“You all showed up tonight, and I’m like, I have 150 stories because you’re all here,” she said to the audience, which packed the restaurant to capacity.
With a 3-course meal presented by Chef Omar, live music, and storytelling, the sold-out Dragon Tales event brought community members together to learn about each other, reminisce, and laugh.
Speakers Bruce Rekstad, Marissa Wollmann, Jan Schetnan, Ruth Sarar, Mary Tilberg, and JT Nelson spoke about growing up in Garretson, what it meant to be a “Garretson-ite,” and the values that our town holds and expresses to others.
While there were inside jokes, the stories the speakers told were universal. Between wanting to get out of town, the joys and tribulations of owning a small business, and the joys of friendship and community, the thread throughout was evident in how we are all tied together.
Rekstad, whose storytelling piece was titled, “The Daring Tales of the Norwegian Cruise Liner- The USS Jesse James,” spoke of his first years as captain of the pontoon tour ride, which got its start in 1992. He spoke of a time when he had a group of 8th graders from Remsen, IA, a broken boat motor and paddles that were too short, but a bright idea to pull the boat to its dock via ropes helped a young man pull out of debilitating depression.
Wollmann spoke of the insecurities of feeling like she didn’t fit in while growing up within a small community, and her realization that it was actually her self-talk more than her reality, and her insecurities followed wherever she went.
“I knew I was destined and I was going to be famous,” she said. She dreamt hard of the day she could leave, because when she was young, she thought a “Garretson-ite” was “a person who never left Garretson.” She spent her childhood resenting the town and dreamed of ways to get out, but once she left, it was the one place she found she’d rather be. She now treasures Garretson, and its values of family and community, and is glad she was able to raise her children here.
Schetnan, whose piece was titled, “Heirlooms from the Hairloom,” spoke of owning a small business in Garretson, and how small pranks always kept everyone on their toes.
“Garretson was great to me,” she said, and while she lives in Sioux Falls now to be closer to family, she remembers her years in Garretson fondly.
Sarar kept the community theme going in her piece, “The Snowy Sonata,” a story of how her husband, Arturo, gathered a group of guys from the local bar between football halves and moved a piano to their new house in a blizzard.
“I’m quite sure there was a fluid quid pro quo involved,” she said to laughter. But it was the kindness, and the willingness of others to get involved, that made the piano move possible. Now that she has more time to practice, she said, she plans to buy herself a slinky black cocktail dress and play some jazz by the time she’s 80.
Tilberg, in her piece titled “Adventures in the Arts: Tales of a High School Drama Queen,” talked about her time in high school, where she managed to give herself a black eye, watch a fellow classmate land in a pile of vomit in the gym the day after a school dance, and as a drum majorette, when the Garretson High band teacher saved her by finding a spare major stick at a competition in Wayne, NE.
Nelson, whose father owned the drug store, reminisced about his boyhood friendships in “Moon Tanning by the Jump Tree,” which was a prank he and his friends pulled in their early years, where they’d line up along the street in lawn chairs at night, pretending to tan under the moon.
“We talked a lot about the things we didn’t know, and a little about the things we did know,” he said.
His story took a sad turn when, on his 24th birthday, he was laid off from a job and found out just after that one of his best friends had passed away.
“Death wasn’t something we talked about much at the moon jump tree,” he said. “It didn’t affect me personally [until then].”
However, the remembrance of a friend is something that brings all people together, and as Bartling said after Nelson’s story, the quote from Steel Magnolias is one she remembers:
“Laughing through tears is my favorite emotion.”
Along with the sing-along of “The Ballad of Jesse James,” a piece written by Garretson member Kathy Winter and put to music by Larry Engebretson in 1986 for the Jesse James Players, the audience enjoyed their time together.
Bartling and Frerk promise to bring the event back to Garretson again.
