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Judy Gail

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Judy Gail grew up in the recording studios of Columbia Records where her father was chief of the Children’s Division in the Golden Age of Children’s Records, producing and directing such timeless songs as “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty The Snowman.” Judy sang backup for the likes of Captain Kangaroo, and her father produced and wrote much of the music for the Captain. She has been interviewed on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered about her father and fascinating childhood. Since age eight, guitar in hand, Judy has been speaking and singing out for and about people who have made a difference. As a Chautauqua Scholar and Performer for the Florida Humanities Council since 1996, she presents programs about women who left their marks upon history. As part of the Oklahoma Arts & Humanities Council Chautauqua Tour 2006, she brought hatchet-wielding Temperance Activist, and American Icon, Carry A. Nation, to life. Her historical programs and portrayals include adventurers, explorers, and achievers, even Ellen Stone, the first American missionary to be taken hostage by terrorists in the Balkans in 1901. Judy appeared on South Florida National Public Radio’s Topical Currents talking about her portrayals and answering questions in the personas of the various characters. Judy performs for all ages, adapting her programs accordingly and captivating young and old alike. She tours throughout Florida, the nation, and internationally. She is a Kennedy Center trained Artist-In-Education and has received many grants to develop and perform her varied and entertaining, educational programs which, in addition to her prime genre of historical programs, include tales and tunes from cultures around the world, stories and songs from her published books, curriculum-related programs, and, of course, programs custom-tailored to requested themes, workshops, and Keynotes.

Judy is co-author of Day of The Moon Shadow: Tales With Ancient Answers to Scientific Questions. The book won the Curriculum Administrators Districts Choice Top 100 Award and a Story World Honor Award. Her book, Work and Labor: A History in Story and Song, received outstanding reviews in several labor publications. A story and original song of Judy’s appear in the anthology Sandspun: Florida Tales by Florida Tellers. She is presently writing A Charmed Childhood, Growing up With Rudolph, Frosty, and Captain Kangaroo, a memoir about her father and her days in the recording studios with him. The Momentum Dance Company hired Judy as a guest writer, narrator, and musician to create and perform It’s Off to Work We Go: American Work Songs and Women of Valor. Judy wrote, produced and hosted a four-part documentary, AIDS – The Plague of Our Times, for PBS-WLRN-TV. It won “Best Bets,” from the Miami Herald. As the creator and producer of the NBC Special, Hurricane At the Zoo, Judy helped to raise money to rebuild Miami MetroZoo after Hurricane Andrew. Judy writes Ask Anansi, a column in the Florida Storytelling Association’s quarterly, StoryTimes.

Judy served as Director of Live Performances and Lectures for the Miami Museum of Science. Here, she created 25 original programs and lectured on such diverse topics as wolves, dinosaurs, cryogenics, robots, and fashions hazardous to health! In partnership with WLRN-TV and the Museum of Science, Judy co-authored and hosted a 13-part television series, Wonder With Me, which took viewers on journeys back in time to visit ancient cultures and hear, through stories, how they answered questions about nature and the universe. For several years she brought fun and laughter to the lives of children and their families, alias Dr. La La La Loca, as a member of The Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit® at Miami Children’s Hospital.

Judy’s venues include Chautauquas, schools, international schools, colleges, libraries, organizations, historical societies, museums, adult communities, elder hostels, festivals, correctional facilities, corporations, businesses, and labor groups. She is a master at creating programs for specific needs and requests.

JUDY GAIL’S HISTORICAL PORTRAYALS Include:

Carry A. Nation (1846-1911): Carry A. Nation became an American icon as she fought for Temperance, smashing illegal saloons with her hatchet, which she claimed would have to serve as the voice for women until they got the vote. She lived in an era when 50% of those dead and buried in graveyards across the nation had died of alcohol-related diseases or incidents. Her faith in her mission and her compassion for wives and children beaten and left homeless by alcoholic husbands and fathers enabled her to carry on in the wild, woolly, and corrupt times in which she lived while enduring repeated arrests, torturous jail stays, threats and beatings by enemies of her cause, barrages of rotten eggs, a hectic schedule of travel, speeches, and huge crowds both hostile and adoring.

Mary Lily Kenan Flagler (1868-1918): Mary Lily Kenan Flagler was the third and last wife of Henry Flagler who founded Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller. Later, Flagler transformed Florida from a swampland into the tourist Mecca it is today. Mary Lily tells of being raised in North Carolina as part of the extremely patriarchal and well-to-do Kenan family who founded the University of North Carolina. She reveals both the expectations and limitations of the life of a wealthy woman of her time. She relates stories of her life with Henry Flagler in the Gilded Age, living in their Palm Beach mansion, Whitehall. She describes the visionary Henry Flagler was and of his amazing achievements including the Key West Extension, called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Mary Barr Munroe (1852-1922): Mary Barr Munroe moved from New York City to Coconut Grove in 1886, when the Grove was a mangrove swamp with one small Inn and thirteen wooden shacks made from the boards of shipwrecks. She taught children of color how to read in spite of protests so soon after the Civil War, and she established the Coconut Grove Library with books donated to her by Mrs. Andrew Carnegie. She fell in love with Florida’s exotic nature and developed a reputation as an ardent and feisty activist working to preserve the environment, establishing the Southern Tropical Audubon Society, and fighting for the preservation of the egrets. She was mentor to Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Her crowning achievement was the establishment of Royal Palm Park, later renamed Everglades National Park.

Ivy Stranahan (1881-1971): Ivy Stranahan served as mediator for the Seminoles with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She persuaded the Seminoles to move to the land designated for them by President William McKinley in 1898, and founded Friends of The Seminoles to help them to establish a decent life living side-by-side with white society while retaining their own language and customs. To this day, she is called “Watchie Esta Hutrie: Little White Mother to The Seminoles.” She was elected president of the Florida Equal Suffrage Association and made speeches with orator William Jennings Bryan. After the Great Depression of 1929, she badgered the state legislature until they passed the Homestead Exemption Act. Establishing hospitals, libraries, and schools, she was often called “The Battling Belle of Broward.”

Ellen Stone (1856-1927): Ellen Stone was a missionary during the prim and proper Victorian era. On September 3, 1901, Macedonian guerillas captured her and her traveling companions. This was the first time America found itself facing the capture and holding for ransom of an American missionary on foreign soil. Ellen Stone’s tale reveals the motives of her captors who targeted her because of their perception of America’s power and wealth. She tells the unique story of her assigned chaperone, Katerina Tsilka; of President Theodore Roosevelt’s reluctance to become involved with this international problem and his annoyance that Ellen, a woman, traveled at all; and of media moguls looking to make money from her story and her ultimate release.

JUDY GAIL’S HISTORY TALES include the following plus specific curriculum-based programs:

Spirited Women of Action: Through story and song, hear about women pioneers to engineers, suffragettes to scientists, who paved the way for women to be free, vote, be educated and work. You may also request an historic portrayal.

Work and Labor from The Stone Age to The Information Age: From cave dwellers, miners, railroad workers, sailors, child laborers to robots and computer technology, find out how work has changed and what it takes to succeed at work today.

Amazing Tales of Adventure and Accomplishment: Listen to stories about men and women who dared to venture into unknown territories, expanding human possibilities as adventurers, scientists and humanitarians.

Florida’s Past: True and Tall Tales: Journey to Florida when it was called America’s “Swampland.” Meet pioneers, cowboys, alligators, pirates and Everglades’ ghosts.

Exploration: From Vikings to Astronauts: Experience bravery and curiosity from the Vikings and explorers who sailed into the unknown seas to the astronauts who fly into the vastness of outer Space.

Life and Times in The Renaissance: Portraying a Renaissance woman, Judy shares these amazing centuries of human creativity with stories about the customs, rituals and music of the times, and of Renaissance men such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo.

This Land Is Your Land: Songs and Stories True, Tall, and Brave tell of Native Americans, Sailors, Pilgrims, Colonists, the American Revolution, Abolitionists, and the Civil War.

Special Programs Developed for Curriculum/Museum/Other Requests: Judy Gail is masterful at creating programs, portrayals, and speeches on specific topics and for particular venues.

OTHER PROGRAMS Include:

Maidel the Dreidel and Other Jewish Tales and Tunes: From the Old Testament to the Fools of Helm, this program of folktales, holiday stories, and songs from the Jewish tradition is chicken soup for the imagination, heart, and soul.

Tales and Tunes from Around the World: Take a multicultural, international journey to other lands and cultures through their folktales, myths, stories and songs.

Tales With Ancient Answers to Scientific Questions: Based upon Judy’s book, Day of the Moon Shadow, this program contrasts how specific questions about nature and the universe are answered scientifically today and how anciently, they were answered through the stories of a variety of cultures.

JUDY’S WORKSHOPS demonstrate, through example and participation, how to bring history to life through storytelling, song, and portrayal. They include:

The Historical Portrayal As Activism: Participants learn the techniques of developing a portrayal and look at the personal and societal circumstances motivating the character’s action: attitudes, morals, and obstacles faced by the character; and the effects of the action taken by the character. A portrayal, like the character’s actions, is capable of inspiring the potential activism within each person in the audience.

A Rum-Soaked Nation Produces A Feminist Movement: This workshop shows how the Temperance movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s opened the door for the first organized feminist movement: the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The WCTU brought women out of the home and taught them skills such as typing, writing, and public speaking while giving them a meeting place and forum to discuss issues, grievances, and how to win the vote.

Creating Your Own Historical Portrayal: This workshop, suitable for children from third grade – middle school, offers tips and exercises helpful in becoming a good storyteller and creating lively historical portrayals. Participants practice gestures and voice intonations to express and emphasize different emotions. We talk about details you must know in order to tell a character’s story. These include how people dressed in the character’s time, what their houses were like, the transportation available to them, how they were expected to behave, and what may have happened in their own lives that led them on the path to make history.

WORKSHOPS FOR TEACHERS Include:

HiSTORY – HerSTORY: Turning “Then Into Now” Through Storytelling
For Teachers Grades 4-12
Curriculum: History and Language Arts

Rapidly changing times and technology bring instant excitement, and make history seem obsolete. Glamorous celebrities and sports stars make the likes of Benjamin Franklin appear an old bore, while a generation, both black and white, who were born after the Civil Rights Movement must be taught about it in school. As a result, students often view history as a subject lacking immediacy and one that is required, not desired. Ironically, the ancient art of storytelling can change this attitude and bring history to life. In this workshop, participants will learn techniques to tell stories of the past. Portraying historical characters in first person and reenacting historical events can make history jump off the written page and computer screen to become living, breathing happenings. Examples of historical people and topics, plus the dress, housing, work, food, transportation, etc., of their times, serve as springboards to demonstrate how students can read, research, write, and then tell the stories of the past in vignettes, plays, and monologues that turn “then” into “now.”

A TUNE, A RHYME, & TONGUE-TWISTING TIME: Lessons In Cadence and Song
For Teachers Grades 3-8
Curriculum: Language Arts, and, depending upon the subject used for the activity, Science, Math, Social Studies, Geography and more.

This workshop demonstrates how to take the content from a lesson in any subject from history to math, science to geography and put it into song, rhyme, rap, or Tongue Twister. It shows how to gather facts about a particular topic or subject segment and then put this information into a catchy and memorable verbal and/or musical form that will reinforce the lesson and make the information an indelible part of memory. We all tend to remember things that capture our imaginations and can be recited in a concise, catching way. For example: What do we mean by metamorphosis, metamorphosis, metamorphosis/ A certain kind of change is what it is/ When it’s a metamorphosis. Putting lessons into cadence or song can become as addictive as doing crossword puzzles, and calls upon listening, rhyming, speaking, and vocabulary skills to be accomplished. Participants will go through the process of creating a piece during the workshop.

WORKSHOPS FOR ADULTS Include:

YOUR LIFE IN WORDS ALIVE: This workshop helps to bring out, speak out, and sort out life stories to tell, write, and record to pass down to grandchildren and generations to come. Judy Gail can record participants as they tell the stories and put them onto CD. Helpful hints, creative ideas and fun-filled projects are also suggested including ones for long-distance grandparents to keep relationships with grandchildren close and active and the generations communicating.

JUDY’S SPEECHES FOR SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES Include:

• Heroes and Heroines shows that real heroism is not marked by money and fame. It inspires action by showing that it is possible for each of us to make a difference.
• This Little Light of Mine reflects how each person has his or her own unique skills and personality. It encourages each individual to respect and share this “light” with others.
• Sticks and Stones is a powerful inspirational speech that demonstrates how words alone can harm and demolish self-esteem. It creates awareness and insights for positive communication.

JUDY'S SPEECHES FOR ADULT VENUES Include:

• This Little Light of Mine emphasizes the value of the individual employee working in the lower tiers and encourages each one to respect his or her own skills and “let them shine.”
• Women Who Have Made A Difference offers historic portrayals in which the women themselves are the message as their courage and convictions still serve to inspire us today.
• Hallelujah I’m A Bum: Stories and Songs of Work and Labor brings the history and accomplishments of labor to life and shows what must be done to create a humane future in the workplace.
• The Troubadour As Troublemaker suggests how stories, myths and songs, past and present, inspire positive action, understanding, and kindness to reflect and shape an ethos by which to live and work.

COMMENTS ABOUT JUDY’S PERFORMANCES:

CLIENT’S COMMENTS ABOUT JUDY’S PORTRAYALS AND SPEECHES

Books

Day of the Moon Shadow offers brief, understandable and fascinating scientific explanations to a multitude of questions that people have wondered about since the beginning of humankind. Anciently, such questions were answered through stories. In this book, the scientific explanations are followed by dramatic stories based on the rituals, customs, mythology and folktales of past cultures such as the Drum People of West Africa, the Vikings, and the ancient Maya. Original songs and sheet music enhance these beautifully illustrated dramatizations. This book is a wonderful source for science classes and multicultural units and will also be enjoyed by storytellers, families and anyone else who questions the world around them.


Work and Labor, A History in Story and Song takes its readers on a journey through the changes in work from cave dwellers through the Agricultural, Industrial and Technological Revolutions. For the earlier periods, allegories and myths suffice to describe work. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, the stories become real. Most are not pleasant. “Progress” is questioned as always meaning “improvement.” Robber Barons such as Vanderbilt, Astor and Rockefeller tell their tales of ruthlessness and accomplishment, while laborers tell of their trials and tribulations working for these barons. Risking life, limb and imprisonment, they win their battles for humane working conditions led by the likes of Samuel Gompers, Mother Jones, A. Philip Randolph and John L. Lewis. As one reviewer aptly says,

AUDIO RECORDINGS:

Judy Gail offers audio recordings of the stories in Day of the Moon Shadow. Recordings of songs and stories on the topic of work and labor are also available. Additionally, Judy has recordings of stories and songs on other topics both for adults and for children. You may find out about these and how to order them and her books by contacting Judy Gail.

Other Websites

www.storynet.org/tellers/JudyGail.htm
National Women’s History Project Website National Performers Judy Gail …
www.nwhp.org

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