From a tragic look at the hidden costs of funerals to retelling a near-death travel experience involving a parasite, community members shared stories at the Word Buffet open mic event on Wednesday.
Hosted at Noyes Cultural Arts Center, the monthly event provides an opportunity to share poetry, novel excerpts, lyrics, memories and more.
Rogers Park resident Judy Parker, a tour guide and actress, performed two personal narratives. The first was a story about crashing her car in a cornfield on the way to pick up her father at the airport, and the second was a comedy piece about the tragedy of getting old.
Parks has performed at Word Buffet more than three times. She said that reading her work at open mics supports her writing process.
“When you keep practicing, you find out that almost every time you read it, you will edit or change something, you’ll switch words around, you might switch the sentence around, you might cut it out (and) you might add things,” Parker said. “A lot of things that you’re writing, it has a rhythm.”
Evanston resident Archana Lal-Tabak is an integrative medicine physician and psychiatrist. At the open mic, she shared a personal story of how she relied on a combination of her network of friends in medicine, decades of medical experience and social media to help recover from a gash on her face and broken tooth after falling on a walk.
Lal-Tabak said she felt that the experience represented a positive moment where all of her work and life experiences came together.
“Storytelling for me is very healing, I find, being a psychiatrist and being a physician who works with feelings and stories and trauma,” Lal-Tabak said. “When I first started storytelling, I realized, ‘My goodness, that was really emotional.’”
Lal-Tabak called herself a natural storyteller. In her first story, performed at Evanston SPACE, Lal-Tabak discussed coming from India to the United States. She also spoke about her parents, who were refugees in India, and going to Diwali, the Indian festival of lights. She said her storytelling style is spontaneous, so her friend helped her modify and edit the story.
Word Buffet is supported by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency that develops public arts policy, fosters arts programming and approves grants expenditure. Evanston’s Community Arts Program Coordinator Angela Allyn said that Word Buffet started after the pandemic because there weren’t a lot of live open mics available.
Now, the open mic scene is growing, Allyn said. She added that Word Buffet has hosted a wide variety of performers, from a magician practicing his patter to a woman reading her journal entries from 30 years ago.
“We are very welcoming of any form of storytelling,” Allyn said.
Word Buffet is hosted monthly, but is paused during the summer. The next Word Buffet will take place at Noyes Art Center at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 7.
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