Host: Dan Kennedy
Dan: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. And in this episode, we're going to dive right in with just stories from the archives. No themes, no topics this time around. Just two great stories that we love.
The first one is from Brianna Wolfson. She told this at a Moth GrandSLAM in San Francisco. And the theme of the night was Fish Out of Water. Here's Brianna Wolfson, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Brianna: [00:00:27] Hey, guys. So, for my eighth birthday, I received four gifts. From dad, Nike high tops, an erector set, a soccer ball signed by Mia Hamm. And from Mom, a dollhouse. So, the best thing about having divorced parents, is that you get two sets of presents on your birthday. Anyone else? Yeah. And the worst thing about having divorced parents, is that you are torn into two pieces. One piece becomes loyal to mom and the other loyal to dad.
So, this was a particular challenge for me, because dad loved me most when I walked off the soccer field with scraped elbows and dirty knees. He was happiest when he was timing me maneuver through the obstacle course he set up in our backyard. And mom, on the other hand, loved me most when I walked down the stairs in hot pink leggings and glitter Converse. She was happiest when we would wear matching lipstick and puck our lips up and sing Kiss by Prince. [chuckles]
So, my parents were divorced when I was five years old. And even then, I was able to recognize what an impossible task it would have been for one person to satisfy each of their visions for what a good daughter looked like. So, at five years old, I became two people, a sports obsessed backwards hat wearing tomboy for dad and a sparkle loving lip gloss wearing girly girl for mom. Getting into character for each of my parents was pretty easy. The real skill was required in executing my transition when it was time to change houses.
“Oh, just drop me off and I'll walk around the back,” I would super casually suggest. And then, I would slip into the tool shed at dad's house or under the willow tree at mom's and I would swap my denim skirt for a pair of breakaways. I did this Tuesdays, Thursdays and every other weekend for four years. I remember this one time when I was seven years old, I nearly blew my cover. I rang the doorbell at dad's house before changing out of my frilly socks. And just before dad could open the door-- I mean, I could see it now, like a movie, the door creaking. In a moment of sheer panic, I bent down, I ripped the lace from the top seam and I swallowed the decorative foot trim whole. [audience laughter] Yes, I did. It's probably still in there. [chuckles]
This clothes swapping ritual, it always felt really logical, clever even. I could be a tomboy and a girly girl and back again, and I never had to be both at the same time. Mom was happy and dad was happy, so I was happy. But when I was nine years old, things really started to unravel. Mom died in a car accident on our way to visit me at sleepaway camp. As dad delivered the news to me, I just sat there quietly, thinking about my last moments with mom. We were decorating that dollhouse.
I thought about our trips to the toy store, picking out miniature tables and armoires and chairs. I thought about spending long afternoons in my bedroom, swapping around all the furniture in the rooms. I thought about how hard she laughed watching me prance around in her high heels. I thought about my brand-new dress she got me with the flowers on it that I would definitely never get a chance to wear. I thought about what my life would be like not only without mom, but also without half of myself. I couldn't let dad see the other side of me.
When I moved to dad's permanently, I took my dollhouse with me from mom's. I knew it would be out of place in my trophy-lined blue room and that it would probably, well, definitely confuse dad. But I just needed it there. In the months following my mother's death, I would wake up in the middle of the night, missing her so much that my body ached. The only relief I could find was sneaking into the bathroom in the middle of the night when I knew dad was asleep and putting on some red lipstick I had stolen from my stepmother's drawer.
On particularly restless nights, I would sit in front of the dollhouse, pathologically moving around the tiny furniture. On several occasions, I tried building up the courage to ask dad to buy me a dress, but I never could. So, over time, I decided to push the little girl out of me. It was too painful having her around at all. By the time I was 10 years old, I pendulumed so far towards tomboy that I completely stopped brushing my hair. My fourth-grade teacher called my parents after she overheard me telling Tracy Dub that it was okay for girls to pee standing up. [audience laughter]
Oh, yes, we made a very big mess. [audience chuckles] I was sent to the principal's office when I pulled my pants down in the middle of the classroom to prove to Jason Levine that I didn't have a penis. And in the ultimate display of my masculinity, I wore a tuxedo to my aunt's wedding. Bow tie, cummerbund, and all. This one night, I woke up and I couldn't get back to sleep and I just couldn't stand the sight of that stupid dollhouse anymore. So, I grabbed the meanest, rustiest hammer I could find and I destroyed my dollhouse with it. I slammed down on that thing with every ounce of strength in my small body. Whack. Whack. Whack. The splintering wood cut through my fingers until they were bleeding.
When that dollhouse was just pieces of wood at my feet, I walked into the bathroom to wash up and looked in the mirror. My face was streaked red from using my bloody hands to wipe away my tears. My eyes were glistening, and my hair was long and shiny and wavy. I still had that hammer in my hand. I looked like a warrior. A beautiful little warrior, which is exactly what I was. I loved what I saw in the mirror. It was intense, and delicate, and strong, and feminine, and athletic and pretty. And it was in that moment that I realized that I could be all of those things, and still be me and still be one person. Here I am, 15 years later, I am strong, I am whole and I am a woman. I still love what I see in the mirror. The destruction of my dollhouse gave me that gift. Thank you, guys.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:06:03] That's Brianna Wolfson. Brianna is a New York native. She's currently living, working, writing and eating tacos in San Francisco. However, her first novel, Rosie Colored Glasses, was published in February 2018, and it's based loosely on her childhood. You can check out briannawolfson.com for more info on that and themoth.org for pictures from this story.
Next up, we go way back to 2010. And this story is from Richard Garriott. He shared it at a New York City Mainstage we did with the World Science Festival. [audience cheers and applause]
The theme of the night was Gray Matter: Stories from the Left and Right. Here's Richard Garriott, live at The Moth.
[gentle music plays]
Richard: [00:06:49] Well, when I was about 13 years old, I also went to the doctor, and the doctor told me, he said, "Your eyesight's getting bad. I'm afraid you're going to need either glasses or contacts for the rest of your life." That's not terribly unusual. But he went on to say, "I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're no longer eligible to be a NASA astronaut." And that might seem like an unusual thing for your doctor to say, but in my case, it wasn't that unusual, because my doctor was the NASA doctor which is because my father was a NASA astronaut.
And in fact, my neighbors were all astronauts. My right-hand neighbor was again a man named Joe Engle, who was another shuttle astronaut, left hand neighbor, Hoot Gibson, another astronaut. Nearby, people like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lived relatively nearby. All of my neighbors who weren't astronauts were either scientists or engineers, usually for NASA, or a prime contractor involved in putting people into space. And so, when I was told that I was no longer eligible, that was like being told that you are no longer welcome in the club that your father, your neighbors and all your friends are a member of.
While before that moment I probably would have never said, "When I grew up, I want to be an astronaut," because I just assumed everybody went to space, because everybody I knew did go to space. [audience chuckles] But suddenly, I said, "Look, if I can't go--" I was clearly disappointed, I was angry and as depressed as a 13 year old can get. But within a couple of days, I resolved myself to the following thought. I said, "If I'm not welcome in the community of NASA astronauts, who are they to be the gatekeepers to space? If I can't go as a NASA astronaut, I'm just going to have to bring into existence a civilian spaceflight capability."
At the age of 13, that of course doesn't sound nearly as impossible as I'm sure you understand that. It really proved to be. So, even though that became my goal in life, I did more normal things that a teenager would do. But in my neighborhood, normal was still a little different. For example, my father, when he would come home from work at NASA, he would go into his study until late night. And when he did emerge in the evenings, he usually brought out with him into the living room some of the techno toys or experiments he was working on for space flight, which were usually things that, while they seemed normal to me were science or technology that was decades ahead of when other people in other neighborhoods would ever get to see it.
For example, one of the toys he brought home one time was something called a photomultiplier tube, a little cylinder of aluminum that we put a camera lens on one end and a telescope ocular on the other end. You could use it to go out in the middle of the night and hunt the cat in the backyard at midnight. [audience chuckles] And of course, this actually became the basis of what a decade later became night vision scopes. But that word didn't even exist when we were playing with it in the backyard. It was just one of many such experiences.
But when I entered high school, I had another pivotal life moment. My sister-in-law gave me a book, The Lord of the Rings. In that same year, a game called Dungeons & Dragons was published. That's also the first year that personal computers came into existence. I actually fell in love with all three of those. And so, in the early 1970s or mid-1970s, I became one of the very first ever people ever to begin to write computer programs and games on personal computers.
What was funny about the school that I went to is we had one computer terminal back in the 1970s, but there was no class that used it, no teacher knew how to use it, there was no curriculum for it, but I fell in love with it. And since I was an active student of science-- At the time, I competed in science fairs and things throughout my tenure in school. So, the faculty knew that I was a self-starter and could do independent projects. So, they let me have my own classroom. No teacher, no curriculum, nothing to turn in. All I had to do was show them what I did by the end of the semester, which was usually make some games. They gave me a guaranteed premium A credit, which is mighty convenient for me.
But they had to count it as something, how to classify this class. And so, for four years, while I was teaching myself how to program games, they counted it as my foreign language credit. [audience chuckles] So, I actually never took a foreign language in school. Don't forget, up until now, I'd lived within this little NASA enclave. When I went to school or went to college, when I went to college, I met what I used to call the Sesame Street people. The butcher, the baker, the policeman, the fireman, all these things that I thought was a fantasy on television, [audience chuckles] I now learned, was actually real normal life, and that my little sheltered existence was what was abnormal.
And another thing happened at that time too, which was I began to publish my first games. I wrote a series of games called Ultima. It was one of the very first ever and longest running fantasy role playing series that existed. As my first income level began to skyrocket, my grade point average began to crash. I knew that there was a real problem that came up when I flunked my first programming class. [audience chuckles] And programming is what I was doing all night, every night by myself at home, so I clearly knew the material, but I just wasn't interested in the class. And so, I contemplated dropping out of school.
For me, this would be a pretty tough decision, because every other member of my family has advanced degrees and there are things like astronauts. And here I was considering dropping out of school to go play games for a living, which is what I did. But the side effect of that, was that with the income that I was getting out of these games, it allowed me to begin to pursue my passion of exploration. I went down to the sea floor. I've been down to the Titanic, been out of hydrothermal vents. I've been on safaris in Africa, I got canoed down the Amazon, I've been on meteorite hunts down in Antarctica. But of course, space was always the thing that I really had this passion for.
I've made many investments down through my entire gaming career, most of which never went very far towards the privatization of space. But finally, right about the end of the 1990s, right about 2000, started a series of companies that cracked the door open. The first one was called the X Prize, where we paid a $10 million prize for the first private vehicle that flew twice to space. We started a company called Zero-G Corp, that actually has a 727. We fly people on parabolic flights. So, for example, all of you can go do that. It's great fun, by the way. [audience chuckles] But we also started a company called Space Adventures.
And with my money, Space Adventures went over to Russia and negotiated a contract with the Russians to be able to fly civilians on the Russian Soyuz to the International Space Station. I had the money, I arranged the ticket, I was going to become the first private citizen to ever fly into space. Then came the 2001 internet stock market crash. And with it went all of my wealth. And so, not only did I have to stop construction on a home that I've still never finished, I had to sell my seat to space that I spent 25 years in pursuit of. I sold it to a man named Dennis Tito, who became the first private citizen in space. Very sad day for me.
But, then I went back and I said, "Okay, I know what to do. I know how to make games." So, I went back and started another game company, built some more games, sold some more games. As soon as I had enough money to pay for a ticket to space, first thing I did with all the wealth I generated to date, was I plunked down my non-refundable deposit on my trip to space. But just because you want to go, just because you've arranged the business to be able to go, just because you've paid to go, it doesn't mean they will let you go. There's one more major hurdle which is medical exams. And to go in space, which is challenging physiologically, they study your body in great detail. When they did this on me, they found something called a hemangioma on my liver.
And in this case, in the case of rapid depressurization of a spacecraft, it would represent an increased chance of internal bleeding which you could neither diagnose nor cure, and therefore it would be fatal. And so, they said, "Richard, you can't go to space with that. So, you either have to give up your large deposits you've already made now to go to space, or you have to undergo life-threatening surgery." So, what do you think I did? [audience chuckles] I now have a 16-inch scar [audience chuckles] as a memento of my quest to find my way into space. And so, finally, after that hurdle was passed, I finally began my training in Russia, spent about a year in Russia in preparations, then finally, escorted by my father.
I actually went out on October 12th of 2008, put on my own custom-made spacesuit, walked out to a fully fueled rocket. It's covered in frost because of all the cryogenic fuel on board and all the air coming nearby. It is condensing into fog that's streaming down to the fire pit down below it. And then, while everybody else gets as far away as they can, me and my two crewmates crawled up inside, squeezed inside this very claustrophobic little capsule, went through a brief checklist, lit that sucker up and then took the very brief eight and half minute ride from standing still on the ground to traveling around the earth at 17,000 miles an hour.
And at that speed, you orbit the earth once every 90 minutes. You see a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes. You cross the entire United States in only eight minutes. You go around the world 16 times every day. I spent 12 days floating around all day and all night like Superman, performing experiments and looking back on the Earth, till finally the fiery re-entry and the impact back on the surface where my father was again waiting for me in the rescue helicopter. So, it was a very cool father-son moment for us.
My father was actually influential in another way. Since he had experience in flying in space before, he helped me put together my entire science program. He knew that one of the most important things to get the chance to do while you're in space is to be at the window and look back at the Earth. And so, we planned lots of experiments where I'd be at the window and got a chance to look back at the Earth. There's something called the overview effect that most every astronaut describes, which is really this series of epiphanies that you get from this great, wonderful vantage point you have in space looking back at the Earth.
For example, as soon as I saw a place on the Earth that I knew well, in my case, it was Houston, Austin, Dallas and the Gulf Coast and the entire planet, I immediately said, "I now know the true scale of the Earth by direct observation." And that actually means a lot more to you personally when it happens than it even does to hear it be said. But then, as you go around the Earth over and over again, just by looking out the window, your knowledge about what are called the grand scale systems of the Earth goes up very rapidly. Things like weather, the results of tectonic plate movement, erosion by water, erosion by wind, all these things are just pouring into your brain at 17,000 miles an hour.
But the most impactful thing doesn't happen until you've been looking out the window for a few days. Every fertile part of the Earth you can see from space is fully occupied by people. There was no fertile part of the Earth that I saw that wasn't either a city or a farm. Only things like alpine mountains or vast deserts or really swampy parts of the Earth weren't fully occupied by people. It really inspires you to come back to the Earth afterwards and redouble your efforts towards environmentalism, you might say broadly. I would have described myself as an environmentalist before I flew, but my lifestyle has been changed profoundly since I've flown.
But of all the experiments that I did in space, the most ironic is that no NASA astronaut who's flown in space has ever flown who's had laser corrective eye surgery, which in the intervening years I have had. And so, the one thing that NASA would have blocked me from ever flying into space for became the number one thing they were interested in studying about me [audience chuckles] as I prepared for my spaceflight. And so, I submitted to and participated in a very extensive test, a sequence of tests on my eyes. And since my flight, NASA has now approved, for all astronaut candidates, laser corrective eye surgery. [audience cheers and applause]
So, the thing that NASA, of course, banned me for has become my number one contribution back to the fold. So, thank you.
[cheers and applause]
[gentle music plays]
Dan: [00:19:47] That was Richard Garriott. Richard made history in 2008 as the first second-generation astronaut to fly in space. He's now a world-leading expert on commercial space travel.
After his space flight, Richard met his wife. And together, they had two children, Kinga and Ronan. And the four of them have been traveling the world ever since, including a recent trip where Kinga and Ronan became the youngest to ever travel to the North Pole at five and a half years old and three and a half years old. That is quite an adventurous family. For more pictures and fun extras from Richard and his family's travels, just visit our site, themoth.org.
That does it for this week on The Moth Podcast. And we'll be back next week with more stories for you. Until then, from all of us here at The Moth in New York, we hope you have a story-worthy week.
Mooj: [00:20:38] 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: [00:20:46] Podcast production by Timothy Lou Ly. The Moth Podcast is produced by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.