“Dear Friends of Telling Moments:
We are very grateful to Ed Stivender who has so kindly agreed to come and perform “American Dreams” storytelling concert for us on September 16th, 2011. We expect this concert to be a great success.

Telling Moments is founded by storytellers and story-lovers. All the board members are volunteers. We donate our time and effort as well as our own money to do this because we feel that our theatre has a very important role to play in the Washington Metropolitan area. Not only do we hope to bring nationally and internationally known storytellers to our stage, we also plan to bring more local storytellers to our stage.

In the past few concerts, the numbers of attendance has been uneven. Storytelling is a very unique, unusual art form and it is still largely unknown to the general public. Most people still think that storytelling is only for children. Regular social media and press may not be able to attract people who have never attended a storytelling concert. We find that the best way to promote storytelling concerts is still by word of mouth and by you bringing friends who have never been to a storytelling concert so they can have first- hand experience of what a storytelling concert is like. That is why we need your help.

Because of the limited resources we have as well as the rather limited audience list we inherited from Washington Storytellers Theatre, we are currently presenting storytelling concerts on a very limited basis. We are also carefully monitoring the attendance of each concert, to make sure that our efforts are not in vain and that our theatre is not just providing convenience for a very small number of people who happen to be fans of certain master storytellers. We need to be convinced by those numbers of attendance that Telling Moments is truly a theatre our audiences want.

In the following month, the board will be carefully monitoring the concert attendance, the number of people who open and respond to our emails, the number of people to come to our concerts to determine the future of our theatre. You participation in this survey is very important. What you do will be your statement as to whether you wish Telling Moments to exist and grow.

You can help in the following ways:
Open and read our email announcements. Email us if you have questions or suggestions.
Come to our concerts as often as you can. If you can come personally due to scheduling conflict or other reason, we ask you to tell your friends and family members to do so. That is the best support you can give us to keep Telling Moments growing.
Make a financial contribution to the theatre. We are very grateful to the people who have donated money to our theatre. Right now we are paying our storytellers a fee much lower than they truly deserve. They are performing for us out of love, out of their sincere hope that our theatre will grow. Your monetary help will also make a big difference and it is tax-deductible.
Sign up to be our volunteers. Share your talents with us. We need volunteers in all areas, and if you are willing to help, please let us know.

We hope you are one of those “I want Telling Moments to grow” people. Please help us in any way you can.

For more information please go to our website: www.tellingmomentstheater.com

We look forward to seeing you on the 16th!

Sincerely,

Linda Fang

Executive Board member for programming”