For its ongoing celebration of 150 years, Milligan College welcomed Elizabeth Ellis, an internationally renowned storyteller and 1964 Milligan graduate, to the McGlothlin Street theater stage last Tuesday to perform a series of stories entitled “Whatsoever Things are True.”
For an hour she captivated a medium sized audience of students, faculty and community members with stories of Hopwood church when she was a child and of Milligan formats attended as an undergraduate. The audience laughed as she asked them to turn their phones to “stun gun” for the duration of the the performance. They cried as she spoke of unmarked confederate graves and the death of her own father.
“I was in trouble every day from the day school started to well after I graduated,” Ellis told the audience.
From spitting on the preacher at her father’s funeral to coming into the lobby in her pajamas (a major offense on Milligan’s campus in 1960), Ellis’ stories showed the crowd just how much of a troublemaker and class clown she really was.
“It was wonderful. I was compelled, enthralled the entire time,” Jared Timmons, a junior studying Bible, said.
Bruce Montgomery, a speech and communications and storytelling professor at Milligan, said events like this cause most audience members to go back in time, remembering similar stories of their own.
“Story is everywhere you look. Why story? Because people came tonight and heard (Ellis) tell her stories about Milligan, and they remembered their stories about Milligan.Hopefully it will leave them with some fond memories of their years spent here.”
Elizabeth Ellis is in town for the 44th annual National Storytelling Festival held in Jonesborough, Tennessee, Oct. 7-9.