112: Jim Norris, “One Kid at a Time”

In October of 2016, our friends at From the Hip Photo hosted a small event at Fort Greene, this cool, funky little place in Globeville, and invited The Narrators to share a few stories. The theme of the evening was "Punk's Not Dead?"

The stage was just the corner of a little concrete-walled room with streamers on the walls. It was part dungeon, part homecoming dance. The audience was tiny compared to our regular monthly shows. The acoustics—as you'll hear in a minute—were terrible for recording. The stories were all fantastic. That tiny crowd, with their cheers echoing off the walls, sounded enormous. The connection and camaraderie were palpable.

But after the show, I decided that the quality of the audio was too poor for the podcast, so left the file sitting in a folder on my computer.

But, you know what? Fuck quality. As my co-host Robert said to me recently, sometimes quality can be a tool of oppression. Socially imposed standards of what's good enough or professional enough can sometimes hold back important voices from being heard—or bend those voices simply to please others. At The Narrators, we don't screen our storytellers or edit their stories not because we want to produce a bad show, but because we believe their stories deserve to be heard in their own voice, without external pressure—and that is the benchmark of a good true story. Maybe we're getting lucky every month, but after many years and tons of stories shared, it seems that our hypothesis is correct.

Today's story comes from Jim Norris. Jim is a longstanding member of the Denver music scene, founder of 3 Kings Tavern, and owner of Mutiny Information Cafe, one of Denver's most important cultural institutions disguised as a used bookstore.

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