October 2017 - An evening with Shonaleigh

With the blessing of the landlord, 40 people squeezed into the plotting room to be regaled with traditional Jewish stories as told by Shonaleigh.

Under the control of Andrea, club members filled the first half hour with:

• Elaine: How the baleen got it's teeth and the little boy got home
• Peter: The old woman in the cave, and the truth, twisty ending
• Cath: The drug pusher's poem, (an autobiography)
• Steve: How Thomas Ferres got his lady love, and Egton got it's bridge. True story.
• Roslyn: A creation myth from America led to a frightened God and an acknowledgement of the value of dreams

Shonaleigh entertained us with story after story from the Indo-Jewish tradition

• Why just 3 red roses in the garden
• how the women enjoyed being warriers
• how the King's guard enjoyed teaching the women to spit, play cards and fight with a sword
• with the mother that could not say "sorry"
• how the sober mother welcomed the pillaging bandit into her boudoir
• how the mother could argue with herself in front of the intoxicated bandit and in so doing bring the house down
• how the bandit's son by the mother came to her rescue on the same night
• and how the betrothed but doomed fiance learned how to influence animals, men and women, became a cross-dressed warrier, and duped her husband to be in order to save her life by solving 3 impossible riddles
• And hence just why an important donkey skin can cause so much trouble

Shonaleigh is a Druts’yla, and carries a living unbroken oral tradition passed down from Grandmother to Granddaughter by generations of Jewish women. She knows around four thousand tales that she can recall on request, using the lost art of ‘stories within stories’.