Advertisement With humor and solemnity, Terry Visger, Sara Slayton and Lynn Wing share the stories of how they viewed and tried to understand events that marked an era of change.
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Veteran storytellers Lynn Wing, Sara Slayton and Terry Visger, from left, will reprise their show, "Three Boomer Broads: Remembering While We Still Can" on June 12-13 at the Pump House Regional Arts Center in La Crosse.
Contributed photo |
The three expert storytellers are members of the Bluff Country Talespinners storytellers guild who wanted to do more with the stories they had and bring them to a larger audience. They said their first show in March was a huge success, and they decided to bring it back. They might even do a sequel in the near future.
Slayton, a La Crosse resident, recalls how the fog that enveloped her while being tear-gassed as a 16-year-old bystander during anti-war protests in Madison brought clarity to her identity.
When she was growing up, Visger, a La Crescent resident, struggled to understand the hatred shown to two young black men who dared to sit in her grandmother’s restaurant.
Wing, a Holmen resident, found how the training wheels on her little bicycle kept coming back to haunt her in the cycles of life as she strained to stay upright and on the straight and narrow path through all the turmoil. “I’ve led a sheltered life,” Wing quipped. “I have always been lifted and separated.”
Loosely woven throughout the show is the theme of a loss of innocence. With songs, pictures and humor, the show aims to bring out the fun of remembering the silliness, such as mothers who sprinkled water on clothes, then put them into the freezer before ironing them, or how children sat and stared at the test patterns before TV programming began in the morning.
These are the fun aspects of the storytelling part of the show, but Slayton, whose husband Paul Heckman, directs the show, said it is much more.
“We want people to walk out with more than just remembering, but to examine how each of us moved through it and found our own way, found our identity,” Slayton said.
The three women have found their identity as friends through the storytelling and staging of their lives. The relationship they share is strong and heartfelt.
“Although we did all these things and shared with the nation all these events, we are still very distinct women in our adult lives,” Wing said.
“And those similarities are very binding,” Slayton added.
“And we respect those differences,” Wing said.
The shared experiences bring to life the memories of those in the audience. Slayton said that after one of their March performances, one man told her he felt like he could have stood up and joined them on stage.
