- Coming up on "The Whitney Reynolds Show."

- So I spent 15 years one-on-one with each sister for their purposes, writing their stories down.

So they had that for themselves and for their children and their grandchildren.

- I think we knew we had something special.

We had done something special, but I don't think you ever really know how it's going to be consumed by the world.

- I love tattooing scars, like whatever the story is behind those scars, I think it's beautiful.

- And I was blown away.

I couldn't believe the quality of the storytelling.

I was personally moved by it, which is pretty challenging for me to be moved by anything.

- "The Whitney Reynolds Show" is made possible by Together at Peace, a foundation supporting hopeful bereavement care for the world by inspiring people to find ways to live with, honor, and share the unique love they carry.

Spreading the light that still shines bright, together at peace.

Children's Learning Place, dedicated to empowering young students with the confidence to overcome present and future challenges to promote a brighter future for all.

Kevin O'Connor Law Firm, when it comes to your injuries, we take it personally, Joeperillo.com, where you can browse their selection of pre-owned luxury vehicles, based in Chicago, shipping all over the country.

Simple Modern, drinkware with unique styles for adults and kids.

Take us with you, "The Adventures of Harry Moon" book series for kids, focusing on becoming your best self with themes of friendship anti-bullying and responsibility.

At harrymoon.org.

Kevin Kelly, Fumee Claire, Midwest Moving and Storage, Mike Dyer, Brendan Stadusky, and by these funders.

♪ So strong ♪ ♪ So strong ♪ ♪ So strong ♪ - Storytelling and the art behind it.

That's today's topic.

(upbeat music) (audience cheering) ♪ So strong ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ (upbeat music) (audience cheering) ♪ So strong ♪ - Then there was this wave of knowingness that came over me like, I'm free.

I walked away from that casket a different person.

I said, "I'm gonna find my sisters."

- Barbara Lane was just three years old when she was separated from her 10 sisters and moved into an orphanage.

- On a cold, wintry date in December in St. Louis, my biological mother turned off the heat, sold all the furniture, packed her bags, and left us.

We were in that cold apartment for three days without food, without heat, without water.

My eldest sister called Catholic Charities.

They came and got us.

- What was the journey like beyond the orphanage into foster care?

- It was a nightmare.

We were placed in the home of a mafia grunt.

So we were put in there and they put up a really good front that they were just the model foster home.

We even had our pictures in the paper, promoting good foster homes, and it was anything but.

- What did you experience in that house?

- Various forms of abuse from emotional, sexual, and physical battering almost on a daily basis.

- How old were you at this point?

- It began when we I was three and my sister was almost five.

When I was 14, I was pretty sick of living this way, and actually I was pretty sick of living.

And I remember speaking one day to my foster father who always threatened us with a gun, and I begged him to just take the gun and shoot me.

That I just wasn't, you know, that was fine.

Just shoot me, I was done.

And it scared him for some reason.

And everything in my life changed at that point.

He left me alone.

Battering still went on somewhat, mainly from my other sister who had really tried to protect, but he left me alone.

And up until that period of time, we really were not allowed to leave the house ever except to go to school or the grocery store with them or something like that.

And after that happened, they set me free.

Oddly, I became almost a normal teenager.

You know, I- - I'm happy to hear after what you went through.

- Yes, yes.

Became captain of the volleyball team, I was in plays.

- You were still in the same home.

- Went to dances.

- In the same home, you know, dated, met my husband, you know, things like that.

And no one would've known.

No one would've ever known that we were experiencing or had experienced what was in that home.

And I would've never told.

- 43 Years later, she was still traumatized by the separation from her sisters and what followed.

She knew it was time to own her story.

When did you get to the point of owning this narrative of what you've gone through?

- My foster mother died, and I remember being at her grave site and crying.

That's the only mother I ever knew.

But then there was this wave of knowingness that came over me like, I'm free.

- Her journey to healing reminded her it was not a solo road.

In fact, she knew she had 10 others out there on a similar path.

- I hired a detective to try to locate them and she did come up with an address for one sister, it was one of the twins in San Diego.

It was a very old address.

Turned out to be a dead end.

Put my name on adoption registries on, you know, lost family registries.

I tried to get ahold of talk show hosts to see if they could help.

Maybe they had some ways of helping me locate my sisters.

And it did not work.

After 43 years, we had moved from St. Louis to Maryland at that point in time.

And Whitney, it was like someone just shook me.

"If you wanted to find your sisters, why didn't you just ask?"

And in my premonition, I heard this.

It wasn't like, I'm hearing you speak now, but I knew this and I also knew they were gonna find me in three days.

They were gonna find me after all my searching.

They were gonna find me.

That third morning I woke up and I knew it was going to happen.

And so I grabbed some stuff and went and sat out on the beach while my kids were asleep, my husband.

And a few minutes later he opened the slider door and said, "Barbara, come in here."

And I ran inside and he looked at me and he said, "Sit down."

I said, "They found me, didn't they?"

He said, "How'd you know?"

And he held in his hand the phone numbers of two of my sisters.

And I mean, who can explain what that felt like after spending my entire life longing for them, missing them, remembering them, treasuring them.

And then they found me.

- I have tears in my eyes thinking about this.

I can see yours.

I just, being a mom and thinking of that sibling connection.

- Yes.

- And going back to three-year-old, you waving goodbye then one by one.

- Yes.

- And just so I understand, once you got those first two numbers, then the domino effect happened.

- Correct.

- Okay.

- The very next day, those of us that could flew to St. Louis the very next day to to be together.

♪ Amazing grace how sweet the sound ♪ ♪ That saved a wretch like me ♪ ♪ I once was lost but now am found ♪ ♪ Was blind but now I see ♪ (group celebrating) (light music) - All the pieces that were scattered all over my life just came together in a hole in my heart.

Like that.

- Wow.

- And I felt, okay, this is what I've been missing.

This is what I remember being before all this happened, determined and powerful and free and loved.

And you know, all of that that was challenged in my childhood just went away.

- And then you collected the stories of your sisters.

- Right.

Right.

- Let's talk about that.

- So I spent 15 years one-on-one with each sister for their purposes, writing their stories down.

So they had that for themselves and for their children and their grandchildren.

They couldn't voice what happened to them.

And the art of storytelling can do that.

Right?

- Right.

- It can write their stories.

One sister, her name was Laverne, I called her Bernie because I obviously evidently couldn't pronounce it when I was a baby and it stuck with her, asked me if I would write a book.

So I eventually put all those stories together as one story of a sisterhood.

And each sister I sat with, I heard another heart wrenching story.

And then in the same sense, I was learning to piece together the mystery of what the hell happened to my family, what happened to cause us all to be taken, to cause us all to be separated all these years.

I was in the total dark, how would I know?

But accepting the highs and lows was something we had to learn to do throughout our next path together over these years that we have been reunited.

Such as the loss of sisters, visiting with a sister 10 days before they died, or, you know, it just happened that way.

- You said something that caught my attention.

- Sure.

- You said, "What the heck happened?"

Did you get closure on that?

- I think I'm close.

- And you never reconnected with your mom?

- No, no, I never did.

- What would you say to her if you had the chance?

- Hm.

That's a tough one.

She was the point of my manifestation here on this earth.

For that, I'm grateful.

It's still painful.

I did visit her grave once.

And.

- Did you tell her about the stories of connecting with your sisters?

- At the grave?

- Yeah.

- We were all there.

I walk up on this grave and I thought, oh, this is nothing.

I didn't even know this woman until it hit me, my little baby of me.

It hurt.

- I bet.

I bet.

- Yeah.

The art of storytelling, the art of the bringing love that was disjointed, taken away.

- Yes.

- Back together is a beautiful thing.

- And it's back together.

- Thank you so much for coming on.

- Thank you, Whitney.

I really appreciate it.

(light music) - And now we turn to visual art.

We sat down with Elva Stefanie and heard about the stories she's sharing through ink.

- There's all kinds of stories.

Sometimes it's deeper and it's for a loved one or you know, a child that they lost.

So it's a beautiful thing to experience.

And also hard because you kind of carry those emotions while you're doing them because they're having them.

So you just end up connecting at a different level with people.

- Elva Stefani tells stories with her art.

Some a new beginning, others masking an old plot line.

But her final product always starts a new conversation.

The why behind each tattoo.

- So I got to tattoo at Sturgis.

It's a huge biker rally in South Dakota.

And one morning we had a group of bikers come in that wanted to get a memorial tattoo for one of their friends, one of their crew that always went with them.

But unfortunately, she was terminally ill and she had been in a hospice.

So she came out to party one more time at Sturgis as her final wish.

And the night before, she partied with her husband, her friends, her family, her son.

And that morning around 7:00 AM she went back to the hospice and passed away.

So around 11:00 AM they all came in to get a tattoo for her.

And it was intense.

It was very intense just 'cause it was so fresh, I think.

- That is fresh.

- All of us, like all of the tattoo artists, we were in tears, like collectively, everyone.

It was a very sad, but happy moment because you got to be part of that for them.

- And when did you decide that you had this or discover you had this love for tattooing?

- So I was around 21 when I started getting good tattoos and I was like, I think I could do this.

- So going back to your younger years, you hit a rough patch when you were 13 and you said, you know, a lot of it had to do with my mental health.

Do you mind going there?

- Yeah, so around 13 is when my mental illness kind of like woke up.

And I've always, like, even with my therapist assumed that it was from being sexually assaulted as a younger child.

- She's a first generation, a tattoo artist, and just like her clients, each of hers tell a story as well.

- I had gotten a couple tattoos.

- At 15.

- Yeah.

- And- - And did your mom know about those?

- No.

I got a mom tattoo to try and like not get into as much trouble, but that didn't work.

But at the time, tattooing was still super taboo, so it would've been like 18 years ago.

It was still something, you know, people believed was for gangs or people in prison and things like that.

It was not taken serious as an art form.

And then when I was like around 13 and like, your hormones are changing and things like that, my chemicals just started to get real imbalanced and I became really depressed and suicidal.

I tried to take myself from this realm a couple times and I would hurt myself a lot.

So I spent some time institutionalized in different psych wards and things like that, rehab, because I had a bit of a drug problem.

So it was a journey for sure.

- And when you say self-harm, like you cut yourself?

- Yeah.

- And you actually have tattoos now that cover that?

- Yes.

- Was it a full circle moment when you learned that you can actually create art to help people that have also been in similar situations like you and help them grow past that?

- Yeah, 100%.

I love tattooing scars.

Like whatever the story is behind those scars, I think it's beautiful.

And then sometimes I'll tattoo someone with a scar that doesn't want the scar fully covered or wants it incorporated because they still wanna remember that story.

So for myself, like I can still feel the scars even though I have tattoos over them over like one of my leg areas where I used to cut myself I have no mercy just to remind me that like that's what life has.

It doesn't have mercy, but that doesn't mean I have to be that way.

I can like be better and remember that like you're gonna get through it.

So it's been a journey between like being able to treat myself with this art form as well as others.

- And for you, people might know you from TV outside of our show today because you competed on a national level in a TV competition showing off your skills.

And one thing that really struck me as we were preparing for this interview was that most people, when you go into these reality type shows, you wanna go in to win and you actually removed yourself.

- Yeah.

- Tell us about that.

- So I wanted to go on there and show people that are a little different, whether it's your color of your skin or your background, or just your quirky, you know, that you can do whatever you wanna do and you can do it well.

And you can also save the world one tattoo at a time.

- Oh, is that your motto?

- Yes.

Yeah, just bring a little light wherever I can.

(light music) - And now to a show that tells stories and keeps pulling people in, meet the actors behind it.

Storytelling can be an art, especially when the plot line is fictional and when it continues to build on multiple seasons.

Now we're talking the "Outer Banks," a show that continues to draw people in.

So when you look at the script sometimes are you like, "Whoa, buckle up?"

- I would say every time.

- Yeah.

- And like we also get 'em as we're shooting and then you're like, "Oh, okay."

And like we're in the middle of season three and then all of a sudden the seventh script comes out, you're like, "Okay, I see where they're going."

- What was one of your favorite lessons that this season taught you?

- I think that, you know, throughout this show there's been a lot of John B's journey of jumping at the bit to try to solve or find a solution to things.

And it's gotten him in trouble and put him and his friends in harm's way so often and so many times.

And there's a lot of repercussions for those actions that start to sort of fall into his lap in this season in particular And so I think for him, being patient and learning and accepting the consequences for those actions is something that we see.

So it was nice because I needed that in my own personal life, to be patient, 'cause this industry definitely keeps you on your toes all the time.

So it was fun to kind of take a page outta John B's book and put that into my own personal life.

- I would say the confusion and stress this season.

I think every character goes through a lot of like, what does this mean with the confusion and like you and your dad and you're like, where do I stand with him right now?

And then also JJ feeling like, is that mean?

Like, my friend's gonna be hanging out with his dad more often then and not me?

And then it's like a whole thing.

So he gets a little directionless and a little confused.

- And just like their characters with all the ups and downs, both of these actors and their real life stories are still unfolding.

Tell me, with this like growing the show and consistently having these seasons, what has it been like for you both personally on a level of, okay, now I'm here.

Now, I don't wanna say have a ride, but kind of as actors, I mean, that's a big deal.

- Yeah, I think, you know, and I don't wanna speak for the rest of the cast or Rudy himself, but I think we kind of recognize how beautiful of an opportunity this is and the platform that it's given us.

But I think as artists, you know, you always wanna create.

So I think we never wanna be stagnant in our work and we're very fortunate that we have this show that allows us to not be stagnant, right?

Like every season has been a new journey and the characters have had new experiences, so we just kind of never allow ourselves to get too comfortable.

And we, I think from day one felt like there was a little bit of our backs against the wall.

- Why is that?

- You just never know.

I mean, with so much content out in the world right now, it's hard to figure out if things are gonna work or if they're not gonna work.

So we kind of left the first season looking at each other saying like, "This was the best summer camp ever and love you all dearly and see you in L.A." I don't know.

- Then then stayed at your place before COVID, you know?

- Yeah.

- We did the whole pandemic together.

But yeah, like we didn't, you never know what's gonna work and what's not gonna work, and I think we knew we had something special or we had done something special, but I don't think you ever really know how it's going to be consumed by the world.

So it's been a very special journey and a very special experience and a lot of magic has happened.

(light music) - And "The Art of Magic" can be seen in their new season on Netflix.

(light music) (upbeat music) (people chatting) - So I was one of those men who was reluctant to watch it.

My wife was a fan of season one.

We were living in New York City under the lockdown of COVID.

She said, "You've gotta watch this show."

I finally did.

We had kinda run out of things to watch and I was blown away.

I couldn't believe the quality of the storytelling.

I was personally moved by it, which is pretty challenging for me to be moved by anything.

- Brad Pillow is now the president and executive producer of "The Chosen," and he's not the only one who has been drawn in by the storyline.

We flew to Dallas to walk the set and meet the cast and find out for ourselves what the show is all about.

- Most of our story happens here.

- Is that what you wanna do is like connect with everybody?

- Yeah, absolutely.

This is not a faith show.

We think of this as a historical fiction show.

- Wow.

- Like other genre shows.

- Right?

- You know?

it just so happens that one of the central characters in our show is the father of Christianity.

- Mm.

- And we think it's really relevant for today because what he was doing in that day was very related to the issues that we face today, around women and society.

- Right.

- And its extremes.

- Right.

- And the division that occurs in modern society was also reflected in theirs.

- I didn't expect it to hit me and affect me in the way that it has.

I think that's been such a blessing with this show is there are so many different characters all going through different things that are relatable to now.

- Life is tough enough as it is when you have a regular job, but of course when you're pursuing acting and you're running in different circles that might not be the best for your emotional health and your mental health.

And I know that God was there the entire time for sure protecting me, I know that much.

But there were personal things like breakups you deal with and friendships that you thought were friendships that ended up not being friendships.

And when you approach things with an open heart sometimes that can really damage you and close you off.

The show I've told people in hindsight now, it was a conduit to get me here.

It's been a dream to be on this and to work with the people and going to work looking forward to working with the people that are there.

- Everybody talks about the genius you are behind all this and the hard work that goes into it.

Tell me, how many hours are you working on this project right now?

- I get about five to six hours of sleep, typically, if I'm lucky.

And then if you, you know, dinner time and time with the wife, it's everything.

So yeah, I don't know exactly.

- Important details.

- I'll just say, I'll just say quite a lot.

- Now I've been seeing your team align over the seasons.

- We get more efficient as each season goes.

What I'm working on today is eventually gonna be seen in every corner of the world and be translated in hundreds of languages.

It's overwhelming.

- Dallas Jenkins is the creator and had the vision of where to start and stop this series.

It's now in season four and there's a lot of changes in the works, on and off camera.

- You now, I think a lot of my job is just to kind of bring a perspective in terms of how a production of this scale as opposed to season one, which was much more of a mom and pop catches catch can kind of production works.

Bringing a perspective for this kind of scale and how to manage a big, a much bigger production.

As the show became more successful and as the budgets grew, they brought me on.

And as the show became more successful, I think Lionsgate took notice and realized, hey, there's an opportunity here to represent "The Chosen" and help sell "The Chosen" to various other venues and outlets.

- It's to be able to be part of a story that means so much to so many people is really, it's rare.

It's why we act is 'cause we want to tell stories that impact people's lives.

- Storytelling is an art.

What masterpiece are you creating?

Remember, your story matters.

(light music) - "The Whitney Reynolds Show" is made possible by Together at Peace, a foundation supporting hopeful bereavement care for the world by inspiring people to find ways to live with honor and share the unique love they carry.

Spreading the light that still shines bright, Together at Peace.

Children's Learning Place, dedicated to empowering young students with the confidence to overcome present and future challenges to promote a brighter future for all.

Kevin O'Connor Law Firm, when it comes to your injuries, we take it personally.

Joeperillo.com, where you can browse their selection of pre-owned luxury vehicles based in Chicago, shipping all over the country.

Simple Modern, drink ware with unique styles for adults and kids, take us with you.

"The Adventures of Harry Moon" book series for kids, focusing on becoming your best self with themes of friendship, anti-bullying, and responsibility at harrymoon.org.

Kevin Kelly, Fumee Claire, Midwest Moving and Storage, Mike Dyer, Brendan Stadunsky, and by these funders.

- Our mommy!