Lost and Found

This can be one person, or can be several. Simply -- you pretend to lose something of great importance to you in a crowded room. This can be the waiting area in a train station, or an audience waiting for a film to begin. The item should be something laden with memory, something with a backstory. Take your time to create your lost treasure -- or use a valuable thing from your own life that you would really hate to lose.

In this example the lost valuable is the great-great-aunt's (the ancestor of a friend of ours.) We have lost her diary, a little leather-bound book. We were entrusted with it -- now it's vanished. We are heart-broken and energized and we filled with the power of the life in the diary.

As you get on your hands and knees looking in the darkness under chairs, in the seams between sections of couch, behind other people's luggage, you keep describing "The lost world that she wrote about. She was a lesbian! Her name was Lorraine! Excuse me if I could just look behind here...You see she met her lover in Chicago at a librarian's convention -- oh I hope we don't lose this -- excuse me can I look behind your leg? -- thanks - and the two of them homesteaded in South Dakota for twenty years with 7 foster children - have you seen it? a little black book, very old -- and then they moved back east when two of the sons went AWOL from the Spanish American War -- what a story! We'll just be crushed if we" excuse me can I look under here? - and then they started a Peace organization and took in refugees in a Toronto Hotel that they somehow fixed up..."

This monologue is an ideal format for re-introducing the bios of the Saints in our church - Mother Jones, Joe Hill, the manong in San Francisco or Bruce Utah Phillips, King of the Hobos.

The Moral of the Action is: We have lost our histories, but they are within us, under us, in the darkness behind us. Left in the hands of commercial media, the history of change in our society is either erased altogether or is made sentimental and sugary and depoliticized. Let's find our past and say it out loud in public space.

What did you lose? What did you find? Share the story of telling your story with us!