Storyteller Entertains At The Library

By Kendra Bobowick

“Can you point out where the moon should be, that quiet luminescence overhead?” asked Chris Fascione. As he entertained children with his animated stories Friday, July 20, at the C.H. Booth Library, he next prompted them all to help him “make that squeaky-door sound.”

He told them tales about kings, the wind, the wise man, farmers, and strange noises at night. Soon, he was asking for volunteers, drawing children from the group to play voice roles in his next story, including a cow, a sheep, and a rooster.

Teasing his volunteer cast, he said, “You all have a part in this story that may not be true — it’s a folktale, it’s fiction — but we can all learn something, and that’s called the moral.”

With children adding the animals’ voices to his tale, he talked about a farmer who could not sleep with the noisy wind and rain from a storm to keep him awake. He eventually gathered his livestock from the barn and brought his cow and rooster and sheep inside, but the animals just added to the commotion. Soon the farmer insisted: “Go back out!” With his animals back in the barn, the farmer realized, “It seems so quiet…”

Mr Fascione said, “What’s the moral? ‘It could always be worse.’”

By 4 pm on Friday afternoon, Mr Fascione had a roomful of parents and children laughing and clapping as he next talked about a stonecutter who wanted to be as mighty as the sun. Mr Fascione acted out the story of the stonecutter looking up at the sun, then saw the sun blocked by a cloud, the cloud blown away by the wind, the wind cut short by a mountain, and the mountain soon cut down by the stonecutter to answer the question, “Who is most powerful of all?” Not the sun or the clouds or the wind or the mountain, but the stonecutter — just a man with his chisel. He told the children: “So, whenever I think I want to be somebody else, guess what, I like me just the way I am.”

Concluding his storytelling by encouraging the group to read, he said, “This was my first visit to Newtown, and you were great.”

According his website, JugglingFunnyStories.com, “Nationally known story-performer Chris Fascione acts out the best of classical and contemporary children’s literature and folktales in fun-filled, participatory shows tailored for specific age groups or family audiences. His unique combination of storytelling, mime, juggling and comedy creates colorful characters from literature who tell their stories as laughter abounds.”

He “Brings Literature to Life!” as he acts out stories his audience can then check out from the school or local library, his website explains.