Tell me a story: Potluck series fills void left by Tales

This is a story about storytelling. Specifically, it's a story about a group bringing storytellers and audiences together in downtown North Little Rock to share tales ranging from the humorous to the profound, to listen to music and share a meal.

It's called Potluck & Poison Ivy and is the brainchild of 61-year-old John Gaudin, owner of Argenta Wealth Management and a longtime supporter of arts in Argenta.

"Storytelling has such an incredible history," he says from the third floor of his art-filled office/home in downtown North Little Rock. "What makes it unique in a live setting is you're watching people willing to be vulnerable, which is pretty special."

Add food and music and it becomes even more special, says Gaudin, a native of St. Martinville, La., who has lived in North Little Rock since 1982. "To have those experiences where you're breaking bread, having a drink, listening to great music and storytelling, I think it's a great gumbo of things coming together."

Each Potluck & Poison Ivy will be held at the 100-seat venue The Joint Theater and Coffeehouse. Shows are planned for the fourth Thursday evening of each month through November. Admission is $35, which includes dinner, and there will be a cash bar.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Rex Nelson and Paul Austin, director of the Arkansas Humanities Council, who host a podcast through the Central Arkansas Library System called Chewing the Fat, will be the featured storytellers June 22. The Wildflower Revue will bring the tunes and Green Cuisine will serve up Southern food.

"They speak off the cuff about food and their food experiences," Gaudin says of Nelson and Austin. "It's tremendously funny. I thought it would be perfect for my vision of the show."

On July 27, Sy Hoahwah, a Little Rock native and member of the Comanche Nation, will tell his story "Melting Pot." The musical act and menu for that show have not been determined.

If storytelling before an audience in downtown North Little Rock sounds familiar, that's because it is.

Potluck & Poison Ivy was inspired in part by Tales From the South, which was started in 2005 by Paula Martin and eventually emanated from Starving Artist Cafe in Argenta, the restaurant Martin owned with then-husband Jason Morrell. The show was broadcast weekly by Little Rock NPR affiliate KUAR and also aired on the World Radio Network and the World Radio Network English Europe channel.

The cafe closed in 2014 and Martin later sold the rights to Tales to Southern lifestyle brand Bourbon & Boots. The series' departure from downtown North Little Rock left a gap that Gaudin felt needed filling.

"Every Tuesday we would go to Paula's shows," he says. "It became a huge community-building thing. We would get together and eat and drink and listen to the wonderful stories people told about themselves."

And though he was influenced by Martin's series, Gaudin wasn't interested in re-creating Tales: "I find that things that have been off the shelf for a while are tough to re-create. There were some essential components I wanted to keep, but I wanted to start fresh."

Tales was a tightly run, scripted affair, but Gaudin envisions Potluck as more improvisational, much like New York-based series The Moth, with performers telling rather than reading their stories.

Martin, the 2017 inductee into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame and an adjunct professor at University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College, has signed on as Potluck & Poison Ivy's producer and creative director.

In her new, behind-the-scenes capacity, she gets to "focus on what I'm good at, and that's helping the writers. That's what I'm really passionate about. I enjoy helping people find the story and find their voice and make it the best that it can be for them."

Among her many duties at Tales was serving as host, but that role with Potluck & Poison Ivy is now handled by Traci Berry, a former teacher and current director of the Raid the Rock adventure race.

"I feel like people are looking for ways to connect to other people right now," says Berry, who also hosts The T with Traci & Angie, a weekly program on KABF-FM, 88.3. "Storytelling is probably one of the best ways to do that. There's a lot of tension that revolves around several different issues right now and, more often than not, we focus on our differences rather than our commonalities. When we tell stories, we think, 'Maybe I have a little more in common with this person than I thought.'"

Food, as indicated in the name of the series, is an important component of the evening.

Because The Joint doesn't serve dinners, meals have to be catered. "It's more of a potluck," Gaudin says. "And when I thought about the programming, I wanted it to be more of a potluck, too. I envision bringing in readers, writers, actors, musicians." The Poison Ivy part, he says, adds a bit of edge. Plus, it sounds better than Potluck & Potpourri and is still alliterative.

Coordinating the grub is Drue Patton, who works with Gaudin and is the former director of development and marketing for the Argenta Downtown Council and the Argenta Arts Council.

"I'll be helping plan the food around the different themes and storytellers," he says. "The one [this month] will be traditional Southern food -- tomatoes, purple hull peas, greens, squash, pork loin" and more.

"That will go perfectly with Rex Nelson and that group," Gaudin says.

"We're thrilled to give them the opportunity to be on stage there. Their podcast is so fun," says Martin, whose second novel, Bone by Bone: A Love Story, will be released this summer. "The food component is really important. It's really about sharing our stories, and we talk while having dinner. That element is important to us and [Nelson and Austin's] podcast is based around food, so it's a great match."

This month's show is actually the second Potluck & Poison Ivy. The series officially kicked off May 25 with a sold-out fundraiser for the Acansa Arts Festival and featured stories by Kevin Kresse, Susan Elder and season sponsor Dr. Tyler Thompson. The Heather Smith Band started the evening with a song and then played between storytellers. Wythe Walker, the series music director, played acoustic guitar to warm up the crowd before things got going in earnest.

"I was very happy," with opening night, Berry says. "We had a great turnout and I think the crowd was really into it. That made it fun and easy to do my job."

Gaudin doesn't want to get too far ahead of himself -- it's early in Potluck & Poison Ivy's run -- but he sees the series as having unlimited potential to bring the community together and bond over stories, music and food.

"I'm interested in social justice and civil rights, and using it as a platform to talk about issues like immigration and race relations," he says. "And at the same time, mix it all up with other great storytellers and writers and readers and create more variety."

Style on 06/13/2017