Host: Catherine Burns
Catherine: [00:01:07] Tickets are on sale now for our GrandSLAM in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Later this week on Friday, January 22nd, featuring 10 of the best storytellers in the Twin Cities. Tell your friends in Minnesota and visit themoth.org for details.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Catherine: [00.01:36] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Catherine Burns, The Moth's artistic director. In this hour, we'll hear stories about running away from home, ridiculously overpacked suitcases, the power of a hymn sung in an unlikely place.
[cheers and applauses]
And this first story about setting up house in a place that most people would find downright creepy. It was told by The Moth's founder, George Dawes Green, at Union Chapel in London. Here's George, live at The Moth.
George: [00.02:06] When I was 15 years old, I lived for a while in a mausoleum. Actually, a very short while, less than a week. But it was actually a wonderful time. It was summer, and there was honeysuckle and fireflies. I was desperately in love with a girl who was dead, and with a man who was living but psychotic. It was the happiest time of my life. And this is how I came to be there.
When I was twelve years old, my parents took me down to Glynn County, Georgia. And that was, to me, like being buried alive. Everything was gray. The skies were gray, the Spanish moss was gray, the cicadas were singing that song all the time. I was lonely, and my parents were drunks, and I'd just wait for them to go to sleep, and then I'd turn on the light and stay up the whole night reading about exploration, mostly arctic exploration, or searching for the source of the Nile, or really anything that was about getting as far away from Glynn County, Georgia, as one could get.
Of course, because I stayed up all night, mornings were torture to me. Glynn Academy was torture to me. My grades went into a death spiral through the 30s to the 20s to the teens. I actually longed for the perfection of absolute zero, but I didn't have the stick-to-itiveness. So, I dropped out of high school when I was 15 and I hitchhiked north. I got a job in New York City as a messenger. I got to wear this really sharp tie and jacket. I loved not being a civilian. I sneered at all yellow school buses. And for a while, I lived in some flops around Manhattan.
And then, one Saturday, I went with a friend of mine on a road trip up to New Rochelle, New York, which is a little suburb. I don't actually remember why I did it. I guess we were on a drug run. [audience chuckles] But anyway, we wound up hanging out at this sort of divey apartment full of drug dealers and derelicts. At one point, I went back to the bathroom, and I saw in a back room a man sitting at an upright piano and singing an operatic aria about an orangutan. I was mesmerized. He turned around after the song, and he looked at me and said, "Do you play chess?"
His name was John Orlando. He was about 30. He was kind of a slender-- If you can imagine, he was kind of a slender Alfred Hitchcock. We wound up playing chess for a week. John's strategy for chess was to gather all of his pieces into a fortress in the rear of the board on the left side, which he called the West. And from there, he would send his knights out on these long, gallant expeditions from which they'd never return. It would take me hours to pick my way in there and find his king and kill it. And during the whole time, John would be laughing hysterically.
Afterwards, I never really could see the point of competitive chess. I just wanted to play what John called chivalric chess. [audience chuckles] But why was this original man living in this flophouse with drug dealers? The rent was very cheap, and it was split eight ways. When I moved in, it was split nine ways. I used to then commute to my job down in New York City, and then come back on the train, back to this drug den every night. I didn't do all that many drugs, but I did happily help to sort and clean. It was an utterly depraved life for a 15-year-old.
There was a 15-year-old girl who used to come by. She was this beautiful redhead, and just exploding into her sexuality. And of course, she came by for the older guys. She didn't even notice me. But I was just painfully in love with her. When I would just smell her, it would cripple me. Downstairs was this little old lady, Irene, who used to worry about me and tell me that I had to go home. She would bake me lasagna. I would tell her, "I really have no home, because my parents are drunks." I loved her. I loved talking to her.
I loved John Orlando, who was unbalanced and who would sit up there at that piano all day long working on that opera about the Bronx Zoo, where he had once worked. He was making all of the keepers and all of the animals sing these arias. I think that this opera was driving him insane, because one day I remember walking up from the train station and John was coming toward me and he had this fedora. He didn't really see me. He just walked almost past me, and then he stopped and said, "Mr. Glo, there's a four-ply Fozzie flying out of here at 5 o'clock. Get a line on it." And then, he just walked away.
I was in love with him. I'm not gay, but this was a physical love. When I was around him, I couldn't breathe. I felt like he was the world. I felt like I loved him the way that a worm loves its apple. I think he loved me, too, because the drug dealers were always trying to throw me out. They were always saying, "John, this punk kid, he's 15 years old, he's going to draw some unwanted attention." And John would say to them, "No, George stays. I don't know if you've noticed about George, but he has one amazing thing about him, is that he doesn't buy into anything. He just floats through life. I want to see what he's going to buy into. So, he stays."
So, they threw us both out. [audience laughter] And then, we had nowhere to go. We were homeless. I wasn't going to get paid for a week, and John never had any money. But he said that he knew that there were these mausoleums in the back of the local graveyard that were in disrepair. And so, we packed up some blankets and some pillows and some wine, and we went and broke into one of these mausoleums. It had two marble shelves on either side. And under one was the mortal remains of some man, and then under the other was his wife. John and I made our beds on these marble shelves and we felt so safe there.
The caretaker was old and never came around at night. And the police never would go into that graveyard at all. We just wandered around and got to know our neighbors. There was a dead 19-year-old girl buried there. She had died in 1928. And her name was Hazel Ash. Her inscription read, "She lived for poetry." And I immediately forgot the sexy redheaded girl. When we went back to the mausoleum, I said to John, "We have to write poems for Hazel Ash tonight." He just wrote these horrible, disgusting, obscene verses. I had to tell him to shut up. He just laughed at me and his laugh echoed in that mausoleum.
People ask me if it was spooky in there. I'll say, “You know, it really wasn't spooky to me. I will say that if you don't like spiders, you would not have liked living there. And I will say it was clammy and gray and lifeless.” I probably would have been scared out of my wits if John Orlando hadn't been with me. But he was with me every second because he wouldn't spend a moment in that graveyard alone. So, if I went out at night to take a leak, he would come shuffling out after me and stand behind me. And in the morning, when I got up bright and early and put on my jacket and tie and went to my job, he went out of the graveyard with me. And then, when I came back on the train that night and walked up to the graveyard, he was waiting there by the fence.
We were both so hungry. So, we were hungry to the point we had to do something. John had a friend of his, and we walked to the friend's house. As we walked, we made up a poem about John's friend. When we got to his house, we recited the poem to the man who in exchange gave us supper and a few dollars. And then later, when John and I were walking home to the graveyard, John said to me, "Now, you're a professional writer." And I said, "Oh, come on, John. He just gave us dinner and five bucks." And John said, "That's what the hooker said. You're a pro." [audience laughter]
I was so proud. I had a little piece of pie that I saved for Hazel Ash, and I put it on her gravestone. And then, John and I went into the mausoleum, and he sang his songs of the elephants all night. Every now and then, he would let out these amazing farts that he called El Destructos, and we would have to evacuate the mausoleum. [audience chuckles]. And then, the sprinklers came on in the middle of the night, and we just ran around buck naked under the sprinklers. I was so happy that my scalp ached. John saw this, and he said, "You know, you're buying into this, aren't you?" And I said, "Into what?" He said, "Living in a graveyard." [audience chuckles] I laughed. But I wasn't buying into that. I was buying into being with somebody who turned every moment of his life into art.
Then a few days later, I was on my way home from work, coming up the graveyard lawn, and I saw that our mausoleum's door had a brand new lock. I just immediately turned and ran. I went to Irene's house, and she said to me, "So, now, you have to go home." And I said, "I can't go home until we find John." So, I went looking for John every day.
About two weeks went by and then one Sunday morning, someone came to get us and said that John was at the chapel on Mayflower Avenue, and was singing songs about zoo life in the middle of the Mass. I ran as fast as I could. When I got there, they were putting John into a police car and taking him to the mental hospital from where I don't think he ever came out, as far as I know. But as he got into the car, he saw me and he tipped his fedora and said, "Mr. Glo, I got to go." And then, so did I. I had to go home.
[applause]
Catherine: [00.15:03] That was George Dawes Green. George is the founder of The Moth, and the author of the critically acclaimed novels, Ravens, The Juror, and The Caveman's Valentine. He says he still likes cemeteries and plans to spend a lot of time in them in the coming centuries.
Coming up, we all suffer from a wardrobe malfunction every now and then, but it sucks even more if you happen to be Project Runway star Tim Gunn, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
[N'Teri by Regina Carter]
Jay: [00.15:52] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Catherine: [00.16:28] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns from The Moth.
Now, we're going to hear from fashion icon Tim Gunn, star of the reality show Project Runway. He told this at a night of fashion world stories. Storytellers often ask us, "What should I wear on stage?” They fret about it. But we always tell them the same thing, “Wear something that makes you feel like yourself, something that makes you feel fabulous. For some of them it's jeans and a T-shirt. For others, it's a sparkly red beaded gown.”
I'm happy to report that Tim Gunn was one of the most impeccably dressed storytellers to ever grace The Moth stage. Wouldn't you be crushed to hear otherwise? Here's Tim, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Tim: [00.17:12] Thank you. Thank you so much. About myself, I will say that I care about how I look, I care about the clothes that I wear, I care about the message that they send. I try to anticipate situations and be prepared for them as well as I can be. So, that's the little bit about me.
My family figures in this story, because it is a family story. Let's go back 12 years, because that was when this happened. My mother at that time was in her late 60s, and living in a house that she built to retire in Bethany Beach, Delaware. I won't say that she cares as much about-- well, I should say. She cares about her appearance, but she's always making excuses for it, that there's not so much she can do until she loses some weight and gets a new wardrobe, and it's that old story. Yet every closet in her house, which is a pretty large house, is filled with clothes. So, when I go to see her, I have no place to put anything. I just am spreading out clothes on a bed or whatever.
My sister and brother-in-law are both in academia, not unlike me. They also care about appearance and they're very, very preppy. Then there's my father. My father had been very ill with Alzheimer's disease. Again, we're going back 12 years. He'd been in a nursing home for about eight years. I don't know how many of you in this room have experienced this with a loved one, but it is devastating. It's simply devastating. At the time that he was diagnosed, which had been about eight years before that, the doctor said to my mother, and I was standing there, "Resign yourself to having this tear your family apart to financial ruin, and eventually your husband will lose his soul." And I thought, it could possibly tear the family apart, it could cause financial ruin, but lose his soul?
So, my sister and I would take the family dog to visit dad at Christmas time, because the nursing home welcomed pets during the holiday season. And our Wirehaired Terrier would-- we'd open the door to the nursing home, she would run through the halls to dad. Somehow, she knew where he was, leap into his lap, and there was this happy reunion, even though he hadn't a clue who she was. And this one Christmas, three years before this particular event, the dog didn't know who he was. We tried to put her in his lap, and she'd just leap off, and she looked at him as though, "Who is this?" I turned to my sister and I said, "He lost his soul."
So, from that point forward, we had a whole series of crises. Dad was going, Mother would call, "Get ready, the time has come. Get ready, get ready, get ready." Well, it didn't come until this one fateful day when she called and I'm sort of-- She's getting into her whole story about it and, "Okay, I know, get ready." She said, "No, it's happened." So, we're gathering, we have to bury him. He was in Washington. He was being taken to Evansburg, Pennsylvania, where there was a family burial plot. Again, why Evansburg? I haven't a clue, but I'm not going there. [audience chuckles]
So, I gathered my things together as well as I could and with no notice at all, and headed to Wilmington via Amtrak, where I was met by my mother. We drove to Pottstown, where we stayed overnight with my sister and brother-in-law and their kids. And owing to the fact that my sister and brother-in-law pack like they're leaving Romanov Russia and never returning, [audience laughter] we couldn't travel in one vehicle. It was impossible. So, the next morning they take off in one car, and mother and I are in another.
And it was a long trip. It was winter, so it was sleety and icy and not very pleasant. And it was getting dark early, and we drove for about six hours. It was a Sunday, just to give you a day. So, it's a soulful day. We're about 30 minutes from Evansburg, and I realized that I have left my funeral suit in the closet in the guest room at my sister's. I'm wearing a pair of khaki pants and a pink oxford cloth shirt. Remember, this was 12 years ago. I've evolved. [audience laughter] I just broke out in this hot panicky sweat of what am I going to do? Nothing's open. I can't be pallbearing tomorrow morning in khakis and a pink oxford cloth shirt.
I'm thinking, my niece is really crafty and maybe if we gave her a couple of Sharpies, she could fix the khakis. But what's she going to do about the pink shirt? And then, of course, I transferred this panic to my mother, who then went into her whole mother thing. This is when you feel completely infantilized about, "You idiot. How could you have done this?" Well, it happened. [audience laughter] So, I thought, I'll drop mother off at the motel, I'll drive back to Pottstown, six hours, get the suit and come back. But you know what the really-- The thing I was just self-flagellating? Because there was no reason to have taken that suit out of the trunk of the car. It could have stayed in the garment bag, it didn't have to go in. But I'm thinking, oh no, it needs to have a nice vertical hang overnight. [audience laughter] Don't ever say that to yourselves. Leave it where it's nice and safe, and you won't forget it.
So, we have the Beverly Hillbilly truck driving behind us with all the luggage strapped to the outside of the car. Not really, but metaphorically it works. I say to myself, “You know something, my brother-in-law Jay probably has about 25 suits with him. [audience chuckles] While we're not the same size, I will make it work.” [audience laughter] [audience applauses]
And in fact, he was traveling with no fewer than four suits. [audience chuckles] So, not only did I was there a suit for me to wear, there could be a fashion show. [audience chuckles] I mean, it was simply remarkable. A white shirt and a dark tie, and I was all set. So, I said to my mother, "I will never, ever, ever say anything about the fact that they overpack so badly." They were forgiven forever at least from me, because they bailed me out of this tremendously difficult situation. They still continue to overpack. They do, but I always know that there's something in that wardrobe for me should there be some critical emergency. [audience chuckles] So, I thank all of you. I'm so thrilled and honored to have been here, and I thank all of you. Thank you.
[cheers and applauses]
Catherine: [00.24:34] That was Tim Gunn. Tim is the Emmy-winning producer, co-host, and mentor for all 14 seasons of Lifetime's Project Runway.
[Full Time by Regina Carter]
Our next story comes from Warren Holleman. He told this at one of our open-mic StorySLAM competitions in Houston, Texas. Here's Warren, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applauses]
Warren: [00.25:08] I'm going to tell you about my first visit to a gay bar. Come to think of it was pretty much my first visit to any bar. I was raised a Southern Baptist. And if you were raised a Southern Baptist, you know that there are church people and bar people, and the two usually don't come together. Well, it was about 20 years ago, and I was taking a class at University of Houston. The assignment was to film a series of family role plays. Most students recruited other classmates to do the role plays. But I had a friend who was an actor, or at least a former actor, and I thought, wow, mine could be really good if I would recruit him.
My friend Grant had actually been a professor of drama at University of Houston, and he had been in movies. He was the rather inept team chaplain for the Dallas Cowboys in the movie North Dallas Forty, if you saw that one. But Grant was in his later years, in his 70s. He had fallen on hard times. His health was poor, he was short on funds, and I thought, he can help my role play a lot, and I can help him by compensating him financially a little bit. Excuse me.
So, we did the role play. It went very well. And then, it came time to pay him. He paused and he said-- he had this mischievous look on his face, and he said, "You know what I'd really like you to do is take me out for a couple of beers." Well, we headed down Greenbrier at his direction, and he had me turn left into a parking lot just north of Holcomb. If you are my age or older, you know that's the site of the Briar Patch, Houston's first gay bar. And by that time there were other gay bars, but this was the one that older men preferred.
As we entered the door, Grant was thrilled. He was in poor health, but you wouldn't have known it for the next two hours. [audience chuckles] His eyes were twinkling. I was happily heterosexual, as he knew, but little did I know that he was now recruiting me for a little role play that he was designing. [audience laughter] In this role play, there would be this aging queen-ish gay man and his younger lover. He took me around that bar, introducing me to all of his friends whom I never could see, because it was so dark and so smoky
But eventually, my eyes adjusted. It was a piano bar. And at a given moment, the pianist started playing Broadway show tunes. And the men in there knew every word to every song. I tried to pretend that I knew the words to the songs. I actually loved it. I've never been in a place where there was so much joy and camaraderie. And at one point, though, they asked me to come sit down on the piano bench, and they attributed a song to me. There was some Broadway show tune about an old man who took a young lover. They changed the words from girlfriend to boyfriend. So, I got to be the feature of that song. And once again, Grant was loving this role play.
And then, the tones shifted and the tunes shifted. Instead of Broadway show tunes, they were suddenly playing Baptist hymns. [audience chuckles] I'm not kidding. Baptist hymns. I knew all the words to those. [audience laughter] But the thing was, the words for the first time started making sense. [audience chuckles] I mean, this just as I am. Did anyone grow up singing that one? Wow. Those men knew the theology of that song and what it really meant. And Amazing Grace, there was a line, Through many dangerous toils and snares and hardships I have already come. But grace has brought me safe thus far and grace will bring me home. And I thought, wow, these songs are beginning to make some sense.
I started thinking, maybe this bar-church divide isn't-- I began to think, I'm in a real church now. These men had been ostracized from most churches, and they had created one there. And the last song sounded like a hymn. There was a very reverent tone, but it wasn't-- I couldn't place it. When they started singing the words, I realized it was that song from West Side Story, that was about a young couple, heterosexual couple in West side who could not really love the one they loved and be the person they were because of prejudice and that sort of thing.
And wow. Tears were coming down my eyes. It wasn't because of all that cigarette smoke in the room, either. Just the last few lines haunt me to this day. There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us, and then someday a time for us. Take my hand and I'll take you there. Hold my hand, we're halfway there. Somehow, some way, somewhere.
Wow. That was one of the last times I spent significant time with Grant. He died not too much after that. I've always been grateful, because I felt like he showed me that place. Having been raised a Southern Baptist, I suddenly felt for the first time I really got a glimpse of heaven in that bar.
[cheers and applauses]
Catherine: [00.31:17] That was Warren Holleman. Warren grew up in a farming community in Eastern North Carolina, pretending not to listen to the wonderful stories his father, uncles and other "old people" told him. He says, it recently dawned on him that now he's one of the old people retelling those North Carolina stories and a few of his own. When we launched in Houston, Warren's daughter called him to say, “I love The Moth. I'm so jealous you get it in your city." Warren admitted he didn't quite know what The Moth was. Then after the show, called her to say, “Not only did I go, but I told a story. Oh, and PS, I won.”
[Somewhere by West Side Story]]
Catherine: [00.32:28] Coming up, a woman in rural Alabama finds her new house so overgrown with vines that she needs a chainsaw to get in the back door for the first time, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
Jay: [00.32:39] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.
Catherine: [00.33:21] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns.
I grew up in rural Alabama. And for those of you who aren't that familiar with the south, we have this green vine down there called kudzu. It looks like ivy and covers over seven million acres of the Deep South. It can grow as much as a foot a day during the summer. My friend Johnny told me that when he was a kid, he got mad at his mama and planted kudzu in his backyard. He spent the next 10 years mowing it nearly every day to keep it in check.
So, I was excited when our next storyteller, the revered fashion designer, Natalie Chanin, wanted to talk about the wildness of the south and how nature is always right at your back door trying to get in.
Natalie told her story at a Moth event that we produced with the legendary radio duo the Kitchen Sisters. Here's Natalie Chanin, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Natalie: [00.34:20] I am from a small town in northwest Alabama. In that place, and at the time I was growing up, it was about buttoning yourself in, being tucked in and hiding things away. Because although all the farms and the textile mills on the outside, just on the edge of those mills was mother nature. She was always so close, just right to that edge of all that cultivation. And so, in my part of the world, a house that's [chuckles] left alone or not cared for can really melt down into this fertile wet green mass, where animals and kudzu wait to grow into the buildings. And so, people hoe and they cut things back, [chuckles] and they keep it pruned, and they watch and wait for that little slip that's going to come through.
So, there's this moment in my childhood where I'm walking down the stairs of the church, and a friend of the family is coming up the stairs. She looks at my cousin Pam and she goes, "[gasps] Pam, you have just grown up to be the most beautiful young woman. Just stunning." She looks over at me and she goes, "And Natalie, you're so, so exotic." [audience laughter] And sitting here today, I look back and I know that what she was trying to say was there felt there's this little piece of that outside that she could smell underneath, and it scared her. And so, I hit the ground running just as fast as I could [laughs] to get away from being tied up in nature.
I tried to run towards exotic [chuckles] and what I thought I could find in the world. I traveled around the world, and I came back again, and I learned how to-- I did things I never imagined I could have done as a girl from rural Alabama. But there was a night I arrived back in New York in the year 2000. I was moving away from a marriage that was gone wrong. I was questioning and not finding answers. That night when I arrived, it was snowing outside, and it was really cold and lost, and everything was raw.
I was invited one night to what I deemed this really fancy fashion party, like only New York City can do, right? And so, I had been wallowing in my self-discovery, or you could call it self-pity during this time. I was pretty broke [chuckles] and I didn't have anything to wear to this party. So, I took a T-shirt out of my backpack, and I cut it up, and I pinned it back together on my body, and I sewed it back together again with needle and thread. And so, I went to the party that night, and the strangest thing happened that people would see me across the room, and they would walk across the room and touch my body, which people in New York City don't really do. [audience laughter]
In the south, you hug people whether you like them or not. [audience laughter] But people in New York City don't really do that. But people were touching me and they were asking, "What is that? What do you have on?" And so, the next morning, I woke up and I was really proud that people had liked my shirt, that I had found this approval from the fancy fashion folk. But what really struck me that morning when I woke up, was that although I had been a designer and a stylist for a really long time, it had also been equally as long since I'd made something with my own two hands. I felt so moved to get up that morning and make another T-shirt. And so, I made another T-shirt and another T-shirt, and I just kept making shirts and I kept wearing them. People would stop me on the street and they would touch me. [laughs]
In the middle of all this making and touching, I had this vision that I wanted to see these 200 one-of-a-kind, cut-up T-shirts sewn back together again and laid out on the floor. And so, I started going around to manufacturers in New York. [chuckles] You know, these bags of Salvation Army, Goodwill collected throwaway things that were cut apart. They thought I was a crazy bag lady. [chuckles] And so, rejection after rejection, excuse me, nobody really wanted to help me make these shirts.
And so, I'm standing in the street corner on 8th and 38th one afternoon, and I'm looking down at the T-shirt, and I'm like, "[gasps] It's a quilting stitch." I realized in that moment that I was going to have to go home, because all of the ladies who quilted with my grandmothers were still there in Alabama quilting, and I was like, "This is such a great idea." In my mind, I thought, this is going to be so great. I'm going to go home. They're going to love to do this. This is going to be so easy. And so, I write a proposal, I raise some money, I call my aunt down in Alabama, I explain the project to her, and I say, "I'm looking for a house that can be project headquarters. Can you help me find something?" She calls me back a couple of days later, and she's like, "I have the perfect house. The house is just behind my mother's childhood home. It's built by my father's father for his very best friend. It is perfect, right!"
And so, in December, I rent a car and I drive down to Alabama, stopping at every thrift store along the way and buying all these T-shirts. On December 23rd, I arrive in Alabama with a friend. You can't see the house from the road, right? She had forgotten to tell me that the house had been abandoned for the last five years, [chuckles] that no one had really lived in the house since that time. There's like a little path that goes around the back of the house that used to be a driveway. We drive around to the back door. My aunt and my mother have cut a hole through all of the nature into the back door with a chainsaw. [audience chuckles]
And my dream, my project is really just an old mattress thrown on a 1970s vinyl floor in a house that smells of old chicken bones, and shut up, and animals and things that live on the edges of places. [chuckles] So, I go to bed that night, and I'm laying on this mattress on the floor, and I just start to cry, and I cry and I cry and I cry some more. I just think I spent my whole life running away from this place, traveling the world, doing these things, and all of this comes to laying on the floor in the middle of the night, waiting for ghosts or kudzu to crawl up the floorboards and lay down next to me.
The whole night I can't stop looking around me, because all I can think about are all of the heat-seeking snakes that are in the house. [audience chuckles] As soon as I'm still, I'm going to feel that cold thing slither up next to me and lay down. So, sometime about in the very early morning, I closed my eyes and I fell asleep for a minute and I woke up and it was the most beautiful, crisp, clear December morning. The light in Alabama at this time is absolutely beautiful. It was Christmas Eve.
I get up out of the bed, and go over to the kitchen and clean up a little place, and make my tea. I sit down on this borrowed stool, and I look around the room, and I realize that it may have 1970s vinyl on the front floor, but the walls are completely covered with heart pine paneling. I don't know if you know this, but these really old broad heart pine boards from the south were made from the longleaf pine trees which were called the giants of the South. And so, they're hundreds and hundreds of years old, these trees, before they make these boards. And so, I think I'm just going to clean one board and just see what the wood looks like.
So, I go over and I clean this one board. And it is so beautiful. I mean, the wood is spectacular. I stand there and I look and I think, okay, I can clean one more board. So, I clean one more board. When I finish with that board, I realize that I can do have the resolve within me maybe to clean one more. And so, throughout the day, board by board, I move through the room. And by the end of the day, as the sun is setting back behind the kitchen there, I sit back down on the stool and I've cleaned the entire room, and I think, I can do this.
So, the next morning, I get up and I get a phone and I start calling these women who used to quilt with my grandmothers, and I'm like, "This is going to be so great. You're going to love it. It's like New York City fashion, and Vogue, and everything that you could dream of." They so don't love it. [audience laughter] They could care less. [chuckles] They talk to me about their kids, and their grandkids, and common acquaintances, and church, and their gardens.
I show them the shirts and one of the ladies says, "My grandmother would say about that, 'Honey, those stitches are so big that you could get your toenails caught up in them.'" [audience laughter] They laugh, and they talk to me about planting turnip greens and the importance of that. But [audience laughter] turnip greens are really important. [audience chuckles] My aunt once asked me, I was telling her about a boy that I was interested in, and she said, "Yeah, but can he grow turnip greens?" [audience laughter] It's true. [audience chuckles]
But what I did find out from having these conversations with the community of my childhood, was that the mills had closed down, and that there were women and men who were out of work. Maybe they would want this work. And so, I ran a little ad in the paper that said part-time hand sewing and quilting. And about 60 women called and about 20 women stuck. We sewed the 200 one-of-a-kind shirts, and I brought them to New York Fashion Week, and we sent out a little catalog. The first person to walk through the door is Julie Gilhart, who was then the buyer from Barneys New York. Julie sweeps back in a few days later with her buyers, and they look at all the T-shirts and they go, "We'll have 12 like this and 12 like this, and 12 like this." [laughs]
And I'm like, "Wait a minute. [chuckles] These are one-of-a-kind shirts. How are we going to make 12 shirts like this that says Smith Family Reunion from Roanoke, Virginia?" [audience laughter] And they said, "Just make something like it." We made them, and we brought them to New York. We took the orders. Julie Gilhart and Sally Singer from Vogue went out into the world and told everybody about the work were doing. All the T-shirts had been made with all of the seams on the inside out. That night, when I sewed that first shirt back together again, I had turned everything to the outside, so it was raw and exposed, like I was in that moment of my life.
This style, this idea of everything being turned on the outside has really become our signature style. So, it's 15 years later and I'm still at home. [chuckles] We have about 32 women who still sew these shirts in the field by hand. Everything completely sewn by hand. We have about 40 of us that work in our studio. We have just opened a new machine-sewn textile factory in hopes of recreating this community of my childhood. We have a cafe. People come from all over the world now to Florence, Alabama, to sit with us, to sew with us, to eat with us, to laugh, to tell stories.
I live at home. Some days, it feels like I'm still cleaning heart pine boards, board by board. I live really close to nature, and I can sometimes feel it coming out of the edges and up, around, and into my life. But I guess I like it that way. So, thank you.
[cheers and applauses]
Catherine: [00.47:57] That was Natalie Chanin. Natalie traveled the globe working in the fashion world before becoming the owner and designer of Alabama Chanin. Natalie and I sat on our porch overlooking her tomato plants, talking about how all this is going, how she grows her own organic cotton which gets made into cloth, and then turned into the clothes for her line.
Natalie: [00.48:16] Well, we call it seed to shelf in the USA. So, that's been a really beautiful, and sometimes challenging process. And then, about a year and a half ago, we opened what we call the factory. So, we have really our flagship store is in Florence, Alabama. It’s been pretty amazing, because people have been driving from all over the country or coming from all over the world to see that space. We have a beautiful cafe in the midst of that where we serve all local, organic, seasonal food, or as much as is humanly possible.
Catherine: [00.48:54] We talked about why this whole venture has been such a success.
Natalie: [00.48:57] I think part of that has to do that there are so many people involved in the process. In the studio, so many hands touch the pieces. And then, because they are sewn by hand by these artisans who work in their own homes, every piece, even two pieces that are made to be exactly the same are different, right? They have a little bit-- One stitch is a little bit bigger than the other one, or the pattern itself is put on in a different way.
While there is a similarity, it's impossible to have two that are exactly the same. I don't know, we talk about this a lot, why the collection resonates so much with our customers and patrons. I think we live in a world where things are just stamped out, 100 million at a time. So, to see something that has character, or a life, or an individual spirit, I think means a lot to us today. So, it's been interesting and beautiful. I'm really lucky.
As we both know when I left here at 18 or left the South, I was like, “I'm out of here, people. I'll see you. I've got the big wide world.” It's so interesting that today I was able to come home, and all those things that I thought I had to go away to do were really always right in my own back door. And so, that's been a wonderful discovery.
Catherine: [00.50:38] When I visited Natalie in her factory in Florence, Alabama, I was overwhelmed by all the heaps of fabric and racks of clothes. They seem to go on for miles. There's a store attached, plus a farm-to-table cafe where people from all over Florence gather for lunch every day, surrounded by gorgeous dresses. I took pictures, and you can see them at themoth.org.
While there, you can also pitch us a story of your own. Dozens of pictures have already been turned into stories for our Mainstage shows around the country, and many have been included on this radio show. So, please call us if you have a story you'd like us to hear.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
[Trampin' by Regina Carter]
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Jay: [00.51:48] Your host this hour was The Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns. Catherine also directed the stories in the show.
The rest of The Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Whitney Jones and [unintelligible [00:52:04] Special thanks to the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, and to Houston Public Media who partnered with us on the SLAMs there.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argot Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Regina Carter, Tom Waits, and Bill Frizzell. You can find links to all the music we use at our website.
The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick, at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.