is a spoken word artist and he is a large man with a big mouth who loves to tell stories to anyone who can't outrun him paul learned to tell stories from the feedback of other people's children teaching sunday school at forty eight paul found a community of improvisers in austin texas and seven years later he is the producer of the austin storytellers show testify and the founder of the improv troupe in our prime hundred eighty i was a senior it was spring i was about to graduate from high school and i was very excited i didn't get to go to the high school i wanted i wanted to go to high school for and for performing in visual arts but my parents had never graduated from high school my dad had worked for nasa and they wanted me to be an engineer so they got me into the high school for engineering professions i did really well on some tests and so because of that i got to attend that school i didn't want to be an engineer i heard my dad complain about him all day he was a technician so i said ok i'll study physics and really like physics and i thought i'd have fun with that well in your senior year you write all those essays and back in the day you didn't type them you hand wrote them out and you filled out a form and you mailed it off i mailed off three one to my fallback school texas a and m university which was about one hundred miles from houston where i was living and they had a nuclear reactor yeah i'd be ok but i didn't want to go to texas a and m university so i applied to rice university which was in use in where my parents lived yes so that was a bad idea but i wanted to be an al i really liked them they were very cool all but if you want to study physics in  only place you go is the same way same place einstein went to teach you go to princeton so when i got the letter from princeton i called rice and i said thanks i that i went to school and i bragged to my ass off all those guys going to cal tech and mit i'm going to princeton now and then it's april and we're going to graduate in may and i'm going to go off to school and i'm very excited and my mom comes up to my room and she says hey princeton is really far away you got in and now you got into rice just go to  i won't bore you with the argument that followed but at the end of it i wasn't talking to her anymore i didn't want to go to school i didn't go to my graduation i didn't want to tell anybody i couldn't go to princeton it was going to and i am i got a job in a machine shop right after schools and and i just gave up on the prospect of going to college it was august my mom showed up in my room again was the first time we really talked to each other and she said when do you have to be at and i don't know she pulls out the letter from the drawer where i kept them all and she gets really upset because it's wednesday and classes start the following monday and the next thing i know we're in the car and that's back in the day when you have to register for classes by going around to the different schools and picking up little cards and so if it's the last day of registration every time you ask for a class they tell you nope all i got is this so my first class was eight am my next class was nine am my next class after that was three pm my next class after that was four pm i was really not happy and i really wasn't too excited about going to the school but there was this woman following me around she took all the same classes i did and we had like everything together and she's just followed around trying to talk to me and i'm just like an angry man at this point like i'm just angry eighteen year old so i completely ignore and my parents eventually figure out hey we have to have some place for you to live while you're going to school here and it's the friday before classes start so eventually they get in touch with these two guys who have a house three bedrooms two baths and we go over there now i'm eighteen years old and i have an expectation from my freshman year if i'm not going to princeton i want to have fun and these two guys were not fun and when we walked in the door the first thing that hit me was the piano in the living room i thought that's odd the next thing i noticed was the red haired guy with glasses and a pipe this was not a bomb this was a pause and he was really  like twenty five and i think in the other guy was like six three and chiseled he looks amazingly athletic because he was an n c a a champion individual sports star and had gone around the world on mission trips for his church and he was studying geo physics so i liked him a little the other guy was going to be a medical doctor and he was working on that because he'd already had his first degrees and i'm like why at which point my dad shook my hand my mom tried to give me a hug and i kind of said no and they got in the car and they drove back to houston and i went and hid in my room and i started going to my classes monday morning and that girl's in all my classes it's really weird and then tuesday night i go to my lab my lab starts at like six thirty at night it's a chemistry lab and i'm thinkin ok this is terrible three hour lab starts at six thirty at night my first class ok anyway it was terrible i think it would have been better princeton anyway i tried to make the best of it but i'm still angry and as soon as i walk in the door this woman who is in all my classes she's like hey be my lab partner and i'm like ok all right sure so we're lab partners and about eight o'clock she starts to panic like breathing problems she just realized the class was three hours and it was going to be dark and she was going to have to walk in the dark on texas a and m campus so i look at her and she goes would you please please please walk into my car when cost is over i don't want to walk outside at night as a woman in the dark on this campus and i'm like oh nobody told me about this and of course who would say no right you say yes yes of course i will do this so about eight thirty she gets up to get some chemicals the guy across from me gets up and get some chemicals in the woman sitting across from me looks at me and she goes holy crap it's going to be dark when this class is over would you walk me to my bus stop i said yes yes yes of course thinking this place sucks now the one saving grace about everybody i've met to this point was the t she could not talk to anybody without having a note card in front of her face right that's how she in if she hadn't anything to hold in her way of her eyes when she was talking you know she looked down a lot and i'm like ok i went to a prep school for engineers i totally get this she's a chemistry major this makes perfect sense no worries at one point i felt her breasts on my back and her chin on my shoulder and she was looking over my work and i realized this is one of those awkward people who doesn't get it and she's looking at my work and she prayed she's praising it but she also says you know you can do better you probably need to get yourself a mentor and i'm thinking oh that doesn't sound good and she says no no  you should get a mentor and she said listen it's going to be dark when class lets out and i'm like stop right there i'll happily walk you ever you want she says to my car i said ok and she said i'll help you study i said ok fine whatever right fine nine thirty the class ends there's two young women standing there in the t s a and the two young women are looking at the t and me and the t s a looks at the two young women and says what are you guys doing here still and they both try to explain at once bus stop car everything and she's like no no no you walk her to a car you drive her home i go paul no i don't have to walk everywhere in everybody's protected and it's going to be fine we get out to the car she gets in the car and i start to walk home and she's like you don't want to be out here at dark all right all right fine so i get the car and she drives me home and then it gets a little awkward because i'm having trouble getting my backpack to get caught on her seat and she gets out of the car after turning it off and taking the keys out and she starts heading to the front door of my house and i finally get out of the car and close the door and i see her just turn the knob and walk in without knocking and i think she must have to be and i go running in behind her and i see the athlete looking at her like who the hell are you at which point the doctor comes around the corner and sees her and calls her by name and says oh are you here for the toxicology notes from the class you must i close the door and i look at both of them and she says now i'm here to help all study where is his bedroom i think i figured it out at that moment and i looked over at the athlete i had this giant grin on his face and was smiling at me and he seemed a little less intimidating and i looked over at pipe smoking doctor boy and i think somebody punched him in the stomach he looked really upset and really hurt and i may have rubbed it in a little as i walked back to my bedroom and was about one thirty two o'clock in the morning i'm standing on the driveway or a house my t a s cars driving away i'm looking at the campus surprisingly well it and i think this isn't princeton but i might do ok here thank you us about that a little bit so you're right yes i love to sing and sorry about that i have a friend mark newton he works for samsung he's a really smart guy i think he's one of the smartest guys i know he invited me up to play in an ultimate tournament for guys over fifty today this was months ago when i made the plans to come i wanted to do storytelling and so i could tell a little story about him then he remembered he was moving his son to the university of texas at austin this weekend and would not be here for the tournaments or the show but i love him and i wish he was here today wilbur stewart has long been active in folk and traditional music in this area yeah mark is not a newcomer here at capping you played here about twenty six years ago twentieth century and he was there we're going to do all remember downstairs before we were up stairs when camping and problems in the little tiny room squished together  ank you that's an old old song collected by carl sandburg in one of its early iterations goes back quite a ways that was a song that my mother used to sing to me at the piano when i was growing up it was that that and the next song which she also used to sing to me were a couple of motivations for recording my first solo album shagbark hickory released this spring not only on not only on cd baby but also here as c d s and  so this is called five hundred mile  thanks once again thanks to thanks to tom for cafe improv for keeping this going for us for so long such a great great ok at the extend you are so happy to be here i should introduce this thing people always ask about it it's an bouzouki i used to keep a mandolin and a guitar next to each other in the room and if you have enough instruments long enough they start to breed was named completely escapes me but i stink with names it's one of those reals in g and indeed rather and and then we're going to go into i build myself as a folk singer tonight in a folk music is the music of the people of will this this is one that you might know so you can you can certainly sing along when it comes around thanks again  at eight o'clock and when they like late actually thursday morning at midnight so we're going to have a bike over to mary and we're going to introduce nathan spears awesome so a philadelphia based singer songwriter who really loves to play nathan's vocal style seems to be a mix of early elvis presley intertwined with john pie and this filthy bach blend suits his baritone vocals and creates a pleasant edge to his original covers and songs nathan is at nathan spears dot com and he's also got a facebook page too so we are going to be very very very pleased to see what we've got here with nathan and helping us and i think what was actually very pleasant this evening too was that we have so many native of this whole area we've got you know philadelphia we had the you know east brunswick we had lambertville so i mean this is yeah that mean this like this place is it's like you know just so many people texas that's right well there you go so tommy you're going to get set up here for nathan won't even know it's i mean i don't have to stall that long right right thank you so much wonderful closure to be here tonight this is from my album river of rocks it's called one little thing and it's but a gentleman who thing i meant to tell you in february every year for disappearing in web organizations songwriting thing it's called bomb dot org if a w m i don't know if you've heard of it or not but it stands for february album writing month and the object of that his to write one song every two days for the month of february so my time for war is over you've  got another album first they need polished up most likely but here's this song is called time can't choose a side in this for this film by february from experience my father was killed in korea because times are pretty tough there's a song i wrote a few years ago it's called feeling pain why is my and i only got to see them a couple times during my life and when i did get there i was spoiled rotten i was a nine year old kid and i w and when he got older he wasn't that old he was still in his early thirty's he started doing really bizarre things he was bizarre in his younger too but then he got to continue that streak of bizarre eddie and here's a song from one of and i know what all right i'm going to find it i'm going to find it i'm looking for you oh really you want to do that oh ok ok we can do i got it i got it will find it we got it up one more two more thank you very much favor winograd favorite singers we'll see you guys in september september i spy have saturdays don't don't get caught up it's the fourth saturday september twenty third thank you all very much