Host: Catherine Burns
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Catherine: [00:00:12] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. Today, we're going to hear stories about things that went wrong, how mistakes get made and what happens afterwards.
A quality most great storytellers have in common is their willingness to tell on themselves, to share a story about the time they really screwed up. Most people listening to The Moth don't want to hear about you being a hero and saving the day. It's our frailties that connect us to one another. Our missteps make us interesting.
With that in mind, here's our first story from Jessica Lee Williamson.
[cheers and applause]
She told it at a show we produced in Somerville, Massachusetts with our friends at WBUR. Here's Jessica.
Jessica: [00:00:52] There's a song called Maybe at the beginning of the movie Annie, where Annie wonders about the parents who dumped her off at that godforsaken orphanage. She says, “Maybe they're far away or maybe they're real nearby. He may be pouring her coffee. She may be straightening his tie.” Annie ends the song on a hopeful note, saying that “Maybe they'll be there loving her when she wakes up, but they're not, which makes it even more sad and depressing,” which is exactly the kind of material that I was really attracted to as an eight-year-old artist. [audience laughter]
I really connected to Annie's plight of loneliness. I had all these very intense eight-year-old girl feelings and ideas, but I was also very shy and didn't know how to share them. And then, I would see people like Annie step up onto a stage, and sing a song or tell a story, and I would see how open they were and I would think maybe I could do that too.
So, when I was in the third grade, I decided to sing Maybe for the school talent show. And the moment I stepped up onto the stage, I found myself pondering some maybes of my own. [audience laughter] Maybe I should have put some thought into it [audience laughter] before I volunteered to sing alone in front of hundreds of people. [audience laughter] And maybe I should have bothered to memorize the words to the song [audience laughter] that I volunteered to sing alone in front of hundreds of people.
I had seen the movie Annie five or six times over the course of my entire life and somehow figured that would be enough. [audience laughter] So, I only focused on the feelings I would have while singing the song. I only asked the important questions, like, should I wear a curly wig or will my short, newly permed hairdo suffice? The only thing I practiced was the ladylike curtsy I would give at the end of my show stopping routine. [audience laughter]
Next thing I knew, there I was thinking maybe standing on a stage and crying isn't the best way to make my debut as a performer. [audience laughter] There was an instrumental version of the song playing over the PA system. And every time a new verse would kick in, I would take a deep breath and brace myself, like I was getting ready to sing, [audience laughter] sending out these tiny ripples of hope that [audience laughter] I might just pull it together. [audience laughter] But I never did, you, guys. [audience laughter] I just stood there and cried for [audience laughter] two and a half minutes [audience laughter] while the audience watched in a horrified silence. [audience laughter]
There are very few things that compare to sucking that bad in front of a room full of people. [audience laughter] My mother did not want it to be something that scarred me for life, so she encouraged me to try again, [audience laughter] a whole lot harder the next year. She also suggested that I find a new act, because rehashing the old one might make the audience uncomfortable. [audience laughter] And then, I had the idea that I would find a costar, so that I wouldn't have to go it alone. I found that costar on the pages of a JCPenney Christmas catalog. He was an Oliver Hardy ventriloquist doll. And the catalog description said that he was famous and loved by audiences around the world, which was exactly what I was going for. [audience laughter]
So, I put his item number at the top of my Christmas list and he was waiting under my tree on Christmas Day. He came with a two-page Xerox copied pamphlet titled How to Be a Ventriloquist? It offered very vague suggestions, [audience laughter] like, do try not to move your lips [audience laughter] and don't forget to smile. And then, I would spend every day after school looking in the mirror and practicing tongue twisters, and then my mother would take me to the library and we would comb through all of the choke books. And I would only take the very best ones.
I even wrote one of my own jokes. I would ask Hardy, “What do you call a good-looking bubble?” And then, he would deliver the punchline, which was “A sud.” [audience laughter] It's a play on the word stud for those of you guys that didn't get it. Not my best work, but I was eight, so, you know, I'm sticking by it. But eventually Hardy and I had this three-minute act originally titled the Jessica and Hardy Show. It was everything a comedy act should be, a combination of joke telling and banter peppered with the occasional zinger. We opened with some knock-knocks and we spent some time philosophizing over who had it worse, a giraffe with a sore throat or a centipede with a broken leg.
At some point, I would say, “Hardy, sometimes I think you're dumber than a log.” He would respond with, “Hey, watch it. My mother was a log.” [audience laughter] And then, we would wrap it all up with a heartfelt moment where I would say, “I love you, Hardy,” and he would say, “I love you too.” And after a comedic beat, he would add, “But you still drive me nuts.”
So, by the day of the talent show, I had felt very confident and even a little bit excited about my act. They implemented a full-dress rehearsal that year. [audience laughter] I'm sure it had nothing to do with the one man [beep] show I personally [audience laughter] put on the year before. And it went great. For the dress rehearsal, my mother painted my face like a happy clown. But for the real show, because that's how I roll, I asked her to paint my face like a sad clown instead. And so, the show started. And in the act before mine, two girls did a comedy routine where they just stood there and told each other jokes. It wasn't that creative, if I'm being honest, [audience laughter] but it fell very flat during the rehearsal, but it was a smash hit during the actual show, because they stole a bunch of my jokes.
They took the centipede and the giraffe bit. They took this other bit where Hardy and I made the number seven look like a monster, because he ate nine. And they even took the joke I wrote myself. When I heard the audience laughing at those girls, my heart broke and I started to panic. And that's when my mother leaned over to me and said, “It doesn't matter if they stole your jokes, because you are a ventriloquist, which is considered an art form, and that makes it totally different.” When she said that to me, I really felt like an artist, because I had gone through the whole process of turning nothing into something to creating this thing.
And so, the emcee called my name and I went to grab my costar, only to find him in the hands of a known troublemaker named Jimmy Moore. Jimmy was the type of boy who had a permanent orange tang stain on his upper lip [audience laughter] and just destroyed everything in his path. I guess he saw my doll sitting in a chair and wondered what it would feel like to rip the mouth out of something that somebody loved. It was one of those things that feels like it's happening in slow motion. I was standing there staring at my doll, watching its jaw dangled to its knees by a string, and I heard the emcee call my name again. I was nine years old at the time, so the phrase, [beep] it, I'm not doing that was not something that occurred to me at that age. [audience laughter]
And so, I walked up onto the stage alone and I picked up the microphone and I cried just like I did the year before. [audience laughter] The only difference was that this time, I had a sad clown face [audience laughter] to accompany my curly wig. So, I guess that was an unexpected bonus. [audience laughter] If you could put a question mark at the end of a clap, I would say that's what the applause sounded like. [audience laughter] It was this slow, rhythmic slapping sound that begged the question, “What was that?” [audience laughter] And what it was was me wondering if maybe there was something that felt worse than humiliating myself in front of hundreds of people all because I hadn't prepared. Maybe it felt worse to do everything right and still fail anyway.
And in that moment, I shifted from feeling like I was invisible over to wishing that I was. So much that it took me almost 20 years before I stepped foot onto another stage. But it wasn't just because of that night. I think that whenever you do something you love, you do it with one foot in fear. And I just got very comfortable leaning on that foot. But if you spend enough time there, you eventually figure out that there is one thing that feels far worse than the humiliation that any kind of failure can bring and that is giving into the fear to the point where you don't do the thing you love at all. Thank you so much.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:13:19] Jessica Lee Williamson is a writer, comedian and public radio contributor living in Los Angeles. Along with hosting The Moth StorySLAM, she co-hosts the monthly comedy show Eastside Bash. To see a picture of nine-year-old Jessica posing with her ventriloquist doll on the day of her performance, go to themoth.org.
Maybe you have a story about a mistake you made. I actually first became a part of The Moth community by telling a story about a big goof of mine at one of our very first open-mic StorySLAM’s. My story was about the time I accidentally drove my friend Alex's car off a small cliff. I managed to do this while sitting in the passenger seat.
Alex had gotten sighted by coffee and I was waiting for him in the parked car. I wanted to listen to the radio, but in order to do that, I needed to start the car. So, I put the keys in and turned them hard. It turns out the car had a manual transmission which caused the car to lurch forward the moment it started up. So, the car and I ended up going over the eight foot cliff, Dukes of Hazzard style. When the cop arrived in the scene, he asked us which one was driving the car at the time of the accident. And we said, “No one.”
Obviously, I live to tell the tale. We have an unofficial motto at The Moth, “You either have a good time or you have a good story.” So, if you have a story, call our pitch line, which will let you leave a two-minute telling about a time things went wrong for you. The number to call is 877-799-M-O-T-H. Or, you can pitch us a story right at our website, themoth.org.
[melodious music]
Coming up, a young boy struggles with a secret his immigrant parents kept from him, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
Jay: [00:15:19] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
[melodious music]
Catherine: [00:16:31] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. Our next storyteller is Hasan Minhaj.
[applause]
He told this story live at The Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. Here's Hasan.
Hasan: [00:16:45] Hello. So, I just got married and--
[cheers and applause]
Yeah, one ring to rule them all, right? Because I just got married, my dad decided to sit me down and tell me how he met my mom. See, I'm first generation, and my parents are immigrants. If you know anything about immigrants, they love secrets. [audience laughter] They love them. They love bottling them up deep down inside of them and then unleashing them on you 30 years later when it's no longer relevant. All And you're like, “What, Mom's a communist? Dad's a ninja? Why are you telling me this right now? This is not the born identity. Why is this happening?” [audience laughter]
I had never known. For 30 years, I had never known how my parents had met. So, my dad, he sat me down and he told me the story about how he married my mom. And 30 years ago, in this small-town in India called Aligarh-- Any Aligarhians here tonight? No? Okay. All right. Aligarh is not in the house. Okay. [audience laughter]
30 years ago in this small town called Aligarh, my dad had heard a lot of buzz in the streets about this girl named Seema, my mom. Seema was that chick you guys like. Like the buzz on Seema and Aligarh was crazy. She was like the new iPhone. People were like, “Oh, have you heard of Seema? She's very slim and slender. And her family owns a camera. What? A camera? I don't believe it.” [audience laughter] And so, my dad just beelined down to my grandfather's house where my mom lived, and he just laid it all on the line, he's like, “What's up? I'm Najmi. I'm a chemist. I'm going to America. I want to marry Seema. YOLO.” Bam. 10 minutes. [audience laughter]
My dad married a woman he had never laid eyes on. That's crazy. So, Najmi marries Seema. They come here to the States, they have me and here I am telling you guys stories about them. But my mom had to go back to India to finish med school. So, the first eight years of my life, it was just me and my dad. It was just two brown dudes trying to make it in America. [audience laughter]
I grew up in this town called Davis, which is right outside of Sacramento. It was a really hard transition, because my dad, he's trying to adjust as the only brown guy at work, and he's in this new country and I'm trying to adjust as the only brown kid at my school. It wasn't easy on me, like, Roll Call was the worst. People are calling me Hanson, Menaja. Sahan Minha. Saddam Hussein. It was horrible.
My dad, you know, he did his best at being a good dad, but birthdays weren’t really his thing. I remember one year he woke me up on my eighth birthday. It was like 07:30 in the morning, and it was one of those cold Davis days. It's foggy outside. And he's like, “Hasan, get up.” I get up. And he's like, “Get in the car.” Eventually, we get to this intersection where the mall is Arden Fair Mall. And to my left, I see the store that's the haven of every eight-year-old kid, Toys "R" Us. I was like, dad saw the clipping that was in my room from the Toys "R" Us Kids catalog.
I had a clipping in my room of the kids catalog and there was a BMX bike that I wanted. I was like, “Oh, my God. Turn left. Turn left. Turn left.” And then, my dad turned right and I was like, “Home Depot? No.” [audience laughter] We're inside Home Depot. I'm like, “Dad, did you even remember what today is? It's my birthday.” And he's like, “Yeah, of course, I remember. That's why I'm going to let you pick the door handle for the bathroom.” [audience laughter] And I was like, “Why don't you let me pick the toilet, because you're [beep] on my dreams? This is the worst.” [audience laughter] But I didn't say that. I didn't say that, because when you're an immigrant kid, you only get so many hands, you can play with your parents. You're going to have your battles, so pick and choose them wisely.
You want to go to that dance? You're going to play it. You want to be a dentist instead of a doctor, you got to play that hand. [audience laughter] And that day, I decided to not play any of my hands and stay quiet. It didn't make it any easier, because when my mom would come visit, she would just kill the mom game. I remember one year she showed up at Pioneer Elementary School and brought me a Ghostbusters proton pack for my birthday. Yes, the full backpack and the gun. She shut Pioneer Elementary School down. Kids were losing their minds. It was incredible. But it made it that much harder when she had to leave.
I remember my dad told me the date when she was coming back and we'd finally get to be a family again, August 3rd, 1993. I was so excited, I ran to my room and I put on my proton pack and I was waiting for her in the living room. I remember my dad's like, “Hasan, put on Indian clothes.” I was like, “All right, I'll be an Indian ghostbuster.” [audience laughter] I put on my clothes. I'm sitting in the living room waiting for my mom to come here, so we can finally be a family again. My dad walks in, and then my mom walks in and then right behind my mom, there's this little brown girl with a mushroom cut.
See, when my dad was going back and forth to visit my mom, he ended up knocking her up and I had a sister, but they didn't tell me about her. [audience laughter] Remember how I told you how immigrants love secrets? This was a huge secret. [audience laughter] This was like an iTunes bonus track that I didn't get to download till eight years later. [audience laughter] And this girl with this mushroom cut, she was so excited. She knew that she had a brother and she was supposed to live in America. So, she just runs towards me and is like, “Hasan Bhai,” and hugs me so tight. I'm in full hover hands mode. I'm like, “Who is this girl?” [audience laughter] And my mom was like, “Hug your sister.” [audience laughter]
It was like, Maury for immigrants. [audience laughter] I'll be honest, I hated that brown girl so much. [audience laughter] I was a little Republican. I was leveling with my parents at the dinner table. I was like, “Look, Mom, Dad, these brown people, [audience laughter] they're coming into our house. [audience laughter] They're eating our gushers. [audience laughter] They don't speak the language. [audience laughter] I say we tell them to go back to where they came from.” That's just me though. That's just me.
But my parents always reminded me, they were like, “That's your little sister. You only have one little sister look out for her.” I remember we had to go to elementary school together. It was hard enough being on the playground, trying to fit in and being the only brown kid at school, and now I have this little brown minion following me around everywhere. [audience laughter] She was just following me around everywhere during lunch. I just couldn't take it anymore, so I just ran into the boys’ bathroom, and she followed me into the boys’ bathroom.
All these kids are peeing, and they stop. They turn from the urinals, and she runs in like, “Hasan Bhai, Hasan Bhai, Hasan Bhai.” And they're like, “What is she saying?” And I'm like, “It's a term of endearment in my culture. Shut up, Cody.” I just couldn't explain it to them. And so, I was just like, “Get out of here. You're not my sister.” She couldn't speak English, but she understood what I was saying. And my dad really, really wanted my little sister's first birthday in America to be very, very special. So, for her fifth birthday, my dad brought everyone into the living room. We were all standing there, and he drags this big brown box into the living room and it says Toys “R” Us on it. And then, he just lifted up the box, and underneath that box, there's this beautiful blue BMX bike. And I was like, “What the hell?” Like, all of a sudden, Home Depot’s dad became Danny Tanner. This is so messed up.
My sister could see how mad I was. And so, she looked up at me and she was like, “Hasan Bhai, why don't you take it for the first ride?” We opened the door, and she's like, “Just take it for one lap around the cul-de-sac and then bring it back.” I got on that bike, and I immediately was like that, [beep] this is my mom, this is my family, this is supposed to be my bike. No. I just beeline down the cul-de-sac, and I am flying on this BMX bike, you, guys. I mean, 17.6 pounds? It is 17.6 pounds. It is as light as advertised. I'm booking it, and I take a left outside of the cul-de-sac, and I see a curb and I'm like, “Oh, man, I'm going to pop a wheelie on that curb. Yeah, I am.”
I pop a wheelie on that curb, and I go left, and that bike goes right and it crashed into the sidewalk. All that blue paint just chipped off the side of the bike. I'm lying there on the asphalt and I hear the pitter patter of her feet in the background. She runs over and she's crying and she's like, “Hasan Bhai, why did you do that?” She's picking up this bike and it's just ruined. She's like, “Why would you do this to my bike?” And in that moment, I just looked at her and I was like, “Man, I'm being such a [beep]”
Like, this whole time, I've been looking for acceptance from Austin and Dylan and Cody and Corey. [audience laughter] Meanwhile, I had this acceptance that this whole time right underneath my nose with her. Ever since that day, even though she's my younger sister, I've always looked up to her. She ended up growing up to be this incredibly beautiful and talented and amazing human being. She ended up becoming an attorney. She went to an Ivy League school, and she's living the Indian-American dream. Meanwhile, I [audience laughter] didn't go to grad school. I became a comedian.
And then, when it was time for me to get married, I decided to marry a girl outside of my religion. We're Muslim, her family's Hindu. And that, if you don't know, is some serious Montague and Capulet [beep] like. It goes back centuries. I remember the day we were supposed to meet my fiancé’s parents, we're standing there on the doorstep, all of us, and all of a sudden, my mom and dad immediately start getting cold feet. They're like, “I don't know if we should do this. Let's just go back home.” They're about to walk back to the car, and my sister steps forward, puts her foot down and lays down one of her cards from me and is like, “Everybody, shut up. I'm the lawyer. I did everything right, all right? Let him do what he wants to do. And if he doesn't marry this girl, no one's going to marry him, all right?” [audience laughter]
And I got to say, there were so many years I just didn't want to be around the little girl with the mushroom cut. But from that day and for so many days after that, I couldn't have been more proud to be her Hasan Bhai. Thank you, guys, so much.
[cheers and applause]
My sister's here tonight and she hasn’t heard that story, so thank you, guys.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:30:01] That was Hasan Minhaj. Hasan is a comedian, actor and correspondent on the Daily show on Comedy Central. We first met Hasan, and he was a struggling up and coming comic. On the day he found out he'd been hired by Jon Stewart, he came straight from the audition to The Moth's offices in Lower Manhattan to share his big news with us. We were literally jumping up and down and screaming so loudly that our downstairs neighbors came up to see if everything was okay. The Moth often feels like a big family, and we are so proud of Hasan.
Hasan mentioned at the end of the story that his sister Aisha was in the audience that night. Maggie Cino from The Moth sat down with Hasan and his sister after the show to talk about what it was like hearing Hasan tell a story from their childhood on stage in front of nearly a thousand people.
Hasan: [00:30:46] I was very, very nervous because she had never heard it before.
Maggie: [00:30:48] Aisha, did you enjoy the performance?
Aisha: [00:30:51] Yeah. I mean, I loved it. Like he said, I had never heard it. So, for me, it was like a brand-new experience, and it was him bringing up all the stuff that happened in our childhood that I didn't know he had remembered that well and he crafted it into this whole story that brought it all back to me. Yeah, I remember the bike incident very clearly, because that was my precious bike. I remember that so well.
Hasan: [00:31:13] I told you, guys, that was a pivotal moment. That was a life changing moment. A classic recurring theme between me and Aisha is things are far more traumatic and life changing for me.
Aisha: [00:31:23] Yeah-
Hasan: [00:31:23] And things are--
Aisha: [00:31:24] -very much. His memory is very, very vivid.
Maggie: [00:31:27] What were you expecting from the story, and then what was your experience of the story?
Aisha: [00:31:32] I'd never gone to a Moth event before, so did not know what to expect at all. And then, his delivery was just fantastic. And so, even though it was a story about me and our family, it was just really touching. I was tearing up at times, I was cracking up at times, like, he just did such a good job with it. It was really nice hearing his perspective on something that I hadn't touched base with him on. It's not like we ever sat down and we were like, “Hey, tell me about how you felt after that time that this crazy thing happened.” So, it was nice.
Hasan: [00:32:02] For what it's worth, my parents constantly remind me that I owe my marriage and approval of my marriage to my sister. So, that's a huge, huge thing. I never got the opportunity to say thank you to her on stage at the wedding. I hope that this was that.
Catherine: [00:32:22] Coming up, a young woman in London makes an embarrassing mistake while shopping for groceries online. And later, the son of a member of the Ku Klux Klan meets a young pastor named Martin Luther King. That's next on The Moth Radio Hour.
[soft piano music]
Jay: [00:32:54] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.
[soft piano music]
Catherine: [00:34:07] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns.
Now, we're going to hear from Holly Rutter. She told the story at one of our open-mic StorySLAM competitions in London. Her story is about shopping for groceries online. For those of you who live in a part of the world where this isn't a thing, the way it works is you go to a website and pick out your groceries for the week, choosing from a long list of items that they have available. The food is then shipped straight to your door. Here's Holly, live at a lovely venue in London called The Book Club.
[applause]
Holly: [00:34:40] I'm going to tell the story of the last online food shop I did. [audience laughter] My life is really exciting. It was a few years ago, so I haven't online shop since because it was a bad experience. Normally, what you can do is in order to secure the delivery slot for the next day, you just select an item and then you buy it and then you can revisit it maybe four hours later and add things. So, I just went on there, I picked the first thing that was on my previous delivery, which was a single apple. And then, I complete my order, I pay for it, maybe I go and do something else, watch some YouTube, have a cup of tea. And then, I come back--
Oh, this is also a Saturday night, I didn't mention that. [audience laughter] I'm on my own on a Saturday night. [audience laughter] Yeah, you can keep laughing, because it was that sad. About midnight, I think, oh, I'm going to finish my order. I'm excited. I've got maybe a salmon I'm going to cook. [audience laughter] And so, I go on there to edit my order and it tells me, no. It says, you can't edit your order now. And I was like, “No, I can though. Let me.” [audience laughter] And it says, no, no, no, we can't let you edit your order after midnight, because we're too busy packing your order. I was like, “No, you're not though. Please let me change it.”
So, it doesn't let me. So, I tried calling and I obviously can't call, because it's midnight on a Saturday night. Even the people that work at Tesco are doing something and I'm not. And so, I think, oh, I don't know what to do. So, I just have to go to bed, really. [audience laughter] So, I set my alarm for 08:00 the next morning and I think, well, you know, this is when my order comes. Also, it's a Sunday, so the delivery is double. So, the delivery was six pounds. [audience laughter] So, I think, oh, well, this is happening. This is something that will always have happened to me and I can't change that now. [audience laughter] So, I think that's the worst thing.
I think the worst thing I thought was maybe paying for the apple. [audience laughter] But then, I forget that a man has to give me the apple. [audience laughter] I think, oh, the exchange is going to be even worse. [audience laughter] So, I set my alarm for 08:00 and it's between 08:00 and 10:00, so I think, okay. So, I'm sat there just biding my time, waiting for the apple to arrive. [audience laughter] I don't have breakfast, because you know, the apple's coming. [audience laughter] I sat there, and I'm looking out my window every now and again and then I see the van and I think, oh, it's time.
And then, the van stops and I see him get out of the front. I think, oh God. And then he goes to the back. He opens the entire side of the Tesco van. [audience laughter] I see everyone shopping and I think, oh, mine's such a small part of that. [audience laughter] I see him reaching and I'm looking the whole time and he takes out a bag and then he's got the receipt and I think, oh. And then, he walks down my little road and I think, oh, God, do I say anything? So, I lean out the door and say, “Oh, it's for me. Hello, it's for me.” He walks down and he's holding the bag with the apple in it. He's also holding the receipt. He looks from one to the other a few times and then looks at me, and I'm like, “Hi.”
And then, he comes to the door and he says, “Is this a mistake?” And I was like, “Yes, [audience laughter] of course, it's a mistake.” Then he says, “Did you not try and change it?” And I was like, “Yes, this is the last resort for me also. Really didn't want this to happen.” And then, I say, “Are there any substitutions?” [audience laughter] And he looks like he's going to cry for me. So, “Oh, can I have my apple please?” So, I take the apple, he leaves. I've never eaten a bit of fruit so completely as my £6.40 apple. [audience laughter] I haven't done a Tesco online shop since and I never will. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:38:37] That was Holly Rutter. Holly is a part time illustrator. She says she particularly likes to draw dancing food. That's right, dancing food. When I asked her if there was an update on her story, she wrote, “I now only do online grocery shops under supervision. The apple in question was tasty, but it was not £6.40 tasty.”
I have to confess that when we first heard Holly's story, we fell in love with it, in part because a few members of The Moth staff had recently had online grocery shopping snafus of our own. I went to buy seven bananas, but with one wrong keystroke, accidentally bought seven dozen bananas. And our senior producer, Maggie Cino, she accidentally ordered 99 green apples. For weeks, we had an apple bake off going at The Moth, trying to help her use them up before they went bad.
Our final story is an oldie, told way back in May of 2001. We've heard about a lot of mistakes in this hour, but this last story is about how we sometimes decide to cause trouble on purpose. In the case of our next storyteller, doing so was an act of civil disobedience. Here's Bob Zellner at an evening we called and Justice for All: Stories on the American Civil Rights Movement.
[applause]
Bob: [00:39:54] Well, thank you. Actually, I grew up in LA, Lower Alabama. So, when I moved from South Alabama to Southampton, I thought I was moving to a different part of the country, but I found out that it wasn't that different after all. I haven’t come a long way though, I guess, from my roots in Lower Alabama. My mother and father, both went to Bob Jones College, which is now Bob Jones University. Has anybody heard of that? I'm actually named after Bob Jones. [audience laughter] He conducted the wedding ceremony for my mother and father. So, it wasn't very likely that I was going to wind up anywhere near the Civil Rights Movement. So, it was a little strange how I did that.
My father was a Klansman. My grandfather was a Klansman. I graduated high school in Mobile, Alabama in 1957. That was last century, remember? [audience laughter] Some of you don't remember. I know you don't remember 1957, but-- Growing up in Alabama, I didn't realize that I would wind up in college in Montgomery, Alabama. But in Montgomery, some things were happening that we now read about in the history books. I took part in some of those things and now teach history at the Long Island University. So, every now and then when my students run into Bob Zellner in the book, they say, “Are you related to this guy in the book?” And I said, “Well, yeah, that's me.” And they say, “Boy, you lived way back then?” [audience laughter]
It was a little bit like a first-grade student I spoke to recently. I do all levels of school and college in my storytelling and lectures. They did a little play for me, the first graders in Harwich Port Cape Cod. They lined up the chairs and everything, and they did the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So, one little first grader played Martin Luther King, and somebody else played Rosa Parks and somebody played the cops. They like to be cops, because they get to push you around and talk mean. [audience laughter]
So, after they did the Montgomery Bus Boycott, I told them about going to school in Montgomery, Alabama, and being recruited to the Civil Rights Movement by Martin Luther King, meeting Martin Luther King and knowing Rosa Parks. And so, one little boy, one of the exercises of the class was they had to write a letter afterwards, so they wrote me a letter. And one little boy said, “I was so excited when you said that you knew Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Do you mind if I ask if you also met President Lincoln and Harriet Tubman?” [audience laughter]
So, I'm not that old, actually. But the little child had it right. It was a struggle that we were in then and it's a struggle we are in now. And the one that we're talking about now is 40 years ago already. I think I was 21 when I was first beaten up and arrested in McComb, Mississippi. And I was 61 when I was last beaten up and arrested in Southampton, New York. So, we're actually talking about fairly recent history. But many of us are still involved. I remember when I first made my resolve to be involved in the movement.
Many people talk about it now. We have workshops and stuff, and we say, “When was your aha moment?” Hopefully, somebody tonight maybe have an aha moment. If you do, we'll offer you to come up front and kneel with us. [audience laughter] But I remember my first aha moment occurred when I was a student at Huntingdon College. I was assigned a paper to study the racial problem. This was in a sociology class on race relations. So, we went and did all of our study and everything. And then, five of us told our professor, “We needed to go over to the Montgomery Improvement association and interview Dr. Martin Luther King. He had invented this nonviolent direct action.”
And our professor said, “Well, that won't be necessary.” He said, “I'm sure your research is really good, and you're going to make a real good grade, but don't go over there and see Martin Luther King.” And we said, “Well, what about Rosa Parks? She's nationally famous. People come from all over the world to study what's happened here in Montgomery. And we're writing on the same subject and we're not supposed to go right over there?” He said, “Oh, no, you'll be arrested if you go over there.”
Now, being young sociologist, our interest was piqued that you could get arrested doing research. So, being young and foolish, we went over there. Anyway, we asked Dr. King if we could come. They were having a nonviolent workshop at his church. He was going to give a sermon. So, we went over and we heard this wonderful sermon from this wonderful young minister. He had told us before the service we could come, but be prepared to be arrested. And we said, “Really? That's what our professor said. We thought he was stupid.” He said, “Well, he's a pretty smart professor, because this is Montgomery, and y’all are white people from Alabama, and you may be arrested.” And we said, “Well, we have a right to come here and everything. And if we have to be arrested, we will.”
So, after the service, sure enough, Dr. King came over and said, “I'm sorry, but the police have the church surrounded and they've said that you're going to all be arrested.” And we said, “Well, Dr. King, we need to escape.” [audience laughter] And that was before he was St. Martin. He had a sense of humor. He laughed, he said, “Oh, yes.” And we said, “Well, not exactly. We don't have to escape, but we have to try to escape. We have to at least make the attempt, so we can tell mom and dad and the college and so forth that we didn't just walk out and say, ‘Put the cuffs on us.’”
And he said, “Okay, I tell you what.” He said, ‘I'll run out the front door.” And Ralph Abernathy said, “You take them to the back door. Maybe they'll all run around front and y’all can get out the back.’” So, Dr. King ran out the front door. All the cops ran around there and the photographers and everything. And Ralph opened the back door and said, “Go.” [audience laughter] You saw five little white boys running all out through the Black community. [audience laughter]
That was the beginning of my true education. I had already been to school three years, and this is when my education began. Words were not what was important. What was important was what was happening. We knew we had a right to do that. We also had a right to get killed. We finally made it back to campus, and in comes the president and all of the administration, “Meet us in office.” So, five of us were told we had to resign from school, because we had broken the segregation laws.
That night, while we were thinking about it, the Klan burnt crosses around the dormitory. And then, we were called into the office of the attorney general of the state of Alabama. We're little college students. And back in those days, college students didn't do nothing. And we said, “Boy, this is the big time right here. This man is the chief law enforcement of the whole state of Alabama, and he's taking up his time with us.” And he said, “I'm sorry to tell you, but you've fallen under the communist influence.” I'd never been out of Alabama. I said, “You mean this communist in Alabama?” And he said, “No, but they come through here.” [audience laughter]
A brand-new sociological concept that you could catch something from somebody that was just coming through. But that was the idea in those days. If you were interested in civil rights or even just trying to study it, you were not allowed to do it. And now, I'm a college professor. I studied history, and I know that before The Civil War, 30 or 40 years before the Civil War, you could be anti-slavery and still live in the community. The closer they got to the war, you could not be anti-slavery anymore. Before, it was cute and eccentric that so and so is against slavery. He's a member of our community. We allow him to stay here. But when the war approached, they'd kill him or run him out of the state. And that was what was happening in Alabama when I was in college.
We were coming to the second revolution. We were coming to the second civil war, and it became impossible to be at center. So, they gave me a choice of knuckle under or become a rebel. Well, I don't know what it was. Maybe it was because daddy was a Klansman. Maybe it was because granddaddy was a Klansman. I said, “You can't tell me what to do. I'm going to join SNCC. I'm going with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Comity.” Little did I know what I was getting into, because it was Martin Luther King, Reverend Martin Luther king, that started me on a life of crime. [audience laughter]
And now, it's strange when I stand up in front of my history class and I say, like all SNCC people, “I've been arrested 25 times in five Southern states. 30 charges, including criminal anarchy. Once in Danville, Virginia, I was charged with the John Brown statute.” Now, John brown was hanged for that. And it said that we incited the Black population acts of war and violence against the white population. They broke the church door down and came in and dragged us off.
1963, one of the bloodiest campaigns in the Civil Rights Movement. Nobody knows about Danville, Virginia. It happened over and over again, little local struggles where ordinary people did extraordinary things. We were privileged and proud to do that. And now, there's been enough time that's lapsed between that time and now and this is history. So, we were your age when I was in jail with Chuck in Baton Rouge, charged with criminal anarchy, facing life imprisonment, death sentence, whatever. I think I was 21.
Brenda Travis, who had just been arrested up in McComb, Mississippi, was 14 years old. So, that's the kind of revolution that we made. Once we started that revolution, once the young people got involved, by 1960, it spread, as Connie said, 70,000 students across the south and across the country engaged in that struggle. So, we still talk about it, we still go back and touch that struggle, but we bring it forward. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:51:06] That was Bob Zellner. Bob interviewed Rosa Parks for his senior thesis. And she told him, “Bob, you can't study the racial problem forever. You have to eventually take a stand and you have to take action.” After graduating from college, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, as it was called, and began a career of activism.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Jay: [00:51:47] Your host this hour was The Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns. The stories in the show were directed by Maggie Cino and Joey Xanders. Special thanks to Alex Henry.
The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Lou Ly and Jenelle Pifer.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from the musical Annie, from Yann Tiersen, Duke Levine, Oskar Schuster, and Hank Crawford and Jimmy McGriff. You can find links to all our music 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 National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org. For more about our podcast, for information on how to pitch your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.