Medicine Show Theatre to Present ANNIE SULLIVAN, TEACHER, 6/26

Living Historian Kate Carney and spoken word artist Jo Radner will perform on Thursday, June 26 at the Medicine Show Theatre, 549 West 52nd St. (3rd floor), New York City, at 7:30 pm. Donations will be $7 at the door.

Kate Carney, in character and costume as Annie Sullivan, Teacher, insists it was no "miracle" that she tamed and taught her blind-deaf student, Helen Keller, to communicate. It took long hard hours of work. Annie reveals the challenges and horrors of her own childhood to demonstrate the tough courage and native gifts that enabled her to teach - and to make a success of - Helen Keller.

Ms. Carney has taught and directed at Brandeis, Smith and other colleges, performed on network TV, in films, and in Boston and New York theatres. She has toured her shows nationally/internationally and directed on Broadway.

Jo Radner has been called "the Garrison Keillor of Maine." She's known for smart, wry, moving stories of odd folks who did things their own way and sometimes encountered hard realities. "Humor and gravity are good bedfellows," she says. At Medicine Show Jo will perform stories from her Maine heritage - perhaps the tale of the eccentric ancestor whose quirks concealed a tragic secret; perhaps a story celebrating the little-known virtues of outhouses; perhaps her much-requested tale, "Mandatory Pie."

Jo has performed widely, from the Talk Story Festival in Honolulu to the Common Ground Fair in Maine and at many points in between. Her CD, Yankee Ingenuity, received a 2013 Storytelling World Award. She is past president of the National Storytelling Network and the American Folklore Society. Acknowledging the range of Jo's storytelling work, the National Storytelling Network gave her a distinguished Oracle Award in 2009.

For more information and samples of Jo's work, see http://www.creativeground.org/profile/jo-radner.