♪ ♪ BRUCE MARCUS: I cringed, waiting for alarm bells to blare.

And miraculously none did.

And I was free!

KEN GREEN: I look over and this guy gets out, and it's this huge guy.

Like, I see his head come out first before I see anything else.

(laughter) PAUL DONCASTER: The next day I came in, and my boss was waiting for me at my desk.

And it was not to hand me a bonus check.

(laughter) MICHAEL TOW: Tonight's theme is "Uh Oh."

ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Tonight's theme is "Uh Oh."

You've all heard it, especially as a parent, you might've heard your toddler in the kitchen saying, "Uh oh."

(laughter) You know it's not a good sign.

Or you send a funny meme about your boss to your coworker.

And then after you press send, you realize that you sent it to the entire office.

Uh oh.

(laughter) Our speakers tonight have some great stories about this theme, "Uh Oh."

♪ GREEN: My name is Ken Green.

I'm originally from Chicago, I wasn't born there, but I lived there long enough where I might as well have been born there.

I worked for newspapers in Chicago.

I eventually left Chicago and moved to Denver for three years, and eventually, we moved here to Boston, and I currently live in the Dorchester area.

TOW: You've done sportswriting, playwriting, poetry, comedy.

What is the most exciting part of storytelling for you?

I've been, like, a shy person most of my life.

I didn't want to, like, stand...

I do a story, actually, about not wanting to have a birthday party.

Like, I hated birthday parties, and I made my mother swear never to give me another birthday party after I turned, like, six or seven.

Because I hated the whole idea of being put on the spot.

But I think that whole thing, I'm not...

I'm generally quiet everywhere else.

Those few seconds right before getting onstage are kind of, like, the most exciting.

Like, I mean, "Am I actually going to this?"

And then you get up there and do it, and when you sit down, it's like, "Okay, it's fine."

Tonight's theme is "Uh Oh."

How does your story relate to this theme?

My story relates to the theme of "Uh Oh" because one thing we thought we were doing-- it relates to an incident that happened when I was a kid.

And one thing we thought we were doing, we thought we were having fun, and how sort of the whole thing kind of twisted very quickly, and it's just how things can flip and become an uh-oh situation in a manner of seconds.

Chicago has a reputation for being a pretty tough town, and it's probably well-deserved.

But, when you had friends like me back in the '70s, we were pretty nerdy kids living in a middle-class neighborhood, so that area was not that rough.

We didn't have a lot of friends, we didn't get a lot of invites to all the parties, so we had to make up our own fun and our own activities.

So when we weren't trying to watch scrambled adult movies on pay-per-view in a friend's basement, we would make up our own games to keep us amused.

And, for instance, one of the games we played was called "Signball."

And the object of that game, which you take a ball, and you throw it against a street sign, and that was pretty much it.

(laughter) Or we had another game we used to play called "Setback."

Which is like two guys... a team on this end of the street, a team on this end of the street, and one would try to throw the ball so it would go over their heads, they'd have to chase it, which would set them back.

(laughter) We also had another game called "Having No Girlfriends."

(laughter) Which, like the rest, were pretty self-explanatory.

(laughter) But because of our limited array of entertainment options, we decided to make up our own games a lot.

And one day one of my friends got the bright idea to look for a Good Samaritan, and we came up with the Good Samaritan game, which I guess I'll have to call it.

The object of the game was we would go down to the street near our block, and three of us would pretend to beat up the fourth one to see if anybody would stop and help.

(laughter) And, again, that was the game.

So we said, "Fine," having nothing else to do, we said, "Fine."

So we walked down to the street corner, and it was this road that would like come off the expressway, and cars would go by, and they'd have to see us, and we picked this, like, vacant lot-type area with a few weeds, we figured it'd be a great backdrop for our little morality play test thing we were doing.

And we waited until the first car came, and we got going.

And, as I mentioned, we're nerds, so we spent most of our life trying to avoid getting beat up, so we knew nothing about fighting.

So everything we knew about fighting was basically from, like, either a Western movie or a Bruce Lee movie, so it was some weird combination of punches and, like, karate chops and kicks, and we're wailing on our friend.

He's like acting as if he's hurt, and he's pretending he has broken ribs, and he's holding his head, these imaginary blows are wailing down on him.

And the car goes up and just keeps going past.

'Cause like I said, this is Chicago.

So we said, "Fine, try it again."

So we go again.

We see another car coming.

Back in the positions, you know, players back in position, and we started wailing.

And I'm doing my karate chop, punch, Western uppercut, whatever-move-I-can-think-of move, and the car goes up, and at best they look at us-- that's pretty much it.

So we keep trying this game to see if anybody would stop, and we do it three times, four times, no one stops.

A few people look, that's it.

We're getting tired, but one of our friends says, "You know what, let's try one more time.

"We're going to really try it this time, "let's really sell it this time.

Maybe somebody will stop."

We're tired-- "Fine, let's do it."

So we see a car coming, and we go at him, and we're like karate chop and hi-ya and all this stuff here, and "Ooh"-uppercuts, and he's in pain, and my friend Hayes is the victim, he's in agony and bending over and imaginary bruises are appearing everywhere on him.

And we're so into this thing that we don't notice-- we hear the car, and it comes screeching to a halt, and we freeze, because we weren't expecting this to happen, we didn't think of the game past this point.

(laughter) Like, what do we do now?

And I look over, and this guy gets out, and it's this huge guy.

Like, I see his head come out first before I see anything else.

And he looks like if Shaft and Fred "The Hammer" Williamson could have a baby, it would be this guy.

And he's huge.

And he comes around the car, this giant body, and as I'm looking, I'm holding this position, like I'm ready to punch.

And I look and I see him coming around the car, and that's when I noticed a gun in his hand.

(audience gasps) I know, right?

(nervous laughter) And everything freezes.

Everything is quiet, and we don't know what to do now, we didn't think past this point.

And the guy comes around the car, and he's, like, checking out the scene, and he's looking at everybody, but I notice he's really looking at me really hard.

'Cause the only thing that I can figure is that I'm the biggest one out of our group, and I think it's that prison thing, where if you take out the biggest guy first, the rest of them will fall in line.

So I'm like, "Thank you, genetics."

(laughter) So he comes around and sees my friend, Hayes, the victim, and he's like, "You okay?"

And instead of, like, ending it there, like, "No, we're just joking," he stays in character.

(laughter) He's like in this whole, like, Stanislavsky method acting thing, 'cause he's like, (pained): "Yep, I don't know, oh, I'm sorry, man, ah."

He's like his shoulder's imaginarily broken or something.

He's like (groans in pain)... "I'm o... oh, ah!"

And we're like "Stop, will you stop doing... this guy has a gun..." But he's not... he's so in the character, he can't move.

So the guy tells him, "You, get out of here, go home, go around the corner.

Get out of here."

So Hayes, like, hobbles off like a wounded veteran, he rolls around the corner where you can't see him anymore.

And the guy waits till he gets out of sight and just keeps staring at us for a little while, and we're still holding position like I don't know what to do.

And the guy slowly walks back and gets back in the car, keeping his eye on us, and he drives off.

And we finally start breathing again, and we go around the corner, where our friend Hayes is like, he thinks it's hilarious, laughing.

This is hilarious to him.

And we beat him up.

(laughter) For real this time.

And that was the end of the Good Samaritan game.

We never played that one again.

We went back to watching scrambled adult movies on pay-per-view and playing Signball and Setback.

And we figured, "You know what?

Let's let someone else find a Good Samaritan in Chicago."

Thanks.

(cheers and applause) ♪ DONCASTER: My name's Paul Doncaster.

I'm the father of two teenage girls.

I've been working as a user experience design professional for about 12 years.

I read a lot of history, I read a lot of biography, do a lot of hiking.

What do you remember about the first time telling a story onstage?

The first time I told onstage, I remember it was a small room.

There weren't a lot of tellers, and that almost made me turn around and walk out the door.

I wasn't sure what that was going to be like, as opposed to an auditorium, or... that's what I was expecting going in.

But at the same time, it almost calmed me down a little bit, because it was just a group of people out on a weekend afternoon at a local library, interested in hearing something that people had to say, or something that I had to say.

Do you find that it's easier to tell a story if you've told it before?

DONCASTER: Yes.

Though, that's the beauty of storytelling.

It's something that happened to you, so you don't have to remember very much.

You have to remember the way you're telling it.

And it's live, so you can always have... That's another beauty of storytelling.

It's in the moment, it's what it is.

And whether it's around a dinner table, at a holiday meal, or in front of a group of people, it's all... it's all getting a positive reaction, it's all getting people to smile, I think.

Why is this story important for you to share?

It reinforces the idea of doing your job, doing it well, shooting straight with the people who you deal with, and everything else should flow from that.

Everything else should take care of itself.

Doesn't always, right?

But it should.

And, hopefully, it does.

♪ You happen to be looking at an individual who some will point to as being responsible for the decline of a major American brand and company.

(laughter) (laughs): Uh-huh.

Some will say that Polaroid never saw digital photography coming, or didn't have a good enough response to it.

But I'm here to tell you there are some insiders who will point to the kid here.

I joined Polaroid in the year 2000 as part of a career transition.

And my job there was as administrator of the website's Help section-- so the FAQ database, the product guides, things like that.

This was at a time when companies were investing heavily in getting people to find their own information online rather than staffing large call centers.

So it was my job to maximize that investment.

About three years into this job, a song came out called "Hey Ya!"

Some of you know where this is going.

(laughter) For those of you who don't know where this is going, "Hey Ya!"

was a massively popular song that encouraged people to ♪ Shake, shake, shake ♪ Shake it like a Polaroid picture ♪ (laughter) We started suddenly getting all types of calls and emails coming in to the company saying, "I was always told you're not supposed to shake your Polaroid pictures."

"Now this song is telling me to shake my Polaroid pictures-- what's the deal?"

Here's the deal.

Let's go back in time to the '50s and '60s, when Polaroid was as synonymous with innovation as Google and Yahoo are now.

Back then, when you took an instant picture, you pressed the button, you pulled out the little white tab, you pulled out the big black tab, you laid it on the table for 60 seconds, and then you took it and you peeled it off.

And what you had was an instant print that had a wet residue on it.

Now, you're supposed to lay that down for another 60 seconds to let it dry, but human nature being what it is, people starting going like this to make it dry quicker.

Now, in the new old days of the '70s, the company came out with a new type of instant photography where you press the button, and (makes whirring noise), it came out the front.

And you had this print in front of you, and it was a completely dry process.

Everything happened inside the frame.

So you didn't have to shake it.

In fact, if you did shake it, you ran the risk of damaging the plastic or having the chemicals spread unevenly, and that's the one in the video that all of the women are shaking like this.

(laughter) So I took everything I just told you and put it in a nice, neat, little three-paragraph FAQ, and I got all my approvals to make sure I was saying all the right information, and I posted it on the website.

The next day, I came in, and I saw that it had been viewed more than 5,000 times in less than 24 hours.

And I thought... and I started doing the calculations in my head.

"Holy God, look at this.

"5,000 hits times X amount of dollars "that the company saves by not having to deal with, you know, deal with it on the phone."

And I thought to myself, "I have found my second calling.

"I am saving the company all of this money.

Get my new office ready, I am on my way up."

The morning after that, I came in and my boss was waiting for me at my desk.

And it was not to hand me a bonus check.

He had been called at home by his boss, demanding to know who was responsible for putting this information on the website.

It seems that Reuters had written an article entitled, "Polaroid Warns Buyers Not to Shake It."

(laughter) Which had been picked up by the New York Times.

And The Times of London.

And CNN.

And the Boston Globe.

And the Terre Haute Thrifty Shopper's Coupon Guide.

And the Weekly Reader.

And on, and on, and on.

And the thrust of the article was, "This is why the company's going in the toilet.

"Here they are, getting millions of dollars "of free, positive publicity "from a song telling people to do something with their product, "and some idiot in the company thinks it's a good idea to tell people not to do that thing."

And on top of everything, that week, I had to sit and watch my major, number-one celebrity crush, Tina Fey, use it as the lead-in for a joke on that week's episode of Saturday Night Live.

(laughter) We were a one-income family, and not a very big one.

The income and the family both.

I was two years into my first mortgage.

I had a 15-month-old and a one-month-old at home, and as I stood there in front of my boss, I felt more connection with my baby daughters than I had since becoming a father, because I was in dangerously close need of needing a diaper myself.

(laughter) But as the day went on, I became more at peace with what I'd done.

I'd always told my dad, "I'd rather be a janitor than a salesman."

I'd much rather spend my time mopping the floor myself and doing a good job than trying to convince somebody what the right mop to use was.

My motto was always, "Do your job, do it well, "shoot straight with the people you're dealing with, and the rest will take care of itself."

Whether it was a curiosity or a genuine concern, people were coming to us for information, and I was proactive in providing that information, and I saved the company some money.

Surely, they would see the value in that.

Well, nobody ever came to me to say, "Good job, Paul."

But at the end of the... by the end of the day, the whole thing had died down.

And my boss sent me back to my desk with a "Don't worry about it," and the name of somebody in the marketing department, who I was to consult if anything like this ever came up again.

Thank you for listening.

(cheers and applause) That song has not haunted me ever since.

I always get a big kick out of hearing it.

It sends me back to a time when I figured out or I learned that staying true to what you think is the right thing to do or how you should do your job inevitably pays off in the end.

♪ MARCUS: My name is Bruce Marcus, and I am a storyteller here in the Boston area.

I've been telling stories for almost 30 years now.

So you write poetry, folk music, fiction, personal stories.

What does storytelling mean to you?

Storytelling for me, I think is the most gratifying way to bring a story to an audience.

If you write for the page, you don't necessarily get to sit there and watch somebody read your story.

And I think it's also, it's storytelling in the most basic sense.

Movies are storytelling, theater is storytelling, but just that one-on-one or one- on-an-audience storytelling is just as stripped-down bare as you can get.

Why is this story important for you to share tonight?

This story is important for me to share because it was a moment in my life where, as an adolescent, I was starting to go down a wrong road, and it was a real wake-up moment for me, and a point where I was able to change that aspect of my life, turn it around.

♪ When I was an adolescent, one of my friends and I liked to go out to stores... ...and leave with merchandise, for which we did not pay.

Now, my mother, who could be strict at times, seemed to have this uncanny maternal radar for such things.

"Where did you get this?"

she asked, picking up, somehow, from the chaotic jumble of my bedroom floor this pricy-looking bound edition of '60s underground comics.

"From the bookstore," I told her, which was true.

"With what money?"

she asked.

"From my paper route," I told her, which wasn't true.

But, hey, I mean, if I... she found out what I was up to, I wouldn't be allowed to go anywhere again with my friends until I was 42.

One afternoon after school, my friend and I paid a visit to the bookstore at the local mall.

We found a secluded aisle with some cool books and slid some of them into the pockets of our winter jackets.

All at once, a grim-looking man descended upon us, seemingly from nowhere.

"Heard you boys were taking books," he said.

My stomach turned to a solid block of ice, and my throat close up to the size of a pinhole.

(high pitched): "Oh, no, sir, not us!"

my friend and I managed to squeak.

Well, the man stepped over in front of my friend, who was standing with his jacket unzipped, the sides hanging forward and clearly loaded down.

He slapped the sides of my friend's jacket.

Whap-- a book.

Thunk-- another.

"Empty your pockets," he said.

And when my friend sheepishly pulled brand-new bookstore books out of the pockets of his jacket, he came over and slapped the sides of my jacket.

Fwip-- no book.

Fwip-- no book.

I had this old snorkel jacket, puke green, you know, the kind with the fake fur around the hood.

I see nods of recognition out there.

Well, the pockets had long since ripped out, so that anything I put into them dropped to the bottom of the lining.

And on this particular occasion, I'd had the foresight to push a couple of books all the way around to the back.

(laughter) Where, I was quite sure, they formed this large, rectangular bulge, clearly visible to anyone standing behind me.

"Follow me," the man said, and he started toward the back of the store.

We fell in behind him like obedient sheep being led to slaughter.

I'd never been in any real trouble before, and I was practically incontinent as he led through a door along the back wall and into the bookstore office.

Which, as I recall, was a small grotto, dimly lit with torches, the skulls of other young shoplifters mounted on the walls.

"See that sign," the man said, and one appeared right where he was pointing.

It read, "Shoplifters will be prosecuted."

At 14, I didn't know exactly what prosecuted meant, but I knew that it was legal in nature and it signified trouble-- big, lasting trouble.

"In this store, we prosecute," the man said.

And I thought, (high pitched): "Not me!"

"Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please, don't prosecute me!"

"But we're not going to prosecute you today."

And I thought, "Ah, thank goodness."

"We are, however, going to call your parents."

(laughter) I pictured my mother and thought, (gasps) "Prosecute me, please!"

Well, the man asked us for our names and telephone numbers, which, being obedient sheep we were, we gave to him accurately.

He lectured us for a while more and then told us he was going to let us go.

He shepherded us out of the office, back into the bookstore, and the walk up that wide main aisle was the longest of my life.

I drifted along past the curious stares of staff and shoppers, all the while acutely aware of that large, rectangular bulge in the back of my jacket.

And waiting for me at the front of the store was the merchandise detector.

And as I walked towards it, I had the curious sensation that it kept getting farther and farther away.

And then, somehow, I was stepping through it.

I cringed, waiting for alarm bells to blare, and miraculously none did.

And I was free!

But hardly relieved, because I had just stepped out of the proverbial frying pan and was now headed into the fires of hell back home.

To my utter astonishment, my parents had completely redecorated our kitchen that very day in the exact same grotto style as the bookstore office, complete with torches and skulls.

At the dinner table, the interrogation began at once.

"What did you do after school today?"

my mother asked, pleasantly.

"Nothing," I told her, being sure to maintain careful eye contact with the food on my plate.

"Just went to the mall."

"Oh, with who?"

she said.

I told her the name of the friend who'd been with me.

"I hope you boys aren't shoplifting."

I pushed my face to within three inches of my plate.

"Don't worry, Ma," was all I could think to say.

And then she... ate her dinner.

And when she spoke again, a minute or so later, she changed the subject.

I was stunned and left to wonder, had the store even called her?

That night, in bed, completely unable to sleep, I wondered.

For days, weeks, months.

Fast forward 25 or 30 years.

I'm a young adult, a storyteller, and I'm sharing this same story in an art center in the far western suburbs.

In the audience, on this particular evening, is my now elderly mother.

Recognizing the fact that she no longer holds any punitive authority over me... (laughter) ...I look out at her in the audience, and I say, when I reach this point in the story, and I say, "And Mom, I've always wondered: did the bookstore ever actually call you?"

And she said, "No."

(laughter) He didn't call.

(chuckles) He didn't call!

The guy from the bookstore never called!

And then I realized, he didn't need to call.

Yeah, he had wielded the weapon of prosecution, and he knew how to scare kids straight, but what he didn't have was the power of maternal radar.

Thank you.

(applause) This story's important for me to tell for the reason a lot of stories are important to tell.

I think that we as human beings are storytelling animals, and we make sense of life, make order out of life and cope with life by crafting stories, by looking at life through the vehicle of story.

ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪