D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2010
 |
She recalls vividly the light-bulb moment.
"I was having dinner with my dad one night," Mariam Weidner remembers, "and he started into his stories, which he always had done. As kids, we just kind of ignored him. We'd roll our eyes and say: 'Oh there goes Dad again!' But this time it dawned on me that these really were good stories. And I asked myself: 'Why haven't I paid attention to them before?'" The now-middle-aged daughter was motivated to set up a tape recorder and made an audiotape of her dad sharing bittersweet memories of his youth.
 |
Mariam Weidner in her Silver City office. (Photo by Richard Mahler) |
With exacting detail, George Weidner described how, as a 10-year-old, he hawked newspapers on street corners in order to help his family survive the Great Depression. He recalled the days, before marrying Mariam's mother, when he performed as a entertainer on Midwestern radio and in night clubs, rubbing shoulders with singer Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day. It was said that he was a "dead-ringer" for Buddy Ebsen, a hoofer and singer decades before gaining celebrity as the star of TV's "Beverly Hillbillies." George talked about his reluctant decision to abandon his ambitions as a professional dancer in order to settle down and start a family. When the draft drew George's partner into World War II, the duo put off their show-biz careers forever.
Unfortunately, it was the first and last recording Mariam ever made of her father.
"Even though I always thought I would," she sighs, "I never got around to taping him again." George had bone cancer, which spread quickly to other parts of his body. "By the time I was ready to record him a second time," Mariam laments, "his disease had progressed and his journey was close to its end." Her father's memory had grown fuzzy and fragmented. The stories, once told with smooth eloquence, were gone. The same was true for the memories once cherished by her mother, Betty, who died of Alzheimer's disease several years earlier.
It was a hard lesson. Everyone we care about has life-stories to tell. Sometimes, of course, meaningful anecdotes and whole chapters are never shared. A few, perhaps embedded in the atrocities of war or tragedies like sudden death, are buried too deep. Many people are convinced their memories will simply not interest anyone. Others share them with friends and family members who listen politely and nod their heads, but aren't really paying attention. And too often, by the time the audience is ready to listen attentively, a storyteller's recollections are muddled by a mind grown cloudy and confused by age, medication or dementia.
"Now," says Mariam, who grew up in the Cincinnati area, "I realize how much I appreciated my father's storytelling, especially about when he was a younger man. He revealed a side of himself I'd never known and described a period of history that I also didn't know."
Despite believing she "waited too long" to document some of George's most important stories, Mariam was able to create an endearing multimedia tribute to her father that preserves something of his essence. The four-minute video includes still photos, memorabilia, music and a narrated script. Images linked to the elder Weidner include those of a stylish golf watch, favorite musical score, commemorative class ring, and scarf knitted by his daughter while she kept him company during his last days. One old photo shows a smiling, handsome George in a dark suit and rakish hat, linked arms-to-shoulder with four other exuberant young men in a sort of conga line. You can tell in an instant that these limber-limbed fellows loved to dance.
"But my dad deliberately exchanged his [dancing] career for marriage," says Mariam. "A central theme of his life was sacrifice."
Such essential threads are now teased from the tapestry of lives unfurled during intimate interviews Mariam Weidner conducts for Moving Life Stories, the business she founded with Maine-based partner Joan Chadbourne after George Weidner's death. Chadbourne, author of the forthcoming Healing Conversations Toward End-of-Life, is a psychologist and trainer in intergenerational conversations.
"My father was kind of my inspiration," says Mariam, seated before a humming laptop computer at the kitchen table of the home she shares with her adult son on a Silver City cul-de-sac. One of Mariam's two dogs is romping happily beyond a sliding-glass door in the backyard, where a 64-foot-wide stone labyrinth is modeled upon the original Crusades-era structure in France's medieval cathedral at Chartres. The labyrinth is a source of meditative solace for its owner and visitors alike.
"I came to an 'ah-hah' about what gifts our stories are to people," Mariam explains, her soft features coalescing into a pensive look. It took a while: Mariam's dad died more than five years ago. "We shouldn't wait," she insists. "When asked to share, people will often think of somebody else's story they'd like to hear. But people are less conscious of the value of their own stories. They don't think of them as being important or as a gift to other people."
Mariam feels passionate about altering this tendency to minimize our own worth. The result is an endeavor that helps individuals, couples, friends, families and even organizations capture and preserve the essence of a specific person's life or life experiences.
Mariam and Chadbourne engage in a collaborative process that begins with a conversation about what meaningful stories a client might share and how a multimedia production is shaped. Working closely with each person, one or more interviews are scheduled and conducted in a respectful, compassionate and appreciative manner. This non-judgmental listening helps draw out the client's innermost thoughts and feelings, even on sensitive topics. In contrast to an oral history, the factual accuracy of the account is less important than its meaning to the storyteller. The resultant audio or video is edited and transcribed, then integrated with elements that may include archival photos, home movies, appropriate music and pictures of objects important to that person. Moving Life Stories creates a script for narration by the client and synthesizes these into an audiotape, mini-movie, booklet and/or slide show.
"What do I get out of it?" Mariam asks rhetorically. "What really feeds me is when somebody learns something new, when he or she comes to a deeper understanding and appreciation of themselves. I am fed when I am able to facilitate their gifts, and to ignite that spark that many of us never see or acknowledge."
Mariam, a founding member of the Digital Storytelling Association, has much experience as an interviewer — but in a profession with which many of us may be unfamiliar.
"I was a qualitative research consultant," she declares. "I did this for Proctor & Gamble," the Cincinnati-based consumer-products giant responsible for such universal brands as Tide detergent, Gillette razors and Crest toothpaste. Mariam still freelances in the field in addition to conducting workshops in corporate training and creativity.
"In the market-research industry," she says, "companies want to understand the needs, desires and emotions that people have in relation to a product or service the businesses are interested in providing. Qualitative research occurs when you conduct a focus group or go into someone's home for in-depth interviewing.... I thoroughly enjoyed these one-on-one interviews. I learned how to go deep with people and truly understanding what the hearts of their stories were, even though we might be talking about something like toilet paper."