternative to stand-up clubs and self-conscious performance spaces has been challenging performers and audiences for more than a decade. Created in a North Hollywood coffee house Story Salon now reaches the globe through Podcasting, publishing, and recordings.
The rules of the Story Salon haven’t changed since it started: Five to seven minutes of original material performed by the author. The result is a unique blend of observation, memoir and comment that makes the Salon one of the most eclectic entertainment experiences available. More than a dozen solo theater works have been developed at Story Salon, as well as a CD of stories, and several books.
“Live storytelling is a unique art form,” says Story Salon founder, writer/actor/comedian Beverly Mickins. “Words spoken aloud paint pictures capable of evoking laughter and tears, the whole range of emotion. People have been telling each other stories since the first campfires, talking about the whole mix of things, important and trivial, that go into making life. Storytelling is one of the ways we figure out how to be human.”
Collected here for the first time in The Story Salon Big Book of Stories are more than forty original pieces first performed by their authors at Story Salon. It’s an omnibus of memories, rants, affirmations, and shaggy-dog stories that once opened is impossible to shut.
The writer/performers of Story Salon include actors, comedians, musicians, photographers, war correspondents, students, life coaches, former clowns, recovering attorneys, one admitted juggler, an international fashion model, several husbands and wives, and one mother and daughter as well as American Comedy Award-winning comedian/writer Cathy Ladman, Emmy Award winning writer Joseph Dougherty, and Story Salon’s producers: Beverly Mickins, innovative Podcaster Lance Anderson, and popular writer/comedian Dan Farren. The writer/performers of Story Salon “In Order of Appearance in The Story Salon: Big Book of Stories”.
Marsha Clark
Julio Martinez
Moira Quirk
R.M. Johnson
Lauri Fraser
Joseph Dougherty
Jessica Bern
Howard Leff
Mary Kennedy
Dan Farren
Cathy Ladman
Bill Sperling
Donna Allen Figueroa
Ellen Cox
Shelley-Anne Wooderson
Shelby Lee Jenkins
Frances Peach
Libbe S. HaLevy
Judi Lee Brandwein
Paula P. Small
Paul Jacek
Marsha Lenox
Suzee Seeds
Richard Tanner
Clay Bravo
Paul Candice
Skylar Lenox
Jennifer Skobin
Lori Weiss
Les Kurkendaal
Debbie McGowan
Kate McHugh
Winfield C. Goulden
Dan Tirman
Tony Figueroa
Michael C. Rayner
Steve Robinson
Sofia Carias
Nigel Paice
Michael Dressler
Bernadette F. Cummings
Lance Anderson
Beverly Mickins