Host: Jay Allison
[overture music]
Jay: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jay Allison. Producer of this radio show. This time, we have a live performance from the Union Chapel in London. The event celebrated the release of our book, How to Tell a Story in the UK. Here's our host of the night, writer and performer, Jon Goode.
[applause]
Jon: [00:00:32] Welcome to The Moth Mainstage here in beautiful London. [audience cheers and applause]
My name is Jon Goode. I will be your host for the evening. We're so excited to be here with you. We have not been here since 2019, and we've all been through a lot. We've been through a president, you've been through a prime minister, we've all been through a global pandemic. Let's get a round of applause just for being here this evening for making it out. [audience cheers and applause]
We're also super excited. We're celebrating our 25th anniversary this year at The Moth. 25 years of one stage, one mic, one storyteller telling stories to let us all know that we have more in common than we have differences. To celebrate our 25th anniversary, we've released a book, How to Tell a Story. It is filled with wonderful tidbits, and guidelines and anecdotes you might even find a quote from someone you recently met. [audience laughter]
So, our theme for tonight is Holding On and Letting Go. I've hung out here in London for a couple of days, and there are definitely some things I'm going to hold on to. One is how delightful, and wonderful and warm the people of London are.
I hang out in New York every so often. It's very different in New York. Like in New York, if you are in the crosswalk, there's a solid chance someone might try to hit you with their car and then they will yell, “Get out of the crosswalk and speed off.” [audience laughter] But in London, if you're in the crosswalk, there's a solid chance that someone will still hit you with their car, but then they'll say, “Sorry,” and then they'll speed off. [audience laughter] I'm going to hold on to that, and that's much more delightful. [audience laughter] I feel warm as I go to the hospital. [audience laughter]
The thing I'm going to let go of is the fake British accent that all Americans get when they've been here for five minutes. I'm going to let that one go. [audience laughter] I'm going to let it go. You know what I mean? Soon as they say, “Is it good?” You'll be like, “Yeah, it is, isn't it?” Soon as you do that, the second you get here. I'm going to let that go. But I'm going to hold on to the warmth of the building and all of your beautiful smiles as we move into this fantastic program. Are you ready to go? [audience cheers and applause]
Fantastic. All of our storytellers, there are fantastic bios in the program which you probably have on hand. So, they will be introduced to the stage by way of a question. Tonight's question is, “What is something you wish you still had?” So, when I asked our first storyteller, he answered, “Air conditioning for his car.”
[00:02:49] Please put your hands together for Kevin McDonnell.
[cheers and applause]
Kevin: [00:03:03] My parents are Irish, but I was born in Bradford in Yorkshire. Where I lived was quite working class, quite poor, but everybody kept the gardens clean and the windows clean. It was also a great place to play. I used to mess around in all these derelict mills, and they had wonderful weird names like Pidgin's Graveyard and the Devil's Spine. I also used to play in World War II air raid shelters and abandoned railway tunnels. And PC Craven, the local police officer, he used to run boxing lessons at the youth club.
My parents split up when I was a child. My mother struggled to bring the four kids up alone. She took cleaning jobs when we were at school. Sometimes in the evenings, one of my big brothers would look after me and my sister. We always used to go to church, Saint Joseph's, every Sunday. It was always the same people sat in the same seats. Mrs. Casey, my teacher. The Brogdon Family.
When I was nine years old, I became an altar boy. It was the first time in my life that I had any responsibility. I took it very seriously. I'd ring the bell, I'd light the candles, I'd pour the altar wine. When I swung the thurible, I'd often see my mother's proud face looking back at me through the incense smoke. It was around this time, I became fascinated by Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man. [audience laughter]
The TV show was all the rage at the time. It was on every Thursday evening at 07:30 PM. Basically, Steve Austin was an astronaut involved in a horrific accident and he was rebuilt using bionic parts. He was my first real hero, and he was who I wanted to be when I grew up. So, it's hard to put into words how happy I felt when I got The Six Million Dollar Man action figure for my birthday. I took him everywhere with me. He had a little hole at the back of his head, and you could look through it and it was his bionic eye. [audience laughter]
I used to throw him over walls, dangle him from trees, send him downstreams, bury him in sand. He never let me down. He was my best friend. But I wanted to give him something that he really deserved, the Holy Grail of The Six Million Dollar Man accessories, the bionic rocket repair station. [audience laughter]
Basically, the bionic rocket repair station was just a rocket, but when you unfolded it, it turned into an operating theater, and you could plug him in and do all sorts of stuff with him. It was in the toy shopping cart, as in the window, and I always used to look at it and my mother would pull me away. She'd buy me it there and then if she could. But the money was just wasn't available. I was too young to get a milk around, too young to get a paper around.
So, one day, I was out playing with my Six Million Dollar Man, and this kid called Billy Crossen came up to me. Now, Billy was five years older than me and had a reputation for stealing bikes and painting them. The Billy Crossen’s family was somebody you didn't want to mess with. But he said to me, “I can get you a rocket repair station tonight if you want. You've just got to help me.” I was all ears.
He told me “He'd heard Gary Bateman's mum talking on the bus. She worked at a local warehouse. And apparently, she said that she'd been packing rocket repair stations to send off to shops throughout the UK.” Billy said that they were doing some work on the roof and they'd covered a hole with a plastic sheet. And if I helped him get into the warehouse, he would get me a rocket repair station. And I thought, as long as I'm home at 06:30 for my bath, I'm going to do it.
So, we walked towards this toy warehouse. It was in the middle of these Victoria mills and it was very satanic. It had a big gate with a long chain and big padlock. We got there. Billy said to me, “Right, your role is to stand here. If you see anybody, walk away. And if I don't see you at the gate, I know there's something wrong.” I said, “Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.” So, Billy got over the gate and disappeared. And now, all I could think of was, “Well, what am I going to do tonight? Am I going to send Six Million Dollar Man to space or am I going to operate on him?” [audience laughter]
I looked round, and I saw Billy get to the top of the scaffolding. He run across the roof like a cat, pulled this plastic sheet in and disappeared inside. And now, I was very worried. Every footstep, every car engine filled me with terror. I was stood alone at the gate, and how I wished I had a bionic eye at that moment. But then I thought, “Hang on a minute, Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man, he won't be doing this. In fact, if Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man was here now, he'd jump over the gate, find Billy and bring him to justice.”
I realized I was on the wrong side at law. [audience laughter] I wanted to go home to my bedroom, but I couldn't leave now, because if I left, Billy would be out to get me. I had no choice. I had to stay. Seconds seemed like days, minutes like weeks. And then, I heard, “Is it clear?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Right. Get over the gates and catch these.” So, I got over the gate as fast as I could, and suddenly the courtyard was bouncing with Frisbees. Billy shouted, “Grab the Frisbees and pile them up by the gate.”
So, I was running around like a ball in a pinball machine trying to catch all these Frisbees. And a 9-year-old can only carry so many at a time. But then I thought, “Hang on a minute, where's my rocket repair station?” Billy never mentioned all about Frisbees. But before I got the chance to ask him about it, a car screeched to a halt and a blue light was flashing. I looked round, and PC Craven got out. I couldn't believe it. I've never been scared of PC Craven before, but he was wearing a black glove and he beckoned me towards him. I thought he was going to send me to jail, or even worse, send me to hell.
He put me and Billy in the police car. And for Billy, it was just another day at the office. [audience laughter] For me, I always wanted to ride in a police car, but not like this. My world had come to an end, and I thought, “What's Father Barron going to think of me? What will my brothers and sister think of me? What will my mother think of me?”
So, when we pulled up outside my house, I could see the curtains twitching. Somebody came out pretending to empty the bin. PC Craven took me to the door, and my mother let me in. He explained what had happened, somebody from a tower block had seen us acting suspiciously around the place. He said I would only get a warning. Billy Crossen would be taken to the police station as he was a repeat offender. The tears flowed. The public shame of being brought home by the police devastated my mother.
The following day, I had to be that altar boy again. I was not old enough to go to confession, but to be honest with you, I didn't want to tell Father Barron what I had done. But maybe he already knew. When I was up on the altar, I looked down at the congregation. Mrs. Casey, my teacher, seemed to have a frown on her face. The Brogdon kids were sniggering. I couldn't even look at my mother. I was too ashamed.
I never did get my hands on that rocket repair station. I'm not even sure if they had one in the warehouse or Billy was just playing me a fool all along. But I lost something very precious that day. I lost the innocence of that little boy playing with his toys. I never got Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar man out much after that. I put him in his box, and he lay under an avalanche of toys and football annuals.
I couldn't be trusted anymore. I was a criminal. No bionic parts could fix that. Not even Steve Austin, The Six million Dollar Man can go back in time. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Jon: [00:12:24] Give it up for Kevin McDonnell. Kevin McDonnell.
Jay: [00:12:30] Kevin McDonnell hails from England's largest county, Yorkshire, and is the son of Irish immigrant parents. He's an author with a background in journalism, has had a short film script produced and is now having a crack at standup comedy.
Kevin came to us through our pitch line, by the way. And you can too. Just check at themoth.org on how to record a pitch for us. It's easy. We find a lot of storytellers that way. Or, 877-799 Moth. In a moment, our host, Jon Goode, takes a military swim test, and a woman pays a visit to her outcast uncle when The Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. We're bringing you stories from our Mainstage show in London with theme, Holding On and Letting Go. The host for the evening was Jon Goode. And here, he is telling a story of his own.
So, in my senior year of high school, I applied to and I was accepted to the university of my choice. I was very excited about this. So excited I told my father. My father said, “Congratulations. That's amazing. All you got to do now is pay for it.”
In high school, I had a fairly decent grade point average, GPA. Mine was 3.4, but they don't really give scholarships for 3.4s. By example, our valedictorian, she had a 4.9, a 4.9 on a scale I was told only went to 4. [audience laughter] So, I was like, “What are you taking classes in the future? How is this even possible?” So, I was feeling somewhat anxious about my chances of going to college.
I don't know if you watch nature shows at all, where they talk about how sharks can smell blood in the water, well, military recruiters can smell anxiousness in high school hallways much the same way. So, before I knew it, there was a Marine Corps recruiter parade resting by my locker, and he said, “Hello, Jonathan.” And I was like, “How do you even know my name? What kind of Marine Corps psychic madness is this?” He informed me that he knew my name, because he'd seen my ASVAB scores. The ASVAB is an aptitude test that lets recruiters know your aptitude for military service. He said my scores were fairly high, an 85 out of 99. It's no 4.9, but I'll take it. I'll take it.
As he was talking, I began to think about the fact that my father-- I had a brother and a sister, they'd all been in the military. And here I was being asked to join the Marines, the toughest of the tough. As I'm having that thought, he says, “You know, the GI Bill can pay your way through college.” That's how I found myself on Parris Island in South Carolina, training to become a United States Marine.
Now, there are four hurdles you have to jump to become a Marine. The first is the physical fitness test. I was young. I was in great shape. Passed the physical fitness test. The next is the rifle range. No one has ever confused me with Annie Oakley, but I could hit the target enough times. I passed the rifle range. The next is a thing called basic warrior training. I was 18, so I was basic. I wanted to be a warrior. I was trainable. I passed basic warrior training. The last hurdle you have to jump is the swim qualification.
Now, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. In the city, and we had a public pool about two or three blocks from my house. Every couple of days, me and all of my friends, we would walk those two or three blocks, go to the pool and we would stand in the water, [audience laughter] because there were actually too many kids in the pool to actually swim in the pool. It was like a black kid soup. [audience laughter] It was like a ghetto gazpacho. You know what I mean? [audience laughter] It was refreshing, but not very informative. [audience laughter] So, none of us really learned to swim.
So, here I am at this swim qual. The Marine Corps swim qual, you get three chances to pass. You have to jump off a 20-foot tower and swim halfway across an Olympic-sized pool. On the first day, everyone is there. It's like a sea of faces. The Marine Corps was 85% white at the time, sea of white faces. The second day is for everyone who failed, and it was nothing but Inner-City black kids that I'm sure went to the pool every day and never learned to swim. So, there we are.
And so, on the second day, when you fail, they teach you how to do the backstroke and they teach you a version that makes it look like you're having an actual stroke. But that's what they teach you. So, I failed the first day, I failed the second day and here I am, my last chance to pass the swim qual. I'm feeling somewhat nervous and somewhat anxious because I know, “This is it.”
I don't want to go home and have to face my dad and my siblings having failed, and I also don't want to miss out on the opportunity to go to college. So, I'm up on a 20-foot tower and I got my toes over the edge. I'm feeling nervous. I take my pants pockets, I pull them inside out, hoping that as I jump off, the air will go up my legs and fill the pockets [audience laughter] and they will serve as a flotation device, just so, you know, that doesn't work. [audience laughter]
So, I jump off. I go down into the water, I surface and then I immediately start to drown. Immediately. [audience laughter] The drill instructor, he jumps in, he grabs me, he pulls me to the side, he jumps out and pulls me out and he says, “Get in line.” Then he jumps back in the pool, because everyone is drowning. Everyone is drowning. [audience laughter]
So, I'm on the side of the pool. I'm taking some breaths. I'm happy to be alive. I stand up, and I look and I notice that there are two lines. There's a line for people who failed, and then there's a line for people who passed. His instruction was to get in line. So, I got into the line for people who passed, [audience laughter] because one thing they teach you in the Marine Corps is to follow directions. And that was his direction, “Get in line.” That is how I passed the swim qual, I became a Marine. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
I've learned a few things since. Number one, since then, I have learned how to swim. It still looks like I'm having a medical event, but I can do it. [audience laughter] I can do it. And number two, I learned that sometimes getting what you want out of life is just about standing in the right line. Thank you for listening to that story. [audience cheers and applause]
So, when I asked our next storyteller, “What is something you wish you still had?” She said, “My own room.” Give it up for Runa.
[cheers and applause]
Runa: [00:20:13] I was in America. I'd gone there for a girl, a girl probably being the only reason one would spend three months of their world traveling sabbatical adventure in Baltimore. [audience laughter]
I was in Baltimore, and my mother called me. In her usual desperately attempting to be light and cheerful way, she asked me how I was doing and she said, “Oh, Baltimore? Yes, I have an uncle there.”
Now, for context, my mother was being light and friendly, but was whispering, because she was either at the very end of her garden or some far corner of her bathroom talking to me as quietly as possible, so that her husband, my father, wouldn't overhear her talking to their gay, ostracized waste of a child, direct quote, “me.” And so, again, trying to be light and pretending everything's fine, she says, “Oh, yes. Uncle Rafi. Yes, he's my father's brother. He lives very near Baltimore. You should go see him. His wife has just died.”
Now, Asian family isn't really something I identify as having what with the ostracized black sheep deleted off the family tree thing. So, when my mother says this, my immediate response is a very quick, “No thanks.” Now, things were going quite badly with Baltimore girl at this point. And eventually, it got to the stage where hanging out with an 88-year-old Asian man grieving the loss of his wife of 66 years [audience laughter] was definitely better than another afternoon of lesbian drama. [audience laughter] So, off I went.
Now, I was expecting your standard Muslim Pakistani uncle. For those of you who aren't familiar, this is the sort of man who has a beer belly from the other golden liquid, ghee, [audience laughter] who would sport simultaneously furrowed brows of concern and wide eyes of horror that I was still unmarried, someone who would offer holier than thou proclamations about white people, and their alcohol, and their miniskirts, and their divorce and their care homes for the elderly.
The sort of man who would hold court in his house while a wife scurried backwards and forwards laying out a spread of every dish, every snack, every drink imaginable. Basically, I was expecting the entrenching of childhood trauma, judgment, cruelty, but off I went.
The first clue that he might not be quite what I thought was his address, a care home, a fancy one at that. I remember walking into these wide carpeted hallways with big oak paneled walls behind which white face after white face after further old white face passed until I came to the one brown face in the building.
Some dusty sentimentality sprung up in me. I scoured his face for resemblance, for connection. He looked absolutely nothing like me, but he took me to lunch and he ordered a ghee-free meal and a glass of wine. He spent the entire lunch entirely uninterested in my marital status, because he was so devastated that his own had just changed. He told me about Ellen, a white, German woman who had found herself in 1940s Lahore, Pakistan, surrounded by mosques and minarets, visiting her brother-in-law, my Uncle Rafi's neighbor. He told me about falling in love with her.
He used that word, love, a word that had been a dirty word in my house growing up. Definitely not the proper basis for a marriage. He told me how falling in love with her, he wanted to marry her. But he was an army doctor in post-independence Pakistan and absolutely forbidden from marrying a foreign national. The family was outraged, hot with anger that he was seeking to break with tradition.
So, he went to America for a girl. As he told me about Ellen, perhaps, some dusty sentimentality rose up in him. Maybe he sensed I needed to hear it, or maybe he had noticed who dropped me off. But he told me that whatever body Ellen had been born in, male or female, he would have loved her just the same. And then, me being the only relative he'd seen for decades, he started telling me about our family.
Now, things were continuing to go terribly with Baltimore girl, but I had promised I would stick with her through the summer. But instead of actually working on the relationship, I just went and saw Uncle Rafi a lot. [audience laughter] We got this huge blue sketchbook from one of his classes at this care home, and we started sketching out a family tree. Huge thing.
He transported me into India of the 1700s, and 1800s and 1900s, and he told me about a great, great, great uncle whose job was to be the lion protector of the village. He'd have to climb up into this tree, and look out for lions and presumably do something about them if he saw them. [audience laughter]
He told me about another great, great, great uncle who was responsible for the first Persian to Urdu dictionary, which he wrote by candlelight. He told me about another great, great uncle who'd had four big strapping sons, all of whom had died in cricket accidents. [audience laughter]
I got completely lost in all these magical stories, these connections to family that I'd never known about before. Somewhere towards the end of the summer, I sat back and I looked at this big family tree, and I remembered that every time Uncle Rafi had not quite remembered a name or not quite remembered a person, we just left a blank. I'd said, “Oh, that's fine. We'll leave a blank. Maybe you'll remember later.”
When looking at this family tree, I suddenly realized something. All of the blanks were women. All of them reduced to a line connecting them to a man, someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's sister. I guess 1700s, and 1800s and the 1900s weren't a time where women had the adventures that people recalled, and celebrated, and told stories about and passed down through the generations. I guess the stories and adventures they could have had were limited. The breadth of the life they could have lived was limited.
Uncle Rafi remembered two women, in particular. Not their names, but their stories. His mother's sisters. He remembered them, because they were quite unusual. Neither one of them had gotten married, at the time a completely scandalous thing to do. Now, the first one, the older one, he said, “Well, she'd had polio, and that had left her quite disfigured and not very attractive.” So, that explained that. [audience laughter]
The second one, and he remembered this very clearly, “She had chosen not to marry, despite how awful that would have made her life, how difficult that would have been.” Something about that made me suddenly realize something that I'd never thought about before. It can't be in this huge family tree, this huge list of faces and people, that I'm the only woman that didn't want to marry a man, and I can't be the only one who didn't want to marry a man, because she wanted to marry a woman, but I must be the first one who's been able to do it.
Thinking about these rainbow ancestors of mine with their untold stories, their faces lost, their struggles, their wishes, reckoning with themselves brought this deep, deep grief into me. I suddenly felt connected to a heritage that I had lost. I thought of them incessantly.
Though I'm agnostic, some part of me hopes that they know I'm here, that they can see me, or feel me or know somehow that I am living, that I exist with my wife, with my children, that I'm free, that I'm safe, that my friends and my loved ones will remember us and celebrate us, and that I stand here a little bit prouder, because thanks to my fellow black sheep Uncle Rafi, I discovered them one summer.
[cheers and applause]
Jon: [00:31:31] Give it up for Runa.
[upbeat music]
Jay: [00:31:37] Runa is a writer, a desi LGBTQ activist, a yogi and a mom. Runa's wife and their son were in the audience as she told her story. Her son was named in part after Uncle Rafi and also, in case you were wondering, Runa's wife is not Baltimore girl.
To see a photo of Uncle Ruffy and Aunt Ellen, and a photo of Ellen as the young German lady he fell in love with, visit our website, themoth.org.
[upbeat music]
When we return, a newly married man considers adoption in our final story from this London Show.
[upbeat music]
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.
You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. We've reached the final story in this live episode from London. Here's your host, Jon Goode.
When I asked our next storyteller, “What is something you wish you still had?” Our next storyteller answered, “His virginity.” [audience laughter] Please give it up for Nick Ullett.
[cheers and applause]
Nick: [00:33:33] All right. I am a great believer in marriage. I, myself, have been married for 56 years- [audience cheers and applause] -unfortunately to four different women. [audience laughter] My present wife, Jenny, was also married previously. When we got together some 36 years ago, we did not want to make the same mistakes that had ruined our lives before. So, we sat down and we asked each other what it was that we wanted. The only thing that Jenny desired that caused me any apprehension was that she wanted to have children.
I already had a son from a previous marriage and I knew what a child could do to a relationship. But I really wanted to make a life with this woman, so I wholeheartedly agreed. We leapt into the business of creating a family, which obviously involves lots and lots of sex [audience laughter] and endlessly everywhere. [audience laughter]
But after a year and a half, nothing happened, which is not only dispiriting, it also engenders a sense of inadequacy. But we forged on into the world of fertility experts. The first thing they want from the guy is a sperm test, which, actually, that phrase alone almost defines the word, inadequacy. This is back in the mid-1980s, and these tests were do-it-yourself affairs. You found a container, you put your specimen inside, you took it to a fertility clinic, they told you what was going on.
At the time, I was working in New York. I was doing a play. One freezing February morning, I had made an appointment at noon with a fertility clinic on the east side of New York. The same day, it turned out I had a voiceover audition on the west side of New York at 10 o’clock. The problem was I couldn't carry this specimen around all morning, [audience laughter] because it has to be freshly delivered. If it's cold, it will die. [audience laughter]
So, I had to get this deed done between being in the [audience laughter] voiceover audition and the fertility clinic, which is how I ended up masturbating in the gents in the Grand Central Station [audience laughter] for a truly humiliating experience. [audience laughter] And it was made no better by the fact that the only container that Jenny had come up with that morning was a Hellmann's mayonnaise jar. [audience laughter] It's a big jar. [audience laughter]
Anyhow, I did my duty. I thrust the jar deep into my pocket and I keep it warm and I hightailed off to the first fertility clinic where I filled out the forms, and then handed them in to the woman behind the desk along with my specimen. She took one look at it and she said, quite audibly, “That's it?” [audience laughter] I hastened to explain. “It's a big job.” [audience laughter] She said, “What was the method of delivery?” “I'm sorry. What?” “The method?” Oh, God. I mutter masturbation under my breath.
She takes out a magic marker, and she writes this huge M [audience laughter] right over the front of the form. I see that M following me for the rest of my existence, [audience laughter] a shadow over my entire life. “Oh, Mr. Ullett, you're perfect for this job. Unfortunately, there's the matter of this M.” [audience laughter] Oh, God. And then, two days later, the doctors tell us that my sperm has low motility, does not swim well with others.
Now, my self-esteem, which had not been doing well since the test took another nosedive. I found myself feeling useless, emasculated, really truthfully worrying about really, is it all worth this bother? Do I want more kids? But Jenny was insistent and on we went. But nothing worked with the fertility doctors. So, we ended up with adoption.
This was where my real fears began, because I already had a child. I understood how I loved that child, how instinctive that was, how would I feel about one that was not biologically mine? That really worried me. But by that time we'd already engaged an adoption lawyer in California who had in his practice a pregnant 16-year-old.
Now, California is an open adoption state, which means that the birth mother gets to choose to whom she gives her baby. Our job was to write a letter enclosing photographs of ourselves, explaining who we were, what we did and why we would make wonderful parents to this as yet unborn child. This letter was then sent to the young woman along with other letters from prospective parents. The young woman reads all the letters, and then she makes her choice.
It started to feel to me, in my worried state, rather like a rather weird reality show, somehow this choice business. I got very worried, and I was going, “We're both actors. Is that good or is it bad?” Jenny, at the time, actually was on a weekly television show and had a minor celebrity. Therefore, easily trackable. “Would the young woman turn into a stalker? Would she blackmail us?” While these paranoid fantasies kept building, she chose us. All those fears went away. We were absolutely thrilled.
But then, the real business of adoption began. You have to register with child services. They send people to your houses. Two people show up. Go through your entire house, every room, your wardrobes, your closets. It's very intrusive. They took our fingerprints. They investigated our backgrounds for criminal activity. And through all this, this nagging doubt kept bedeviling me, “What the hell? How am I going to feel about another kid that isn't mine?”
I started really, truthfully freaking out, and also doubting whether do I really want more children and things. This was not a fear that I could share with Jenny. I had, after all, committed to this. I couldn't back out of it.
At the time, I was on tour in a national tour of a musical, me and my girl. We were playing the Pantages theater in Los Angeles, which is where I live. It's a big old theater. On one night, during the intermission, a friend of mine came to the stage door and told me that the young woman in question had gone into labor. By the time I got home, Jenny would be on a plane flying to Charleston, North Carolina. These were the days before mobiles. You actually had to talk to people to explain things to them.
The next day, a baby girl was born into Jenny's hands, basically. And the next morning, she spent with the child, and with the young woman, and then clearing up the legalities that allowed her to take a baby out of a hospital, and put her on a plane and fly back to Los Angeles. That plane would get in at 11:15 that night.
So, I go to theater, and I explain to my fellow performers what's going on and I say, “Listen, I have to meet that plane. This is a watershed moment in my life. I cannot not be there. I must.” And they go, “Okay. Fine. Yeah, you can leave.” I go, “Yeah, but to get there, we got to knock 10 minutes off the show.” [audience laughter] So, they go-- They're [unintelligible 00:42:34] “Yes, come on, piece of cake.”
So, the show starts exactly at 8 o’clock. We talk fast, we sing fast, we dance fast, [audience laughter] We don't stop for any laughs. Me and my girl whizzes by this bemused audience. [audience laughter] And then, the stage door guy has got my car outside and it's running. I leap out, and I jump in car and I roar off to the Los Angeles airport. I get there, and/because these are the days before security, I run to the gate, and I get there and there's nobody there at all.
I sit down. In that moment as I sit down, every fear, every doubt, every apprehension, every worry that I had about other children and dealing with a child that wasn't biologically, everything formed itself up into a cannonball and smashed into me. I was completely panicked, stricken. I can't explain it. It was like being hit with a two-by-four. I'm terrified and I can't move.
And then, the plane rolls by the window. And I'm thinking, “God, what if I don't have any feelings for this child? What am I going to do? Can I fake it? And if I fake it, can I live with that lie for the rest of my life? And if I lived with that lie, what would that lie do to this child? I'm going to destroy a human being's life.”
And then, the doors to the gate open. Instead of passengers coming out, flight attendants started coming out. First one, then another, then another. They're coming out in this V-shape. What has happened, is that on board, they made announcement that they have this tiny baby, literally less than 24 hours old on board the plane, whose father has never seen her. If everybody wouldn't mind waiting for a couple of minutes before they get off the plane, they would like to make this into a special presentation. [audience laughter]
I don't know this, this phalanx of these [audience laughter] flight attendants keeps coming towards me and-- They're Americans. They've got 48,000 gleaming teeth [audience laughter] And they're all smiling. “I can't move and I don't know what to do.” And in the middle is Jenny with this tiny baby. She walks right up to me, and she places this child into my shaking hands and she says, “Say hello to your daughter.”
In terror, I look down and in that one moment, love literally suffused my entire body. I started getting warm and felt wonderful. I could feel this sense of this endless love running over me. I'm looking down and I am completely besotted by this beautiful tiny child in my arms. And then, I'm surrounded by passengers. [audience laughter] They're all wishing us well and they're patting me on the head. [audience laughter] Some of them are bestowing blessings on us. And I go, “Wow, what a fabulous way to come into the world to have your birth recognized in this public fashion.”
My daughter is 34 years old now. Jenny and I went on to adopt another girl. Jenny and I are still together. I love my daughter. She's terrific. She's a wonderful young woman. We've had our ups and downs, but there's one thing about her that has never changed, which is there's a part of her that is always that tiny child in my hands in the LA airport. Because from that moment onwards, there was one thing that was absolutely crystal clear to me, “That's my kid.” Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Jon: [00:47:04] Give it up for Nick Ullett.
[cheers and applause]
Oh, that's what I love about these nights. You will hear stories that will make you laugh, make you cry, some will make you do both at the same time. It's amazing, man. But as I said earlier, the stories always show that we have more in common than we have differences.
What a talented storyteller will do is they will weave the narrative thread that pulls us all these disparate swatches, pulls us all together and makes us one thing, this one thing that can keep us all warm, this quilt to cover us all. One more time for Nick Ullett and that wonderful story.
[cheers and applause]
[upbeat music]
Jay: [00:47:49] Nick Ullett came to America on a boat. He was half of a British comedy team. He wandered the country with his partner trying to make Americans laugh and appeared on The Ed Sullivan show among others. He's worked in advertising and tap danced on Broadway. And he's still an actor.
If you have a story to tell us, you can pitch it right on our website, themoth.org, or call us at 877-799-Moth. That's 877-799-6684. Leave a two-minute pitch. We listen to all of them, and a lot of the stories end up here on The Moth Radio Hour.
Remember, you can share these stories or others from The Moth archive and buy tickets to Moth storytelling events in your area all through our website, themoth.org. There are Moth events year round. You can find a show near you. Come out, tell a story. You can find us on social media too. We're on Facebook and Twitter, @themoth.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth.
[overture music]
This live London show was hosted by Jon Goode. Jon is an Emmy nominee, the host of The Moth Atlanta and the author of the novel, Mydas, and the poetry and short story collection Conduit.
This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, Catherine Burns and Meg Bowles. Co-producer is Viki Merrick. Associate producer, Emily Couch. The stories were directed by Meg Bowles and Michelle Jalowski.
The rest of The Moth leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Lee Ann Gullie, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski, Sarah Jane Johnson and Aldi Kaza.
Special thanks to everyone at our British publisher, Short Books. Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Marisa Anderson, D.D. Horns and Hubert Laws. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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.