Each Monday night, people take the stage at downtown bar Dante’s Inferno to reveal intimate, trivial and bizarre snippets of their lives to strangers during “Story Tellers,” hosted by Dave “Killer” Queen.
Queen reigns over the two-hour show, urging often-hesitant audience members to share their voices. This can mean a personal story, an opinion, even a political ideology. There are no prerequisites, no rules. All Queen asks for is an interesting story and “your name, age and sign.”
“I think it’s important that people listen to other people,” he says, “and see that they have something of value to say.”
Aric Morgan, a 27-year-old Aries, is the first to go up this night. He paces the stage, cigarette and microphone in one hand, beer in the other. Standing in front of the crowd of a dozen or so with an easy manner, he recounts how he had to strangle to death an injured possum the night before.
This is Morgan’s second story-telling night. He said he did not come in knowing what he would talk about. He just likes to be “spontaneous” and to have a few drinks.
The small but attentive audience, however, is his biggest draw. He likes the attention. “People have to sit there and listen to you,” he says. “They don’t really have a choice.”
Morgan and a small group of his 20-something friends take turns on the red-velvet-curtained stage. They egg each other on. Beneath the soft glow of the red lights, they tell tales of drugged-out hippies, UFOs and the ineptness of karaoke club bartenders.
Queen gets into the act during lags, describing a scrap over his dead grandmother’s car and decrying the scatological habits of rhinoceroses. He addresses audience members like they were old friends. His stories are peppered with expletives.
“I think UFO’s are a bunch of bullshit,” he ribs in response to someone’s story about visiting Area-51.
Queen, a 43-year-old self-employed maintenance worker, brought his show to Dante’s two years ago. Before that he hosted an after-hours show at Portland’s now-defunct X-Ray Caf퀌�. He first became interested in the power of story telling as an oft-uprooted child. Telling exciting stories was a way of winning friends at new schools. Later, it became a means of wooing women. He was in his 20s when he first took the stage, in San Francisco, in order to impress a woman. Though his effort was unsuccessful, he found a lasting emotional outlet.
“When you talk about yourself, it has therapeutic qualities,” he says.
Though the usually slow Monday nights leave a lot of time for Queen to tell his own stories, he didn’t complain about this unusually prolific night.
“Tonight was great,” he says. “I hardly got to talk. It was excellent.”
“Story Tellers” runs from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. each Monday at Dante’s, located at 1 S.W. Third Ave. Happy hour prices apply till 8 p.m., with domestic beers and pizza slices for $1.