The Moth - 25 Years of Stories: One Plus One Plus One Plus…

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

On this week’s episode, we take a look back at 2000, the origin of the Moth StorySLAMs. In lieu of bringing you to an actual show, we’ll be playing ten abbreviated versions of GrandSLAM-winning stories. This episode is hosted by Jenifer Hixson. Storytellers: Donna Otter Tere Negrete Vivienne Anderson Pam Burrell Juliette Holmes Craig Mangum Ruby Cooper Phyllis Bowdwin Wilson Seely and Ray Christian For more information on all of our storytellers, go to the moth.org/extras.

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 the moth.org forward slash Houston. Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Jennifer Hickson, your host for this episode. Throughout 2022, the moth has been celebrating its 25th anniversary by revisiting our history, counting down year by year.

In this episode, we'll go back to the turn of the millennium, 2000, a truly auspicious year for the Moth because that February, we held the very first Moth Story Slam at a small independent theater space in New York City called Dixon Place. The idea for a story slam was borrowed from poetry slams and retrofitted for storytelling. We'd hear ten stories picked at random and judges pulled from the audience would decide upon

the winning story. Those winners would go on to compete in our grand slam. From those ten stories told at Dixon Place, official Moth story slams are now held in 26 cities across the globe. And just today I checked with Vela Voineva, who manages the Moth's enormous database, and we clock in at more than 43,000 slam stories. 43,597 to be exact. What are these 43,000 stories about? Well, after each show, brief story descriptions are written by the local producers. Just for fun, I looked up a few keywords in our searchable database. There's a lot of variation. Six mentions of trampolines, six mentions of hamsters, over 70 mentions of pizza. There are 236 stories involving Revenge, and 375 stories involving hair. And in very good news for humanity,

the word love clocks in at 3,112 mentions. At each story's slam, we have no idea what the tellers will bring to the stage. Pizza, hamsters, something else. And one of the most exhilarating parts of a tending a show is wondering, what are we going to hear tonight? To try and replicate a little bit of that experience, we're going to do something kind of different this episode. Each year for Argala, the mothball,

we ask some of our Grand Slam champions from around the country to give us the one-minute trailer versions of the stories they told to win their local Grand Slam. So in lieu of bringing you to an actual show, here's a taste. 10 of those abbreviated versions of Grand Slam winning stories. As a note, these stories were recorded at a bunch of different mothballs, some live and some virtual, so the audio

is going to be a little different for each one. Here's Donna, Tere, Vivian, Pam, Juliet, Craig, Ruby, Phyllis, Wilson, and Ray. Ruby, Phyllis, Wilson, and Ray. Yeah. For my first solo venture out, after the end of a long marriage, I go to a tantric body-painting party. LAUGHTER Where? Who should appear?

But my ex-husband. I'm horrified. And then I'm like, thank God there's someone here I know. So the leader gathers us all together for the pooja's which are these spiritual exercises where every goddess will connect with every God And we all form a circle and the men facing the women in the middle and we step from person to person until Inevitably I'm facing my wasband And the pooja that the group is given at this time is you to have a long rich history. Hold each other and feel all that complexity. And then release each other into your futures.

So life brings us a divorce ritual. We hold each other, we release, we bow. And I step away to face my new partner. And I step away to face my new partner. So I was a young reporter at the Miami Herald, and I got an assignment to cover midnight ride along with the county's police agricultural patrol. And our mission that night was to stake out a group of notorious fruit bandits because it's Miami and even our produce has a criminal

backstory. So we drive out to this mango grove and we wait and wait and wait for hours. All of a sudden the officers radio crack was to life and he shouts out here they are! They're coming! We take off after them a police helicopter shows up overhead, two police trucks up here out of nowhere. We are zooming through the mango groves and hopper suit. All of a sudden the officer looks to me and says screaming over the sirens. If anything happens to me, there's a rifle in the gun rack. So what now?

First of all, I'm a journalist, and I cannot get involved in whatever the hell is about to go down right now. And secondly, if some crazy shit does go down, I am the last person who should be counted on to handle a gun. I come from a very long line of extremely nearsighted, easily startled, and very clumsy women. Like, I cannot be the last defense in the situation.

Luckily, the van crashes into a chain-linked fence about half a dozen men. Porra, disappearing into the night, leaving behind dozens of burlapsacks filled with stolen mangoes. The fruit bandits have gotten away again. So I'm in sixth grade, and I'm on my way home from school, and when I walk in the house, it is just dead silent. It is too quiet. And I drop my bag and as I do, I turn and I see

my mother sitting in our dining room at the head of our table, perfectly still, perfectly quiet, like a big black widow spider just waiting for her favorite prey to return. just waiting for her favorite prey to return. And as we make eye contact with all eight of them, she starts in with me. What kind of a faggot are you anyway? I'm going to take you to a therapist and he's going to fix you. You're a real son of a bitch. You know that? Technically that last one I couldn't disagree with. Spread out in front of her on

the table was the contents of my stash, not my drugs, but the things that made me feel okay about myself and my place in the world. There were the bras and the panties and the skirts and all the things that I wasn't supposed to have. This was not the first time I had endured one of these sessions and they could go on for hours. But the way that I did it was by promising myself that as soon as I could, as soon as I turned 18, I would get out of the house and I would take care of myself.

I made it through college thanks to a maximum security prison. I volunteered there and those men inspired me to persevere as the only black woman in my entering class. I drew courage from their determination to succeed against impossible odds. One night a popular band was playing on campus, and I was the only volunteer who showed up for our weekly meeting. One of the men said, what's you in here fool, and we all laughed. I said, well, I'd rather be here with you guys.

I love you. I care about you, and I want to do everything I can to help you succeed. The room went deathly still. Finally, one of the men began to cry and said, in my whole life, no one's ever told me, they loved me or cared what happened to me. Then one by one, every man in the room, even the guard began to cry. And for the first time since I left home, so did I. I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. My mama would take us shopping that she would always say to my sister and me, drink a glass of water.

On this particular day, we were going to a special store that I had not been to before and it was says Roebuck. When we got to see is my sister and I saw something that we had never seen before. A water fountain with signs, white water, a colored water. To myself I said, color water, it must be like the rainbow, with red and blue and green. Mama, mama.

Can I drink some of the colored water? And she looked at us. She looked at me. And she eased over to the fountains. And she told my sister, drink from the white fountain. Mama? Oh, it's good. Now drink from the Colet fountain. She told me now you drink from the white fountain. Now drink from the Colette fountain. Mama, the water tastes the same. She said, yes, yes. My Mama did something she took a risk to teach us a lesson that water is water and it belongs to everyone. to say the least. Internally I was bursting out of the closet, but externally I was still maintaining the facade of the good Mormon missionary I had been trained to be, underwear and

all. I was scared that if I took off that last symbol of my religion, I wouldn't know who I was anymore. When I was young, my mom had taught me that when the underwear becomes old and worn out, it couldn't simply be thrown away. It was too sacred. Instead, it had to be burned and reverenced. So when the time came for me to finally say goodbye to that last relic of my religion, I knew exactly what to do.

I built a huge bonfire and I finally came out as flammingly gay. All right. My son was born with cerebral palsy and was quadruplegic. He moved into his first group home when he was 21 and all his new friends, a few guys, all they ever did on their spare time was talk about sex and girls and I'd go visit and laugh with them and then I'd go home and forget about it. Late that year when I was getting close to Christmas I called them and said, so cur, is there anything special you want for Christmas? And he said, I want sex. Said sex, sex is not a Christmas present.

Sweathers and games and shit you don't need, that's Christmas. And besides buying sex is illegal. I could go to jail. I don't even know where to look for sex, Perth. And he said, you could find summer, 1979. A hoarder people formed this human oval on the sidewalk, locking the entrance to the cafeteria. I found a gap. I cut through it. I was grabbed, held in

mobile, groped in every part of my body, then pushed in my lower back. It was a mime. He beckoned me to hit him with my purse. I tried, but he bounced away, taunting, teasing. So I gave up, turned away, he squeezed my behind and everybody laughed. I fled feeling humiliated and powerless. Then I remembered something in my purse that I bought as a joke for 99 cents. I grabbed it and I returned. He was galloping

around with a woman mounted on his lower back. He let her down, raised her dress above her head, the crowd cheered, she staggered away. I entered that arena smiling. I said, Hi, remember me? And I lifted my can of pepper spray and I sprayed him in his face. His eyes got wide. He reached for my throat. I took two steps back and I sprayed him again. And again, I sprayed him like a roach. LAUGHTER CHEERING My wife and I stood in the lobby of our hotel

in the Miyong-dong district of Seoul, South Korea, waiting with our interpreter, Nuna. I picked the hotel not knowing it was in the same shopping district my birth mother had wandered around 32 years before After taking me to the orphanage. Nunez foam buzzed and she looked up at me and said she's already here. Are you ready? I hadn't been able to sleep at all the night before or eat anything that morning But I nodded yes and we got into the elevator.

As we rode up on floor, I tried to focus on my breathing. My wife put her hand on my back, centering me for this moment. When the elevator doors opened, I turned the corner, and in the back of the hotel bar, a woman was sitting on a leather sofa in front of a large window. Just her silhouette in the backdrop of morning light. As I stepped into the light, she stood up and brought her hands to her face and started crying. Almighty said, that's the Korean word for mother. When I was in the army, I was trained to have two contradictory views of war. One was to have complete trust and faith in the people and the unit that I served with,

even if it meant I had to risk my own life. And the second was to have absolutely no mercy or empathy for the enemy. But sometimes during periods of stress, in the fall of the war, those fine lines of vigilance can get blurred. Like during a quiet period when I walked out into the desert without my weapon. And suddenly I saw the ground in front of me starting to move and three Iraqi soldiers jumped about a position. They had me and just as suddenly they indicated to me we want a surrender. Luckily all four of us survived the encounter but here's the thing. If I had

been one of those three Iraqi soldiers and I saw me walking up there with no weapon, I would have shot me. And if I had been carrying my weapon that day, I would have killed them because that's what soldiers do. And luckily for all of us, I wasn't carrying my weapon and we all successfully survived that day. But since that day, I have wondered and I have hoped and I have prayed, you know, all three of those men went on to have long, healthy, wonderful and prosperous lives. You just heard in order, Donna Otter, Terry Negreedy, Vivian Anderson, Pam Barrell, Juliet

Holmes, Craig Mangum, Ruby Cooper, Phyllis Bowdwin, Wilson Sealy, and Ray Christian. We'll have more information and bios on all of the storytellers on our website, just go to the moth.org slash extras. We want to end by saying thank you to all the good people who've mined their lives for stories to share on the moth story slam stage and also express gratitude to our local producers, our hosts, and the audiences who show up again and again

to give their full attention to strangers as they talk about their highs, their lows, the winds and the losses and in 3,112 cases so far, the love. And if this episode has made you want to attend a Moth Story slam, we'd love to see you there, we'd love to hear you there. So go to the Moth.org for information on all of our live events. From all of us here at the Moth, have a story worthy week. Jennifer Hickson is a senior director, one of the hosts of the Peabody Award-winning Moth Radio Hour, and co-author of The Moth's Had a Tell a Story.

She always falls a little bit in love with each storyteller and hopes you will too. Jennifer's story, where their smoke has been featured on the mouth radio hour, this American life, and was a part of the mouth's first book, The Moth, 50 True Stories. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Geness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Salinger. The one-minute stories in this episode were directed by Jennifer Hickson. The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bulls, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Kluccheye, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Leanne Gully, Ingeglialski, and Aldi Kaza. All Moss stories are true, as remembered by the story tellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go good or website, TheMouth.org.

The Mouth Podcast is presented by Pierre X, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at PierreX.org.