If you want to experience a fun, educational story that’s great for long car trips, today’s the last day to order Odds Bodkin’s The Odyssey for $24.95. That’s 50% off the 4-hour mp3 download. Sale ends tomorrow at Odds Bodkin’s download shop.
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Upcoming Events, Shows & Performances:Odds Bodkin’s Odyssey epic $24.95 this week
Storyteller Odds Bodkin’s 4-hour epic telling of The Odyssey is on sale at 50% off this week through Sunday, June 25th. Visit Odds’ Shop.

Eye of the Cyclops
He’s as tall as twelve men standing on one another’s shoulders. He sees the world through a single, malevolent eye in his forehead. Although tender with his own flocks, this giant shepherd is quite happy to tear men apart and eat them raw, spitting out the heads as slightly too crunchy. He’s Polyphemus the Cyclops, a character I’ve had fun portraying for years whenever I perform The Odyssey: Belly of the Beast, which I’ll be doing on April 2nd at Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA.
Some listeners find him quite sympathetic, they tell me. Perhaps that’s because to me, he’s a gigantic child of sorts, living a simple, solitary life until Odysseus and his men, searching for food, show up in his cave when he comes home. For some reason my right eye always closes and remains shut whenever this character speaks in his deep, roaring voice. Whatever I can see of the audience out there I see through my left eye, often with retinal projections of blood veins, which are actually mine, not fictional in any way. Stage lights cause this strange effect.
Call it solidarity with the most renowned cyclops of myth!
Tickets to the Grendel’s Den show are available here.

Learning to Tell THE ODYSSEY
The letter arrived from a teacher in Norwich Vermont, addressed to storytellers across New England. David Millstone, a fifth grader teacher, who ended up writing a great book called An Elementary Odyssey, was searching for someone who could tell a few episodes from Homer’s great epic. The Sirens, maybe. The Cyclops. Maybe the Test of the Bow. I didn’t know any of them, but immediately wrote him back claiming I could tell the whole thing. Hire me! I’ll tell the entire epic in three hours, I told him, two half-hour shows a day for three days.
When I was a kid I’d seen a movie, Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas. Made in 1955 with early stop-action monster effects, it was a mixture of tan guys in knickers, sword fights and beautiful women filmed among blue waters and craggy islands, most of it on a sailing ship with oars. It was a hazy memory at best.
After I’d walked out to the end of this limb, he wrote me back fairly quickly. I was hired. The residency was in three months.
Imaginative work is really good if you can get it, and here I had the perfect excuse to create a new spoken-word tale, but a really big one this time. A storytelling longer than a movie. I’d never tried to stow anything quite that large in my hold, so I bought the Fitzgerald translation and set to reading, jotting down essential details I thought were either crucial to the story or gratuitously gory and fun. I ended up with 42 episodes in all, but still, they were spread over thirty pages in my journal. If you’re trying to forge mental images and remember them while playing a 12-string guitar, a mess like that doesn’t help.
“I need to be able to see this whole thing in one place,” I told myself, and so for my own sanity and the feeling that yes, this was manageable, I forced myself to write the essentials of each scene in teeny tiny script, cramming them all onto a 2-page spread in my journal.
Here are those two pages from many years ago. It was the beginning of an odyssey of my own.
PS: I’ll be performing The Odyssey: Belly of the Beast at Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA on April 2nd
at 8:00 p.m. It’s the first 75 minutes of what is now a 4-hour performance. You can buy tickets here, if you’d enjoy such a show. From the Walls of Troy to the Cave of the Cyclops.