Storytelling: The Fortune-Tellers, Lloyd Alexander, Trina Schart Hyman

The Fortune-Tellers
Lloyd Alexander, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman
ISBN: 9780140652330
First told spring 1997, purchased for storytelling library Sept 2014.

This was the second story I learned and told, at another storytelling festival.  Lloyd Alexander does a beautiful job winding up a fantastical mystical story without ever leaving the totally mundane world.  It's the picture book equivalent of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and I loved every minute of learning and telling it.  It doesn't hurt that for me at least, studying the text also let me spend hours looking at Trina Schart Hyman's beautiful artwork.

Summary:
A young carpenter grows frustrated with his life's seeming gridlock, and goes to visit an old magician in town, who gives him cryptic, but very positive answers to his questions.  A typical example: "Do you see me rich?"  "Rich you will surely be, on one condition: that you earn large sums of money."

With answers like those, the carpenter's heart is soothed, and he heads home, full of joy.  Of course, halfway there he thinks of more questions to ask this generous prophet, and he turns right back around - to find him gone!  The land-lady barges in before the carpenter can figure anything out, and mistakes him for the magician - obviously having magicked himself young and handsome.  She demands her own fortune be told, and the carpenter, no slouch in the brains department, promptly recycles the pleasant words the prophet had for him.  Soon he's figured out the trick, and made himself a rich, famous, and well-beloved figure in town, but whatever happened to the poor soothsayer?  His bad luck - falling out a window was the least of it.

My favorite element of this story is getting finished with all of the nod and wink fourth-wall stuff where the audience and the fortune-teller, and then the carpenter, know what's up with the circular "predictions" that don't promise anyone anything, and then we move directly on to the hugely fantastic unfortunate circumstances of the actual soothsayer after the carpenter left his rooms.