Host: Jenifer Hixson
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]
Jenifer: [00:00:09] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jenifer Hixson from The Moth. The Moth is true stories told live and all citizens of earth are invited to take part. The storytellers never use a script, no cheat sheets, visual aids or PowerPoint. In this hour we'll hear four stories. A teacher whose well-meaning attempt at charity is a flop, a rags to riches story, a frightening encounter, late night in a park, and this first story about finding your place in the world. [crowd murmuring] Matt Diffee told this story for us at a show called Around the Bend in Los Angeles. Here's Matt.
[cheers and applause]
Matt: [00:00:51] So, when I was a little kid and I first heard the term musical chairs, I thought it was going to be a lot more exciting than it turned out to be. [audience chuckles] Right? It's just a dumb game. The chairs aren't musical at all. [audience chuckles] I was similarly disappointed with a couple other terms, baggage carousel [audience chuckles] and even Nazi party. [audience chuckles] The problem with musical chairs is it's a terrible game. It's not fun, it’s just stressful. I don't know why we do this to children. I mean, the only good thing about it is it sort of prepares them for the harsh brutalities of adult life.
Because it's like that, at least at the beginning, you know, where everyone wants to sit down and there's just not enough chairs. [audience chuckles] Good thing about the game is it only lasts a couple seconds. In real life, it can last a lot longer. In my life, that frantic scramble lasted seven years. It started the day I graduated from college, I realized the music had stopped. [audience chuckles] See, I had two problems. First, I had a BS degree, and I mean that in both senses of the term. [audience laughter] I had a degree in art. I think we can all agree that's a BS degree, right? My minor didn't help at all, I was a creative writing minor. And for me, that was always comedy writing. So, art and comedy, those are the two things I wanted to do.
And that brings me to my second problem. I grew up in rural Texas and then later North Carolina. And I'm not going to say that it's harder to pursue comedy and art in the rural south, [audience chuckles] but it is harder to pursue art and comedy in the rural South. [audience chuckles] It's the same reason you don't hear about a lot of little girls in the Upper East Side of Manhattan growing up to be champion barrel racers. It's just hard to find the beginning of the path. [audience chuckles] But you don't know what you don't know. So, I took off running after it. I painted every day. I tried to petal paintings to friends and neighbors, tried to get them in galleries, I got them in restaurants. Yeah. Nothing happened.
I also was pursuing comedy at the same time. I had a comedy team. We did open mic nights. We did shows everywhere we could. I don't have to tell you guys how it went. Nothing ever happened. Eventually the other guys wised up and got real jobs and I was on my own trying to do standup and trying to write plays and everything I could do. But nothing was working and nothing was making me a dime. So, I obviously had the long string of crappy day jobs. Anyone? [audience chuckles] I was a waiter, obviously. What's worse than that? I was a waiter at Applebee's. [audience chuckles] Worst two weeks of my life. [audience chuckles] I was more suited for outdoor work. So, I did all kinds of construction and I did asphalt repair and sealing. And this is in 100-degree weather, 100% humidity. It was terrible.
The best actual crappy job I ever had, and this might surprise you, was when I was a night shift clerk in a convenience store gas station out by the interstate. You know those. I'm serious. It was actually the best job I ever had. Sure, I had to mop up and stock the coolers and had to clean the bathrooms. Yeah. But about 2:30 after that was done, I had the place to myself until 7:00 AM. Pretty much some long-haul truckers, some Waffle House waitresses, but it was basically just me and a stack of books, notebook to write in. I had endless coffee, free Slurpees, come on. [audience chuckles] I even had those greasy convenience store hot dogs, spinning in the rotisserie if I ever wanted one. Never did. [audience chuckles]
I will tell you something about those hot dogs. I never touched them. I never took the old ones off [audience laughter] and I never put new ones on. As far as I know, no one ever did that. [audience laughter] I'm pretty sure those weenies came with the machine. [audience laughter] And that's basically how I spent my 20s. 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, yeah. 27, undatable. 28, oh crap. 29. I'm 29 years old. I'm still trying, still nothing's happening. I just wanted a chair to sit in. And I didn't want a lazy boy. Right? I wanted a work chair, one of those task chairs. I just wanted a chance to do the thing that I thought I could do. I know there's people out here who can relate. The 29, nothing.
One night, about midnight, I'm doing what I always do at that time, I'm watching Letterman. Me and Letterman got me through a lot of hard years. I watched Letterman so religiously that when for some reason I pick up the remote control and I start flipping through the channels, I realize I don't have any idea what comes on at this time of night because I always watch Letterman. It's like foreign television. I’m like-- [chuckles] And finally, I rest on Nightline because they're doing a special feature on these cartoonists from a magazine out east called The New Yorker. This is because The New Yorker is about to publish its first ever cartoon issue, whole issue about cartoons. So, I stopped and I watched this. And I was like, "Huh" I know you guys are probably familiar with The New Yorker, I was not. I told you I grew up in Texas. My family didn't subscribe to The New Yorker. We weren't communists. [audience laughter]
So for me, cartooning was always just the googly-eyed greeting card kind of thing. You know what I'm talking about? I didn't want it, like it's not funny, more punny than funny. But this was different. Suddenly I was looking at something and it was very similar to the streamlined one liner jokes that I admired from people like Woody Allen and Stephen Wright. And the art was different, it wasn't like generic cartoon character. Each one was different. It was art. It was comedy and art. I'm thinking. "Hmm." Now in this-- to tell you how significant I realized this was I grabbed a VHS tape and I threw it in the VCR [audience chuckle] and pushed record. Some of you guys remember those.
And then I watched the tape over and over the next few days and I freeze framed it and I studied like what kind of pencils they were using. And then when this special issue came out, I went out and grabbed the issue off the newsstand and just really pored over it, memorized it. And in that magazine, there was announcement for a cartoon contest that was sponsored by The New Yorker and the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Interesting. And this was before The New Yorker started doing the caption contest in the back. And this one, you had to do everything, the cartoon, the whole thing, both parts. And it had to be about hotel life. I didn't know what that was. Still don't really. [audience chuckles] But one thing I did know is that I was going to enter this contest.
So for a couple weeks, that's all I worked on. I went to the library, checked out a bunch of those old cartoon collection books, poured over them. And I remember one of those cartoonists stood out to me was George Booth. Some of you probably know his work, it's always that he draws that single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the old crazy country people and the dog. Some of you do. Anyway, I loved the drawings and I loved the jokes, but what really stood out to me was the fact that this rural sensibility felt so perfect in this sophisticated city slicker magazine. I filed that away, and a few weeks later, when the deadline came for the contest, I sent my ideas in.
A couple weeks later, I heard that I was one of the three finalists. [applause] Crazy, right? So, me and my high school buddy got to fly to New York City. They put us in the Algonquin Hotel. [audience chuckles] We walked in. There's the Algonquin Oak, round table, and the walls are all dark wood paneling and copper lampshades. And we didn't actually say it out loud, but I'm pretty sure our clothes and the looks on our faces were like, "golly." [audience laughter] And I'll tell you this. In the hotel, in the Algonquin, they have custom one-of-a-kind wallpaper in the hallways and the stairwells and stuff. And it is made of old classic The New Yorker cartoonist. And I was thinking, "Yikes, this is really a thing I'm getting into here."
So, the big day came, and I put on my good duds and I went down to the ceremony, and I met Roz Chast, and I met Sam Gross and some of the other legendary cartoonists. And I met Bob Mankoff. He's the cartoon editor at the magazine, and he was the juror of this contest. So, he was about to present the grand prize to one of the three finalists, and [excitingly] it turned out to be me. [cheers and applause] I know. And the prize was this giant Styrofoam check [audience chuckles] that I got to give to charity. [audience laughter] I was thinking the same thing. We were posing, Bob here and me here, and we're posing there taking photos. And I was really thinking, I bet my construction worker fingers could probably take his sissy literary fingers, and I could probably yank this thing and make a break for it. But then I started thinking, it's a revolving door to the street. I don't know how that would work. And even if I did get through, I don't know how do you cash a check? It won't fit in the slot. Have to lob it over the Plexiglas. Anyway, so I reluctantly let go of the check.
But my real prize came about an hour later. We were mingling, and when I say mingle, I mean I was standing in the corner alone, [audience chuckles] and Bob Mankoff came up and he said, "So, have you ever submitted cartoons to the magazine?" And I resisted saying, "Not only have I never submitted cartoons, the cartoons you saw were the first cartoons I've ever done in my 29 years on Earth." And instead, I just said "No." And he said two magic words. He said, "You should." And he might as well have said, "Open sesame" [audience chuckles] because that's the effect that those words had. There was like a whoosh of air and this big iron door of The New Yorker cracked open. Just this much, you best believe I slipped the tip of my boot into that gap faster than a caffeinated jackrabbit. [audience chuckles] I just went full Texan on you. I'm sorry, is everyone okay? [audience chuckles]
Let's just move on. So, when I got back home, that's all I did, was cartoon. No more art, no more comedy. It was all about the mash up of those two things. My two greatest passions, and up till that point, my two most frustrating failures. So, for that week, I worked all these ideas. I took the best three, and I drew them up and I sent them to The New Yorker. I didn't hear anything back, so I did it again. Week two, nothing. Week three, nothing. Week four, nothing. Week five, I got a letter. Some of you remember those. It was a letter that said “I had sold a cartoon to The New Yorker magazine.” [cheers and applause]
I don't know if I can explain how it felt, but if you can imagine being on your feet for seven years, walking and working and waiting and then somebody pushing up a nice big comfy chair, you wouldn't be far off. So, after you sell your first cartoon, you're allowed to come into the offices and deliver your batch of cartoons in person. So, I did that. I came all the way to New York City and I sat across the desk from Bob Mankoff and I handed him my three cartoons for the week. And that's when he told me that the rest of the cartoonists were doing 10 a week. Good to know. [audience chuckles] So, I was going to impress him. So, I went home and I started doing 15 a week every week. I did that for a full year. 15 every week.
And that first year, I sold four. [audience awe] But I was elated because I had finally found a place to be. I'd found my home. And I remember the very moment when I felt that, it was that first visit to The New Yorker. I'd seen Bob and I was coming down in the elevator all by myself, grinning ear to ear. I may have done a little jig. I'm not sure I can't verify. [audience chuckles] But I love to think that somewhere, in the basement of that building, there's some security camera footage of this 29-year-old kid, just smiling for no reason. And I get to the bottom and the doors open and there's George Booth standing there. And I reached out my hand and George is like 70, he's kind of tall, goofy, kind of graceful. He's from Missouri.
I'm looking at him and I'm thinking, "I'm hoping that I'm looking into my future." And I reach out my hand and I say, "Hi, Mr. Booth, I'm Matt Diffee. I just sold my first cartoon." And he said the perfect thing to me. He said-- he shook my hand and he kind of raised an eyebrow, goofy like that. And he said, "Well, welcome aboard." [audience laughter] And that's the very moment when I knew I'd finally found my seat. Thank you very much.
[cheers and applause]
Jenifer: [00:13:25] That was Matt Diffee. [Mid-morning in Moscow from Chandler Travis Philarmonic playing] We first met him at a show we did celebrating The New Yorker magazine where you can pretty regularly see his cartoons but also keep an eye out for his book Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart, Attractive People. To see a picture of Matt with one of his heroes, cartoonist George Booth, visit the Radio Extras page at themoth.org. While there, you can share any of the stories you're hearing on this hour with your friends and family. We're also on Facebook and Twitter @themoth. In a moment, we'll hear about one kid who's stumped when she's asked to use a vacuum cleaner and another who has to adjust to her mom's new boyfriend and new lifestyle.
[ crowd murmuring]
This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jenifer Hixson from The Moth. Our next story comes from a Moth StorySLAM, which is a competition. Each teller interprets the theme of the evening with a true story from their lives and judges from the audience choose a winner. The theme for this StorySLAM in Seattle was Fish out of Water. Ijeoma Oluo [cheers and applause] chose to talk about her fifth-grade teacher whose good intentions, kind of backfired. Here's Ijeoma Oluo.
[cheers and applause]
Ijeoma: [00:14:43] I was in the fifth grade when my teacher asked me if I wanted to come to her house after school and work on a special project. Now, any friendless overachiever, this is a dream come true. So, I said “Yes” before I even knew what the project was. But I was really confused when she told me that the project was to help clean her house for a party she was having. [audience chuckles] Now this was really confusing because she of all people should know I don't clean. [audience chuckles] My desk was always overflowing with paper and pencil shavings and there was always a good chance you could find an old sandwich shoved under a book. But I had already committed. I could make this work.
I showed up at her house. She walked me into the living room, and it was like a palace compared to our apartment. She walked over to the closet, opened the door, pulled out a vacuum, and said, "Why don't we start with the vacuuming?" She started to walk upstairs. You guys, complete panic. I had never used a vacuum before. [audience chuckles] Let me explain a little bit about my house. My mom was a single parent, she worked the night shift. My brother and I often fended for ourselves. We would make different concoctions in the microwave out of different food-bank food. And then we would squat on the living room floor, and if we had cable, we would watch TV. Then we would leave the dishes there. The dog would clean them up. [audience chuckles] Sometimes, if my mom was feeling playful, we would have a water fight in the living room. And then we would just go to laundry mountain over in the hallway and grab some towels to clean up any extra mess. Now, we did clean a little. We would make space for dance contests in the weekends, kind of push everything out to the edges. And once a year, we would have the Section 8 inspection, which was really more of a frantic throw everything in the dumpster as fast as possible than real cleaning.
So, I was definitely out of my element. But like I said, I was really determined. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to even get the handle to turn down so I could push the vacuum. But I figured it out, and I basically just pushed the vacuum in a circle for, like, 20 minutes in this little patch of the living room. But my teacher had said that she would pay me to do this, so I knew I had to earn my keep. So, I figured I'd clean the couch next. And people vacuum couches, right? [laughs] So, I picked up the vacuum and stuck it on the couch and kind of pushed it back and forth. [audience chuckles] I stopped that the second time that I got her curtains stuck in the vacuum. [audience chuckles] I knocked over a few vases.
And after about 45 minutes, I really started to wonder “What was I doing here? This place was already clean, really clean, and she needed it cleaner? Was this a thing that people did? They just cleaned for no reason?” [audience laughter] And after a little bit of time, I started to feel uncomfortable. Really, I was not earning whatever she was giving me, and I kind of wanted to go home. And after about an hour she came down and said my mom was going to be there soon. My mom showed up and we walked to the door and she handed me $50. [laughs] $50 for basically destroying her curtains and [audience chuckles] pushing a vacuum in a circle for an hour.
My mom looked really nervous and kind of relieved, but she definitely didn't look happy. We walked past my teacher's shiny Saab and I noticed for the first time how beat up my old hand-me-down Honda looked. We drove home. We didn't talk much about it. It was after that I kind of started to notice the comments that people would say. Our house, it was dirty and sometimes the lights didn't work. Our clothes were funny. I started to be embarrassed of the mustard sandwiches that my mom would pack for lunch and she would wrap them in paper and draw little cartoons on them. Because my friends all had lunchables, I stopped inviting people over.
Part of the reason why I'm telling you guys this is because I am a 33-year-old woman with a job, a degree, two good kids, friends, but I still don't know how to vacuum. [audience laughter] I have a vacuum because that's a thing that grown-ups have. [audience chuckles] But I would have to move the laundry in order to be able to vacuum and that's just not happening at this stage of the game. Now I don't have dishes on my floor, they live in the sink where dishes go. [audience chuckles] But people don't know this about me because I don't let anybody come over to my house.
But I think what I'm starting to realize is that my teacher's weird act of charity, it didn't reveal any truths to me. It revealed a lie. And the truth is what I had known before that day. Our house was dark and cold sometimes and messy and chaotic. But it was full of dance contests and weird food competitions. It was full of water fights and laughter and love. And I hope one day I will be able to invite people in and you guys can come take a break from your orderly lives and I'll make some room on the floor. We'll have a picnic and when we're done, we can just leave the dishes for later. It's totally cool. [audience chuckles] Maybe we'll have a dance contest, my kids have some sweet moves. But before you leave, if one of you could teach me how to use my vacuum, [audience chuckles] I would really appreciate it.
[cheers and applause]
Jenifer: [00:21:20] That was Ijeoma Oluo. She's a writer, blogger, arts advocate, parent and occasional dance party host. [Calabria from Enur featuring Natasha playing] To see a picture of Ijeoma as a kid, visit the Radio Extras page at themoth.org. [crowd murmuring] Next, we're going to hear a story from Tara Clancy. We met her at one of our New York City StorySLAMs, where she took the crowd by storm with her textbook New York Accent. Since then, she's told many memorable stories about growing up in Queens, working in her uncle's bar, her father, the ex-cop, her big Italian American family one side, her big Irish American family on the other. But here's one about a whole other aspect of her life. [cheers and applause] Here's Tara Clancy.
Tara: [00:22:15] All right, so I am a fifth generation native New Yorker. [cheers and applause] Yeah, and while there is certainly something cool about that, there is also actually a downside. Like there was a moment when it occurred to me that while many other American families also first landed in New York, for the most part, at some point they kept going and pioneering their way west with little more than the rags on their backs and all of that. Meanwhile, it's like my own family got off a boat, took two steps and were like, "Good enough for me forever." [audience laughter] All of that is to say I come from a place where discovering the great unknown means New Jersey. [audience laughter]
Okay. But seriously, it didn't take me too long to realize that the reason for that was mostly fear and that fear pervaded everything. Where you live, what you do for a living. You find the first solid thing and you don't risk going any further. But as it would wind up, my mother was something of a pioneer herself, although not without her share of false starts. So, at 20 years old, she had hardly been outside of Brooklyn. And when she did finally leave a year later, it was only because she married a cop from Queens, [audience chuckles] which she then called the country. [audience laughter] They had a baby, me.
But by the time I was 2, they had divorced. And so, to make a little extra money afterwards, she had to take on a weekend job, cleaning apartments. So, the very first was this duplex with Manhattan skyline views, filled with antiques and artwork. But as it winds up, it would be her last, because over the course of a year, she would go from being the cleaning lady to the secretary to the girlfriend of the multimillionaire who owned it, named Mark. [audience laughter] That's true. [laughs] So, they never wound up living together full time. They were both divorced and so, it's sort of been there, done that. But also, my mom had this philosophy which was “If you take someone's money, you have to take their advice.” And so, when it came to raising me, really, she said, "I wanted to do it my way, which had to mean on my dime." So, she would go on to spend every weekend with him, and then every weekday back home in Queens, living this dual life for the next 22 years.
And on the weekends, when I wasn't with my dad, I was right there with her. Together, mom and I would become like superwomen, able to jump social strata, single bound. [audience laughter] So, because of my mom's plan, my life was never very different than anybody around me. I wasn't sent to some elite private school or moved to a penthouse. And so, I just grew into your typical Queens teenager. I smoked blunts and I drank 40s, and one of my best friends had a baby in high school. [audience laughter] I was a walking cliché, right? In every way, except for the fact that I still spent every odd weekend talking with this art collecting, croquet playing, brilliant, if pretty intimidating man at his mansion in the Hamptons. [audience chuckles]
And when I say talking, I actually really mean it. I don't just mean we made a little chit chat, I mean that, after dinner every odd Saturday night for 20 years. He would ask me some enormous question. Right? He would say, "If I told you that the universe was infinite, that it had no end, how would that make you feel?" [audience laughter] And for that, I was like five years old. [audience laughter] But I actually lived for it, really. And we would just go on for hours and hours. And finally, my mother would she'd just kind of leave us to it, and eventually she'd come back in and she'd be like, "Are you two going to talk about the moon and the stars all night?" And that's actually what she came to call them, our “moon and stars talks.”
Okay. So, at 16, like all teenagers, I didn't want to be away from my friends for five minutes, let alone a whole weekend. So, I called Mark and I asked if I could bring them to the Hamptons. "Ring. Mark speaking." "Hi, it's Tara. Could I bring some of my friends next weekend?" "That would be fine." Click. He wasn't one for small talk. Right? [audience chuckles] So, he was not the problem. What the problem was that some of my friends had no idea about any of this. Now, that's not because I was trying to hide it. It's really because the details weren't exactly easy to slip into conversation. They'd be like, "Hey, Tara, you want to go smoke and drink on the corner?" "Well, I had been thinking of discussing the Hudson River School painters over dinner in Bridgehampton, but what the hell." [audience laughter]
Truly, I was nervous about telling them. The only thing I can kind of compare it to is coming out. I would just be like, "I have to tell you something, and I hope you find it in your heart to accept me, [audience laughter] but I know a rich guy." [audience laughter] But truly, it was awkward because I really wanted them to come, but I also didn't want them to be embarrassed, so I sort of had to explain. And so literally, here I'd be in the schoolyard, and on one side, kids would be beating the crap out of each other. That's how we do recess in Queens. [audience chuckles] And then on the other side, I'd be huddled up with my friend, Lynette, trying to explain antiquing. Right? [audience chuckles]
Anyway, before you know it, there we were, me, Lynette, her boyfriend Rob, piled into the back of his red hooptie, flying down the highway heading from Hollis to the Hamptons. And just for brevity's sake, let's just say that Rob is like Eminem, and then Lynette's like an Italian Rosie Perez. [audience laughter] They're in the front, and I'm in the back. And now as we're getting closer, I'm getting a little more nervous, and I'm thinking of all these things to explain, and I'm like, "Oh, did I tell you about the ketchup?" "The what?" I'm like, "You can't put the ketchup bottle on the table." "Where do you put it?" "On the floor?" "No, listen, you have to. [audience chuckles] You got to take the ketchup out of the bottle. You got to put it in a little bowl with a spoon first, okay? Remember that. Right?" [audience chuckles] And then, "Oh, I didn't tell you. There's no TV there." "Dear God." Always got the biggest reaction. "What does he do all day?" It's like, in Queens, the most diverse place in the world, the one thing everybody has in common is a perpetually blaring TV set. [audience chuckles]
Anyway, so that would lead me to have to explain what we did after dinner instead of watching TV, which was the talks, the “moon and stars talks.” And like I said, I really love them, but they weren't actually for the faint of heart, meaning that Mark did not care if you were some kid, unaccustomed to this type of thing. He talked and he argued with you like you were his peer and he fully expected you to keep up. And so, I was not sure if my friends were going to be into that or if he was going to be into them, but too late. There we are pulling into the driveway.
So, the most shocking thing you first saw at Mark's place wasn't the hand laid stone pool or even the regulation croquet court or the five-bedroom historic farmhouse. It was Mark himself. He was six foot ten. Again, six foot ten. I mean, everyone just sort of looked at him like, "Is that a man or is that oak tree wearing chinos?" [audience laughter] All right, so likely because my friends ignored my stupid paranoia and were just themselves, the day went without a hitch. But still, that night as we finished up dinner, I couldn't help but to be a little nervous again as I knew the questions were coming. So, he says, "Presuming we can fix all of the societal ills right here and now, where would you begin? Go." [audience laughter]
You have to understand that nobody is asking us these kinds of questions. And maybe, sure, we're at an age where you may be starting to think bigger picture, me starting to think about what you are going to do for a living. But it's also we come from a place where it always felt like there were only two job options. Cop, not a cop. [audience laughter] I mean, really, it was like your parents, you took the first solid city job that came along, and you held on for dear life and you were proud and you did your best and you did it forever. So, solving society's ills doesn't get you a pension. I mean, we weren't thinking about this kind of things. So-- [laughs] So, I kind of look away, I kind of look down. But then I hear Rob say something and I look up and then I see Lynette kind of disagrees with that. And then I see that Mark is nodding along and it's on, just like that.
And not just that one time. There would be many more “moon and stars talks” over the years. And in a way it was a beautiful thing and, in another way, it was a little bit sad because I think what most of us would tell you now is that those talks forever changed the way we thought of ourselves. Those talks sort of made us think that maybe there was a little more to us than we knew. And for some of my friends, certainly not all, but for some, and definitely for me, they even made you think, "Well, shit. If A, I like talking about these big things and B, the universe is infinite, then C, there's got to be more job options than bus drivers. Correct?" [audience chuckles]
But really, I think that when we stood at that same crossroads as our parents had, I think it was this experience that gave us something that unfortunately they didn't have. And that's just the confidence to know that we had a choice. And so here I am today, living in a whole other world, Manhattan, [audience laughter] a whopping 20 minutes away from where I grew up. But that is not because of fear. That's my choice. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
[Moonlight Sonata by Glenn Gould playing]
Jenifer: [00:35:15] That was Tara Clancy. We caught up with Tara and her mom after the show. We asked her mom if Tara has always been such a raconteur.
Tara’s Mom: [00:35:25] Absolutely. She's been telling stories since she's a little kid. [laughs] Oh, yeah.
Jenifer: [00:35:33] To see some pictures of Tara's mom, Mark, and Tara's friends from the neighborhood, go to our website, themoth.org and be sure to look out for Tara's book, The Clancys of Queens.
[Moonlight Sonata from Glenn Gould continues]
When we come back, a woman walking through a park late at night and alone. This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jenifer Hixson from The Moth. People often ask what makes a great storyteller. There's this assumption that storytellers are boisterous and animated, but some of the people we find to tell moth stories are by nature pretty shy. Our next storyteller, Nancy Finton, considers herself an introvert and yet she held the room in rapt silence. I've always admired how she got us all to lean in to hear every last word. She told this story for a show in New York City called Smoke and Mirrors - Stories of Fact versus Fiction. I should mention [cheers and applause] this story was told in the year 2000, when we were young and didn't have the best recording equipment. Here's Nancy Finton, live at The Moth.
Nancy: [00:36:38] Summer after my junior year of college, I was ready for big adventure. Moved to New York City, found a sublet in Inwood, got a job in an Italian restaurant in Tribeca as the world's shyest bartender. [audience chuckles] The regulars used to lean over the bar and try to draw me out. [audience laughter] So, every night after work, late at night, I'd take the A train up to Inwood, like 200-something blocks. Then I'd walk through these really quiet streets to my building. Some nights that was really creepy, but I actually wasn't afraid because I'd worked out my own protection system.
Every night on the A train, I'd spin these stories in my head. Different details, but always the same plot. Me versus the rapist. And just by my wits and incredible internal strength, I always won. Some nights when I was really pissed off at the world, I'd imagine it like this. I'd just look inside myself and dredge up every bit of anger that I've stored since the womb and hurl it in his face. [audience laughter] And in the face of this huge and incredible anger, he'd just run away. Most nights I took the opposite tack, though. And I would just imagine myself being so good, so calm and so kind that nobody could ever hurt me.
Three summers later, I was living in Norway, waitressing again at a sweatshop of a restaurant. It was a cold, bleak summer with the sky hanging like this far over my head. And I just broken up with a boyfriend, just working all the time, trying to save some money to go travel and find myself or something again. The night it happened, we'd all gone out for one of the waitress birthdays. And it was like 3:00 in the morning, we were standing in front of the bar, figuring out how everyone was getting home. Nobody was going my way. I remember one nice guy offered to take me in his cab and loop around and drop me off. I said, "No, it's all right, I'll walk. I always walk."
I remember it was a quiet night because I was wearing these new leather shoes. And after wearing Converse high tops for three years, I was really proud of these leather shoes and the way they'd make a sound on the concrete. And I was so proud of them, I'd worn this little miniskirt to show them off. So, I walked through the lighted shopping street and up this residential hill. I lived up on the backside of the hill, and on top of the hill there was this red brick church with a little park in front of it. And it was surrounded by buildings that looked like houses, but the next day when I went back there, I realized they were university buildings, so they were empty at night.
I was crossing this little park when for the first time in my life, I understood what people meant when they say time froze. Because I still have this millisecond in my mind, frozen there. And inside it is one sound. Sound of somebody else's shoes behind me, running. And one thought, "If he grabs me, I'll kick him hard with my new shoes." [audience chuckles] But it was only a millisecond because I never got time to turn my head around before there was an arm around my neck and a body pressed up behind me. Every muscle on my body clenched. I just wanted to hurt him. But nothing moved.
So, I moved to plan B. Prideless begging. "Please don't hurt me," I said. "Please don't Hurt me, please. I'll do what you want. I'll do anything you want. Just don't hurt me." He dragged me closer to some bushes and threw me on the ground and lay down on top of me. And immediately he took one arm and he shoved my face to one side, so I never looked at his face. And with the other hand, he started to tear up my clothes.
And somehow when I was on the ground, the panic started to lower just a little bit and a little bit of my brain lit up and I started thinking. In probably the least neurotic moment of my life, I started taking in only essential information and translating into action. I knew two things. I think he must have said something, though I don't remember what, because I had this idea that he wasn't Norwegian, maybe he had an American accent. And the other thing I knew is that it was different from the man in the story I wrote. In the story he had a focus-directed violence and rage, but this guy was just all over the place. I couldn't see him, but his movements were jerky and weird and he seemed chaotic and kind of desperate.
So, I started talking in a mixture of English and Norwegian, just trying to find the language that would reach him. And I started to try to cut through the chaos and just calm him down. "It's okay," I said. "It's okay. It's all right. Everything's going to be all right. I know. Believe me, it's okay." I heard something rip, but I still felt covered up. I couldn't see myself or him. Luckily, I was wearing this vintage dress. It was thick material with good seams, and I was wearing thick black tights because that's what you wear in a Norwegian summer. [audience chuckles] "What do you want?" I said. "What do you want? What do you really want? This isn't it. I know this isn't it. Tell me what you want."
I have no idea how long I'd been lying there with him sort of struggling and tugging. And I was completely scared and I knew that he could do what he wanted, that I still had no power in this situation, but still part of it, it just started to seem like I'd been there a long time. And it started to seem awkward and ridiculous, [audience chuckles] like you're just not good at this. [audience laughter] I guess he started struggling harder because the arm that was leaning on my neck to push my face aside started to lean harder. I started to feel like I was choking. "Could you please move your arm," I said, "because I'm having some trouble breathing and I know you don't really want to hurt me?" Then everything changed. He answered me one word. "Okay," he said. And he jumped up and I jumped up, and I had the Swiss army shoulder bag on. And he grabbed one strap and he pulled.
And without thinking, I guess I was winning, I grabbed the other strap and pulled and he let go and he ran. So, this would be a good place for the story to end. This is about where it ended when I wrote it down. Unfortunately, it's not where the real story ends. A few weeks later, I was cleaning my house and listening to the radio and the local news and I heard this 10-second news report. A young woman had been raped in front of the church on the hill by a stocky blond-haired foreigner. Same guy. I didn't tell the police. I didn't do what I could have done to protect this woman. And the worst thing is that one of the things I felt when I heard this news report was a little bit of satisfaction.
See, when I wrote the story, it was all clear. I played both parts. I knew what was in their heads and I knew that this woman had made a connection with this man and used her power to get rid of him. Somehow when it happened, it almost seemed less real than the written story and I just didn't get it. Was he inept or did I really make a connection? Did my plan really work? And when I heard the news report, I knew it had worked. I'd done it. So, I thought about it a lot. I thought about why I didn't go to the police. And I know at the time I told myself that I hadn't really seen his face and it wouldn't do any good because I couldn't describe him, but that was bullshit.
I know that part of me felt that the police would just say, "What a stupid woman for walking home so late and all drunk and alone in a miniskirt." But I could have gotten over that. And I think the real reason is that I was just so used to spinning these stories in my head. I was just so wrapped up in my version, my power against the world and how it all affected me that I just didn't stop to realize that it wasn't only my story.
[cheers and applause]
Jenifer: [00:45:58] That was Nancy Finton. She's a writer and editor and mother of two. She lives in Brooklyn.
[Snowden’s Jig by Carolina Chocolate Drops playing]
If any of the stories you hear today inspire you to share one of your own, please pitch us. The number to call is 877-799-MOTH. Or you can do it right on our website. We listen to all of the pitches, and lots of them end up as stories on our stages. Here's a pitch we liked.
Dorothy: [00:46:27] I was born on October 29, 1929, the day of the stock market crash that ushered in The Great Depression. My dad worked in a bank and I guess my parents didn't see the handwriting on the wall because they went ahead and made another baby, a boy born about the time the banks were closed. My dad died in 1936, leaving my 34-year-old mother with seven kids aged 5 to 15. There were no food stamps or welfare checks in those days, so one sister went to live with a family friend who needed a nanny and one sister and two brothers went to orphan schools and I remained at home along with the two oldest girls.
Under the influence, I guess, of Oliver Twist and the Cinderella stories, I used to fantasize that a kindly old woman would take me under her wing and take care of me because I didn't think my mom was doing a very good job of it. It didn't happen that way exactly, but in 2010, I got an enormous bequest from a very unlikely source and the interesting thing is that I now get to play my fantasy in reverse, that is, I get to be the little old lady benefactor to young people in need.
[Snowden’s Jig by Carolina Chocolate Drops continues]
Jenifer: [00:47:43] Remember, you can pitch your own story at themoth.org. That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]
Jay: [00:48:08] Your host this hour was The Moth's Senior Producer, Jenifer Hixson. Jen also directed the stories in the show along with Joey Xanders. The rest of The Moth directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Meg Bowles and Maggie Cino. Production support from Whitney Jones, Kirsty Bennett and Jenelle Pifer. Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. The pitch in this hour came from Dorothy Sedley.
Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from the Chandler Travis Philharmonic, Enur with Natasha, Glenn Gould and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Links to all the music we play on The Moth Radio Hour are available at our website.
The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, with help from Viki Merrick. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.