Address Your Audience as Your Grandchildren

Last night at the RPCV (Return Peace Corps Volunteers) storytelling gathering, I realized that hearing the "Important Date in Peace Corps History" story wasn't the same as reading it in print--because I'm there looking like the grandmother of the woman experiencing it!  Getting it in print, the reader could see the young me, but hearing it from me was another experience--maybe a little creepy!  Who was this 69-year-old woman acting out the antics of a recent college graduate?  Here's part of the story:

I liked being trapped in the rain with Jim.  I started singing a song from The Fantastiks.  “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” described finding shelter in the rain and ended with these lines:

And we'll not complain
If it never stops at all.
We'll live and love
Within our own four walls.

            I loved musicals and knew a show tune for every occasion.

            But on that occasion a very nice Filipino-American couple saw us from their living room window, and the husband came across the street with an umbrella and invited us into their home.   They gave us clothes to wear while our wet ones were in their dryer.  They also invited us back to have dinner with them and to meet a friend who did authentic Hawaiian dancing.

            Were Jim and I a couple? I wondered.  That felt good—even if he wasn’t a foreigner!

            Then came our final days in Hawaii—in Honolulu, where we were given three days—like a furlough-- before leaving the United States to serve in a foreign land.    We travelled as a group, of course, but we were sometimes given moments and even hours alone.

I've decided to address the audience as my grandchildren.  I'll say something like this:

Okay, grandchildren, gathering 'round!  Grandmommy's gonna tell you a story.  That's what grandmommies are for.  And this story is about an important date in Peace Corps history!  It's one I went on in January 1970, and the guy who took me on this date said it was the best date he'd ever had!  No, I'm sorry!  This is not a plot spoiler, but it wasn't your granddaddy though he and I have had some pretty good dates too.

This one began in Hawaii.  (and on it will go)

I am no longer the Kate Winslet Rose in The Titanic.  I am now closer to the Gloria Stuart Old Rose.