Host: Dan Kennedy

[crowd murmuring] 

Dan: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Exciting news this week, The Moth's brand-new book will be published this Tuesday, March 19th. It's called Occasional Magic. The book was edited by our artistic director and the rest of The Moth's creative staff as well. There is a story that I told on stage a few years ago in this book actually. It's not the story we're going to hear today, thank God, because the ending to my story is not particularly uplifting. Today, we're listening to Ana Del Castillo, who is also featured in our new book. Ana told this story at a Moth Mainstage in San Antonio, Texas, where we partnered with the San Antonio Book Festival. Here's Ana, live at The Moth.

[cheers and applause] 

Ana: [00:00:54] Twenty years ago, I was living out my dream of being an actress and a singer in New York. And at the time, I was a swing on the national tour of Les Misérables. I've actually performed on this stage [cheers and applause] during that tour. Beautiful theater. And if you don't know what a swing is, a swing is I understudied all the women, which was awesome. So, I was living out my dream when I got a call from my brother, Danny, letting me know that our father and our brother, Alberto, had both been-- they were both dead. They had both been murdered in our hometown of Miami.

My father owned an import and export electronic goods business, and my brother, Alberto, worked with him and for him. And I didn't know this at the time, but business wasn't going well. So not well that one of them made some sort of shady deal. And that deal went really south. So south that one day, some men came into the office and took my father and my brother into the warehouse and then tied my father's hands behind his back and taped his mouth shut. And then, they made him watch as they tortured and murdered his favorite son. Alberto was everybody's favorite. If you had met him too, [sobs] he would have been your favorite. And then, when they were done with that business, they shot and they stabbed my father to death.

So, I was in a fight with my dad when he died. I wasn't speaking to him. And the day that they died, I had this overwhelming sense of-- there was this voice in the back of my head that kept telling me to call him. “Call them both. Call them both. Tell them that you love them. Tell them.” And I was just like, no, I had my reasons, and I thought they were good ones at the time. But when I got that call, what I did first was just fall on my knees and I screamed out loud that I didn't tell my father that I loved him.

So after they died, my life got really small. I had always been the kind of person who was, like, first one on the dance floor, first one to laugh, first one to be out there. Just first, first, first. After they died, I just got off the road, stopped singing, could barely leave my house. I was almost agoraphobic. And I developed, unbeknownst to myself at the time, a panic disorder which, if you've ever-- I hope nobody here has ever had a panic disorder, but if you've ever had a panic disorder, you panic because you think you might panic. That's very odd. [audience chuckle]

So, I'm going to say something that sounds a little crazy given what I just said, but I'm really, really lucky. [sobs] I have amazing friends, and they dealt with me during this time, like, “Okay, this is a rough patch you're going through right now.” But they never lost sight of who I was, and they spoke to me, they got me out of myself. They got me out of the house, and they never lost sight of who I was. And one day, one of these friends, Sandy, she says to me, “Oh, you know what we should do? Whenever one of us hears the other one say, ‘Oh, I've always wanted to do X or I've always wanted to do Y,’ it becomes then the other person's responsibility to make sure that we do that.” And I thought, “Okay, I'm, like, barely leaving the house. That might be a good idea for me to do.” [audience chuckles]

So fast forward, I don't know, maybe a few months later, she says out of the blue, she says, "Oh, I've always wanted to skydive." [audience chuckle] Okay, skydiving. So, I thought that if it was just going to be she and I that we're going to go skydiving, I was not going to skydive. And I wanted to make sure that we do-- like, integrity was a big deal, “Do what I say.” And so, I went around for a while, like, introducing. “Hi, my name's Ana. Would you like to skydive?” “Hi, my name's Ana. Would you like to skydive?” I just figured that if I got as many people to go along, I would finally do it.

So, all right. I ended up getting, like, nine people to come along with us that day. So, the day comes and we pile into two cars. One is, like, a neon green Metro Geo or something like that, and the other one was this, like, boat of a Monte Carlo. [audience chuckle] So we drive, like, two and a half hours in the middle of New Jersey somewhere. And we get there, and the woman who's driving the Monte Carlo, she only has an American Express, and the place doesn't take American Express. So, she's like, "I'll be right back." She never comes back. [audience chuckles] And we're, like, freaking out because this is, like, way before Uber, and we're like, “What are we going to do? Oh, my God, I'm freaking out.” We're all conferring like crazy people.

and all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see this beautiful man come towards us. He looks like he's 8 feet tall and 800 pounds of pure muscle. He's like this Paul Bunyan man. It's like he's just coming over to us, and I think to myself, “You eat because he's Australian and I think you eat Vegemite and vagina for breakfast every day. [audience laughter] Start here.” [audience chuckles] He's [chuckles] our jump master, and he gives us this, like, ridiculous, minute-and-30-second demo of how to jump from a plane, which is just, like, "You put your foot--" I can't do an Aussie accent. Like, “Put your foot here and do this, and then we'll put a shrimp on the barbie, and then I'll see you up there." [audience chuckles] It's that kind of thing.

So, all right, we put on these, like, onesie outfits and goggles, and then we go to what is an outdoor waiting room. And then, we're there. And then we watch people go up and fly up, and then they fly and then they come down to the ground, and it's great. And I start to freak out a little bit. And the thing that has me sort of not run after the woman with the Monte Carlo is two things. First of all, everybody's flying up there and jumping and nobody's dying. And then, the other thing is that everybody-- The people I came with and everybody else, once they land, they have that look on their face. Like, the wattage of their inner light has been turned up to maximum. You know that look. And I wanted that because I knew I didn't have it anymore.

So finally, my name gets called and [chuckles] I walk over, only I can't feel my body. I'm just like a floating head walking over to the plane. And we get into the plane, and the plane is this ridiculously small plane. It's literally small enough where my back is to the pilot's seat and my feet are touching the back of the plane, and we're like-- claustrophobia. So, we start to fly up, and I think it's like, I don't know, two or three miles up. My adrenaline's pumping in my body, and I'm like-- have you ever that adrenaline feeling where you can't hear anything because the blood in your-- it's like bom-bom-bom in your head?

And I have this really weird response to the adrenaline. I start to sing maniacally [audience chuckles] Les Mis songs, [audience chuckles] this one in particular: [singing] “But the tigers come at night [audience chuckles] with their voices soft as thunder, as they tear your hope apart, as they turn your dream to shame [continues to sing in high pitch]” [cheers and applause] Yeah, it's all fun and games for you now, but I sang that over and over again while I was up on the plane, like a crazy person. [audience chuckles]

[chuckles] So, we get finally up to the right altitude which is, like, three miles above the Earth, and we get into jump position, which is, like, doggy style, crouching right before the plane door thing, and he straps himself into me. And that might have been fun at another time, [audience chuckle] but I'm about to jump from a plane. And he opens up the flap, and it's shocking because it's freezing air that rushes in. And it's like August, it's hot down below, but it's cold up there. And I take a peek down at the earth, and I think, “I'm not jumping from this fucking plane. The hell was I thinking jumping? I’m not doing this.” And I start to, like-- at this point, I am saying this so calmly, but at that point, I was just, like, panic. I start to, like, [gasps for air] "I can't. I can't."

And he's in my ear, like, "Ready?" And-- [audience chuckles] "No, I'm not. No, no, [mumbles]” We're doing this kind of thing, right? And he's just wrestling with me a little bit. No. He's got, like, 100 pounds on me. The man is huge. He could have just grabbed me and thrown me out of the plane. But he does this amazing thing. Because I'm like [gasps for air] And he does this amazing thing. He just wraps his arms around me, and he whispers in my ear like a lover. He says, "I promise you I will get you down in one piece, and I swear that you are safe with me." And what he says just opens me up, and I start to cry and I start to cry, and I'm just letting go. [audience chuckle] We're having this beautiful moment together.

And I realized in that moment that the day that my father and my brother both died, I died with them, and that I had a choice in this moment. I had a choice to either continue living the pathetic life that I had lived, started to live since my father and brother both had died, or I could jump from this plane with this beautiful Aussie man strapped to my back, [audience chuckle] and I could live. So, I chose to live. [cheers and applause]

So then, we really get into jump position, which is insane. It's one foot on the wing, a knee inside the plane, straddling the open air. Your earth is just-- “You ready?” “I'm ready. Okay, let's do it.” So, we jump, and as we jump, we start facing the Earth. And then, he turns us around and I see the plane leave-- or we're leaving the plane, actually-- and then we turn back around, and then we're facing the Earth. And I don't know if anybody's ever gone skydiving, but the Earth comes at you pretty quickly. Then we go into full flying position. And it's so loud. Your lips are literally wrapped around your face [audience chuckles] because the air is just like-- And at the time, I'm just like-- and I can't process this at all. I can't process. All I'm feeling is my panic and my despair and my rage and my grief and all the missing of my father and the fact that I didn't say anything. And all that is just, like, going there and [pants]. And then, it was just nothing.

So then, he taps me on the shoulder and tells me to pull the ripcord. And so, I pull the ripcord, and the parachute opens up. And it's so loud before. And then, all of a sudden, the parachute opens and it's just silence. The kind of silence that's thick, does not exist here on Earth. So, we float down to Earth. He tells me to, "Bring it in, baby." And we bring it in. [audience laughter] My friends all come over to me, and they've got their light up to maximum, and I can feel my own light up to maximum and we just pile into that stupid neon green Metro Geo like Keystone Cops, and we don't even drive back to New York. We float back to New York, back to my life, back to figuring out how I could live my life again one day at a time.

I had all this love to give to my father and my brother that I didn't give. And when you don't give love, it rots inside of you. So, my life rotted for a little while. But when I jumped from that plane, it stopped. I started figuring out how to tell people, "I love you," even when I was angry, even when I was really angry. I also told people when I was really angry. [audience chuckles] I stopped letting things rot inside of me. Thank you.

[cheers and applause]

Dan: [00:16:16] That was Ana Del Castillo. Ana is a writer, speaker and life coach who leads courses in personal transformation. As she mentioned in her story, she's performed on Broadway and on tour as an actress and singer. She's currently writing a one-woman show which includes the story you just heard. To see photos of the time the Clintons went to see Ana in Les Mis, just head to our website, themoth.org. And again, you can read Ana's story in our new book, Occasional Magic. Kirkus Reviews refers to Occasional Magic as "captivating, artfully wrought tales. Heartfelt stories that bear eloquent witness to hopes, dreams and triumphs." And Booklist writes, “Each story is as captivating as the one before it. If The Moth's live events are full of people gently holding their beating hearts up to the mic in front of a breathless audience, these written adaptations definitely do such sacrifices justice.” That's Occasional Magic, the new book from us at The Moth. It's available wherever you get your books. That's going to do it for this week. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.

Voiceover: [00:17:26] Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock On, and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with The Moth.

Dan: [00:17:33] Podcast production by Julia Purcell and Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.