Host: Jenifer Hixson
Jenifer: [00:00:03] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Jenifer Hixson, 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 StorySLAM at a small independent theater space in New York City called Dixon Place.
The idea for a StorySLAM was borrowed from poetry slams and retrofitted for storytelling. We'd hear 10 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 GrandSLAM.
From those 10 stories told at Dixon Place, official Moth StorySLAMs are now held in 26 cities across the globe. And just today, I checked with Vella Voynova, who manages The Moth's enormous database. 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 StorySLAM, we have no idea what the tellers will bring to the stage. Pizza, hamsters, something else?
And one of the most exhilarating parts of attending 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 different this episode. Each year for our gala, The Mothball, we ask some of our GrandSLAM champions from around the country to give us the one-minute trailer versions of the stories they told to win their local GrandSLAM.
So, in lieu of bringing you to an actual show, here's a taste, 10 of those abbreviated versions of GrandSLAM 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, Vivienne, Pam, Juliette, Craig, Ruby, Phyllis, Wilson and Ray.
[cheers and applause]
Donna: [00:02:37] For my first solo venture out after the end of a long marriage, I go to a tantric body painting party, [audience laughter] where who should appear but my ex-husband. [audience laughter] I'm horrified. And then, I'm like, “Thank God, there's someone here I know.” [audience laughter]
So, the leader gathers us all together for the pujas, which are these spiritual exercises where every Goddess will connect with every God. We all form a circle, the men facing the women in the middle, and we step from person to person until inevitably I'm facing my husband. And the pooja that the group is given at this time is, you two 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. [audience laughter] We hold each other, we release, we bow and I step away to face my new partner.
[cheers and applause]
Tere: [00:04:22] So, I was a young reporter at the Miami Herald, and I got an assignment to cover a 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. [audience laughter]
So, we drive out to this mango grove, and we wait and wait and wait for hours. All of a sudden, the officer's radio crackles 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 appear out of nowhere. We are zooming through the mango groves in hot pursuit. 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.” [audience laughter] 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. [audience laughter] Like, I cannot be the last defense in this situation.
Luckily, the van crashes into a chain link fence, about half a dozen men pour out, disappear into the night, leaving behind dozens of burlap sacks filled with stolen mangoes. The fruit bandits have gotten away again.
[cheers and applause]
Vivienne: [00:06:05] So, I am in sixth grade. I'm on my way home from school. When I walk in the house, it is just dead silent. It is too quiet. 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. 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. [audience laughter]
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.
[cheers and applause]
Pam: [00:07:54] 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-- 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 you doing 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.
[cheers and applause]
Juliette: [00:09:26] I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. [audience applause] My mama would take us shopping, but 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 Sears, Roebuck. When we got to Sears, my sister and I saw something that we had never seen before, water fountains with signs, white water, colored water.
To myself I said, colored water? It must be like the rainbow [audience laughter] with red and blue and green. “Mama, mama, can I drink some of the colored water?” 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 colored fountain.” She told me, “Now, you drink from the white fountain. Now, drink from the colored 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.
[cheers and applause]
Craig: [00:11:42] When my first boyfriend discovered that I was still wearing my magical Mormon underwear, [audience laughter] he was surprised, 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 in reverence. 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 flamingly gay. [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Ruby: [00:12:41] All right. My son was born with cerebral palsy and was quadriplegic. He moved into his first group home when he was 21. All his new friends, a few guys, all they ever did on their spare time was talk about sex and girls. I'd go visit and laugh with them and then I'd go home and forget about it.
Late that year, when it was getting close to Christmas, I called him and said, “So, Kirk, is there anything special you want for Christmas?” And he said, “I want sex.” I said, “Sex? Sex is not a Christmas present. Sweaters, and games and shit you don't need, that's Christmas. [audience laughter] And besides, buying sex is illegal. I could go to jail. I don't even know where to look for sex, Kirk.” And he said, “You could find it, mama.” [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Phyllis: [00:14:15] New York, summer 1979, a horde of people formed this human oval on the sidewalk blocking the entrance to the cafeteria. I found a gap. I cut through it. I was grabbed, held immobile, 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. [audience cheers and applause] 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. [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Wilson: [00:16:04] My wife and I stood in the lobby of our hotel in the Myeong-dong district of Seoul, South Korea, waiting with our interpreter, Noona. 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. Noona's phone 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 one 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 and the backdrop of morning light. As I stepped into the light, she stood up and brought her hands to her face as and started crying. “Oma,” I said. That's the Korean word for mother.
Ray: [00:16:57] 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 and the fog of 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 up out of position. They had me. And just as suddenly, they indicated to me, “We want you to 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. If I had been carrying my weapon that day, I would have killed him, because that's what soldiers do.
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 that all three of those men went on to have long, healthy, wonderful and prosperous lives.
Jenifer: [00:18:33] You just heard in order, Donna Otter, Tere Negrete, Vivienne Anderson, Pam Burrell, Juliette Holmes, Craig Mangum, Ruby Cooper, Phyllis Bowdwin, Wilson Seely and Ray Christian. We'll have more information and bios on all of the storytellers on our website. Just go to themoth.org/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 StorySLAM 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 wins and the losses and in 3,112 cases so far, the love.
If this episode has made you want to attend a Moth StorySLAM, we'd love to see you there, we'd love to hear you there. So, go to themoth.org for information on all of our live events. From all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.
Marc: [00:19:38] Jenifer Hixson is a senior director, one of the hosts of the Peabody Award-winning Moth Radio Hour and co-author of the Moth’s, How to Tell a Story. She always falls a little bit in love with each storyteller and hopes you will too. Jenifer's story, Where There's Smoke has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour, “This American Life and was a part of The Moth's first book, The Moth’s 50 True Stories.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson and me Marc Sollinger.
The one-minute stories in this episode were directed by Jenifer Hixson. The rest of The Moth’s leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Lee Ann Gullie, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by the storytellers.
For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.