Each day at The Leonardo visitors, children and adults alike, wander into our story booth and record themselves for a few minutes. After nearly one month since BODY WORLDS 3 opened Every Body's Story (That's what we're calling it), is allowing Leonardo guests to share some remarkable stories.

Unlike in the beginning, when we felt the booth needed constant monitoring and visitors needed to be coaxed inside to record stories, now the booth is selling itself. We're leaving it open for guests to use at their discretion and to say what they want. Even during times recently when our staff are too busy and volunteers are in short supply, visitors are coming into the booth, recording themselves, and even signing release forms on their own (which we need in order to use their recordings on our website). So now, like any patient fisherman, we're leaving the story booth's door open... and waiting to see what we catch. In short, the booth is working but not like we thought.

Every day, this writer's job is to save and archive recorded stories on the computer in the booth. The recordings that BODY WORLDS 3 guests are leaving after exiting the exhibit gallery are all unique, and many are ripe with emotion. Lots of people have talked about scars, or double-jointed fingers, or suffering a sledding injury. One young boy shared by saying, "I'm 6' 2" and I'm only age 15. It's freaky... you know."

For others the booth offers a place to publicly reflect on what they saw in the gallery. "I still can't believe they were real humans," one boy said.

And then, there are stories of people having babies, and others who talk about losing babies. One woman told about having Perry Romberg Syndrome, a rare disease, when she was a kid. And one woman who visited from Los Angeles introduced herself saying she wanted to talk about the heart. "Part of the display talked about dying of a broken heart," she said. "And my husband just died... it was definitely brought on by stress over an extended period of time. And I want everyone to know that stress is a definite killer."



Every Body's Story at The Leonardo is getting people to open up and share very personal things. Sure, sometimes the recordings we're finding are just plain comical as our guests, most of them amateur self-documentarians, fumble with the microphone and speak too loudly into the computer in front of them. And of course some are way too silly, (especially on the days high school groups come through The Leonardo). But when parents and kids, teachers and students willingly tell us about themselves on camera - exposing real moments and emotions in their lives - those are the most meaningful stories for us. In the end this helps us all to better understand what it means to be a human being.





If you'd like to see some of our Story Booth recordings, check them out here. We try to update this page every few days.








Also, you can share your own story with us from home and post it here:
http://theleonardo.org/bodyworlds/community/share/instructions.php
posted by: Ross