Every person's life contains at least one great novel, or so the saying goes. Be it the lady sitting next to you on the bus whose wallet unfolds into 120 photographs, or the man on the park bench whose memory is so good he doesn't need the photographs, everyone has a story to tell.

There is a touch of the friendly stranger in each interviewer at the Family Folklore tent. But unlike that friendly stranger, the interviews heard in the tent amount to more than scattered reminiscences. At last summer's Festival, we heard of human experiences in forms which best express them--family stories, family names and expressions, family jokes and traditions. Taken together, this material often becomes the stuff around which a family celebrates itself. As one of last year's festival-goers put it, family folklore is a kind of glue.

"You remember things that you did together," the same informant had said. "I think it's an attempt to dust off, get rid of the cobwebs on memories which were pleasant. It isn't a particular story or a particular event so much as an attempt to get everybody on the same wavelength.