By Susan Gerhard

WHY ARE THE best stories the ones we have no business telling? The scene is Thanksgiving dinner, 199-. I have two relatives, four friends, and six bottles of wine sharing a table. I decide to pose the question "What is the worst thing you've ever done?" and begin with my own meager transgressions. Two hours later, I have learned that one of my friends has burnt down a gas station, another two have lit a river on fire (I'm still not sure how), and it's almost feeling like relief when we get to the finale and learn that another intimate was, in a previous life, a mugger. No jail time was served.

It wasn't a scene I felt I could, or should, re-create – until I hit my first night at Porch Light. Porch Light is an urban storytelling series roughly built on the model of New York's Moth. The Moth adds the word urban because, of course, the word storytelling has a lot to overcome: the folk teller with long bunny ears and an acoustic guitar slung over the shoulder, the crowd of unruly children sliding off their mamas' laps, the wide-mouthed wrangler pronouncing big words, sloooowly.

But who knows, I might actually be sitting on someone's lap as a woman situates herself in front of the mic and announces, "Hello, my name is Kelly, and I do emergency roadside service." Porch Light is intimate. And it's also "urban," but not the way you're thinking. Her story? A woman has driven up, or down – who can be sure? – some stairs at the Church and Market Safeway; it will take 10 minutes to understand how that could have happened, and by story's end, you still won't know, or care. But you will have laughed, hard, at this unpolished water-cooler report from a jobland with no cubicles. Porch Light's cast of characters – cops, lawyers, politicians, taxi drivers, nude housecleaners, bank robbers – is a welcome respite from the kind of "urban" ex-sex-worker-in-clubland storytelling that, frankly, in San Francisco at least, has become passé.

The rules of Porch Light are strict: no memorization, no "performance"; the story can't go longer than 10 minutes. The word is not so much spoken as given, spit out, transferred, the way one does in a conversation. It's homey – you might be among 100 people, but feel like you're at a table for three, as some big guy who doesn't know how to use a microphone tells you a long, long tale about how the best mushroom hunt he ever went on caused the end of his very best friendship. Afterward, you may meet the mushroom hunter, or another – the series has already featured at least two so far – over beer and get 15 more minutes of morels, more morels than you ever thought you could know, while somewhere in the dank bar a necktie-loosened San Francisco supervisor who's just spun on with a story of nudity and alcohol and dormitory lobbies in the Ivy League holds court with a flock of groupies, and a semifamous cab driver recovers from unloading a gang murder on a shocked literary crowd.

Porch Light's creators, of course, have their own stories to tell. While we sit at a spot overlooking a real porch somewhere in Potrero Hill, its impresarios – writer-editor Arline Klatte and writer-spoken word artist-sketch comedian Beth Lisick – tell me the one about the time they tried to get a Hell's Angel onstage. "Sure," the dude had said over the phone, "I can do that." But when calls went unreturned, and he didn't show up for a casual run-through, they decided to track him down, arriving unannounced at some kind of Hell's Angels den in East Oakland. The guy was lying down in front of a big-screen TV, Lisick says, and wouldn't speak to them directly. He told another guy to tell them to forget it. As they walked out, they noticed a huge sign hanging in the room that read, "Anything that is said or done inside the clubhouse remains inside the clubhouse." He is, I believe, the only speaker to have actually chickened out.

Klatte and Lisick, who met at SFGate while sharing a cubicle that became the pit stop of choice for bored staff, found out they had not only worked the same job at different times (publisher's assistant at the Bay Guardian; publisher Bruce B. Brugmann and executive editor Tim Redmond have both taken turns on the mic) but also dated guys from the same band, only learning of the coincidence (...?) by reading liner notes. Their aesthetic was as clear in Porch Light's first month as in its 10th: a mix of media types, blue-collar workers, slackers, and, occasionally, performers. The most difficult type to bring in has, oddly, been the performers, who – one notable instance sticks out – haven't been able to switch back to conversational mode, their broad stage gesturing and clearly pre-blocked movements as uncomfortable in this setting as a gigantic belch would be at the opera. On the other hand, the highlight of the first yearlong season may have been performer Nate Denver in Porch Light's debut show, deadpanning a mytho-fictional kiddiehood fable that rocked (I mean that in rock-a-bye sense as well) its audience back to the crib.

In a year that saw word of mouth push the series from its tiny space at the Hemlock Tavern to its present home at Cafe du Nord, embarrassments have visited the Porch Light stage. One of the lottery picks from the audience, Lisick reports, shared a racist rant, complete with obligatory fake foreign accent. There are also times when the yarn is so unfocused or overacted that people get nervous. "You can practically hear the whole collective cringe," Klatte says. But it's the randomness that makes the series so strangely new. A combination of voyeurism and generosity drives Porch Light far away from the competitive bent of a slam, or the "entertain me" vibe of live theater.