Host: Catherine Burns
[overture music]
Catherine: [00:00:12] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. Big news. This week, The Moth is celebrating our 25th anniversary. On June 6th, two and a half decades will have gone by since our founder, George Dawes Green, held the first Moth event in his living room in New York City. To celebrate, we're bringing you five stories, one from each five-year period we've been around. We're going to start with the present and work backwards.
In recent years, The Moth has grown from a local event in New York to a truly global organization. And our team has contributed to work being done around the globe to empower women and girls. So, we're going to kick things off with a story told in a Moth Global Community Workshop in 2019 that we taught along with the Ford Foundation, during a convening of women leaders from around the world.
In Kenya, where our storyteller is from, it's common for people to have three names. And children are usually named after the elders. Here's Purity Kagwiria, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Purity: [00:01:19] When I was seven years old, I needed to get baptized. All this time, I knew I had one name, Kagwiria. But at the church, they said I needed two names. I went home and asked my grandmother, “What name I should be baptized by?” And she said, “Pick my name. Be called Elizabeth like me.” And I said “Hmm, that’s too old. I'm still very young. I need to find a cooler name for myself.” [audience laughter] I went back to church and the teachers’ daughter gave me her name. After all, I was just baptized two months ago, so her name to me sounded very fresh. Therefore, I was baptized as Purity Kagwiria.
Four years later, maybe five years later, I needed to do my high school final exam. When I went to register, they said I needed a third name. [audience laughter] And this third name had to belong to a man. I needed to show that I belong to someone. And all this time, no one had ever brought up the issue of me having a father. I knew that my grandmother's father was my father, after all, we all called him Baba. But then, I knew that I couldn't pick his name. Again, this age thing was too old for me to pick his name. [audience laughter] So, I decided that I'd grown up hearing that my mother had a husband called Mutua, and I thought what are the odds? I must be his daughter. So, I picked this last name, [audience laughter] went to school and said, these are my three names. I got registered.
Four years later, I needed to apply for my national identity card. And for me to do that, I needed to bring an identity card belonging to my father to show that I belong to this man. And here is a crisis, because my mother had not talked to this man for so many years. [audience laughter] And my mother was also missing. I had not seen her for at least three. So, there was no way I was going to go to this man to tell him to give me his ID. So, my grandmother said, “Oh, I have a long childhood friend. I'm going to go to him and he's going to give me his ID and you're going to register for your identification.” And that's what happened. This man adopted me. On the spot, I became his daughter [audience laughter] and registered for my ID.
A couple of years later, I lost this identification card and needed to remember my father's name, so that [audience laughter] I can put it on the certificate on the application form. I could not remember, my grandmother could also not remember the name of this man, [audience laughter] and the man had since passed away. [audience laughter] I sat on the pavement in Nairobi and said to myself, what could this man's name be? And I guess his name must be Stephen. So, I put Stephen Mutua as my father. And by the masses of God, that was his name. So, I got my ID back.
When I decided to get married at 29, I again had to decide what name I was going to go by. And the registrar said that I needed to drop this Mutua name and pick my husband's name. And at that point, I decided that I was going to stick with the two names that are on my birth certificate and the ones that I really chose for myself. This is Purity Kagwiria. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:04:57] That was Purity Kagwiria. Purity lives in Kenya, and is now the director of the With and For Girls Fund and Collective, the world's only participatory fund by and for adolescent girls. Purity is also The Mother of two boys. She wrote, “I chose my son's names with a lot of thought. Each of my sons has four names. So, if they want to drop any, they have plenty to choose from.”
Next, we're turning to the years 2013 to 2017. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of talk about immigration during this time. As is the case today, many of these stories came from abstract or biased news pieces. So, here is a story straight from someone who has made America his home.
Nestor Gomez was born and raised in Guatemala and came to the US in the 1980s to escape the civil war. We first met Nestor in our StorySLAM series in Chicago, where we partnered with Public Radio Station WBEZ. Here's Nestor Gomez.
[cheers and applause]
Nestor: [00:06:07] When I came to the USA with my family, I was 15 years old. And here in the USA, everybody speaks English. My family and I, we could only speak Spanish. But my family could speak Spanish, because I could barely speak. When I was a child, I used to suffer from a speech impediment. I used to stutter. As I grew older, I was able to overcome my stuttering just a little bit. But when I came to the USA because of the culture shock, I started stuttering again.
I remember thinking to myself, great. [audience laughter] Not only do I stutter in Spanish, [audience laughter] now I'm going to stutter in English too. [audience laughter] I'm going to be a bilingual stutterer. [audience laughter] We had a ride to the USA at the beginning of the summer, which meant we didn't have to go to school. [audience laughter] But instead of spending the time at the lake or at the park, we used to spend our time at our apartment just watching TV. And the reason was that because every time that went outside, we felt so different, so alien. We felt like we didn't belong.
In fact, the only place that we felt like we belonged was at home. At our tiny apartment, we could watch TV all day long. We could watch Telemundo and Univision. We could see people speaking Spanish, we could watch the show that we used to watch in Guatemala. And then, when our mother came back from work in the afternoons, she started watching her novellas and we started watching the novellas. We heard the soap operas, which is strange, because in Guatemala, men are not supposed to watch novellas. But here, we were like, “Oh, my God, novella.” [audience laughter]
After a couple of months, we had to go to school. I remember two weeks after the school got started, my brother came back and he was really worried. He had a worried look on his face. I asked my brother, “What's going on? Why are you worried?” And he told me, “Tomorrow, I have a test.” I told my brother, “So why are you worried? You're smarter than me. You memorize everything really well. Why are you worried?” He told me, “Because I had to memorize all the names of the states and the capitals, and I had to say them in front of the class. It's going to be an oral test.”
Now, I was worried, because as I told you before, I used to stutter. And the idea of an oral test scared me to death. In fact, because I had started going to school and I was the oldest, my mother had decided that I was going to become the official translator. Anybody who is immigrant would tell you that your parents made you that translator. In fact, only days prior we had gone on a sightseeing tour. When we got lost, my mother told me that I had to go and ask a police officer for directions.
Now, I usually argue with my mom about those things, but I always lost because I stuttered, so I couldn't really argue. [audience laughter] But this time, I decided that I wasn't going to argue with her, so I just walked in front of the family and I approached the police officer and I just pretended to be talking to him. [audience laughter] And then, I went back to my mom and I gave her the made-up directions. We got lost really bad that day. We finally managed to find a way, but it wasn't because of me. I didn't help at all. So, now that my brother came and asked me for help, I decided that I was going to help my brother. I wanted to help my brother.
So, I started to write down all the names of the states and the capitals on little cards, so I could show them to my brother. So, I showed him one card. “I-O-W-A.” “Perfect,” I told my brother. He was trying to say Iowa. You see, the problem was that in our time in the USA, the only thing that we have managed to learn was the A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The alphabet song. We only knew how to pronounce each letter, so we were putting all the letters together to make up the name of that state. So, if we messed up Iowa, you see, imagine what we did with Kansas or with Mississippi, it was horrible. [audience laughter]
But my brother studied the name just like we pronounced them, and then he went to school.
So, the next day I was waiting for him and I asked him, “How did the test go? How did the test go?” And my brother started to cry. “They made fun of me. Everybody was laughing. Even the teacher told me that I didn't study.” I felt so sad for my brother, because he had studied really hard. I felt so mad for the teacher and the classmates, but I also felt mad because I wasn't able to help my brother. So, I told my brother, “That's it. From now on, we are not watching Telemundo or Univision anymore. From now on, when we come back from school, we going to watch TV in English only.” “Yes,” my brother said. And that's what we started doing.
When we came back from school, we started to watch The Cosby Show [audience laughter] before the allegations against him. [audience laughter] We started to watch Roseanne before we learned that she actually hates undocumented immigrants. We started to watch The Simpsons on Fox before we knew that we shouldn't be watching Fox. [audience laughter] When our mother came from work and started to watch the novellas, we didn't watch the novellas we heard anymore. Instead, we went to our room, and we studied and we practiced the words that we had learned, especially the crazy words from Bart Simpson, “Cowabunga, Eat My Shorts, dude.” [audience laughter]
And sometimes our mom will come into the room and will ask, [foreign language] Are you guys talking about me? And sometimes we were. [audience laughter] But most of the time, we were just trying to learn new words. The only time that we allow ourselves to watch movies in Spanish was on the weekends when we went to rent the Mexican movies. But then, one day I decided, I'm going to rent one movie in English. So, my mother sent us to the video store, and that's what I did. I rented one movie in English, even without asking her. And that Friday afternoon, first we watched one of the Mexican movies. And when the movie ended, I put the movie in English that I had rented. It was the Eddie Murphy rogue comedy special. [audience laughter]
I thought it was just a regular movie with a beginning, middle, end a plot. But no, it was this guy that was just telling jokes really fast and we couldn't understand anything. So, I fast forward the movie a little bit, and nothing. I fast forward the movie some more, and nothing. I fast forward the movie a third time, and then I saw that Eddie Murphy was moving his leg up and down [singing song of the music] to the sound of the music. [onomatopoeia] He did this little scream, [mild scream] He did this little jump, he turned around, he did the moonwalk. He was making fun of Michael Jackson. We knew who Michael Jackson was. It was so freaking funny. [audience laughter]
So, my brother and I, we started to point that a TV, “Funny, funny, funny.” We point at each other, “Funny, funny.” I was sitting on the floor in between the TV and the sofa, and I turned around to see my mother, to see she was laughing, but she was looking at us with a strange look on her face. She was looking at us, like she didn't know who we were, like we were alien to her, like we were strangers. So, I told my brother to go into the kitchen and get some popcorn and some sodas. My brother didn't like to be bossed around, but he liked popcorn and sodas better, so he ran into the kitchen. While my brother got the popcorn ready, I took the movie out and I put one of the Mexican movies instead.
By the time my brother came back with the popcorn, he saw that the Mexican movie was playing, he didn't say anything. He just sat next to my mom, and my mother hugged him and they collab together. I wanted to do the same, but I was 15 years old, so I was too cool to do that. So, instead, I got up and I sat on the other side of the sofa and I just looked at my mom and I looked at my brother, because I knew that we had to get used to this country, that we had to learn to speak English, so we could get better grades and eventually a good job. But in that moment, in that tiny apartment, we just needed to be a family. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:15:25] That was Nestor Gomez. Since he found his voice, he has not stopped using it. At the time of this recording, he has told a whopping 187 Moth stories all over the country, which is indeed a Moth record. Nestor produces and hosts his own show called 80 Minutes Around the World. It features the stories of immigrants, their descendants and allies.
Coming up, a story from the set of the classic mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap.
Jay: [00:16:11] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Catherine: [00:16:21] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. In this hour, we're celebrating The Moth's 25th anniversary by hearing stories recorded across our two and a half decades. Now, we're going back to 2009. This is the period where we began touring, and we began experimenting with new partners and venues in our hometown of New York City.
Our next storyteller, Tony Hendra, was the first editor of the National Lampoon. And as an actor, he played the role of the band manager, Ian Faith, in the classic mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap. And that was the subject of a story he told at a Moth in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, which was presented in partnership with Doc Fortnite 2009.
We're going to join him mid story, which finds Tony depressed over the death of his friend, John Belushi, in financial ruin, going through a tough divorce, and feeling completely disillusioned with the ideals of the 1960s, especially the promise of rock and roll. Here's Tony Hendra.
Tony: [00:17:19] And it seemed to me somehow appropriate that I was in California, [audience laughter] because California is the end. [audience laughter] It's the end of America. You can't go any further, right? It was also appropriate that somehow this magnificent sunset was sliding gradually underneath the horizon into stygian darkness. And for the first time in my life, I just wondered, what the hell was the pointing going on? Now, whoever owned this house was kind enough to have left a quart of vodka in it. I also had with me my very first prescription for Valium. So, these two things taken together seemed to me to present a perfect opportunity.
So, I laid out 10 Valium. I figured that's how many it would take. I took a big, big slug of vodka, and took my first Valium ever and then took another slug of vodka. Nothing much seemed to happen. And so, I took a really big hit of vodka, picked up the Valium, and I looked at them in my hand for a long time and I fell asleep. [audience laughter]
And about 14 hours later, I woke. [audience laughter] I remember through the fog, that I was supposed to be on a movie set. To be precise, about four hours earlier. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, was be on a movie set, and especially a movie about rock and roll, which at this point I hated. It didn't have a script, this movie. It had to be totally improvised. I'd never improvised in my life either. But I was a professional.
So, I jumped in my car and sped across the Malibu Hills to the location. They rushed me into hair and wardrobe and so forth and so on and rushed me to the set. And there were the three stars of the movie, looking absolutely hilarious in their fright wigs. And the set was actually a limo and I was placed in the limo with them and somebody yelled action and we were underway. [audience laughter] They were brilliant. None of them was British, but they all had perfect British accents. They were being incredibly funny in character, intimidatingly funny. I knew that very soon one of them would turn to me and say something and I would have to answer. [audience laughter]
Now, I'd done a little homework. I'd read up on improvisation and I'd talked to all my friends who'd been in improv groups. And the consensus seemed to be there was one basic rule you had to follow. Listen. Can't bring anything preconceived to improvisation. You must just listen not just to what people are saying, the other people are saying, but to what their faces are saying, what their bodies and their movements are saying. And if you do that, just simply answer what you hear, it will work.
And now the moment came. The character called David was turning to me, and he was saying something to me. I could see in his face that his character thought my character was pretty sleazy, that this character, whose name was Ian, lied a lot. And out of my mouth came this voice that wasn't really mine. It was evasive and slimily ingratiating, and it had that kind of nasal whine that was beginning to creep into everyday English. And it worked. It was amazing.
The scene was enabled to continue being funny. I wasn't funny, but I helped them be funny. And my friend, the director was very happy with the scene. So, we did another take of it and he was even happier with that. And then, we did another scene and another scene, and pretty soon the day was over. I had completely forgotten all thoughts offing myself. [audience laughter] But more importantly, something quite wonderful was happening, which was these stars and the extended cast and myself too, we were all in some way on the same emotional page.
We had all arrived at this deep disillusion and disappointment with this wonderful music that when we were younger, we had such high hopes for that. We actually thought some of us would change things, would bring peace and rationality into life, would end racism and war. You remember? And it had betrayed us. It had been betrayed for us. It had been a source of failures, and disappointments, and vulgarity, and stupidity, and absurdity and pretension and so on. And this whole cast was just coming into that and devising and finding all these wonderful ways in which venality and cynicism and so forth had poisoned this whole area of the art world.
I would actually venture to say that This Is Spinal Tap actually isn't a mockumentary. Because of this wonderful cinematographer we had, Peter Smokler, it was actually a documentary record of a really fascinating collective comedic experiment that took place at a certain point in time and couldn't have been at any other point in time. And that was a success. I think that's why it works, that's where it gets its edge in authenticity.
I have one little epitaph to this. I haven't the foggiest idea what it means, but I'm going to throw it in anyway. This was about five years later, and Spinal Tap had been out for about three years and was on its way to becoming the minor classic that it became. I got into a cab in New York, and my driver was a quintessential acid casualty. [audience laughter] I mean, he had one of those beribboned ponytails down to his ass crack. He peered in the rearview mirror and he said, “Hey, man, weren't you in Spinal Tap?” And I said, “Yeah, I played the manager. Yeah.” And he said, "Oh, man, I really dig their music so far out.” [audience laughter] He said, “Man, I was into tap before they made that movie.” [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:23:42] That was Tony Hendra. Tony was the author of the memoir, Father Joe, and the coauthor of George Carlin's posthumous memoir, Last Words. Tony was a many time Moth storyteller, host and longtime board member. He championed The Moth right up until his death in 2021, and we miss him terribly.
And to give you a sense of that era, Jessie Klein, now beloved for her bestselling memoirs and is a writer and executive producer of hits and such as Inside Amy Schumer took the stage. And in her Moth debut had to explain what Google was to the audience. Here's a clip.
Jessie: [00:24:24] Now, I was a nerd, but I was not a geek. So, I didn't know what Google was. I didn't know and I'm sure, you all know what it is. If there's one or two people here, I'll explain it. Google is the most powerful thing ever invented on the planet. [audience laughter] It is this insane search engine that allows you to be crazy and stalk someone from the comfort of your own home. [audience applause]
[applause]
It is a more important invention than fire or the wheel, [audience laughter] as far as I am concerned.
Catherine: [00:25:00] That same night, Jeffery Rudell made his Moth debut. This was an era when our open-mic storytelling competitions had taken off in New York. We were meeting many amazing raconteurs at the shows, among them, Jeffrey. Live from the New York Public Library's Celeste Barcos forum, here's Jeffery Rudell.
[cheers and applause]
Jeffery: [00:25:25] At the age of 19, I fell prey to a powerful and deeply corrupting influence. It dogged me for six years, costing me many a friend and in the process, bringing my family to ruin. It crippled me to such an extent that I have spent the intervening 15 years recovering from it. The influence I speak of is hope. [audience laughter]
Now, you should know at the get go, there's nothing in my childhood to suggest I might find myself on such a wayward path as that. My parents loved me terribly. They taught me right from wrong, they taught me to be courageous in the face of bullies, they taught me patience and forgiveness, they taught me that love would see you through any misfortune.
My trouble began on Independence Day. Not the Independence Day, but my Independence Day. My Independence Day occurred on Memorial Day, 1982. That was the day I told my family, I was gay. The act itself, “Mom, dad, I'm gay,” was relatively unexceptional. In fact, it should have been more exceptional, and I've always wished that it had been. However, subsequent events overshadowed it and it pales by comparison.
The subsequent events occurred in my absence, after the fact, as I was in my car driving back to college to take my final freshman exams. I remember being on the highway and thinking how, I expected my parents to freak out a little. [audience laughter] And to my surprise, they had not freaked out. They'd been calm and cool and collected. Oddly calm, cool and collected, but still, I was really happy as I drove back to school. Meanwhile, subsequent events were busy unfolding back home.
My mother was going through the house where I grew up and was gathering together things I had made for her, a jewelry box when I was in 4H, and a painting when I was 16, a box containing the letters that I'd written them from school, which I used to do every week. She was removing photographs from the walls and placing them in little piles around the house. She was directing my father, who never dared not follow her direction, to take the bed and the desk and the chair and the lamp and the Smith Corona even, and they put them all in the front yard next to the rock garden, not too close to the maple tree.
My clothes, my books, my bookcases, my report cards, my Farrah Fawcett posters, my shoes, three years’ worth of Interview magazines, the good ones with the Andy Warhol covers, [audience laughter], everything. Then with my brother and my sister and my grandparents watching, my mother removed a cigarette from this tiny crocheted case she always kept them in. She lit the cigarette and then she took the match and put it to the pile of things there in the front yard that contained the sole and complete record of my existence in my family. It burned for seven and a half hours, thanks in part to the addition of some lighter fluid to help get the larger pieces of furniture going. All of it, all that was me prior to that memorable Memorial Day up in flames.
According to my sister, who years later recounted these details to me, it was a mighty impressive blaze. In their eagerness to feed it and due to an unexpected wind off the fields around the house, the sugar maple that was older than my great grandfather caught a spark in its branches and was sacrificed. They cut off all communication with me. They emptied and closed our joint bank account. There goes college. They barred the door. They stopped talking, stopped answering my letters, stopped taking my calls. They stopped anything with me. They just stopped.
I was completely disbelieving. I mean, this didn't make any sense. All of my friends had stories about telling their families they were gay and they all ended the same way. Sooner or later, everything worked out fine. I even had a friend named Neil who parents had done the same thing. At first, they just stopped talking to him. But one year later, they were inviting his new boyfriend to come home with him for the holidays. Everyone counseled me to have a little patience and have a little hope. And this is how it starts, slowly, just a little hope, just enough to get you through. But hope is cumulative. A little bit here and a little bit there, it builds up in the system until it becomes something, denial.
Their reaction had been, yes, extreme, but not the worst that could happen. The thing to do was to be a good son, to make them proud, to earn back their love. So, I got a job, and then another and then a third. Three shifts, three restaurants, six days a week. That would show them. But they weren't watching. I wrote them letters, lots of letters about nothing. It's Tuesday and it's hot. Or, my new roommate is named Kathy. Or, my friends took me out for my birthday yesterday. They didn't write back.
Living for me came to a halt, despite the fact that my life just went on and on. I didn't think about my future, I didn't think about my needs, I didn't think about my sadness, I didn't think about any of it. I didn't have to, because I had hope. Every day whispering in my ear, “Don't give up. Don't walk away. You're almost there. Don't stop. Don't grow. Don't develop. Don't worry. Just don't make any sudden movements or you'll blow it.”
So, six years went on like this without a word from them. So, finally, hurt and confused beyond my ability to hold it in, and frankly, finding it really difficult to maintain the illusion that this was temporary, [audience laughter] I decided to make one more attempt to force the issue. So, I flew home, and showed up unannounced at my mother's office. It was an amazing visit.
I asked the receptionist to page my mother and tell her she had a surprise visitor. I stood there in the lobby, and I remember seeing my mother come down this long hallway toward me. She was walking, and then she looked up and she saw me, and then she recognized who it was, and she turned and walked away again. It was a really amazing 92nd visit.
Two and a half weeks later, a black funeral wreath was delivered to me at my office with a note that said, “In memory of our son.” Clearly, it was time to give up hope and take up therapy. [audience laughter] So, I talked to a counselor who asked me, why I had invited this turmoil into my life. I talked to a minister who suggested a Christian youth camp. [audience laughter] I talked to a lesbian who offered to slash my mother's tires if I paid for her flight there. [audience laughter]
I signed up for scream therapy, where I beat pillows with tennis rackets and screamed obscenities and pulled a muscle in my shoulder. Mostly, I talked to friends, and mostly the pain persisted. The sheer weight of it nearly crushed me or at least that's how it felt at the time. Since it was my constant companion, I spent most of my time turning it over in my mind, fingering it like some sort of psychological worry stone.
Over the years, it's been eroded by so much handling. All that remains now is a small, hard, nearly weightless pebble, really. Worn away is most of the anger and much of the hurt. But one question remains, how was it possible that they taught me love and loyalty in excess of that which they themselves possessed? I have come to believe that it's not possible to understand what they did. Not possible for me, anyway. To understand it, it would seem to indicate that there was some justification for it, and I know for certain that there is not.
Still, there's no escaping my parents. This thing they did. This extreme and unfathomable and many layered thing they did, tore a hole in the middle of my life. I have spent years and a lot of money darning that hole while trying to keep the rest of my world from unraveling, and yet their influence on me is enduring. My parents loved me terribly. I have been courageous in the face of bullies. There is such a thing as too much patience, but no such thing as too much forgiveness, and love has seen me through every misfortune.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:35:04] Jeffery Rudell is a writer and paper artist. Jeffrey's mother died in 2005. They never spoke again after that fateful Memorial Day.
[00:35:19] Coming up, a story from the woman whose life and friendship inspired The Moth's founding.
[softhearted music]
Jay: [00:35:41] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Catherine: [00:35:50] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. And I'm Catherine Burns. We're here celebrating the Moth's 25th anniversary. For our final story in this hour, we're going back to our earliest days. I'm now going to turn this introduction over to our founder, George Dawes Green.
George: [00:36:08] I started The Moth back in 1997. And people always want to know where I got the name from. Well, I grew up on an island off the coast of Georgia called St. Simons. And there's not much to do on St. Simons Island. So, at night, we'd go on over to Wanda Bullard's house, which was a ruin. And her porch screens were all bellied out, so moths could get in, and they'd go battering around the porch light. We'd just sit there under all that air traffic, and tell stories and drink bourbon. Sometimes we'd drink a lot of bourbon. And the stories would seem to get better as the night wore on, and we started to call ourselves The Moths.
And years later, I was at one of those cocktail parties in New York City where you can't finish a story, because there are scavengers all around you who are just waiting for you to pause, so they can interrupt you. And no one in a New York City cocktail party can hold the floor for more than about 20 seconds, which I thought was sad. So, I started The Moth, and we just made people shut up and listen. We had a string of really amazing evenings. But the night I felt proudest of was when we got Wanda Bullard to come up from Georgia.
Wanda: [00:37:30] And then, George made it happen. And he named it The Moth, because he said they were like the moth that come to the lights on my porch on Sunday afternoon. And people came like the moth, and they listened to stories. So, that's why he named it The Moth. And a few years later, he called me up on promise and said, “Okay, you promised to come to New York.” I had never been to New York then. But I went to New York and I told a story about my dad. It got a good reception. Everybody liked my story and seemed like me too.
[applause]
George: [00:38:0] Here's Wanda Bullard, live at The Moth.
Wanda: [00:38:10] I'm here today to tell you a story about my father, George Bullard. He was born in 1900 in a little bitty area up in the northeast corner of Mississippi. That's very rural. Most people would call it hillbilly country. They just call it paradise. [audience laughter] So, he was one of nine children. He married when he was 20. He and his wife had two children, and his wife died. So, he raised those two daughters. And then, when they were grown, he married another woman who turned out to be my mother. She was about 20 years younger than him, and they had two daughters and I'm the last of the last. He was about 50 years old when I was born, but an incredible influence on my life.
One of the things that he did, mostly what he did to make money, was to raise and train bird dogs that hunted quail. And if the bird dog business got slow, he'd paint a house or two. But when he got late into his 60s, someone talked him into running for office, this bird dog raiser. And he ran for Board of Aldermen, which is like city council. He was elected. When he went to the first meeting, he found out that his assignment was that he was the fire commissioner.
Now, every previous fire commissioner had gone to meetings, and made political decisions and voted and did those kinds of things. But my father didn't quite understand. And so, he went down to the fire department and said, “Now, how am I going to know when there's a fire?” [audience laughter] And they said, “And you need to know?” Because he said, “How else can I know where to go until I know where the fire is?” And they said, “Mr. Bullard, you intend to go to the fires?” “Of course, I'm the fire commissioner.” [audience laughter]
They didn't have the heart to tell him that he was taking a step in a new direction from fire commissioner. [audience laughter] And so, they went along and they hooked the fire department telephone to our telephone at home. I was a teenager. [audience laughter] And every time the phone rang at the fire department, it also rang in my house. [audience laughter] Not a normal ring, one long continuous ring until you picked it up. And then you didn't say anything, you just listen to find out where the fire was. And then, my father would hop in his little Datsun station wagon and head for the fire.
Now, one downside to it was, he didn't see so well at night anymore, so he didn't drive a lot after dark. So, as a teenager with a driver's license, my new job was when the fires happened at 02:00 in the morning, I got to drive him there. [audience laughter] I had to keep my jeans and my sneakers by the bed in case of a fire that we had to go help fight.
Now, he knew nothing about fighting fires, understand? But he wanted to encourage those young men who were out there doing a valiant job. [audience laughter] Well, after serving two terms, he was past 70 then, and some people were saying, “Well, you still going to go on?” I discouraged it a little bit. He said, “Okay, he'll let some younger fellow come in and be the fire commissioner.” So, he stepped down. But he decided after he retired from being the fire commissioner that he missed being around the fire.
And Booneville is such a small town that the fire department and the police department are right in the same building. You can walk from one to the other just between a door. So, he'd gotten really close to all the firemen and also the policemen. They considered him like a grandfather. So, they tried to figure out how they can keep him hanging around, because they loved my father. So, they asked him if he wanted a job with the police department. Well, he's 70 years old. He's never done that. He said, “Sure, what can I do?” They say, “Well, when someone say or needs to be off the day, you could come in and fill it on the radio. You could be the dispatcher, take calls, call out to the cars and tell the policemen where to go, that sort of thing.” He said, “I could do that.”
I'm never sure how they maneuvered this. They paid him to do this. So, he was going along really normal with that job, and everything was looking good. And then, one day, he got to work and found this most amazing thing. They had a prisoner. [audience laughter] Now, in all the months that he'd been there, they had not had a prisoner. So, this intrigued my father. So, he'd work on the paperwork a little bit, and he'd go back and talk to a prisoner.
And by noontime, he was liking this young man, even though he had hair way down here, which my father hated. [audience laughter] So, when he went out for lunch, he brought the young guy back a couple hamburgers and went back and talked to him some more. And he said, “Son, why are you in jail?” He said, “Well, I had a little too much to drink last night, Mr. Bullard, and they arrested me for public drunkenness.” My father said, “Well, that's not too bad. Why doesn't somebody come and pay your bail?” He said, “Well, I'm from Corinth, Mississippi.” Now, that's about 20 miles up the road from Booneville.
He said, “I think if I could see my father face to face, he might loan me the $200 to pay my fine, but I'm not sure how he's going to react to a call from the Booneville jail.” My dad mulled that over a little bit. He was a real good muller. And he said, “Now, if I were to let you go, could you go up to Corinth, find your daddy, borrow the $200 and be back here before my shift ends at 05:00?” [audience laughter] The young man was liking the direction of this conversation. [audience laughter] He said, “Mr. Bullard, I appreciate it, but they impounded my car, so I don't have any way to get to Corinth. It's 20 miles.” My daddy said, “Well, is it a blue Chevrolet?” He said, “As a matter of fact, it is.” He said, “Oh, it's out in the parking lot. I can find the keys.” [audience laughter]
So, with no authority to do anything but type on the radio, he searched through the desk, found the keys. And not only turned the prisoner loose, gave him a getaway car. [audience laughter] About 4 o'clock, the policemen started coming back in off the shift, and they went back to check on their prisoner. They weren't used to having a prisoner either, and they discovered to their dismay, they didn't have one. [audience laughter] And they said to my father, “Mr. Bullard, what happened to the prisoner?” And very nonchalantly, because he just didn't see that he'd done anything wrong, he said, “Oh, I turned him loose.” [audience laughter] “You, what?” “I turned him loose.” “Why did you do that?” “Well, he just seemed like such a nice young man, and I told him he needed to go get his $200 and come back and pay his fine.” They said, “Well, how's he going to get the car in?” He said, “Oh, I gave him his car.”
So, they're sitting around mulling around, saying, “Okay, what are we going to do to make this go away?” Because they didn't want my father to be in trouble. They wanted him to be able to continue coming in, and hanging out and working on the radio. So, they decided, one man said, “You know what we'll do? We'll remind the chief of police that George Bullard helped get him elected.” Another one said, “I got a better idea. Let’s just tear up all the paperwork, the arrest report, everything, and let's just pretend none of it ever happened.”
Now, my father's standing over in the corner listening, and he said, “No, we're not going to do either of those things. That young man will be back with the $200. I'm waiting here until he gets here.” One policeman observed, it might be a pretty long wait. But my father's thinking about that young man and how they had bonded in those few hours. He remembered telling that young man as he left, “Now, if you can borrow $200 to pay your fine, get a few more and get a dern haircut.” [audience laughter] That was my father's only parting advice to him.
So, the policeman stood around, and 4 o'clock came and went. 04:30, 5 o'clock. No young man. Nobody was surprised, except my father. My father said, “Well, he's just running a little late.” And they waited till 05:20, 05:30 and they said, “Mr. George, your shift was over at 05:00. Why don't you go on home? We can take care of this.” My father said, “Didn't I tell you I was waiting till he got back?” “Yes.” So, they just started off.
The guys that had come in at 4 o'clock wouldn't go home either. Their shift ended. They wouldn't go home. The new guys were coming in, they were trying to fill them in on what was going on. And all of a sudden, strange looking young man walked through the door, nice clothes, clean cut, short hair. He walked up to the counter and he stopped. Nobody paid him any attention. So, in a minute he said, “Excuse me.” And one of the policemen went over and said, “Can I help you?” He said, “Yes, sir, I'm here to pay my fine.” And he said, “What fine?” Nobody recognized him but my father. And he said, “$200. You guys arrested me last night. My fine is $200, so I'm here to pay it.” He's counting out twenty-dollar bills.
Nobody in the room is making a sound. They're all stunned, except my father, of course, he knew he was coming back. They ride him out a receipt. He's looking around the room at all the policemen talking to each other in quiet voices. He's imagining what the atmosphere was probably like before he returned. So, as a parting thought, when he got to the door, he turned around and said to my father, “Mr. Bullard, I'm sorry I was late getting back. I had to wait in line at the barbershop.” Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:49:05] That was Wanda Bullard. Wanda was a teacher in Brunswick, Georgia. Wanda left this world in 2011, but we do our best to carry The Moth forward in her spirit.
That's it for this special 25th anniversary episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
[overture music]
Jay: [00:49:37] This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison and Catherine Burns, who also hosted. The stories in the hour were directed by Jenifer Hixson, Joey Xanders and Lea Thau, with additional coaching by Sarah Austin Jenness. Coproducer, Viki Merrick. Associate producer, Emily Couch.
The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski, Sarah Jane Johnson and Aldi Kaza. Moth Stories are true is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.
Our show at MoMA was supported in part by the New York Department of Cultural affairs and New York State Council for the Arts. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Amadou Bagayoko, Mark Orton, Spinal Tap, Bill Frisell, and 3 Leg Torso. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Special thanks to the Ford Foundation's Build Women Leaders program for its support of The Moth Global Community program.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.