The Moth - 25 Years of Stories: A Family Legacy

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

This week, connecting with your faith, and going to prom. This episode is hosted by Jon Goode. Host: Jon Goode Storytellers: Tia Valeria, Eddy Laughter

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slash Houston to experience a live show near you. That's theMoth.org forward slash Houston. Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm John Good, your host for this week. Our families leave their mark on us in interesting ways. I literally still have a scar on my knee from wrestling with my brother.

Thank you, Duane. I remember my mother saying, I believe in you, but I told her I was leaving corporate America to pursue the arts, and I can still feel my father's hand in mind as he lay in bed fighting cancer. Our families, by word, deed an example, try to teach us what to do and what not to do. We take the best, throw away the rest, and hopefully in the end, we're all the better for it. This week, we're continuing our countdown of each of the Moff's 25 years, with stories

from 2021 all about family and their indelible mark. Our first story teller this week is Tia Valeria. Now, this was 2021, so Tia told this at a virtual slam, where the theme of the night was played again. Here's Tia, live virtually at the mouth. betrayal. It was 1999, my senior year in high school, spring and sprung in Portland, Oregon, and I was on my way to prom. No, senior year in high school, I did not care about prom. I wondered if there would be snacks there. I had made any arrangements, but I did like a good time, but I enjoyed the dance floor, so I decided to go. Now, high school, the 90s, I was pretty crusty.

I was a skater. I had the unique and completely unremarkable unisex gender presentation of queer ravers in Jacob Flair, Highwater Bell, Jeans with mismatched oversized hoodies, and of course the beanie that was also a functional hairstyle. So I wasn't thinking much about fashion. Come from night, I did have a prom squad. And for a queer teenager, I was very fortunate to have a supporting family. Now, prom squad consisted of my mother,

who was also a teacher at my high school, and my eldest sister, who was an alone. Both of them divas, orange anews, accustomed to the spotlight. They knew their stuff and they knew how to formal. Now, I wasn't in charge of anything, so we were fighting the entire night, getting ready, leading up to it.

Yes, I'll wear the order and no, I'm not shaving. No, I don't want a little lift, a little blush. We're not trying makeup on tonight. Yeah, you can do my hair. And I was also shopping in Mama's closet for this real pretty brown velvet dress that I just knew my girlfriend at the time would like. I was trying to get it felt up.

I had an idea about something, but Mama wasn't having it, and prom squad kept insisting that I wear this nice black satiny number that they had laid out. Now, I couldn't figure out why, because I just wanted to wear this brown veil of dress and get felt up. Of course, I couldn't say that, but there was also things that they weren't saying, like a real reason why they wanted me to wear the second black number. So they finally guessed me up, they convinced me, oh, you're going to look so great. Just try it on. Look at you. You look fantastic.

It also matches your cousin's tux, who by the way, you're going to prom with your first cousin. So instead of, of course, so I get a beard for prom. So I get all the, I'm in the black number. We're doing this whole Cinderella high-fim cosplay and I'll pull it off, you know, I'm cute, cute. So I'm okay with it. Cousin and I arrive, our friends are stud, they're our jaws on the floor, we make our entrance and I'm, our friends are stunned. There are jaws on the floor.

We make our entrance and I'm feeling great. We find our way to the dance floor. We find our actual dates for the evening and the dancing commences. We are getting down. It doesn't take very long before my hair is sweated out. I don't know where my shoes are because it splits his tux pants. I've already ripped the dress and we are feeling it.

I am cute. I am Cinderella. I am Virginia in a bottle. I'm your baby tonight. I'm every woman and there's a commotion in the corner and I can't see it because I'm five four and I don't have any shoes on at this point. Because though six, three is just peering casually over the heads of our classmates and he tells me, no fam, you don't need to see that. It is fine. So, FOMO me gets out of the spotlight and goes, I'm every woman to the corner to see what happened. And what happened was I'm every woman, the shock of conversion had walked in the door and was taking pictures with all of my friends.

That's right, my mama showed up to my prom in that brown velvet dress. And I'm looking like, who wore it better, right? And I'm gonna tell you, I would tell you right now. Mama clearly wore it better. No argument, not gonna lie to you. But inside I'm feeling like, what are you doing this for me?

That's not like, I'm not the cute one anymore. And I go up, I'm greeter, I'm like, you look great. And we pose for some pictures with all of my friends and got the 1999 disposable point in shoot cameras. And I'm serving grimace-based, like second grader on picture day, just cheese. And I eventually get over it. I did have a good prom.

We parted ways. She made the rounds to go and see her colleagues. I went back to the dance floor to just gait up and whatever. Found my shoes eventually, found some healing, some closure, or so I thought, because trust issues, 20 years later, we're deciding we're gonna have a 20 year reunion and the classmates and I are figuring out location and they casually ask if

mom was gonna make an appearance so I casually ask her for the worst because if she still has those dresses we can do this all over again and she hadn't committed to shaperoning the problem the first time around and she wouldn't give me an answer and she hadn't committed to shaperoning the problem the first time around and she wouldn't give me an answer and she was going to show up to the reunion. Thankfully she didn't and I'm sure forgiveness is out there but we will find out. That was Tia Valeria. Tia Valeria, pronoun she they serve, is proudly black,

bold, queer, and quantum-gendered. She's hypnotically ambiverted and a typically chill. Tia Moonlight, by stagelight, is artist musician-songwriter, A'Laria Tiva, who is known for such smash hits as Penicillin Asperin and Whiskey. Tia dabbles in the unspoken word, yarn spinning, anthropology, and no chill. And it's beholden to cats,

the cycles of planetary alignment and one lower-case C. For photos of Tia at prom, head to the extras for this episode on our website, themoth.org slash extras. Our next storyteller is Eddie Laughter. Eddie is a graduate of the Malth's education program and she told this story at a showcase in New York City where the theme of the night was resilience spirit, stories of women and girls.

Here's Eddie, live at the Malth. I grew up going to a Quaker School, and I was one of the only three actually Quaker kids there. My dad was Quaker, so is Quaker still. And I thought that made me an expert whenever it came up in class. I was like, interlite, I know all about that. I just gotcha, and I was in like fourth grade, by the way. But that was like my, the most active way I identified with Quakerism. I was going to Quaker Meeting for Worship every Sunday

because my dad wanted me to, but I would just kind of sit downstairs and doodle while our parents were in worship. And that was just what would happen on Sundays. And my mom is Jewish, and my connection to that side of my family is even foggy and more distant. I would just visit my family for the holidays and get really confused about how I knew everybody and then I would come back and then go to school the next day. Weirdly a lot of kids at my Quaker meeting were also this combination of Quaker

and Jewish, and we like to call ourselves Quakersh. That was the extent of our analysis of that. And if I'm being totally honest, all I wanted to do was when I was little was pretend to be a dragon with my friends. So religion is not pretending to be a dragon, so it was thus not high on my list of priorities then. But as I got older, it eventually was no longer cool to pretend to be a dragon, and it wasn't cool to really talk about religion either. I got in some middle school and got everything got more awkward, and I got less friends. And I'm going to say I was being like politely bullied where nothing was happening that intense, but it was far from great.

And I got really distant from religion. I stopped going to Quaker Meeting on Sunday because no one was really making me and so I'd like talked about it less. My Quakers and Facts weren't fun or like cool things to tell people. But I could never really get out of going to the Jewish holidays. They happened so infrequently that I had to be there and I didn't see my cousins very often. So it was important that I went.

But I got that it was important for my mom. I didn't get how it was important to me. I never really saw myself there. I didn't really get why I specifically had to be there. In seventh grade, my school took a field trip to a Holocaust exhibit in a Jewish cultural center in Manhattan.

And I had learned about the Holocaust. We were learning about it in history class, and we were learning about World War II in Germany in the 30s and 40s. It was something that happened in the past, so this was a field trip. And it was just a time and not be in class. So we were in seventh grade, and we entered the museum in a sort of ran-bunctious fashion because it's seventh grade. And that's just what kind of happens. And the museum goes in chronological order

through timelines. So we're in the beginning part. And the work, me and my two friends, are just sort of like walking around, and sort of like making fun of propaganda and laughing at videos of Hitler Youth Kids. And then the museum takes a hold on us as it is designed to do and my friends go elsewhere

and I am by myself. And the floor of the museum is carpeted, so it kind of eats away at footsteps, so you can't really hear anyone else around you. And I'm by myself and I'm walking and I turn to my left and I see this long hallway and at the end of the hallway is this wall that looks like it's made out of a bunch of small tiles.

And I get closer and realize that they're not tiles, but they're actually very, very small portraits of like photographs of people who entered and died in Auschwitz. And there are so many of them. They go all the way down this hallway. They turn the corner. And there are these pillars in the museum, go all the way down this hallway, they turn the corner, and there are these pillars in the museum just architecturally, and they wrap around, and I'm overcome with this wave of like this urge to make eye contact with each and every one of the pictures,

and I feel like I need to give them the space that I owe them, and like take my time and try to give all of my attention to them. And I physically cannot do that, but I'm trying my hardest in this sort of frantic fashion of making eye contact with everyone. And the pictures start to feel different. All of a sudden they feel like a mirror. And I see parts of my own face there. I see my nose and my eyes, something

about my bone structure and my hair. And it's overwhelming and it's terrifying. My mom would talk about feeling like she looks really Jewish in certain places when there weren't a lot of other Jewish people around. I never knew what that meant. And then all of a sudden it makes sense. It clicks in a crushing way.

And I was someone who was very familiar with the concept of loneliness. I felt really isolated at school and middle school. And when I would walk down a hallway, it felt like I was lonely to the point where it felt corrosive in my body. But this loneliness that I feel in this museum is not like anything I had experienced before.

It's like the museum had singled out me and left me somewhere stranded and I was almost in a free fall. And it was so much that when I eventually left the exhibit, all I wanted to do was find someone to talk about this with. And so I'm going up to people in my class and trying to relay the information that this museum is apparently about me specifically.

And my classmates don't really seem to get how shocking this feels. I feel like I'm crushed and everyone just sort of takes it like a, yeah, Eddie. And this is the reaction I get from my non-Jewish classmates and also from my Jewish classmates. Someone just sort of gives me a yikes face, which doesn't help at all. And we eventually leave the museum and find our way to a playground

because that's kind of like where field trips always lead. And people are running around and playing tag and I can't get myself to do that. I'm sitting on this bench and this feeling that I've found in the museum. It's kind of like sticky. It feels like I can't leave the museum and I'm sitting there with my friend talking to me about TV shows that I don't want to talk about watching everybody else play tag and I feel so angry that they're able to play tag and I can't because that was all I wanted to do in a normal school day. But I'm sitting there and with this feeling that I found this whole new piece of who I am in that museum I have to like hold on to it and somehow fit it into my perception of who I thought I was

Which is so hard, it was like my, someone, it was like suddenly my whole face meant something different than what I thought it did. And like how do you deal with that when you're 13 and all you do is think about the way your face looks and comparison to other people. And I've just sat with that piece for a really long time and I felt it grow into myself and I've, or maybe I've grown into it. And I found other people to talk to this about. And with my half Jewish friends we talk about how we exist in this sort of like limbo space of maybe we're not necessarily practicing, but it's still very much in our lives. Everybody who I talk to has like their own sort of like definition of what it means to

them. And it's really interesting and fascinating. And somewhere along this journey, I realized that I really like going to all the family gatherings, and they're really important to me. And I get upset when I miss them. I was sick for Recha Shano one year, and I was just like, how am I going to all the family gatherings, and they're really important to me. And I get upset when I miss them. I was sick for reticiano one year, and I was just like, how am I going to have a sweet new year? I was like, I was distraught.

But there's a lot of comfort and connection in those gatherings. Sometimes it feels like Judaism is a part of my body in that very physical way that I got in that museum. And at the same time, I've recently, after taking a very long break from it, I've recently become a member of my Quaker meeting. And I'm finding that Quakerism is own piece

that's separate from Judaism in my life, but they can both be there together and they can both exist and they don't negate each other. They're just both there. I can sit with them for however long I need and I can ponder my spirituality, what being Quakers means, and the fact that I have a heritage. And also like maybe research some Jewish superheroes because like, you know, Jewish superheroes.

Thank you. That was Eddie Laughter. Eddie Laughter grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and is an alumni of the Maltz Education Program where she is now working as an intern. She's a fan of writing, wandering aimlessly, and over-analysing monster movies. Currently, she's attending Smith College and Northampton, Massachusetts. That's all for this episode. We hope you'll come with us as we continue

to take a look back at the meaningful, surprising, and important stories from the most 25-year history. From all of us here at the Moth, have a story-worthy week. John Good is an Emmy-nominated writer raised in Richmond, Virginia and currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia. John's work has been featured on CNN's Black and America, HBO's Deaf Poetry Jam, and TV 1's Versus and Flow. He has written a collection of poetry and short stories entitled Conduit and a novel entitled Midas. John is a fellow of Air Serenby and current host of the Moth, Atlanta.

Special thanks to the Kate Spade New York Foundation, which provided sponsorship for the resilient spirit, stories of women and girls showcase, at which Eddie Laughter told her story. This episode of the Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Geness, Sarah Jane Johnson, Mark Solinger, and me, Davie Sumner. The rest of the Moths leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bulls, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klucce,

Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Gladowski, and Aldi Kaza. All Moth stories are true as remembered by Storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, visit our website, thomath.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at PRX.org.