Host: Sarah Austin Jenness
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Sarah: [00:00:12] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin Jenness. And in this hour, a celebration of 20 years of The Moth. That's right, The Moth produced storytelling nights long before the start of The Moth Radio Hour.
For some, 20 years means China or platinum. We've marked 20 years with over 20,000 stories told on Moth stages all around the world with events that were stitched into our collective personal history, from Y2K to The Spice Girls, Fukushima, Bernie Madoff, the royal wedding, wild elections, discrimination and wars all over the world. The last 20 years have been full.
Male Speaker: [00:00:53] It was 1997. And AOL was a thing. [audience laughter]
Female Speaker: [00:01:00] And she said, “All of Martha's emails were just subpoenaed.”
Male Speaker: [00:01:05] So, you're either voting yes to Saddam Hussein or no. There's no other candidate.
Male Speaker: [00:01:12] And I realized in that moment, for the first time in my life as an out gay man, I feel like an equal American.
Male Speaker: [00:01:18] So, as me and my wife and my mother-in-law watching it, the second plane came in and we noticed the big explosion.
Female Speaker: [00:01:26] And that's a momentous, because that's when Hurricane Katrina hit.
Female Speaker: [00:01:30] That was the year the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:01:42] Novelist George Dawes Green started The Moth in New York City in 1997. So, people could connect through personal stories. The Moth Community Program started shortly after that, where we run storytelling workshops with underrepresented communities. The Moth is dedicated to presenting stories from everyone.
And with that, our first storyteller is Richie DiSalvo. It's a story from our archives. Richie is a tried-and-true all-star storyteller from The Moth Community Program. And this story is called Anthony the Hat. Here's Richie, live at The Moth.
[applause]
Richie: [00:02:19] One of the regulars in this pizzeria that I used to manage was Anthony the Hat. [audience laughter] Every time Anthony would come in for lunch, he would tell me, “Richie, you run a great operation here. The place is always clean, food's great, take care of the people, nice.” He'd say, “Someday you have to get your own place. You need to have your own pizzeria one day.” In the back of my mind, I'd be agreeing with him, because that was my dream, to one day open my own pizzeria.
I had been in the business for 15 years. Every boss that I worked for was the same old crap, [audience laughter] “Richie, you're a good worker. We'll give you a piece to the action, we'll take care of you.” But after a while, many years, it was just like they were stringing me along and I was getting fed up with the whole thing. So, one particular afternoon, Anthony comes in for his usual lunch, two slices with anchovies, five garlic knots, a calzone and a Diet Coke. [audience laughter] I can never understand that. And he says, “Richie, I got this proposition for you. I want you to come and work for me. I'll take you under my wing and I'll let you make some real money.”
It happened to be a bad day at the shop that night. So, let me take a shot with Anthony. So, he tells me, “I'm setting up this operation downtown. I'm going to have my friends in the back taking some illegal bets on sports, a few numbers in the back. [audience laughter] And your job would be to stay up front, run the operation up front. All you need to do, Richie, is you look out for the police, take care of the buzzer, let in the clients, press the code if you see the police. And in the morning, when my workers come in, make sure everybody has that little metal, plastic, waste paper basket filled with lighter fluid, and make sure everybody has matches.” [audience laughter] That was my job. [audience laughter] Piece of cake. [audience applause]
I said, “No problem, Anthony.” For three times the amount that I was making, it sounded pretty good. So, I started working for Anthony. It was great. Not only working at the job. It was just like every night after work we'd all go down to Eddie Leblanc social club down on Sullivan Street. Start off with a little cappuccino. We'd go to Nick & Eddie's on Sullivan Street. We'd go to La Dolce Vita. Every time we walked in the restaurant, the seas would part. The waiters would trip over themselves to take care of us, because Anthony the Hat was there, Eddie LeBlanc was there, Frankie California was there. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
From working behind an oven all these years, this was a nice thing. People would stop at the table, give their respect to Anthony, buy us a bottle of wine and just move on. And it was nice. I started feeling like King Kong after a while. [audience laughter] The money was great. I'm spending it as fast as I'm making it, and I things look good now. This is going on for about seven months.
As fate would have it and it usually does, [audience laughter] I look out of the corner of my eye one afternoon and I see cops coming with hammers. They're pretty close, so I was just able to get the code in and warn the guys. And so, I knew they would get this work in the waste paper basket, no evidence and everything would be cool. [audience laughter]
So, now they must have known the operation. They must have had somebody come in the back, because they just bolted past me and they broke down the door and they wanted the guys in the back to try to get the papers and stuff like that. So, with that, I was able to walk out of the place. I just scooted out of there, ran down a block, got down the subway and I'm going like this, man, why didn't I stay sweating behind this pizza oven rather than come aboard with Anthony? But I didn't. I was running down the train station with no job. [audience laughter]
So, now, I didn't know what to do at first. So, I just laid low for about three days. Then Anthony called me up. And I said, “Anthony, you took me away from this job. Now, what am I going to do? I'm out of a job. This lasted a hot nine months, Anthony, I know, I liked it in the beginning, but what am I going to do now? I'm out of a job.” He says, “Let you take it easy. Don't worry about it. You meet me at the Woolworth Building tomorrow morning.”
I didn't really want to meet this guy anywhere or any of his friends at that point. [audience laughter] But when Anthony said to meet him somewhere, you usually went and you met him. [audience laughter] So, I did as I was told. I went out to the Woolworth Building, met Anthony, we go up to the ninth floor and we meet his lawyer. We walk in there, and he hands me a brown bag. I says, “What is this, lunch?” He goes, “No, are you a wise guy?” He says, “Open the bag.” So, I open the bag, and it's $38,000 in there. And I said, , “What is this for?” He says, “You see the man over there?” He goes next to my lawyer. He goes, “That's the owner of the pizzeria.”
Okay. That's the only pizzeria that's going to be your pizzeria in a couple of minutes. [audience laughter] “This is pretty good. This is nice of you, Anthony. I'm sorry I yelled at you before.” [audience laughter] Sorry, I got a little excited. He says, “Go sit down by the lawyer, put everything in your name and you are the owner of the pizzeria.” I says, “I can't believe.” I'm saying, “This is unbelievable, Anthony. This is just about too much for me-- This is beautiful thing. [audience laughter] This is my dream. This is my dream working many, many years.”
So, lo and behold, I get the pizzeria. I go down to Brooklyn, I set it up, I clean up the store. I name it DiSalvo's Pizza, home of the baby calzone. I was the only one in Brooklyn or in New York to make a little baby calzone. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
From then and now, I've never even seen it anywhere. But here I am. It's my dream. It's my dream. I buy neon. The business is going good. This was like, in October, November, my accountant can't believe it because I'm tripling the business. The business is quadrupling within about five months. It's like five times the amount that the guys previously were doing. So, things are looking good. Like I said, I put neon in the window, I framed it with green, I put Coca Cola in red and I put pizza in white the Italian flag. [audience laughter] [audience applause]
It was real nice. And the young kids in the area could see it from blocks away and said, “Richie, that looks really cool, man. We could see you five blocks away.” It was a nice sign [audience laughter] and I really liked it. I spent money on these antique Coke bottles. I put them on the table. My heart was really into it. This is my dream, man. And now, I put fresh flowers in the antique Coke bottles every day, give it a nice, homey look for the ladies and the kids. It was nice. I was painting it up. I was putting tile. I bought an air conditioner. Okay, so, October, November, December, January, February, March, I'm doing really good, fixed this place up nice and I was making some good money. My dream was there.
Now, what happened is it was my first time in business, and I really didn't plan things well. I was so excited that Anthony had set me up. I didn't plan on the fact that the summer was coming along and the school that I was selling a lot of pizza to was going to close that. It was a residential area. A lot of people go on vacation. So, my business was started to take a downturn. It went down half. It went down a little bit more than that.
And then, July came, and everybody was out of town. The business was down. Now, in the meantime, Bobby Cash was coming in for Anthony's payments every week and I was paying him off, and it was no problem. I paid him off. I had money for supplies. I was paying the store off. I paid my workers, everything was great. So, now, this one week, I told Bobby Cash, “Bobby, I don't have the $500 this week. Could you come next week?” He goes to me, “Yeah, but don't let this happen too often.” So, he says, “All right, we'll double up next week.” I says, “Fine, I'll pick up the business.” I told him what was going on.
So, the third week comes by, he comes back, he comes down and he comes in the store. He gets a little irritated. And I said, “Can I speak to Anthony?” And at this point in time, he says, “No, Anthony's not in the picture right now. I'm collecting the money for Anthony.” So, my dream's becoming a nightmare already. [audience laughter] So, now, Bobby comes down the last time, and he throws me up against the wall. I'm thinking of all the stories that he used to tell me when we were having a good about how he shakes people upside down off a 15-story construction site to get money for Anthony, and this is not a good thing. [audience laughter]
So, he leaves the store. He goes, “I'm going to come back tomorrow, and you need to have the money.” I says, “All right, I'll get it up somehow.” Anyway, with that, I knew there was no way I was going to get the money, so I just shut the store down. I moved out of Brooklyn. I went out to Long Island to my sister's house. I was trying to figure out a plan how I'm going to get these guys their money.
Anyway, I'm out there, two weeks in Long Island, trying to hide, trying to calm down, trying to lay low, but I'm sick. Anyway, one particular night, I get a knock at the door. I peer out the window and who's there? It's Eddie LeBlanc. It's Frankie California and it's Bobby Cash. [audience laughter] So, I look around, turn around about my sister and I'm ready to say, “Eileen--" Maybe I can tell Eileen to tell him I'm not here, but I can't really bring this to my sister's house. I did this myself. I have to take care of this myself.
So, summon all the courage I can get up, I open the door, I says, “What's up?” They says, “Anthony's in the car. He wants to speak to you.” I says, “Okay, let me get my jacket.” So, took off all my jewelry. I told Eileen, “I'll be back in a little while.” [audience laughter] We go down the driveway into the car. He says, “Get in the back. Anthony's in the back.” And Eddie LeBlanc, this scary individual, sits right next to me. Okay. But Anthony says, “Take off.” So, we take off down the road, nobody saying a word. Get on the Long Island Express. We're riding for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and nobody's saying a word. The silence is deafening. We're driving. My head is down. I try to speak to Anthony. I tell him, ‘The store this summer--” He don't want to hear about it. [audience laughter]
So, at this point, I don't really know what's going on. We're just driving and nobody's saying a word. So, finally, Anthony speaks. He goes, “Richie, you remember the IOU that we signed in my lawyer's office?” And I says, “Yes.” Again, I try to tell him about this and the summer came and the air condition. And he tells me to shut up. [audience laughter]
So, we're driving along and out of the corner of my eye, I see Anthony going like this. My stomach is flipping, my heart is racing, my head goes down even further. He comes out with the IOU and he goes, “Remember this IOU that you signed in my lawyer's office?” And I says, “Yeah, Anthony, but the summer--” Everybody starts laughing. He rips it up. He goes, “Richie, you're a standup guy. When you get the money, you take care of it. If you don't get it, don't worry about it. You look a little sick, are you all right?” [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
I said, “Yes, I'm fine, but I have a date tonight, Anthony. Could you get me home immediately?” [audience laughter] And with that, I was thinking the next time I went out to eat, it was in a diner. I didn't care who took care of me. I ate by myself, I paid with my own money and it was one of the best dinners I had in a long time. [audience cheers and applause]
I'll just stick to my guns, how I was brought up. If I want to make money, I'll do it, how I was raised to. That's work hard. Do it yourself. Don't count on anybody. Hard work in America will do the trick. That's my story.
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:16:05] That was Richie DiSalvo at a Moth night called New York Stories. Richie passed away a few years ago, but he'll always be remembered through his stories.
[upbeat music]
It's important to note The Moth is a place that was built and grown by an army. A wide-ranging community of dedicated staff, board members, storytellers, volunteers and listeners like you. Sprinkled through this 20th anniversary episode, we also have shoutouts from listeners, like this one from Mariella in Los Angeles.
Mariella: [00:16:44] Just wanted to wish you, guys, a happy anniversary and let you, guys, know doesn't matter what type of story it is, if it's a sad one, a happy one, a good one, a bad one, it always makes me cry. I feel so happy. I can totally get a sense of the people who are telling this story. And happy anniversary, guys.
Sarah: [00:17:07] After our break, a story from the dawn of time, when Google was invented, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
[upbeat music]
Jay: [00:17:40] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Sarah: [00:17:55] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin Jenness. And I'm your host. We're celebrating 20 years of Moth nights in this episode. We asked our listeners to call in and tell us their Moth moments, their favorite story or how they found The Moth. Here's one from Maya in San Mateo, California. And hey, it's honest.
Maya: [00:18:16] I actually discovered The Moth through hardcore stalking my therapist. When I first began to see her, I wanted to know more about her, so naturally I took to the Internet to help me out with that. There was this one video on her husband's Instagram, I believe, of them driving by a volcano and her husband was jokingly rubbing in her face that he had spotted the volcano first. She responded back that she was busy crying, which is why she missed it.
[00:18:49] It's definitely weird how much detail I remember about this video. And if she's listening, I am in for a very awkward next session. But in the caption of the video, there was a shout out to The Moth, because that was what they had been listening to, which is why they were crying. I was intrigued. So, I looked you, guys, up, fell in love and I've been a huge fan ever since.
Sarah: [00:19:14] Now, we hear that moth stories make people cry a lot. And okay, okay, it's true. Some do make people tear up, but come on, some are just very funny, like our next story from Jessi Klein. The story's about the dawn of Google with a shoutout to Craigslist. And a heads up, Jessi story does contain references to human sexuality.
[cheers and applause]
Here's Jessi, live at a Moth Mainstage at the New York Public Library.
Jessi: [00:19:43] Okie pokey. So, here it is, in August of 2001, me and my boyfriend of six years, my first love of my life, went through one of the worst breakups in the history of recorded man. I know that may sound naive or self-absorbed, and that's because it is. But I swear I was really, really bad. We worked together at the same company, but that's not where we met. We'd met in college when were both 18, 19 years old. When we met, I was this super, super nerdy virgin. I know it's hard to imagine, but I was really a nerd and I was really a virgin. He was this chubby almost virgin. You know what I mean? Like, he had a really fat face, and he had slept with someone for all intents and purposes. Anyway.
So, we both had really low self-esteem and that was part of what brought us together. It was like, “I feel crappy about myself. So, do I. Do you want to come over and have sex?” [audience laughter] So, that was part of the thing. But then, the magical thing that happened was we got in this relationship, we loved each other and we showered each other with affection and sex and love. And over time, we started to feel better about ourselves. So, at the end of the six years, we were both feeling okay and we were both secretly, independently wondering what it would be like to give having sex with someone else a go. You know what I mean? [audience laughter]
That's when the relationship began to crumble. Even though we still loved each other, we ended up breaking up and he asked me to move out of our shared house. I was devastated. But it was this devastated where you think you feel bad but something's going to happen that's going to make you feel worse. And for me, that was finding out that three weeks after I moved out, he started sleeping with his 22-year-old blonde assistant at the same company we worked at. She sat like five feet away from me. [audience laughter] Yeah, right?
I am normally a level headed human being. I went berserker. I didn't know how to handle this. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. Like, it was a month, part of six years was the worst thing. What made it even worse is she was absolutely like a Jewish girl's worst chics nightmare. You know what I mean? [audience laughter] She was blonde, she was petite, she was waify, she had a pert nose and no visible body hair. It was just like the worst thing. So, as a Jew, I hated her for being everything that I wasn't. But then, someone who was in the know told me that she was also a Jew. [audience laughter] And I was like, “Oh my God.” I was like, “How could like a member of my own tribe betray me this way.” [audience laughter]
The worst thing was that now, there was the potential for her to actually be neurotic and interesting. You know what I mean? I couldn't just imagine her as this emotionless wasp, which is what I had been thinking to make myself feel better. I know that it's wrong to ethnically stereotype people, but I feel like if you already hate them for really valid reasons already, it's okay. [audience laughter] It's all right. So, I was having a breakdown, just a total breakdown. But I was like, “Okay, I'm a normal human being. I will take the routes people can take to recover from this in a normal amount of time." So, I tried going to therapy to talk it out. Didn't work. I tried going to the gym to work it out. That didn't work. Instead, I fell into this depressive spiral where I couldn't think about anything. I was just ruled by these two horrible urges.
One was the urge to just sort of masochistically think about how much prettier she was than me and everything about her that was, I don't know, just so much more perfect and sexier and better. The other urge was that I needed to find out anything, something about her personality that would allow me to hate her, that would allow me to feel superior to her, some bit of dirt on her that would prove she was actually shitty. [audience laughter] That wasn't what I planned to say, but it's really what was here. [audience laughter]
So, one day, I'm whining on the phone to my friend Wendy, God bless Wendy. And I'm like, “Hey, [unintelligible [00:24:15] I wanted to hate her. I want to hate her. What can I find out to make her hate-able? And she was like, “Well, have you tried googling her>” [audience laughter] Now, I was a nerd, but I was not a geek. So, I didn't know what Google was. I didn't know. And I'm sure, right, you all know what it is. If there's one or two people here, I'll explain it. Google is the most powerful thing ever invented on the planet. [audience laughter] It is this insane search engine that allows you to be crazy and stalk someone from the comfort of your own home, right? [audience laughter] [audience applause]
It is a more important invention than fire or the wheel, [audience laughter] as far as I am concerned. So, she was like, “Why don't you google her?” And I was like, “Sure.” [audience laughter] I am going to Google the crap out of this girl, because I knew her name. So, I went to the little search window and I entered her name. I didn't understand the power of Google. So, I wasn't really expecting anything to happen. But within three seconds, this link comes up and it takes me to this article that had been an interview with her from her college newspaper her freshman year. It was like this thing where she was the campus celebrity of the day. Listen to this.
So, this thing comes up, there's a photo of her and it's the most adorable photo of a human being ever taken. She couldn't look blonder or more waspy Jewish. She's wearing lowrider sweatpants before anyone even knew about those and a thing with a cow on it. She's just in a 3/4 grade. Oh. And that drove me nuts and I was scared to move on to the article, but I did. It was an interview. And in the interview, she revealed that her greatest desire goal in life was to become a standup comic, a famous standup comic. And I was like, “Fuck me.” Because that was my secret goal. That was my goal. I had always wanted to do that since I was a kid, but I never had the guts, I'd never had the moxie to do it.
And here it was, I was reading, she was already in a sketch group. Oh, my God. I was like, “So, okay.” So, she looks waspy, but she's Jewish. She's banging my boyfriend and she's already apparently on her way to achieving my dream. This cannot stand. I decided if we were both aiming for the moon, we both have the same goal, I was like, “I'm getting there first,” So, I start to perform. It's the ironic thing, I've never been more miserable in my life and I start trying to write jokes and go perform. I'm going to open mics, and it's depressing and I hate it.
But over time, it's slowly improving. I get to do book shows. So, it goes from two or three depressing open mics to four or five okay shows a week. But all along, I'm still just manically depressed, and I'm googling her endlessly and looking at the picture. And that picture became the focal point not only of my loathing for her, but my loathing for myself. I literally five or six times a day would just stare at that photo and I felt terrible at myself. My therapist was like, “If you don't stop googling her, [audience laughter] I'm going to call your doctor and put you on Prozac.”
I didn't want to go on Prozac because I was scared that one of the side effects of Prozac would be that I would become less witty. And being witty was the only side effect of being depressed that was working for me. You know what I mean? [audience laughter] [audience applause]
No, you really should not clap. But so, I decided to keep performing and I'm not going to go on Prozac yet. So, I'm performing. So, one day, I'm doing this show. It's at a slightly better place than I usually do it. I'm watching the audience stream in, filling in before the show starts. And who walks in but her. She comes in. The show had been advertised in Time Out New York. My name, it was very clear. She must have known I was going to be there. I was like, “What kind of weird drive by shit is this?” [audience laughter] Because she sat in the front row. It was clear. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I felt so terrible.” I was looking at her, she was pretty. I barely could go on. It just so upset me. I managed to do it and I ran out as soon as I was done, I ran home because I needed to have my nightly loathe fest with the photo. I'm sitting, I was just like, “How could she do it?”
I'm about to Google her. All of a sudden, it occurs to me maybe the reason she came there is because she's also obsessed with me. I'm the girl before she's dating this guy. I was with him for six years. So, she must be curious, must be driving her crazy. And I was like, [gasps] “What if she's googling me?” [audience laughter] I don't know why it had never occurred to me to try googling myself. I think I thought there was a rule against it or something, [audience laughter] or that the computer would implode, the self-absorption wouldn't be handled.
But I was like, “I'm going to do it.” I type my name in, I Google myself. And to my shock and amazement, there's shit there on the computer about me. I didn't put it there. It's all stuff about performing. It's all links to advertising for shows I had done, stuff that was still there. One or two just really brief, nice mentions about things. It just briefly made me feel better. I realized that it was the only antidote to the feelings I had when I would Google her was to Google myself and that's how I became obsessed with googling myself.
Here's the thing about Googling yourself. It's as dirty as it sounds. You know what I mean? You have this urge to do it, but you don't want anyone to know you're doing it. [audience laughter] But the thing is, people deny it, but everyone does it. You know what I mean? But I would Google myself, I would look at things, I would see if anything new was coming up, blah, blah, blah. So, anyway, I couldn't stop. I was googling her and googling myself, googling her and googling myself. Feeling bad, feeling good. Okay.
So, one day, I do a show at Irving Plaza. It was like this big thing. Do the show, next day, normal stuff. Come home, Google myself. [audience laughter] Want to check in, want to check in. Something new pops up and it's this thing, the heading. It's this link. It says funny Girl. I'm like, “What's this?” I click on it and it takes me to Craigslist. Yes. Do we know what Craigslist is? If anyone here doesn't know, it's this hippie dippy bulletin board. People renting apartments and giving each other bikes. [audience laughter]
But there's this thing on it called Missed Connections, and that's what Funny Girl was from. And Missed Connections, is that, on the back of the voice, when people see each other on the street and you're walking down the street, you see someone cute or whatever, and you don't have the guts to talk to them and then the next day you write something like, “Hey, I saw you on 6th Avenue and 8th Street. You were wearing a Metallica T shirt. I like Metallica. Please call me,” like that. [audience laughter]
It's like billions of them. That's what Funny Girl was. Someone wrote, “They'd seen me at the Irving Plaza show. It was like, Funny Girl. Like, “Hey, Jesse Klein, I saw you at the show and I thought you were really adorable. I wanted to talk to you afterwards, but I didn't have the guts. You can email me.” This is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me my entire life. I've never had someone just like me without putting a lot of work into it. Like, when I used to want to hook up with guys, it was a huge exertion of personality, which was exhausting. It's exhausting to have a personality.
So, okay. Anyway, so, there was, like, take a couple of days to think about it. In the space of those few days, I continued to Google myself more shit start popping up on Craigslist about me. The second thing was from a totally different guy. And he's like, “I saw you performing, but this one was creepy. It wasn't as brief and adorable.” It was like, “Ugh.” That's when I was like, “Yeah, maybe the people on Craigslist missed connections are not dating material. But it could be funny material for the stage, because it's really the greatest website ever.”
So, I started doing this bit all around town about Craigslist and missed connections. I found out that when I did it, by saying it, I was inviting every delinquent loon to my little app, because people would email me, because they knew I looked at it. And stuff kept popping up and popping up. What I didn't immediately know, was that a lot of it was from my friends. Because once I told them about the first two, they were like, “Ha-ha. Wouldn't it be funny to fake her out?” So, it was like these decoys.
But I didn't care, because if you looked on Craigslist, it looked like I was hot shit for a week. [audience laughter] I was like, “Awesome.” But one day, it's within this special two weeks, I get back to my office from lunch and I have a voicemail on my phone from a man who identifies himself as a writer for the fucking New Yorker. And he says, “Hello.” He's like, “I've seen all this stuff about you on Craigslist. [audience laughter] I would like to write a talk of the town piece about you and this crazy trend. Please call me.” Oh, my God. [audience laughter] What better revenge on the ex-boyfriend than for them to read an article in the New Yorker about the fact that I am hot, and I am funny and I have groupies. Oh, my God. [audience laughter]
And I was like, “I did it.” I called him. It was done deal. I was like, “How's it feel down there, bitch, with no one writing about you in the New Yorker, the most legitimate publication ever?” I've won. I've won. I'm on the moon. But then, something happened, which was that the article didn't happen. [audience laughter] Oh, she loves the pity. No, it didn't happen. I don't even remember why it didn't happen. He was very nice on the phone. He called me to pitch it to his editor. For some reason, he couldn't get it through. I was really nice on the phone back. I was like, “That's okay. Don't worry. Okay, fine.” I hang up. I was more disappointed than I'd ever been in my life and I started bawling, bawling having a breakdown, bawling, crying.
During that bawl fest, I had this epiphany where I left my body. It's like, my soul suddenly was like, “I can't take it.” I left my body. I floated up to the top of the office. I looked down. I was like, “Let's take a lay of land here.” I'm in my office where I have not done any work for my employer in about six months, because I've been diddling myself on the internet constantly. [audience laughter] And I'm crying. I'm crying and I'm disappointed. But why? Not because I didn't get the article in the New Yorker, but because the ex-boyfriend wouldn't read it.
It was like at that second, it all just dawned on me that in the years since the breakup, I'd become so obsessed with being in this race to make other people laugh that I'd lost my ability to laugh at myself. I was like, “If I could just regain the ability to step back and look at all the crazy things I've been doing since this thing happened, I would be a better comic.” Like, “This would be material. This is much funnier than anything I've been trying to write. And moreover, I would be a happier person.” [sighs] So, that's what I did. I've become a better comic and I've become a happier person. I've been dating this guy that I really like. I don't look at that girl's picture anymore, but he and I Google each other constantly. Thank you very much.
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:35:41] That was Jessi Klein. Jessi is well known for her role as head writer and executive producer on the Emmy award winning show, Inside Amy Schumer. She's also the author of the memoir, You'll Grow Out of It.
Over the years, The Moth has connected lots of people, including Jessi and her husband actually. After hearing one of Jessi's stories on The Moth Radio Hour years ago, a young man thought, “Hmm, she sounds super.” And yes, her now husband googled her and asked her out on a date. The rest is history.
[upbeat music]
After the break, a story set in South Africa that was told at a Moth night to coincide with the 71st UN General Assembly. It's a contemporary story about things that are happening right in front of us right now, coming up next on The Moth Radio Hour.
[upbeat music]
Jay: [00:36:50] The Moth Radio hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Sarah: [00:37:04] I'm Sarah Austin Jenness. And you're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. We're up to our final story as part of this celebration to mark 20 years of Moth nights. Over that time, we've heard about the milestones in many people's lives and in the world.
The story coming up reminds us of the importance of bearing witness. It's from our Global Community Program, which has now expanded to the global south, elevating stories on world issues. Sisonke Msimang told this at a Moth night at Lincoln Center during the 71st UN General Assembly.
[cheers and applause]
The night celebrated women and girls from around the world. Here's Sisonke, live at The Moth.
Sisonke: [00:37:47] So, I am the product of a freedom fighter and an accountant, which I guess would make me a pragmatic idealist. [audience chuckles] My father left South Africa when he was 21 years old to join the armed wing of the liberation struggle. A few years later, he met my mother-- Well, she wasn't my mother at the time, but he met an accounting student, a young accounting student, who was charming and beautiful and the rest, as they say, is history.
So, when we were growing up, my parents used to say things like, “When we are free, one day when freedom comes, when liberation is here. And our favorite would be when Nelson Mandela is released from jail.” My sisters and I would look at each other and be like, “Yeah, right. That's ever going to happen. [audience laughter] Nelson Mandela is going to get out of jail.” Of course, he did. And not only did he get out of jail, but actually he was the first President of a free and democratic South Africa.
And so, fast forward, it's the mid-1990s. My family is back, I'm back from university and I've landed my first job. It's actually my dream job. I'm working for the United Nations on a program on young people and HIV and AIDS. And so, of course, it's a pragmatic idealist dream come true. [audience laughter] On the one hand, it's the UN, so it's like love, peace and happiness. And on the other hand, let's face it, the UN is the world's biggest bureaucracy. So, it's rules and systems and procedures, and I'm in heaven, both [audience laughter] at the same time in one place. So, it's great. So, it's great.
So, I'm very happy. I'm also really excited, because I get to throw myself into my new country and this new job all at the same time. Because by this time, it's clear to me that while my parents’ generation, for them, the struggle was one to end white minority rule. For my generation, the struggle is going to be slightly different. For us, it's going to be the tangibles. It's going to be health and education and water and sanitation, the things that you need to know stuff about. So, I throw myself into reading and research and trying to figure out as much as I can, because I'm the pragmatic idealist. So, I've got to figure out how to do this stuff.
And so, I can tell you everything about HIV and AIDS and young people, because that's what my new job is about. I can tell you about the key elements of a plan for the syndromic management of STIs. I can tell you how many young women living in the northern KwaZulu-Natal district of [unintelligible [00:40:35] age 15 to 19 are living with HIV. I can tell you the likelihood of HIV transition and a single sex act. Like, I am on it. [audience laughter]
And then, of course, I meet Prudence. So, I'm sitting in my office one morning, no doubt, with my head buried in some or other research report, and this whirling dervish of a mad dreadlocked teeth and joy and laughter person plunks herself in front of me. She introduces herself. Like me, she's a young woman who's working for the UN. While I was working on a program on young people and AIDS, Pru was working-- She was one of the first people living openly with HIV and AIDS in South Africa. And so, she was working for the UN to help to reduce stigma in the workplace. So, she was hired to demonstrate to employers that people living with HIV aren't going to bite, and that you can actually hire people living with HIV and there's going to be no negative consequences for you or your bottom line.
And so, we had a lot in common. And so, we hung out, not just in the office, but on weekends. There were concerts and there were plays, and South Africa was this amazing new blossoming place with this fantastic new constitution. Everybody had rights. Pru and her mad group of friends were all lesbians, which was fantastic for me, because my cool points shot up a 1,000%. [audience laughter] So, it was wonderful. It was great. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. But of course, it wasn't as simple as things seemed on the surface.
After some time, it became clear to me that Prudence was in a very violent and abusive relationship. And so, I pulled her aside and I was like, “Pru, what's going on, man? You're the most confident, amazing woman I know what's happening.” She's like “Eh, eh.” “It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, because what's going to happen is you need to get out of this relationship, and the way you're going to get out of that is you're going to move in with us. There's plenty of space in our house. Come and live with us.”
And so, before you knew it, Pru was living with us. And of course, there wasn't a lot of space, so she was living in my room. Actually, she was not just staying in her room, she was staying in her bed. So, we were chatter, chatter, chatter late into every night, and we would get up in the morning and go to the office exhausted, because we were talking so much. Twice a week, because Prudence had managed to wangle her way into this experimental drug treatment program, because these were the days before antiretrovirals were widely available, twice a week, we would get on the highway from Pretoria where we lived, and drive to Johannesburg to the doctor's office where she would have the meds.
I remember the first time we got to the doctor's office, I parked and I took the key out of the ignition, ready to get out, and Pru was like, “You stay here.” And I'm like, “Oh, but we do everything together.” “Okay, okay, okay, stay in the car.” And so, Pru went in and the drive back was in silence. There was no talking. And so, this happened twice a week, every week for a few weeks. After a couple of weeks, the meds were clearly starting to have their effects on her. We got to the doctor's office one morning and she needed help. There were two steps to walk up to get into the doctor's practice, and so she needed some help. And so, I got out to help her. Inside, secretly, I'm like, “I'm feeling really bad that she's not feeling well, but thank God I get to go inside, because now I see what's going on in there.”
So, we go inside. It's the small little room, and it's about 12 to 15 people who are sitting in that room and it's this deathly silence. Contrary to what all the headlines were telling us at that time about what AIDS looked like, AIDS is a black disease, AIDS is a gay disease, AIDS is a disease of poverty. Actually, this room didn't look like that at all. It was a fairly affluent, middle-class room. But it was clear that nobody in that room wanted to be there. So, it was this deathly silence. And so, we crept in, and we sat down and people would be called one by one. The receptionist called this name, and it was first names only, and she called Alice. Prue stands up and she goes inside, and I'm like, “Huh.”
She comes back out after about 30 minutes or so, and we go back into the car and we start making the long, silent trek back to Pretoria. And so, I'm driving. I look at her and I say, “What's he like?” And Pru says, “What's who like?” And I said, “The doctor, what's he like?” She looked at me for a long moment and she said, “He won't touch me without gloves on.” I realized that my friend, my brave, courageous, amazing friend, who is openly living with HIV in a time when people are getting killed for that, who is an out lesbian at a time when women were getting killed for that, still are, actually, that she's also petrified and vulnerable and ashamed of herself. That's not a contradiction. That's all of us. That's life. It's all happening at the same time.
And so, in that moment, Pru taught me a really powerful and important lesson, a lesson that I have carried with me in 20 years as an activist and as an ally with people living with HIV and AIDS. It was a lesson that was basically that it was fine to be a pragmatic idealist, that pragmatism is good and idealism is good. But that what I was missing was empathy. And that if I was going to make any difference, that I wasn't actually listening to what Pru was saying, I was listening, but I wasn't listening enough, and that if I was going to make any kind of impact and if I was going to be the advocate that I wanted to be, that what I was going to have to do was listen not just to the words of people like Prudence, but much more importantly, I needed to listen to the silences.
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:47:29] That was Sisonke Msimang, live at Lincoln Center. Sisonke writes a column in South Africa's daily Maverick newspaper. She's working on a book about belonging and identity. And with that, we've reached the end of our anniversary hour. Boy, that went fast, this episode and 20 years. Before we go, one more listener's tribute art from Santa Ana, California.
Santa Ana: [00:47:56] To me, The Moth reaffirms at the most primal level the human experience, all the highs and all the lows. I have a good friend who's a family physician. And he says the best diagnostic tool he's ever come across is out of a book called The Exquisite Risk, which says some Native American tribes would ask four questions. When was the last time you danced? When was the last time you sang? When was the last time you told your story and when was the last time you listened to the story of another? I just want to say thank you for covering at least half of that.
Sarah: [00:48:37] And thank you for telling and listening with The Moth for the last 20 years. And remember to sing and dance too, for good measure.
That's it for The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll all join us next time.
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Jay: [00:49:12] Your host this hour was Sarah Austin Jenness. Catherine Burns, Larry Rosen and Leah Tao directed the stories in the show. The rest of The Moth’s directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Lou Ly. Special thanks to Lawrence Fiorelli, Delia Bloom and Casey Donahue.
The Moth would like to thank the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their support of The Moth Community Program, along with Andrew Quinn and Rachael Strecher from the Aspen Institute. The Moth would also like to thank everyone who has ever worked, interned or volunteered with us, from our board members to our talented and tireless staff, to people who have manned the theater doors and handed out programs. And we thank our storytellers and all those who threw their name in the hat and haven't yet been picked at one of our StorySLAMs around the world. Thanks to our talented musicians, our incomparable Moth hosts, our collaborators and friends, the hundreds of public radio stations who air this show and all of our national partners and crews for the Mainstage and StorySLAM series.
So, Moth Stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Evan Christopher, Nightmares on Wax, Tom McDermott and The Batteries Duo. 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 National Endowment for the Arts. Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.