Jim Magruder took a deep breath, swung back his arm, and threw his wedding band as far as he could into the audience. That's how he knew he was finally free.
"Telling this story has taken the hex off this wedding ring that I haven't known what to do with for ten years," Magruder told the 250 people attending a Stoop Storytelling session in 2006.
"If you caught it, give it to someone you love, or sell it on eBay, but I'M DONE WITH IT!"
FOR THE RECORD - An article in Sunday's Arts & Life Today section about The Stoop Storytelling Series misquoted one of the speakers. Karen Weeks spoke about her tumultuous relationship with a ring she had picked up at a Stoop show. She was not referring to her personal relationships.
THE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR
Magruder's impulsive ring toss - and the thunderous whoops from the audience that followed - illustrates why the live storytelling series has been selling out its shows since its inception on Feb. 9, 2006.
Telling his story in public proved unexpectedly liberating for the 47-year-old Baltimore playwright and educator.
"I didn't know I was going to throw away the ring until I did it," Magruder says. "It was very, very cathartic. Getting that story off my chest was one of my highlights for 2006."
Held six times a year, and organized around such themes as "My Nemesis"; "What I Did for Love" and "Legends of the Fall: Stories about Failure," Stoop combines the intimacy of group therapy with the drama of live theater.
Seven invited guests, some well known and some not, stand before a microphone and talk for seven minutes about formative events in their lives. After the intermission, three audience members tell their own stories.
The Stoop's "house band," Caleb Stine and the Brakemen, plays at the cocktail hour before each show and during intermissions.
"Baltimore is such a neat, gritty town, and these stories illustrate it," says Phil Meeder, 74, of Annapolis, who spoke at the Stoop about searching for an organ donor after his beloved wife was diagnosed with a hereditary kidney disease.
Some tales are horrifyingly funny: in September, Dana Kollmann, a forensic scientist and former crime scene investigator for the Baltimore County Police Department, relayed the unlikely events that resulted in her having a dead man's fist jammed inside her mouth.
Yup, you read that right.
Look, Kollmann was trying desperately to get the victim's fingerprints so he could be identified and his relatives notified.
It was a dry winter night, and she needed to restore humidity to the man's hand because the prints weren't taking, and - accidents happen.
"I'm screaming and pulling back, and the whole corpse is coming with me," Kollmann told the Stoop audience this past September. "The detectives are bent in half, they're laughing so hard."
