CAMDEN — It’s every organizer’s worst nightmare: what if you throw an event and no one shows up? In the case of the And/Or Storytelling event, launched in June, organizers had four folks signed up as storytellers—and only one showed up. There were nearly 85 people in the audience eager to hear stories and the only teller, Sean Durnan, a Maine Street Meats butcher, wasn’t going to be able to carry the entire show.

After his story, 10 more people in the audience offered to come up to the stage and tell their own stories, impromptu.

“The subject  was labors of love,” said co-organizer Caitlin MacRae. “We heard stories of policemen delivering babies in snowstorms, people coming to terms with the death of parents, celebrating the births of their children, folks working in drive-thru windows, traveling the U.S. as missionaries, spectacularly quitting private chef jobs and so on.”

The 10 people who volunteered to go up on stage so the show could go on impressed MacRae.

“I think all of us were impressed by the depth and range of these stories, and moved that so many people were comfortable enough to share their personal stories with us almost spontaneously,” she said. “It went for almost two hours, and I felt like more people would have shared if we hadn't run out of time. It was a really heartening moment, the way the room rallied to save an evening that could have easily fallen flat, and used their stories to help it become something really beautiful.”

MacRae and her co-organizer, Chris Michael will be hosting the next storytelling session Friday, July 24 at High Mountain Hall in Camden. July's theme is Boom &/or Bust: Stories of Success, Failure and Entropy. Big dreams, wild successes, spectacular failures, and everything in between.Three storytellers have been selected in advance, with more open slots for folks to sign up at the event.

“We are planning to continue these story nights once a month, throughout the year,” said MacRae. “I feel like it's a really unique opportunity to get to know our community better. We all tell anecdotes like ‘the time this thing happened to me,’ but the sharing of stories is something else entirely, because the focus is on transformation, how the thing that happened changed you, moved you or shaped you,” she said.

The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free, donations are welcome. For more information, visit andorstories.com, facebook.com/andorstories, or email story hour organizers Chris and Caitlin at andorstories@gmail.com.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com