If you’re not familiar with First Person Arts, they are a non profit group that helps foster real life stories into various genres for presentation.

They regularly hold First Person Slams, in which individuals tell a 5 minute story pertaining to a predetermined theme. The winner is then funneled into the annual First Person Grand Slam, where someone is bestowed the honor of being Philadelphia’s Best Story Teller, by their standards.

On Saturday, November 10th, dreamy Robert Drake, WXPN producer emceed the Grand Slam at the First Person Stage, 2111 Sansom Street. Drake really stole the show giving snippets of WXPN’s musical memories that had been submitted through the website.
The theme for the Grand Slam participants was, “musical moments.” The arena was filled with the story tellers sitting together like a literary penalty box.

The seven story teller’s were picked randomly to take the stage, and the judges were volunteers. Each musical moment was varied by the speaker and some were obviously better than others. Some stuck to theme better; others had more content and performance value, which are characteristics they were judged by.
Story Telling highlights:

• Ingrid Wiese told the tale of being in Bosnia and her only true connection, besides the international language of love, was music. Prince to be exact. 1999 to be painfully exact.

• Raeann Drew spoke about her choir in high school and how they had a girl in choir that had a bit of a Tourrette’s seizure issue, and often shouted out WHORE.

• R. Eric Thomas blew me away personally with his tale of drunken karaoke at a lesbian bar. I imagined his story fully as he spoke of nailing Tina Turner’s crazy dance moves while belting out Proud Mary.

• Juliet Wayne made a very personal story of drug rehab, very funny and very vocal as she described her musical moment with rehab roommates and gossip all to the tune of a clock radio blasting rock power hours.

R. Eric Thomas won for best content with overall winner and Best Story Teller in Philadelphia title going to Juliet Wayne. They both deserved the great scores the judges gave them. First Person Slams start up again on January 22nd. If you have a true story to tell check it out.