Working Hard for the Money

Of the many roles I enjoy playing - friend, interviewer, daughter, writer - few suit me as well as audience member.

Tell jokes and I will laugh long and hard, assuming you're not corny. Play music for me, read poetry to me, lecture me and I will listen devotedly.

Tell me stories and I will walk over two and a half miles there and back on a cold night in a skirt and tights to hear them.

Balliceaux was hosting "Secretly Y'All, Tell Me a Story" with tonight's theme being "Guilds: Stories of the Trades" and the beneficiary of tonight's fundraising being Rag and Bones Bike Collective in Scott's Addition.

The crowd was huge tonight, so I snagged a seat in the third row and headed to the front bar to order food, namely pork carnitas and dark chocolate lava cake, a holdover from the '90s that seems terribly dated but did the trick addressing my chocolate needs.

New Belgium Brewing was sponsoring tonight's event, which meant their signs were everywhere, free samples at intermission and beer-infused specials like my carnitas.

It also meant that the first storyteller was a beer rep from New Belgium whose story, "By Way of Paul Harvey" had only a little to do with his last summer in Colorado with his dad before moving to Virginia and a lot to do with their new Ranger IPA.

Next came a familiar face, Mike from the Green Boys, whom I'd just heard play at the Silent Music Revival a few weeks ago.

A carpenter and furniture-maker by day, tonight he told a story called, "Romanticism Debunked" about how people perceive carpentry to be a romantic occupation.

"It's not, but I like to work hard to earn my money so it's okay. That's why I'm a musician, too."

His tale of renovating a bathroom for a friend's mother had a lot to do with what he called shit water, which was apparently leaking in between the linoleum and the wooden sub-flooring beneath.

"Black mold started growing up through the walls from all the shit water, so you gotta take all that down and put it back up without the mold," he explained, Carpentry for Dummies-style.

The story ended with a ball of petrified shit on the end of a 14-inch screwdriver, thus debunking any possible romanticism.

Greg's story was called "Rolling Steel with Sons of Vulcans" and involved a steel mill moved from Richmond to Cleveland and the local workers who moved with it.

An historian (and musician), Greg was working on an exhibit about working people and heard about the mill and decided to visit.

After watching the men forge steel old-school style (no hydraulic lifts, no machinery), he was offered the chance to "catch" a piece and did so for the experience, admitting it required a far more physically fit body than his to do so.

Danni, the cheese monger at Ellwood Thompson, told her saga of "Meeting the Cheese Guy," her idol, Herve Mons, at a cheese convention in San Francisco.

Explaining that Herve was a master affineur, one who collects cheeses, takes them to aging caves and oversees their maturing process, she told of hearing him speak and how he "vibrated with passion when he talked."

She kind of did the same when she talked about Herve and now I have a good reason to stop by the ET cheese counter.

I recognized the next storyteller, Chip, the former owner of Pibby's Bicycle, originally in Carver and then on Broad Street before closing last year.

Chip was the one who had fixed my bike when it had gotten out of true and not treated me like an idiot for not knowing what the problem was.

His story, "The Dark and Bright Sides of Retail" was about some kids who'd come into his store raising a ruckus and, as it turned out, stealing a bunch of stuff from him and leaving the packaging on the street for Chip to find. That was the dark part.

The bright part concerned a time he'd left the store unlocked (not as uncommon as you'd think) and a kid had gone in to find it empty and then told his Dad, who called the police.

Chip wanted to meet and thank the kid and when he found out he'd come in to look at skateboards, offered him any board in the store in gratitude.

Kind of warms your heart, doesn't it?

Or, as Chip put it, "It was a redemptive experience. All America's youth aren't evil people."

Last up before intermission was Skillet (introduced as having the most colorful house in Oregon Hill) and his story was about being a fabricator, namely going to Dandy Point to make crab shedding boxes.

Of course, he and his buddies had no idea what they were doing, using a five-page VIMS pamphlet to figure out how to do it while the locals looked on and sneered.

There's no way I can adequately describe Skillet's delivery except to say that he could have been telling the story in Swahili and it would have been just as funny because of his squinting, almost-closed eyes, changing volume and acting out.

Showing us how jimmy crabs lay back and snap their claws to attract she-crabs ("They're the virgins, born last year") to mate, he got into it and the crowd about lost it.

I will say this, though, Skillet was educational, taking us through the difference in peelers and busters, and talking about how they eat each other ("They're vicious, they're cannibals, folks!")

Surprisingly, Skillet's tale ended well and they managed to raise the soft-shelled crabs they'd set out to.

"When restaurants like this one get soft-shelled crabs, they're still alive! Then they cut their faces off!" he yelled with diabolical laughter.

Skillet was one for the Secretly Y'All books.

As soon as intermission began, I jumped up to beat the bathroom line, only having to wait behind two people.

Coming out of the loo, the woman two behind me in line looked at me with astonishment. "You are amazing! That was so fast!"

Right? I am known for my bathroom speed and had been a tad surprised that the guy behind me hadn't even commented before ducking into the bathroom. I said as much to her.

The guy in front of her nodded. "If she hadn't said something to you, I would have. I can't believe how fast you were!"

We all need recognition for something.

During the break, I met a D.C. transplant and had a good conversation about adjusting to the small world of Richmond after a real city and since she's car-less, about the local biking scene, its hazards and recent improvements.

Back in my seat, I found newcomers in front of me and the woman turned to ask why a DJ was even bothering to play when the noise level was so loud you couldn't hear the music.

After telling her it was a record crowd, she admitted part of the problem was deafness due to years of going to too many shows.

Well, you know where that conversation went, to my delight.

She'd been a regular at Max's Kansas City in NYC, seeing the Heartbreakers repeatedly and the Misfits, including one time she fell asleep on the table as the Misfits played. When the band left the stage, the guitarist bumped her in the head with his guitar to show his displeasure with her sleeping through their set.

She had lots of show stories from NYC, including seeing Madonna in an early incarnation as an opening act, so forgettable that a friend had to remind her years later that they'd seen the Material Girl way back when.

She'd also seen the Clash and the first NYC gig of the B-52s. "And that's why I'm deaf," she concluded as Secretly Y'All got going again.

After intermission, the storytellers are chosen from the names in a hat, put there by people in the room who have a story to tell on the night's theme.

The first was Phil from Rag and Bones, and it was about a breakup where the girl got engaged two weeks afterwards to another guy and planned to move to Italy.

To deal with his emotional angst, he began getting involved with Rag and Bones, growing his role and time spent there.

"The best thing to do after a shitty breakup is use your hands," he said to suggestive sounds from the crowd. "In a productive way."

Painter Chris Milk's name came next and he told a saga of a crazy friend who bedeviled him here and followed him when he moved to NYC.

"And when I say New York, I didn't mean Brooklyn," he clarified. "Back in my day -I'm 41- New York meant Manhattan."

It was funny hearing a man with fingerless gloves painted with colorful rainbows and stars, piercings and tattoos talk about "back in my day" like it was the dark ages.

The crazy friend followed him when he returned here and started desecrating a mural Chris was working on.

But only because he was crazy, a fact Chris finally came around to and apologized to the guy for not understanding his brand of crazy.

Peter came last and I recognized him, too, from previous storytelling.

Tonight's was about working "the devil's trade," also known as a call center, a last resort after graduating college and not finding the video engineer job of his dreams waiting for him.

"For two years, I was pleasant Peter," he said. "I credit Wells Fargo's bill pay center with teaching me all the patience I have. I got to talk to a lot of inspiring people, many of whom I hung up on."

His takeaway had been that sometimes the little guy needs to win after the bank had mistakenly not paid a customer's mortgage and there were repercussions.

Peter wanted to spend two hours researching and fixing the mess but when he told that to his boss, she said, "Do you want to take down this whole bank for one customer?"

Yes, he told her, he did and the room erupted in applause.

He finished by waxing poetic. "I asked myself why am I working this job for $36 thousand instead of making $15 thousand doing what I love freelancing and walking dogs and loving my life?"

Welcome to the club, Peter. You won't regret it.

In fact, that kind of life will provide far better stories for future Secretly Y'Alls and probably a more colorful house than all the call centers of a lifetime.

Just ask Skillet.