SHIRLEY JACKSON WHITAKER: I'm from the South.

And if your grandmama tell you to move, you don't move your lips, you move your rear.

And that's what I did.

MILOS BJELICA: I always felt that the clarinet is an extension of my voice, that I could say things through it that I could never say with words.

ALEXANDRIA SHARPE: I felt like I was at war with my body.

I needed someone to believe that this was as bad as I said this was, and help me.

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "Body and Soul."

♪ ♪ In our lives, our physical and our emotional selves intertwine, in order to profoundly shape our experiences.

As we all know, our physical well-being so very often affects our mental health, and the reverse is just as equally true.

Tonight, our amazing roster of tellers is going to share their stories of overcoming physical and mental challenges, and we are so very grateful that they are here sharing this stage with us.

♪ ♪ WHITAKER: My name is Shirley Jackson Whitaker.

I was born and raised in a town in South Georgia called Waycross, Georgia.

I presently live in Amherst, Massachusetts.

I'm a physician.

In addition to being a physician, you are a multi-hyphenate creator.

You've done some writing.

You've done filmmaking.

You're telling a story with us tonight.

I'm wondering, is there a unifying throughline you can see in all of your work, in everything that you do, something that's important to you in all of your efforts?

Growing up in South Georgia, my parents were from the eastern part of Georgia and South Carolina.

So, that Geechee Gullah thing is somehow a part of me.

And over time, being proud to be a Southerner.

You know, it's tough being a Southern African American, but I've learned to appreciate those things.

That it makes me, um... special, in a way, because of that exposure, that experience, that strength that I gained from those environments.

When you release this work into the world, what do you hope is the effect that it has on people?

I think it's important that when they finish seeing my work, they're more educated about different aspects of my life and my experiences, and I hope it adds strength to them.

It's a hot summer day, very humid in South Georgia.

I'm under a mulberry tree with Shoeman and his cousin Nora, and Dorothy Mae.

We've been playing marbles all week, and I had my eye on a special marble that Shoeman had called a cat eye.

I'd been practicing how I was gonna get that cat eye.

I said, I put my knee down and my butt up and my elbow back, and pop it.

I knew my time was coming.

I just couldn't wait.

I was nervous, but I thought if I just calm down, it's gonna be all right.

I was just getting ready to pop that cat eye.

I knew it was mine.

And my grandmama said, "Shel-lann, come and go with me."

I'm from the South.

And if your grandmama tell you to move, you don't move your lips, you move your rear.

(laughter) And that's what I did.

I jumped up, put all my marbles in a bag, twisted them around my waist and got behind my grandmother.

She said, "Come on, baby.

Gotta go fast.

"I just got word that Cilla just died."

Miss Cilla's my grandmama best fishing buddy.

She said, "We got to get there "before the undertaker get there.

"Because when they get there, honey, they mess 'em all up.

They're never the same."

And so I was running at my grandmama, just jumping up and down.

I didn't have shoes on.

During the summer, we didn't wear shoes.

You know, the only time you wore shoes anywhere was the church and school.

School was out, and this definitely wasn't no church.

So, my grandmama took her skirt and threw it around her left arm.

I caught it so I can...

I could hold on, I can keep up with her.

And I was moving just like, I was moving like popcorn, bouncing around, trying to keep my feet cool.

And the closer we got to Miss Cilla house, there was people in the yard, there were people on the steps, there was people on the porch.

As my grandma moved up the step, she went to Mr. George, Miss Cilla's husband, and she said, "Is she still here?"

He said, "Yes, ma'am.

She's still in.

They ain't got her yet."

So we went in Miss Cilla's room.

My grandmama went on one side, and I went on the other.

Then my grandmama started talking to Miss Cilla.

And all I could see was an outline of Miss Cilla.

Miss Cilla I know was a big woman, and she went fishing with my grandmother.

And she usually had three poles in the left arm, and two cans in the right.

One can for a fried egg sandwich with a cup of water and the other can for her fishing baits.

So she just said, "Shel-lann, baby, come here and get my poles for me."

So I said, "Get her poles," and I would get... help her get in the car.

with my grandmama while they head out to go fishing.

But what I saw in the bed, it wasn't Miss Cilla.

She was so, she was so thin, and my grandmama was talking to her.

And when my grandmama finished talking to her, my grandmama took her hand and rubbed it over Miss Cilla's face.

And then she rubbed her face.

And then she said, "Baby, Shel-lann, I want you to rub Miss Cilla's face."

You kidding me?

(laughter) This is the first dead person I ever saw.

(laughter) And want me to touch her.

(laughter) But believe me, I didn't give no lip service back to my grandmama.

I do what I was told.

So what I did was I propped my body against the bed to lift me up, because I was, I was...

I really couldn't see Miss Cilla.

So I moved closer to her head.

I lift up and put my body up against the bed and on my toes so I could touch her.

So, I couldn't use my hand so I used my finger.

And then I, I touched Miss Cilla's skin.

It was so warm and smooth and spongelike.

Then I rubbed her lips.

They were dry, but there was no words or air coming through her lips.

And then I rubbed her cheeks and her nose, and I went to find her eyes.

It seemed like her eyes were sunk in her head, but I tried to find and rub her eyes, and they were soft.

And I rubbed both the eyes.

Then I rubbed the forehead, and I rubbed the whole face.

Then I looked up at my grandma, and she said, basically nodding, that I should do my face.

(sighs) So I, so I rub around my face like my grandma told me.

And then when I finished, I looked up at my grandma, and she said, "Shel-lann, you'll never, ever be afraid of dead people."

To that, my grandmother stepped away from the bed, and so did I.

And so as was leading out, my grandmama turned back around to look at Miss Cilla.

And on our way out, the funeral home people was rushing in.

We had just made it, just in time to get there before they got there.

So we went back home.

My grandmother went in the house, and I was outside.

And I looked to the left.

And under the mulberry tree was Shoeman, Nora, and Dorothy Mae.

Nora Felton had my marble.

(laughter) And she held my marble up between her two fingers and gave a little smile.

But that wasn't it.

That wasn't enough.

She took her lips up, and she kissed my marble.

I said, "No, you didn't, Nora Felton.

You know that's my cat eye."

But she wasn't finished.

She took my cat eye and dropped it in that old dirty, holey sock.

Confirming that she owned my marble.

And I said, "Nora, you know you shouldn't have done that."

And I said, "That's all right.

"That's all right.

That's all right.

"My grandmama took me to see Miss Cilla.

"Miss Cilla was dead.

And my grandmama have me... let me take my whole finger "and rub it on Miss Cilla's whole body.

(laughter) "And Miss Cilla and I comin' to get all y'all."

(laughter) And before I could finish, they ran like roaches when the lights turned on.

(laughter) But I said, you know what?

That just shows you the power of a finger.

And knowledge is a powerful thing.

I have the knowledge to know I ain't scared of no dead folks no more because of my grandmama.

But they is.

They real scared.

And me and Miss Cilla goin' to get 'em.

(laughter) So I said, "Come on, Miss Cilla.

"We goin'.

We goin' to get us some roaches and a marble."

(laughter) So we ran them all over the neighborhood.

They were screaming and hollering and, and making all those noise.

People was coming out of the house going, "What is going on?"

Everybody was wondering what was going on, and so was my mama.

(laughter) My mama said, "Shel-lann, get in here!

Now!"

So as I went in the house, I heard them back there snickering.

They thought they had me.

But I turned around and I looked at 'em, and I held my finger up, and I said, "I'll see you tomorrow."

(laughter) Thank you.

(chuckles) (cheers and applause) BJELICA: My name is Milos Bjelica.

I'm originally from Serbia.

Now, I'm Boston-based artist, teacher, and professional musician.

And I understand that you're very involved with music education, with... especially with immigrant communities here in the Boston area.

What do you like about that work?

We run a program in Chelsea where we teach songwriting to immigrant kids.

It's really motivating working with them and just having this first experience of music with, with kids who are, like, ten to 14 years.

It's just priceless.

You've been on stage.

You perform frequently all over Europe and the United States.

Tonight, you're going to be sharing a story.

How has the preparation for tonight been different than when you're, you know, getting ready for a musical performance?

I'm, I'm very excited to share the story.

I've performed on stage before, not just like music, I was acting.

So, it's not the first time I'm talking in front of people.

But I'm definitely happy to share this story because it's the first time I'm sharing it.

♪ ♪ I'm 24 years old, and I'm standing backstage with three of my friends.

We are barefoot, dressed in white, torn robes stained with mud.

Our faces are pale as ghosts, covered with scars, and we have bandages on our heads.

And it's not what you think.

We are not extras for Walking Dead.

Quite the opposite.

We are a clarinet quartet about to walk on stage and perform at the finals of Serbia's Got Talent show.

(laughter) We are professional clarinetists in our 20s who have been playing together for around six years.

Before getting into the finals of Serbia's Got Talent, we played several local sh... concerts and won a few chamber music competitions.

But we wanted more.

Our goal was to popularize classical music to the wider audience.

In our performances, we play, dance, act at the same time.

We mix different genres of music, like jazz, pop, classical, folk.

For example, we would take Bach's fugue, mix it with Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," and name the tune called, "FuGaGa."

(laughter) Our mentor and founder of our quartet always said to us, "You need to be one body and one soul when you play."

And we were.

We practiced for hours every day.

Now, back at the finals of Serbia's Got Talent show, we are on the stage, cameras are on us, and we performed very complex choreography with four different genres of music.

We even made a carrot clarinet.

Eh, you heard me well, carrot clarinet.

We actually took a real carrot, drilled the holes in, mounted a mouthpiece on and played a folk song.

Audience loved us.

(laughter) We waited for a long time to hear the results, and then finally they called us on the stage.

And then... ...shock.

We didn't only lose, we took the last place.

But there's something the judges and audience didn't know.

It was remarkable I was even on that stage playing the clarinet.

You see, I suffered an injury during birth, the one that occurs in about one to three out of every thousand babies.

The umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck and arm.

And to save my life, doctors had to pull my arm, disconnecting the nerves in the shoulder.

First five years of my life, I spent in intensive physical therapy with my parents, trying to get any movement possible from my arm and hand.

Their creativity and persistence helped me regain the movement in my fingers from early age.

And I could lift my arm in the elbow by age three.

Eventually, my parents decided to enroll me in music school so to motivate me to practice and move my fingers more.

I started with cello, violin, and then finally clarinet.

I really liked playing clarinet and my clarinet teacher so much that by age 14, I decided to go with music professionally.

Some professors and friends disagreed with that decision.

They thought that I would never reach the level of playing required from a professional musician because of my injury.

But I didn't care.

I was always a man of few words, especially when I was younger.

But I always felt that the clarinet is an extension of my voice, that I could say things through it that I could never say with words.

And speaking about words, there's a joke among musicians going something like this-- what is worse than one clarinet?

Two clarinets.

(laughter) And there were four of us, right?

So, after we're losing at the finals of Serbia's Got Talent, many would say that we should be proud to get as far as we did as four clarinets.

But we, again, we wanted more, right?

We were hungry.

So we had gained a small following from media attention and then we decided to made a bold move next.

We used our own money to organize our biggest concert and book the biggest concert hall in Belgrade on April 1.

The concert started taking shape with help of friends and others, but we were worried about ticket sales.

We needed a good ad.

So we figure out that word duvanje has two meanings in Serbian language.

First one is to blow, like in clarinet, and the second one is to smoke weed.

So we named our concert April Fool's Day Duvanje, which would roughly mean "getting high on April Fool's Day."

(laughter) We asked a very famous actor to be in that commercial, and we had instant success-- 30,000 views overnight.

The April Fool's Day arrived, and we were still unsure if the concert hall would be full.

But this time, as we walked on stage dressed in designer tuxedos, not as four zombies, we were overwhelmed to see concert hall fully packed with more than thousand people.

For next 90 minutes, we were all in zone.

No fear, just four of us playing, dancing, acting at the same time, mixing all different genres of music-- jazz, pop, folk, classical.

And at the end, we received ten-minute standing ovation.

After the concert, a man approached me.

He was a local MMA fighter and a loan shark that I knew from around the town.

(laughter) But I haven't seen him cry before.

He said, "I've never been to a classical music concert, but this is so beautiful, bro.

Thank you."

In that moment, I knew that we had achieved our goal of making classical music more appealing to everyone.

And I was so proud that I overcame the injury and became a professional musician.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ SHARPE: My name is Alexandria Sharpe.

I'm from Brooklyn, New York, but I live out in the desert in Phoenix, Arizona, now.

My family is from Jamaica, and I'm a financial wellness specialist, which is essentially a community educator on financial literacy skills.

What did you enjoy about growing up in Brooklyn, and how did that inform your storytelling?

The thing that I loved about growing up in New York is you can see the entire world in your little city.

There are people from all over the world who speak all different languages.

And so I got that exposure to the world early, even though I had to wait before I could really start to travel for myself.

Tonight, you are going to share what is a very personal story, something that, you know, was very difficult.

And I'm wondering, what is compelling you to share that story?

Why do you want, you know, to bring that to the stage?

Sometimes when you're going through illness, there's a lot of shame, and there's a lot of being taught to be silent and be secretive.

But I don't think that being silent helped me.

It didn't help heal me.

And so I think in speaking about it, it's a continuous process of healing and hopefully, for other people who are going through illness and symptoms of illness, they can feel heard and understood through my story.

I remember being on the phone with a friend in the early 2000s, Y2K.

The days of low-rise denim, chipped nail polish, and lip gloss.

(laughter) I was telling her that I had cramps and that the over-the-counter painkillers that I'd taken still weren't working.

"Just take more," she said.

Ever the good girl, I told her, "But the label says I have to wait two more hours."

And she said, "So?"

It hadn't occurred to me that I could just take more.

And she was right.

More worked.

That began a series of quick fixes for my period, though the pain increased over the years.

I grew from a teenager concerned about 50 cent butter rolls to a woman concerned about bills and whatever.

By now, I was regularly using more than the max dosage, in addition to increasingly higher absorbency products and whatever birth control doctors told me I should try.

By this point, I learned that I had fibroids, non-cancerous tumors that grow in the uterus.

Secretly, it felt like my ultimate prognosis was: "You're a woman, just deal with it."

So I did.

I started to view my body as a machine that just needed to be patched together enough to keep going.

But what were those patches?

An ultra tampon, an overnight pad, menstrual underwear, menstrual diapers, compression shorts, often all at once.

And if I was sleeping, a towel beneath me as a final line of defense.

And even then, I still had to set multiple alarms throughout the night so that I could get up and change.

I felt like I was at war with my body and like I was being told to just live life like this.

What life?

I would guzzle painkillers and cradle a thick pouch of boiling water, searing the skin on my stomach so that I could focus less on the agony going on inside of it.

I needed someone to believe that this was as bad as I said this was and help me.

Eventually, my machine, my body, hit its breaking point and I ended up in the E.R.

On the outside, I looked okay, so I sat there for a couple of hours until it was my turn.

It wasn't until my lab work came back that things shifted.

The doctor walked in, mouth hanging-- and side note, it never feels great when the doctor looks scared.

(laughter) He told me, "You shouldn't even be walking."

He said my blood levels were what he normally sees in shooting or stabbing victims, and that I was at risk of heart failure.

He said I needed blood transfusions, and I said, "I didn't come here for that."

(laughter) Which was an ineloquent way of saying, "Doctor, that doesn't sound like a quick fix."

And it wasn't.

That set off a saga of medical treatments and procedures.

What once upon a time was probably a pea-sized tumor had now multiplied into a uterus nearing its second trimester.

Which explained the protruding belly and the blood and the pain.

They would have to be removed.

But first, I needed to build up enough blood to survive surgery, and that was a problem.

After those transfusions, I ended up back in the hospital, having lost most of what I'd received.

The hospital was hesitant to give me more transfusions because there was a national blood shortage, and clearly my body was wasting a precious resource.

I felt defective.

I could feel myself slowly bleeding to death.

But I held on and started to undergo an alternative to transfusions, and I was nearing surgical eligibility.

But then I learned that the complexity of my fibroids made me ineligible for various procedures.

I felt like I had made it to the end of my rope, and I'd tied a knot, but I wasn't sure if I could hang on much longer.

Thankfully, my childhood best friend suggested that we keep in touch by routinely discussing episodes of Love Is Blind.

(laughter) And it was the perfect idea.

That reality show gave me an escape from my own real-life drama, and she gave me something to look forward to.

I also stayed with family that helped me to find a radiologist and a surgeon who felt comfortable that they could help with my specific case.

So, can you guess what was always my favorite part of surgery?

(whispers): Anesthesia.

(laughter) I'd breathe peacefully into the promise of sedation and hope to wake up to a better reality.

And eventually I did.

But one thing lingered.

Even though I had been freed from the torture of fibroids, I still felt a grudge against my body, even though it was now healing.

So, I decided to address this turmoil with a not-so-quick fix-- meditation.

And meditation is definitely not as easy as anesthesia.

(laughter) But I practiced every morning and every night.

So one morning, I'm meditating, and I'm focusing on gratitude.

I'm fibroid-free.

My periods are normal.

My blood levels are increasing.

But there's this very ungratitude-y voice that says, "But I have this tiny scar that will be there forever.

"And I spent a decade suffering and some people didn't believe my pain."

And then I remember, I'm supposed to be focusing on gratitude.

(laughter) So I take a deep breath and I clear my mind.

I notice my heartbeat, and it just clicks.

My heart, my heart had been at risk of failure, and yet it pounded on nonetheless.

I had been so focused on quick fixes, and I had been conditioned to suffer in silence.

But my body had never been at war with me.

I instantly realized that my body had been the main thing fighting for me.

And in that moment, I made peace.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪