Every fall and spring I am on the road visiting schools, museums, galleries and gatherings. I was in Miami last weekend telling stories and making "sounds" for the Children's Museum Sound Month program. I learned to do audio noises, ambient sounds when I was a kid. This is how it happened . . .

On the way to school, the big boys made the little boys feel even littler in the back of the bus. How did they do this? They belittled us, of course. That included smacking our hairdos, which, in the 1950s, was a punishment that you felt all day long because you had worked your hair into a state of perfection, Elvis or Gene Vincent style, and then cemented it in place with a certain hair glue called Vitalis.

My hair looked like the tailfins on a 1957 Chrysler, swept up, slicked back and duck-tailed. Then the big kids messed it up in the back of the bus. I would've sat in the front of the bus but the girls occupied all those seats. What this has to do with making sounds is this -- I became a soundman in the back of the bus when I learned, by accident, that the noises I made while I was inventing stories at home by myself were amusing to my torturers.

The big bullies would say, "Do the squirrel." I'd become a scolding squirrel. "Do old Lady Henshaw," and I would, I'd bring her right up out of her Halloween spooky woods half-finished house. Every town in the 1950's had an old lady who lived in an unfinished house in the woods and was considered to be a witch. I wrote about all this in the novel Doctor Moledinky's Castle: A Hometown Tale.

However, way before I wrote the book, I made up stories and sounds and pretty soon the back of the bus became my personal sound studio and I could have any seat I wanted. Later on, in high school, I did announcements on the PA system and used my special sound effects to capture people's interest. I never stopped making weird noises, some of which are natural ones you hear in the woods -- last night I had a conversation with a Great Horned Owl. I've also talked to shrews, eagles, snakes, toads, cats, dogs, but always, KIDS. And kids, let's face it, make the funniest sounds of all.

At the Children's Museum in Miami I did a series of stories that turned into a series of sounds because that's what the kids wanted to hear, and when I was finished, I asked the audience what it was I had done. A boy jumped up and took the mic and said, "You told stories, made noises but the best part -- it was FREE!" Here, here. Thanks to the Museum and a grant from Target. But I've done my share of street theater performances, too. And they're often free. I once did a performance at Barnes & Noble and my audience was moms and newborns.

I don't know how that happened but it did. I had never done a storytelling for babies, so this was a challenge I looked forward to, and I went to work with -- you guessed it -- sounds. I did hummingbirds on the wing, elephants on the loose, dogs howling, winds blowing, eagles whistling and chortling, hawks screaming, water boiling, mermaids blowing bubbles, and after about twenty minutes of silliness, I looked up and every baby in the store was giggling or smiling or at least dreamily drooling.

It's fun being a storyteller.

Best of all, it's free.

Especially for me.

(Special thanks to Debbie, Hannah, Amy, Danielle and the whole staff of the fabulous Miami Children's Museum!)