Host: Kate Tellers
Kate Tellers: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Kate Tellers, 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're bringing you back to 1998, the year that The Moth celebrated its first birthday. As we learned to walk, metaphorically, we started to refine the role of a Moth story director. Very often, people would come to us with the seed of an idea or even more often in the early days, we would seek out potential storytellers who we thought might thrive on our stages. Some people had stage fright. Some thought they had no good ideas. Some thought they had so many good ideas. So, a director worked with each of the tellers to help prepare them for the stage. Here's how the directing process works.
Through a series of conversations, the teller shares their story. A draft, an idea, whatever the start. And the director listens, asks questions and helps to guide the teller to the best version of the story, they will then share on our stage. The conversations are intimate. We challenge Moth storytellers to be vulnerable, to share their emotional connection to the events of their lives.
So, during the directing process, storytellers often discover truths about their own experiences that they hadn't realized before. These conversations take place in person, a few recently on Zoom, but mostly, over the phone. So, often the teller and director meet for the first time in our in-person rehearsal just before the show. In these cases, they'll sometimes recognize each other by voice alone, catch eyes and leap into each other's arms. I always say working on a story with someone is one of my favorite ways to fall in love at The Moth.
After today's story, we'll feature a conversation with two beloved members of our Moth community who have been through this process more than once. Peter Aguero and Samuel James. But first, a story from Peter. He told this at a Moth Mainstage in Charleston, South Carolina, where theme of the night was Between Worlds. Here's Peter.
[cheers and applause]
Peter: [00:02:00] So, I just finished my first semester of college. I have a big bag of laundry. I come through the door of the house, and things aren't looking too good for me and my mom. The first thing I notice is that the piano is gone. She had that ever since she was a little girl and took piano lessons. We always put the nativity on top of it around Christmas time. I took piano lessons for two weeks, but I still took piano lessons on that piano, and that's gone.
I go through the living room and the only thing that's left is just one couch that's with broken springs sticking out of it. There are two televisions, one on top of the other. One has picture that works and one has sound that works. [audience laughter] Over in the corner are the impressions still from my dad’s La-Z-Boy. That has been gone for four years now. That's the only furniture in the room. I go upstairs. The dining room's empty. There used to be this big, beautiful dining room set with carved chairs and a glass break front and a buffet table. And that's gone.
In the kitchen, there's the kitchen set. There's two chairs. There used to be four, but I broke one of them and the other chair I also broke. [audience laughter] There's only two left. I go upstairs to the bedrooms. And in my mom's room, there's nothing left but her mattress on the floor. There's nothing quite as damning as a bedroom without furniture, because you see all the dings and the scratches in the wallpaper. Like, all the mistakes that can usually be covered up, but you see them all now.
My sister's room is exactly the way it looked when she moved out to go live with my dad. It's Pepto-Bismol pink walls, and a canopy bed and this big toy box in the shape of a rubber strawberry, as if she was going to move back in and be the little girl that she was before she moved out. My room looks exactly the way it was when I left. There's just posters all over the walls and it's ridiculous like me.
So, I start to do my laundry. My mom comes home from work and she immediately takes over. Doesn't let me do it myself. I end up helping her with it. And she's happy to see me. She's happy that I'm home. When we're done that, we go up to have dinner. My mom makes tomato casserole, one of favorite things. It was canned tomatoes with cubes of Wonder Bread and American cheese baked in the oven. If you put enough shaky cheese on it, it's delicious. [audience laughter]
So, we're sitting there in the two kitchen chairs, and I'm telling her all about my first semester of college and how it finished up. She's so proud of me. She's telling me about work. My mom's a nurse, and she's been taking all of the shifts that she can. But she had warned me that she was starting to have to sell stuff in the house to be able to catch up on the bills, because the house was too big for the two of us. Now that I was away at school, it was just her. So, she was doing everything she could. She warned me, but it was still shocking.
She had just taken a second job, a part time seasonal job at the mall behind the perfume counter. My mom didn't like people telling her what to do, so I knew that wasn't going to last very long. While we're sitting there at dinner, she says, “Pete, we're not going to have a lot of money this year for Christmas. So, I don't think we're going to be able to give each other presents.” And I said, that's okay, mom. I'm being completely honest. I'm just happy to be home with her. I don't need anything. And that's the truth.
We sit there eating quietly for a minute. And then, she says, “You know, it'd be funny. What if we cut out pictures of things from magazines that we would give to each other if we could?” We laughed about it, and then we cried about it, because it's really sad. [chuckles] It's a really sad thing. But then, we laughed again. No matter how hard things are, you just have to laugh.
The next day, I decide I want to make the house look as Christmassy as possible. I go up to the attic, and I get the boxes down at the lights, and I hang the lights in the bushes out front and around the gutters. I want to go get a Christmas tree. I grew up in a little small town in New Jersey called Delanco. It was a little small town, 2,500 people, mostly farms. At that time, there wasn't Walmart or big stores or anything. So, I went over to the local Christmas tree farm to get a Christmas tree. I figured they'd give me a deal, because I used to date their daughter. But it turns out they didn't give me a deal, because I used to date their daughter. [audience laughter]
Christmas tree was like 40 bucks, man. I couldn't afford that. So, I went back home, and I got an old saw out of the garage, and I cut out a tree from the side yard and I brought it in. It wasn't even like a pine tree. It was a stunted maple tree. [audience laughter] I put it in the tree holder had like five branches. I put 20 ornaments on each branch and just put the lights on it and called it a day. My mom came home from work and she just laughed about it.
When I was visiting my friends who were also home from college, I would steal their mom's fancy catalogues, and bring them home and cut out pictures of stuff. My mom always wanted a green Jaguar convertible. I found a picture of one of those, I cut her out pictures of gold and diamonds and jewelry and island, like all these things that I would love to be able to give my mom for Christmas.
As I was doing it, I knew it was sad. It was a sad thing to do. But I kept collecting them and folding them up and tying them up with ribbons and hiding them in my room, and I was waiting to put them under the tree. Like I said, it was a sad thing, but I knew it was something that would bring us together. I knew it was something that we would always be able to hold onto. It was something that we would be able to hold onto together.
There was one night toward the end of December, close to Christmas, when we're sitting there in the living room watching the TVs, and the Charlie Brown Christmas special is on.
One of the TVs hooked up the cable, and the other one gets the antenna, so the sound doesn't quite jibe up. We're sitting there just right next to each other on the couch. We're worlds apart. My mom's exhausted. I've been trying to get her to sell the house for years, because I knew it was just too big for her to be in by herself. It was too big for the two of us to be there. If I'm being honest, it was too big when all four of us were living there. I don't know why they got it in the first place.
But four years before that, my parents, who had been separated on and off the whole time that they were married, they were giving it one last try. And the plan was that they were going to sell the house, and take the money, and we were going to move to Georgia from Jersey and have a fresh start. That was the big plan. It went along okay for a couple of weeks, and then somebody just came in and poured the eggshells all over the floor again and they started to fight, and things were back to normal. That fresh start never really happened.
It culminated with four of us, in the third pew at St. Casimir's Church in Riverside, New Jersey, for a Christmas Eve midnight mass. Right before the priest started the mass in the packed church, my dad stood up and he walked out of the church. And the only sound you could hear in the silent church was the hydraulic door just go shoop. The three of us left, stood up and we went outside past the priest and everyone we knew, and went outside and we walked the two blocks to where the car was parked. My dad was nowhere to be found, but he left the keys of the car on the hood. And that year, my parents were done. That was it. I got what I wanted for Christmas that year. My parents never got back together.
So, here we are now today, the two of us sitting on this couch and trying to watch this thing and let us be happy of something. She's a million miles away. It's all killing her, trying to pay the bills, trying to keep it together. She did everything she could to try to keep the house, so there would be some semblance of normalcy to the outside world. I know that she took a big hit on her pride. She's a very prideful woman. I knew that when everyone that she knew in her life saw our family disintegrate that midnight mass, I knew that it was just ripping her apart. But she was trying to keep the house together and she was a million miles away.
My mom was my best friend. It was the two of us, man. She was my partner. She was like my road dog. It was me and her against the world. Being there with her and having her be a million miles away was killing me, just like I knew this house was killing her too. Well, it got to be Christmas Eve, and my buddy Brian came over and picked me up and we went to a different church for midnight mass. When you're under 21, you can't go to a bar, so you go see your friends at mass. [audience laughter]
We split a jug of wine in the parking lot. And the mass was awesome. It was pretty great. [audience laughter] Afterwards, I come home. And the next morning, I wake up and it's Christmas morning. So, I go and I gather up all the little pictures of the gifts that I want to give to my mother, all wrapped up and tied in ribbon and I put them under the tree.
I hear my mom stirring upstairs. She comes downstairs. And her hair's in corkscrews. She's got this big flannel housecoat on and her big red plastic Sally Jessy Raphael morning glasses [audience laughter] with the broken ear thing on the side taped up. And I say, “Merry Christmas, mom.” And she goes, “Oh, honey. Oh, hold on.” She goes upstairs and she's upstairs for a minute, and then she comes back down and she has a few. I give her hers first. There's the Jaguar, and the jewelry, and the island, and a picture of a baby grand piano, and a picture of a new dining room set, and a picture of a new mahogany bedroom set. And all these things I wish I could replace for her. She's smiling and laughing the whole time. And then, when it's all done, she gives me mine.
There's three of them. There's a picture of bag of Reese's peanut butter cups, [audience laughter] there's a picture of a pair of Homer Simpson slippers and there's a picture of a karaoke machine. They were all from the same Rite Aid catalog that was up in her bathroom, because she had completely forgotten about this thing that I thought was going to bring us together, because she was working so hard. [audience laughter] So, we're stuck in the middle of this O. Henry story that he never should have written. [audience laughter]
I thank her so much for the gifts. We go upstairs. My mom makes the best pancakes in the world. You might think your mom does, but I'm so sorry, you're wrong. [audience laughter] My mom made the pancakes, but this morning, she burned them a little bit. I'm sitting in the kitchen eating these pancakes, cutting around the burnt pieces. I'm looking out through our backyard at everybody else's houses. All the light in their houses looks like orange and colorful and friendly with all these people. Our house just feels empty, and stark and white in the fluorescent light. Eating these pancakes in silence together, the two of us.
A couple months later, she finally did send me my present. I was back in college. I had taken out all the tuition and loans. We couldn't afford it otherwise, but it was important to her that I go. I had just finished a day of classes, and I was heading to the dining hall and I stopped over to check my mail. Remember mail, when people used to send mail? I open up the mailbox, and there's an envelope with my mother's postmark on it. I take it up, and it is the dining hall and I fill up my tray with too much food, because that's what you do.
I go over to a table and I sit down, and before I start eating, I open up that envelope. And inside, there's no note. There's just one photograph. It's of her standing in front of the house with a for-sale sign. The house sold pretty quickly, and she got it, she offloaded it and she took a little bit of a hit financially, and she took a bigger hit on her pride, and she moved into a much smaller place that she could afford. It hurt her. I know it hurt her. It took a big hit. But the most important thing to me was, right then, we're looking at that picture, I got my girl back. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Kate Tellers: [00:13:55] That was Peter Aguero. For many storytellers, their relationship with The Moth doesn't end when they walk off of the stage. Many catch the storytelling bug at The Moth, they catch a bug. And many relationships develop well after the stage lights have dimmed. As promised, here are two Moth storytellers and friends, Peter Aguero and Samuel James.
Peter: [00:14:16] We're friends and I love you dearly. [crosstalk] So, how do you remember how we met?
Samuel: [00:14:24] I remember-- [laughs] So, it's at the State Theater. It's in Portland, Maine. You were the host of the show. I remember being a little self-conscious about being the biggest bearded man in the room. [Peter chuckles] And then, in you walked. [Peter laughs] And I felt the stress just come off my shoulders right onto yours. [laughter]
Peter: [00:14:50] But what I remember in that moment, is I walked in and it was like, “Oh, good.” Same thing. I'm not the [chuckles] monster in the room. We get to be two [Samuel laughs] monsters together. I was like, “Oh, good.” And then, you stood up and you were the same exact height as me. And then, [Samuel laughs] I was wearing a Batman T shirt and then you pulled out a Batman wallet and you were like, “Hello, Batman.” And I said, “Hello, Batman.” [Samuel laughs] And then, we fell in love right then.
Samuel: [00:15:20] Yeah. Your Batman in my phone. That's who you are in my phone. [laughter]
Peter: [00:15:27] How did you get your start with The Moth?
Samuel: [00:15:31] I got my start with The Moth from-- When The Moth came town, I think it must have been, I want to say 2013, 2014, something in there. They were looking for a local to tell a story. I got a call from Meg Bowles. We started going through stories, I started telling her. So, I'm a musician by trade, and so I have a lot of stories about being on the road and ending up in odd circumstances.
Peter: [00:16:02] Yeah.
Samuel: [00:16:03] And so, those stories always work well for me on stage or meeting people. And so, I just started hitting her with all these stories. But Meg's, one of the OGs at The Moth, so Meg has heard every possible version of every story. So, in my life, my stories are unique and I think in her life they weren't. And so, we just started digging through stories. I don't know how many stories I told her, but it had to have been upwards of 20. I think she must have got some sense that I knew how to tell a story, so she just kept digging.
Peter: [00:16:34] That's a familiar thing. The way The Moth directors will tend to work, is you'll get in there thinking you're going to talk about one thing, and then they catch something, and then without you knowing, they sneak in the side door and they're like, “Ah, here's this story.” They try to end up convincing you that it was a story you wanted to tell all along. Most things, we were not always such great judges of what is interesting about our lives, right?
Samuel: [00:17:04] I'm very aware of that. My own [chuckles] tendency to be precious, maybe about something that I've made or something that I've said a little sentence that I think is funny. There were definitely moments in the second story, The Little Pink General Lee. There was one moment in particular, where I had this joke that I thought was so funny, and I still think is very funny. But it didn't work in the moment.
It killed the momentum and it killed the drama that was being built. It was almost like a pressure valve from myself in telling the story that it was like, I knew I could feel the tension I was building for the audience myself. And so, I wanted to release it by putting this little joke in there, but it the whole story a disservice. And Meg was the one who was like, “Don't put this joke in here.”
Peter: [00:17:52] Meg has this great little smirk smile she does [Samuel laughs] when it's those moments where she's telling you that the thing you're doing is not a great idea. It's just like “Mm-hmm”. And you're just like, “I know.” She's right. [Samuel laughs] To me, the best direction comes where they're just telling you to trust. Of course, you're trusting them. But as a Moth storyteller, you're trusting the director. But they're a proxy for yourself. You really have to trust that it's enough, that the facts of what happened and how you felt are enough.
You can watch somebody in a rehearsal the night before the show perhaps still have too many jokes, or too many deflections or too many things that are keeping us away from the honesty and the emotional core of the story. It's like, you can see the director almost heartbroken, just like, “Oh, man, I wish they could have-- Oh, man, if only.”
Samuel: [00:18:52] Yeah.
Peter: [00:18:53] The story is not the director's story. It's always yours. And the best directors make sure that they're invisible in it.
Samuel: [00:19:02] Yeah.
Peter: [00:19:03] I would say that process, some of it surprised me in some of the same ways that it did with you, where you think that something doesn't matter, and then you realize it did. Like, you think a moment in the experience might not be as big a deal that it really is, because a lot of times, the stories that we tell are about a time that was about a change, or some pain or a failure. But when you work on this with a director and they help you identify this stuff makes you realize like that thing you did to survive is the thing that is it's not just yours. Those are those moments of being afraid, and being vulnerable, and being real.
Working on these stories over the years like that always surprised me when you go back and how, in a way, accidentally dishonest we are with ourselves, with what we've been through, because it's too hard. It takes a good guide to get you through to the other side. The directors here at The Moth, they will very much respect the pain you've been through, and want to help you honor and want to help you presented in a way that honors those feelings and is also being safe for you.
I remember the first story I ever told on a Mainstage was originally a story I told at a SLAM, and it had no ending. It was a Christmas story, and it was about me and my mom at Christmas. We didn't have any money, but it didn't have an ending. I think my ending of that story originally was-- And then, after we had breakfast, I realized that I learned nothing from this experience. [Samuel laughs] Thank you so much. I didn't know how to do it. So, I just walked off stage. [Samuel laughs]
So, the director of that story was Catherine Burns. I remember Catherine calling me into the office to work on that story with me. And she said, “Peter, we need to have an ending to the story, [Samuel laughs] because you did learn something from this. You did survive it.” And so, that was the first time that I just trusted and gave into it. It was really beautiful to flesh it out, and make it bigger and make it smaller, have the story expand and contract.
Again, it was really surprising because again, it's like, this is just my experience. It's something I went through. It was the parts that I thought were the most important, might have been the most uninteresting. And the things that I skipped over were the parts that were the juiciest bits. And then, I never really doubted that I wanted to tell it, because it felt good to tell it. It was an amazing experience. I was really grateful to Catherine for selecting the story and helping me work on it. That first Mainstage was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Samuel: [00:22:18] [laughs] What a debut.
Peter: [00:22:22] It didn't feel real. And then, I told the story. Because Catherine helped me, trust in what was there and trust in myself, I was able to tell this story. My mother was there, and she was in the audience, and it took this thing that was really painful for the two of us, and it made it into something beautiful.
After the story, I took this cathartic exhale breath-- Jonathan Ames was the host, and he was like, “One more hand for Peter.” And then I hear him say [laughs] and he goes, “And Peter's mother.” She stands up and starts waving. And the audience- [laughter] -like, she's a duchess. My mother is now getting an ovation from a crowd in New York City around Christmas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [Samuel laughs] [laughs] I think that's my mother's favorite part of any of my career has been A, that she got to do that, and B, when it was on the radio, that story was on the radio later, it went on the record that my mother's pancakes were the best pancakes [Samuel laughs] ever cooked in the world.
At moment that clicked, it was really about that we had gotten through it, man, that we had survived that we had gotten far enough away from it that it was something we could tell the world about. Sam, it's been great to talk to you, man. I love you so much. I can't wait to see you down the road.
Samuel: [00:24:10] Oh, I love you right back. I can't believe I'm looking at your face after talking to you on the phone for three years and not seeing you. Here you are. [laughs]
Peter: [00:24:17] I'm sure, somewhere Meg is listening to this with that little smile. [Samuel [laughs] She’s like, “Look what I did.”
Samuel: Oh, sure of it. I'm sure of it. [Peter laughs] I hope she's is. I hope she is.
Kate Tellers: [00:24:27] That was Peter Aguero and Samuel James. Peter was born and raised in the wilds of South Jersey. He's been working with The Moth since 2007 as a storyteller, instructor and host. His solo show, Daddy Issues, has played the far reaches and middle grounds of North America, mostly to acclaim, except for one guy in Fresno, California. That guy hated it. He spends most of his time listening to the Allman Brothers while making profane ceramics and queens. Samuel is a journalist living in Portland, Maine. He primarily covers local and national issues as they relate to race. James is also an internationally touring musician and storyteller.
We hope this episode inspires you to call someone and ask them to tell you a story. You never know what might happen next. That's all for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, have a story worthy week.
Marc Sollinger: [00:25:16] Kate Tellers is a storyteller, host, senior director at The Moth, and coauthor of their fourth book, How to Tell a Story. Her story But Also Bring Cheese is featured in The Moth's All These Wonders: True Stories about Facing the Unknown, and her writing has appeared on McSweeney’s and the New Yorker.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson and me, Marc Sollinger. The story in this episode was directed by Catherine Burns. The rest of The Moth’s leadership team include Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, 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.