MELISSA FERRICK: And I see him, Bob Dylan.

I'm thinking, "What am I going to say, what am I going to say?"

And I'm going, and then I just walk by him, and I go, "Hey."

(laughter) JEFFREY FOUCAULT: The thing that happened next had something to with dignity and something to do with luck and something to do with grace.

JASON PROKOWIEW: She says, "Do you hear yourself?

You can sing."

And those words that she says to me feels like she is getting straight to my core.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ FERRICK: My name is Melissa Ferrick, and I've been making independent albums for 27 years now.

I'm an associate professor at Berklee College of Music.

What do you find to be the hardest thing to achieve as a storyteller?

Whether it's, you know, telling a story on stage, like you're gonna do this evening, or as a songwriter?

Staying in the moment.

Not thinking while I'm performing too much.

There's like a real fine line of being conscious and unconscious in performance.

Uh, so for me, as a performer, uh, I do think some people have like a bit of a gift in performing, and um, I've been blessed with that gift.

So I am able to get out of my own way pretty quickly.

So I find that if I get in trouble when I'm telling a story or when I'm playing a show, it's because I'm thinking about myself.

So... (laughs) - Mm...

I have to remember to, to stay open to change.

So allowing the story to really go where it wants to, but also be involved as my human enough to also kind of mold it, and shape it, and get it back on track, so... And is this the first time that you're telling a story like this as not part of your musical act?

FERRICK: Yes.

This is the first time I've ever just told the story, so... How are you feeling?

I'm nervous, yeah.

I'm nervous, it's different.

I just hope to be able to look out and see people smiling and laugh a couple of times.

That's, that's like, such a great feeling as a performer, 'cause you're enabling people to relax.

That's what makes a good show, even when I'm playing music.

If people are able to forget about their own lives, even if it's just for a brief moment, that's something I'm able to give them, so...

It was October 1992.

I had just turned 22 years old.

And I had also just signed a seven-album deal with Atlantic Records, and I was living at home with my mom and dad, who were so proud of me that it was almost unbearable.

(laughs) So I'm from Ipswich, Massachusetts, which is about an hour north of Boston.

And my dad was a middle school teacher there for forever, and everybody knew my dad.

His name's John.

And my mom, really popular family, and really great people.

And my dad was downtown one day getting a coffee, and this guy who teaches over at Endicott College, which is in Beverly, about a half-hour away... (audience members cheer) There you go.

He's a friend of my dad's, he was, like, "Oh," you know, "Hey, John, good to see you."

He's, like, "Hey, what's going on?"

"Oh, I hear a lot about your kid these days."

My dad's, like, "Yup, you do."

And this guy's, like, "You know, Bob Dylan's on his 30th anniversary tour, "and we've got him coming to Endicott College to play, "right here in Beverly.

Do you think Melissa would want to open up that show?"

(laughter) And my father says, without a beat, "Absolutely."

Now, I'm not there, okay?

So he's now my agent.

So he says, "Absolutely," and then the promoter guy from Endicott goes, "That's great, but listen, there's one hitch.

"And that is this, "that I've been informed by Dylan's people that no one-- "and they mean no one-- opens for Bob Dylan solo.

So she has to find a band."

My dad goes, "No problem."

He comes home, he's crying.

"You're not going to believe it, Andi, you're not going to believe it."

My mother's, "What's going on, John?"

He says, "I got Melissa the gig.

I got her a gig opening for Bob Dylan."

My mother starts crying, they're hugging each other.

They had tickets to Woodstock, but they didn't make it, so, like, this was, like, the dream.

Now, I'm, like, the golden child.

My sister's, like, "Whatever."

So I'm standing there, I'm, like, "You're talking about me.

I'm right here, what's going on?"

So Dad goes, "I got you the gig, you're going to open, "it's the Endicott College show, it's his 30th anniversary, "it's going to be great, but the only thing is, kid, you got to find a band."

And I was, like, "Oh, awesome."

I have never played live with a band before, ever.

I'm only 22, but mind you, I thought I had been playing for a long time, so, um...

So I called up my alma mater, Berklee College of Music.

I found a couple of musicians, we rehearsed for, like, five days.

We got about five or six songs down.

We felt like we were ready to go.

Boom, day of the show, October 30, 1992, I'm opening for Bob Dylan.

Me and my mom leave from Ipswich, head to Beverly.

Dad comes from the middle school, the band comes up from Boston.

We meet, we're at the tent.

It's freezing out.

There's 4,000 people lined up outside the tent, and you can hear Dylan's band sound checking.

And I'm walking in, and we walk through the tent, and I see him-- Bob Dylan.

There he is, he's walking right towards me, and he's got a zipped-up hoodie on and the hood over, and I'm thinking, "What am I going to say?

What am I going to say?"

And he keeps walking towards me, and I still don't have it, and I'm going, and then I just walk by him, and I go, "Hey."

(laughter) And he went...

I didn't get a "hey" out of him.

So we get into the dressing room, I'm all excited, and the dressing room is full-on five-star, it has everything: every kind of coffee, every kind of tea, the deli platter, like, important cheese like brie.

And so it's very exciting for us, so we're sitting there, we're very excited to play, and the dude that got me the gig, the dude from Endicott comes in, and he goes, "John, can I talk to you for a second?"

And now my stomach dropped, because I'm, like, "I know there's something wrong."

So my dad goes outside, talks to the guy for, like, two seconds, comes back and he goes, "I got really bad news.

"Dylan, he's canceled the show.

I mean, like, Elvis has left the building."

He actually said that-- I didn't just make that part up.

"Elvis has-- the show can't happen, it's not going on."

I was, like, "What are you talking about?

Why?"

My father says, "Well, we've been informed "that Dylan has a stipulation in his contract "that it has to be at least 68 degrees in the venue for him to perform."

And I'll grant him this, it was very cold that night, maybe 58, you know, 62.

But still, I was, like, "Come on," you know?

But he didn't want to play, so in the very moment that we all realized we weren't going to get to play this gig, we also realized that we were the only five people that knew this, and that the 4,000 people didn't know this yet, and we needed to get out of there, like, right away.

So me and mom look at each other, and it was, like, this instant mother-daughter thing, and we start packing up the back of her Rabbit with everything from that dressing room, and I mean everything.

The brie, the deli platter, the cups, right?

The Coke, the bubbly water, the coffee, the coffee filters, the little honey bear, the little tiny packets of mayonnaise, the little tiny packets of mustard, we're throwing... She's, like, "Get it in the car, get it in the car."

And we leave, and we go back to Ipswich, the band drives back to Boston, my father's, like, rummaging around drinking more coffee than he should.

And when we get inside the house, me and my mom, we walk in, and the phone is ringing, and we're, like, "That's weird."

I put the deli platter down, I answer the phone, and it's my dad, and he's screaming, "The show's back on, the show's back on!"

I'm not even joking, I'm not even making this up.

"The show's back on, get back in the car, get over here."

So I hang up the phone, I'm screaming at my mother, "We got to go back!"

She's, like, "What are you talking about?"

We get in the car-- 15 minutes flat, my mom, driving a Rabbit like 75 miles an hour down Route 1A, pulls behind the tent, and I get out of the passenger car, and I'm right by the side door of where you go onto the stage, and the promoter's standing there, and he's yelling at me.

"Get on the stage, get on the stage, there's no time for the..." I remember, he's, like, "There's no time for the band, there's no time for the band!"

And I was, like, "Good thing, man, 'cause the band already left."

So I walk on the stage, and I've got my guitar, all the lights are on, I can feel the heat on the back of my head, because they're trying to warm this tent up for Dylan.

So all the lights, there's 4,000 people, I can see every single one of them, and in the back row, they start crowd-surfing this guy.

And then I notice that there's a stretcher being wheeled down with the EMT people, and I'm up playing my folk song.

And I'm, like, "What's going on, everything okay?"

And they're, like, "Yeah, everything's fine."

They put the dude on the gurney, and they wheel him back out.

And I finish playing, so I was, like, "Whatever."

I walk off the stage, I don't even know, I think I played three songs, and there was a guy at the bottom of the stairs, and he looked at me, and he goes, "Great job, kid."

And I was, like, "Thanks.

Do you work here, or...?"

He goes, "No, I'm Ian, I'm Dylan's drummer."

And I was, like, "Oh, cool."

So two years later, I'm in Glastonbury, England, playing the Glastonbury Festival, touring that album I had moved to California to make, and that year at Glastonbury, headlining, was The Pretenders, Radiohead, and Jackson Browne.

This was not a bad gig to get.

And I played that gig, and all the lights were dimmed, and I played a full set, and I did an awesome job.

No one had a heart attack, that I know of, no stretcher got rolled into the front.

I finished that set, and I walked off the stage, and there was a guy standing there, and it was Ian Wallace.

He also played drums for Jackson Browne.

And he looked at me, and he said, "I remember you.

You're the one who got to open for Bob Dylan solo."

(laughter) (cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ FOUCAULT: My name is Jeffrey Foucault, and I grew up in the Midwest in Wisconsin.

I'm a professional touring musician, and I've been on the road about 20 years, and I have...

I want to say six albums of my own songs that are out in the world.

How did you come into music?

You know, what caught the, you know, that you had to have the bug?

The thing that led me to music was my parents.

And my dad was a guitar player-- is a guitar player-- and he would come home from work, and he would be tired.

And one of things that he would do is sit down and pick up his guitar, which would lean over in the corner of the living room, off the kitchen.

And he'd go in there, and he'd pick up the guitar, or maybe he would sit down at the piano, and he would play a little bit.

And he would get this look on his face, and it was not a look that I would see any other time.

it was almost as if he was a different person.

And my mom, when she would sing along with, you know, the turntable or whatever, same thing.

There was another person that wasn't present the rest of the time, or if they were, they were in the background.

And I was curious about those people.

How are you approaching this, what you're about to do, tonight?

Have you ever told a story without, you know...?

No, and I am scared out of my mind.

The last time I stood up in front of anybody and I was not holding onto a guitar was at the wedding of a guy that I lived with in college, and I was the best man, I had to give a speech.

And that just about made me ill all day, thinking about it.

We train ourselves to do the thing, right?

"It's your job, you're the one who's going to get up onstage, and you know how to do that one thing."

The lights are off in the room, but the lights are on you, and you can't really see very well, and you go out there, and you learn how to do it.

And when you change any one variable in there, it becomes just as nervous-making as it was.

In June of 2006, I played what seemed to me to be an almost perfect show at a very nearly empty bar in Des Moines, Iowa.

It was a hot day, with the kind of flat, wet, oppressive heat that the Midwest gets in exchange for the wind-chill factor.

And I went to the Des Moines airport, and I picked up my friend Eric Haywood, a pedal steel and electric guitar player of some note.

And we had a few hours to kill, so we drove around town, like you do when you're a musician on the road.

First, we went to the vintage clothing shop, and then we went to the vintage guitar store, and we played some guitars that we couldn't afford.

We had been on the road about a month prior to release a record in Europe, and we had traveled all over the continent, but for whatever reason, we had got some very nice traction and were very mildly and very briefly famous in the Netherlands, of all places.

It's worth pointing out that the Netherlands is a country of 17 million people that would fit in the state of Iowa a little over three times.

There are three and a half million people in the state of Iowa, and six of them came to our show in Des Moines that night.

(laughter) Bear with me.

Like I said, we had some time to kill, so we killed it.

And then we drove across town.

We located the club.

And we pulled into the municipal parking lot across the street, took a deep breath, and we got our courage up, and then we stepped out of the air-conditioned rental car, and we carried our guitars across the parking lot in what I would describe as sort of a radiant, sweltering heat that softened the asphalt.

You could probably see our footprints from the car to the club.

We got inside, and they said, "You're late."

And it turned out that the time that I had been told for the show and I had advertised was different from the time that the club had advertised with the result that, though we had just screwed around for about two hours, we had exactly enough time to sound check, very briefly, drink a few beers as fast as we could, because we were not going to have our supper, and walk onstage and play this show for six people who had not actually arrived yet at the show.

(laughter) You might think that the hard thing about playing a show in a large room with very few people in it is that you feel demoralized by the turnout.

But, actually, it's the palpable unease of the people in the room who actually showed up at the show, and the feeling that they're embarrassed for you.

(laughter) And because they're embarrassed, they're unlikely to have a good time, and we're all there to have a good time.

Bob Dylan said that dignity has never been photographed.

And I think that's probably true.

But that doesn't mean that dignity doesn't exist.

And the thing that happened next had something to do with dignity and something to do with luck and something to do with grace, for lack of a better word.

You see, when you are a performer, you don't get to be yourself-- you walk out onstage, and you become a compressed version of yourself.

And if you tried to go out, night after night, and be completely undefended and wholly present, holding nothing back, in a very short time, you would be so burned out that you would have nothing left to offer.

It's probably true that it would also be boring for everybody.

What a performer does is distill experience into a character or a story, and when you walk out onstage, what you are is the conduit for a collective experience.

You're there to be the conduit for the expectations of the people in the room around you, their hopes and their fears and their joy and their desires.

And that sounds pompous, but the truth is the better you do it, the less it has to do with you.

So we kicked into the first song, and very short order, it was clear that something beautiful was happening.

A few songs in, we wouldn't even look at each other, because we didn't want it to go away.

We were playing beautifully, effortlessly, in a way that sometimes happens, a sort of rare magic.

And I don't want to get churchy, but what I would describe as a sort of ineffable elegance, or grace, came into that room, which is something that can't be earned.

We finished our set, and the show was over.

And we said hi to the people.

And we sold a few records, and we packed up our gear, and we went out, and we had a smoke in the alley by the club.

And we went out, and we threw our stuff into the rental car with the flashers on, it was parked out front.

And then we drove a few hours east on I-80.

And that was one night, and that was one show.

Now, let me tell you what I learned: It has to be enough to do what you do and do it well with some humility and an open heart.

That's how you leave room for grace to find you wherever you go.

And if it's not enough in an empty club in Des Moines, Iowa, it's not going to be enough anywhere, ever.

Thanks.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ PROKOWIEW: My name is Jason Prokowiew.

I grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and I live in Stoneham now, where I run my own disability law practice, and I am also a writer.

So how did your career as a writer begin?

A lot of the story that I'm telling today is about how I was a quiet child, but I always was able to write.

So if there was any kind of recognition of this quiet child that I can remember from when I was young, it's through my writing and teachers sort of highlighting to my parents that this is something that Jason can do.

Well, it's one thing to write, and it is a different thing to write about yourself.

I'm wondering, where did you get the courage to tell your own story?

My father was a war survivor in World War II.

He, however, didn't really tell me much of his story, um, until I started asking him questions when I was about 20 years old.

And when I began to interview him and he began to open up and tell me about what he'd been through in the war, I think I took a lot of courage from that, like the vulnerability it took for him to tell things that he wasn't comfortable telling.

♪ ♪ I was raised to be quiet, but the home I grew up in was not quiet.

It's the early 1980s, my father gets home from work about 5:00 p.m. and he heads straight for his bottle of whiskey.

And I know that I have about 30 minutes to run around the house, collect my He-Man figures, my Care Bears, and get them and myself safely behind my bedroom door.

Because around 5:30 p.m., he begins to transform.

For the next several hours, that's where I cower.

And I can hear them, my mother and my father, going at it.

Mostly it's him going at her.

"You're so stupid!

"The kids are so stupid!

They cost too much money!"

Around 10:00, he tires himself, falls asleep, and my mom comes to free me from my room.

And I finally can go use the bathroom to wash up for bed.

The next morning, she acts as though none of this has happened.

She's chipper.

My father looks withered and I think, "This is life.

When something hurts, you keep it quiet."

So when I'm at home, if I feel pain, I quiet it.

I'm quiet at school when the meanest, baddest bully snaps rubber bands against my skin.

Me, the fattest, gayest kid in all the land, I'm quiet when he and his friends lift up the rug at the entrance to the school and I tumble and fall on the ground.

Sometimes, through all of this, alone in my bedroom or in the car with my big sister, I sing.

I know the beauty of a Whitney Houston song, and I know the magic of the beats in Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean."

I know from them that there are things in this world besides rubber bands slapping on my skin and stumbling fathers.

I'm a freshman in high school-- still the fattest, still the gay kid-- and I decide to take a chance on something that I love, and I join the chorus.

And I'm thrust onto these risers with these other boys who somehow have learned that you don't have to be quiet, you can be loud.

They can sing forte.

And I do my best just to keep up.

Our music teacher, Debbie Smith, terrifies me.

She enters the room and she owns it.

The black curls on her hair bounce with everything that she says and does because there's always a hand gesture with it.

Everything that she is terrifies everything that I am.

She announces that next week there will be auditions for a solo for this song, "Shenandoah."

And I think, "Can I do this?

Should I do this?"

I go home, practice it in the bathroom to myself.

The next week, I go into the music room.

I make sure that there are no other kids there.

I slip a tape into the tape deck and I start practicing very quietly.

From 20 feet away, Miss Smith emerges from her office and she comes at me, all forward motion like a storm that's about to hit.

And she stands right next to me and I'm singing, quietly.

I'm trying to act like she is not there beside me.

I'm trying to act like her attention is not on me.

Attention on me has never done me any favors.

It means the kid's chants of ♪ Fatty, fatty two by four ♪ ♪ Couldn't fit through the bathroom door.

♪ Or my father sneering "My God, you are fat" on one of those rare nights when I dare leave my bedroom because I've left a He-Man figure out in the rest of the house.

Miss Smith's beside me now.

She says, "Sing it again."

♪ Oh Shenandoah ♪ "Stop.

Rewind.

Play."

She steps back.

"Again, sing."

I sing again.

She rushes at me.

She stops the tape-- presses, rewinds it.

Presses play, steps ten feet back.

At this point, the classes are changing over so there's maybe ten other kids in the room.

Maybe there are a thousand, maybe there are a million.

(audience laughs) I actually don't know, because there is a bubble around me and Miss Smith.

And she says, "Sing, again-- louder!"

♪ Oh Shenandoah ♪ I sing and she races at me, stops it, rewinds it.

This time she runs clear across the room to the top of the risers and she says, "Play!

Sing!"

♪ Oh Shenandoah ♪ ♪ I long to see you ♪ "Do you hear yourself?"

she says.

She's screaming it because she has to, because I'm so loud, she needs to scream at me.

And I sing... ♪ Away, you rolling river ♪ She says, "Do you hear yourself?

You can sing!

You can really sing!"

And those words that she says to me feels like she is getting straight to my core.

She may as well be singing, "Sing, Michael.

Sing, Whitney.

Sing, Jason."

(audience laughs) And her attention feels brand new to me.

It feels strange, positive, glowing.

And I sing to it.

The next month, I have my first solo.

My hands shake, my heart is pounding, my voice cracks.

But I work my way through those lingering notes.

And as I sing, I look out in the audience and I lock eyes with my mother, as she wipes tears from her cheeks.

I'm 16 and what I am has always been here.

It was just hard to see and hard to hear on the other sides of those full whiskey glasses that ruled our world.

I'm 45 now.

People like my husband or my friends may shake their heads at this idea of a "quiet" Jason who doesn't sing loudly and clearly.

And I say to them, "Well, let me tell you about high school choir."

And I feel these two distinct tugs.

One of my upbringing and of "Be quiet," and then the other, the revolutionary lessons of Debbie Smith, who demanded that I get out from behind closed doors, who demanded that I change.

Who heard me whisper into the world and she demanded, "Sing!"

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪