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The Moth
A World of Difference: Sofija Stefanovic & Andy Fischer-Price
00:31:15
In this episode of the podcast we share two stories of the world leaving it's mark on us. Sofija Stefanovic leaves her communist Serbian roots behind for a new life abroad, and Andy Fischer-Price has a chapter of his family's history reopened.
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- [00:00]
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Apple Representative
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Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and today we have an episode featuring two stories all about the places that we go that shape our lives, those places that are forever sort of embedded in us. First up is a story that I love. It's from Sophia Stefanovich. She shared this story at a show we did here in New York City, a main stage show late last year. The theme of the night was Hellbent. Here's Sophia Stefanovich live at the mall.
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Sophia Stefanovich
So I was five years old when I left Belgrade. My dad had left a couple of weeks before us, so it was just me and my mother and my newborn sister. And we were leaving Yugoslavia and going to our new home in Australia with a fuel stop in Singapore. And at the airport, my grandma Xenia held my face in her hands and she said, you will never see grandma again. And when my face crumpled at this, she said by way of consolation, that's because I'm very old and I will probably die soon. So the last time that we had been at the airport had been under happier circumstances. We were going for vacation in Croatia. But now there were tensions between the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Serbia, where we were from. And some people, including my dad, thought that there might even be a War. Which is why instead of going for one hour to a place that we knew and loved, we were picking up all of our things and traveling for about 30 hours to the other side of the world to start our lives again. And in the plane, I cried a lot. Not just because of what Grandma had said, but because I really liked my life up until then. Like, I really liked the little communal yard where I would play with the kids from the surrounding buildings. And I loved how in the winter, Belgrade smelled like snow and cigarettes and chestnuts. And I loved that all our family and friends lived there. And I was scared about going somewhere new. And so for the first half of the journey, I basically cried and vomited and pulled on my mother's sleeve while she tried to get my newborn sister to sleep. And finally we landed for a fuel stop in Singapore. And we kind of miserably trudged out of the plane and hit this. Like, we went through this tunnel, this air conditioned tunnel, and suddenly we were at Singapore Airport. And that is the moment that my life as I knew it completely changed. So my first five years had been spent in socialist Yugoslavia, and I had loved it. But that's because I had never been to Singapore Airport. And it was amazing. Welcome to capitalism. I realized that actually my whole life up until that moment had sucked and that this was the best place on earth. So I forgot about Grandma and Yugoslavia and all that stuff. And I just started taking in all of the things around me. And my mum said, wow, it's as clean as a pharmacy, which is what we say in Serbian when a place is clean. And I had to agree with her. It was like we had been plopped into one of the Disney films that my dad used to get for me on the black market. And then she said you could eat off the floor. And I had to agree. Like, I felt like actually doing it. I felt like getting on my butt and kind of like sliding across the beautiful gleaming tiles. I wanted to jump on the escalators and travel up and down, singing and dancing to the beautiful music that was playing everywhere that we went. I was kind of amazed that no one else was marveling in the way that we were. And my mum said, look, orchids. And I looked around, and actually everywhere, like, every few steps, there were these beautiful flowers growing out of planters. And I realized that my life, you know, that the world was this big and beautiful place, and that I had been confined to this small gray corner of it up until now. And everything smelled like perfume. And copying my mother, I put my Wrist out. And this beautiful Singaporean woman in a suit like spritzed us with perfume. And we walked around looking at these beautiful glass fronted stores that had this beautiful colorful apparel in them. And there were these massive screens everywhere. And on the screens there were ads for all the latest stuff that you could get, like entertainment systems and shoes and Walkmans. And then this ad came up that just stopped me dead in my tracks. And on this screen there was this ad and there were these little kids about my age and they were all like laughing and having this great time while this tiny, gorgeous squiggly worm toy just like wriggles around everywhere. And I was just watching this ad and up close, the worm, its face is really beautiful and pointy and it has these little googly eyes and this soft pink fur. And it's the most amazing thing I've seen. And apparently at that moment, my mother becomes an immediate convert to consumer culture because she grabs my hand and we march over to the currency exchange counter and she slams down her Yugoslavian dinars, gets some dollars. We go into a store and she buys me the worm. Now, this is pretty unheard of. I know that if my dad had been there, there would have been an argument between them. There would have been a discussion about money and how we didn't have much and how we were moving to a whole new country that was expensive, but with just us there. My mother doesn't even look at the price tag. She just gets the worm and buys it for me. And on the plane I'm trembling with excitement. I'm not thinking about grandma anymore or any of that stuff that has happened in the past. I'm just thinking about how as soon as we take off, I get to open this box and the worm comes in this little round box and I open it up and it's kind of coiled inside and I touch it and its fur feels like the softest feathers. And I whisper to it in like one of the three English words that I know. So I say girl, girl. And I expect it to kind of come to life and start wriggling around like in the ad. And my mom's kind of looking at me with this weird expression because I guess she thought that I was smart. And she explains to me that the worm isn't in fact alive, but that it has this little invisible string that's attached to it and that's how it moves around. And so once I get the hang of this, it does actually move around in this adorable way that it had done on the ad. And when I get the hang of it, I kind of get the attention of this little boy across the aisle in the plane. And I stick my arm out and I make the worm crawl up it. And he watches very solemnly, suitably impressed. And I think, this is pretty, pretty amazing. Like, I decide I'm going to carry this little worm around in my pocket like a gorgeous fuzzy secret. I start to think about my life in Australia, and I think maybe the kids will love me. I imagine this beautiful classroom with these little kids, and I imagine them saying to each other, wow, did you see that new magic girl? And I'll be standing there with my worm, the new kid on the block. And on the plane, I practice the three English words I know. So girl and hello and tomorrow. And I think this is the start of my new life. And I think that we can agree it's a pretty good start. Meanwhile, my mother, she puts her arm around my shoulders and she wipes tears from her eyes and looks out the window as we travel further and further away from our little world. Cut to the present day. I'm in my new home in New York, pregnant, having another consumer experience in which basically, I'm being sold things left, right, and center. And I'm panicking because I think that I'm not going to be a good mother in advance. That if I don't buy a machine that heats up butt wipes for babies, or if I don't buy this special mobile with elephants that speak in French and sing. And the more I'm stressing about this, I suddenly remember the best toy that I ever had, which was the worm. I've got my computer in front of me and I Google magic fuzzy worm, and it comes up immed. So remember when I first saw this worm? It was like the best thing that I had seen in my entire life. And now I feel very confronted because this image that has come up in front of me, the worm looks really crap. Like, it just looks like this piece of matted fuzz with this piece of fishing wire coming off it and these little eyes that are stuck on with, like, bits of glue coming off the side of them. And the image is so disturbing to me that I kind of don't even know what to do with it. I'm really upset by it. So I immediately pick up the phone to call my mother in Australia, even though it's the middle of the night, but this is an emergency, so I call her up and she picks up and I say, hey, mom, do you remember that worm that you got Me at Singapore Airport. And she says, of course I do. And I say, well, I have just found it on the Internet and it looks really terrible and I can't believe that I loved it so much. And my voice does this involuntary wobble because I'm thinking about how much I loved the worm at the time and how pathetic it all seems now. And there's a little pause and my mum says, impossible. The worm that we got in Singapore was wonderful. You must be looking at a completely different worm. And then I think back to that time and I remember me crying, and then Singapore airport, and how impressed I was by this worm. And for the first time, I think about what it would have been like for my mother. And I realized that she was also leaving her whole world behind. And we were traveling to a whole new country, a whole new language. She was leaving behind everyone, Grandma, who happened to be her mother. And it must have been really frightening for her as well. But she didn't let on. She kept it together. And even more than that, she managed to offer me a distraction and make me less scared in that moment. And for some reason, like even now, decades later, when I have called her as this distressed adult who's waddling around on the other side of the world, my mother is still trying to protect me by keeping them myth of the Worm alive. And for some reason, I think of that Belinda Carlisle song, Somewhere in my heart I'm always dancing with you in the summer rain. And I remember me at the airport and my young mother holding my hand. And I think about how when we got to Australia, the kids didn't actually love me. Like those three words didn't really help me out much. I got laughed at and I got bullied and kids called me stupid and dummy and things like that because I couldn't speak English. And I know that I can't actually protect my future kid from the world. Like, I'm sure that he'll get teased because maybe he'll have big ears like his dad or he'll have a big nose like me. And there are plenty of far worse things that he's going to have to learn about in the world that I can't protect him from. But what I can do is offer some sort of protection in the form of that magic that my mother offered me. A way of seeing the world as a wonderful place instead of just a frightening place. And I know that it works because somewhere in my heart, that worm is still dancing like it did that day. And it is still the most magical thing that I have seen. Thank you.
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Dan Kennedy
Great story there from Sofia Stefanovic. The thing I love about Sofia when she tells a story is you can tell some of these stories are epic and you can tell that a big emotion is just around the corner. And I always feel like with Sophia, we're in good hands. Like, you will come from this moment that is just this most heartfelt, beautiful, simple observation about life. And right around the corner from that, there will be this wonderful, warm, huge smile, this joke, this humorous observation. And it never feels like just cheap comedy. It never feels like it's there for effect. Both of the moments feel equally weighted and equally honest. And it sort of makes it feel like we're going to be all right if we have a huge feeling there's going to be something around the corner that makes us smile and comforts us. Sofia Stefanovic is a Serbian Australian writer living in New York. She hosts this Alien Nation, which is a monthly celebration of immigration. She also hosts the best selling literary salon Women of Letters New York. She has a memoir that's about to be published and it's called Miss X Yugoslavia. It features stories about warlords, beauty queens and everything in between. The story that we just heard actually is in this book as well. It's called Miss X Yugoslavia. So check it out. It's going to come out April 17th and it'll be available everywhere. Books are sold. Up next, a story from Andy Fisher Price. He told this at a Moth main stage in Breckenridge, Colorado, in 2016. The theme of the night was into the Wild. Here's Andy Fisher Price live at the Moth.
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Andy Fisher Price
When I was a little kid and people would ask me what my parents did for a living, I would say, my mom's a pilot and my dad's a mountain climber. And that was actually true. My mom was a captain for Alaska Airlines, and my dad had climbed K2 and Mount Everest without oxygen. And his company, Mountain Madness, specialized in getting their clients to summit the highest mountains in the world. And then three days before my ninth birthday, I woke up to the sound of my mom sobbing in the hallway. And I jumped out of bed. And I somehow just knew to ask, did dad die? And she said, yeah, honey, they can't get him off the mountain. My father was Scott Fisher. He's the American guide on what's now referred to as the 1996 Everest disaster, in which unexpected storm struck Mount Everest in the peak of climbing season and caused eight people to die in 24 hours. It was a news story that kind of just didn't go away that year as 9 year old me and my 5 year old sister Katie were trying to comprehend and adjust to this new life where we no longer had a dad. And the world's focus on this story continued as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air was published and quickly became a number one best seller. And Krakauer was critical of some of the decisions my dad made as a guide and for being a part of the commercialization of the climbing of Mount Everest, where amateur climbers pay a professional like my dad a lot of money to be taken up to the top of the highest mountain in the world. I was just a little kid when Into Thin Air came out. But I always kind of got this squirmy feeling when, when I'd see it in bookstores or on the shelves of homes that I would visit. It was kind of the ubiquitous book of that time, kind of like the Da Vinci Code in the early 2000s. And into thin Air was so successful that they just cranked out a made for TV version of it about a year after the book came out. I wasn't allowed to watch that, but I remember hearing my mom crying and cursing through the walls of my bedroom the night that it aired. And then some years later, I was, I think I was in middle school and I was up late with my little sister. We were watching TV and we noticed that it was on and I think we felt like we were doing something naughty like watching an X rated movie or something. But we were just a couple of kids watching an actor play their dad as the guy who's so arrogant and dumb that even at the beginning of the movie, you know, he's not going to make it. And they gave him this catchphrase. He would button his scenes by throwing his arms up in the air and saying, I'm invincible. I think we just felt embarrassed for each other and for our whole family and for dad. And so we got weirded out and we changed the channel to something else. But we switched back just in time to watch him die. And they did a slow dramatic zoom in on his face and he stuttered out his last words, I'm invincible. And Katie and I had kind of a hard time figuring out what this was all about because the Scott Fisher we knew was just the coolest person ever. All of our friends loved him and our friend's parents became his friends. And after he died, everyone close to him was telling us, you know, what an amazing person he was and what a great friend he had been and how hilarious and helpful he was, and how many people he had saved in the mountains. And it seemed like everybody was constantly telling us, man, he loved you kids. He loved you kids so much, and we missed him so much. So I was just struggling to figure out why this movie had made him out to look like this cocky idiot who seemed deserving of his fate. And I started to wonder, is this what the rest of the world thought he was like? And then I started to wonder if any of that was true. So normally when somebody loses a parent, it's a really big deal for the first few months, the first year even, and then it kind of just fades away and becomes a painful part of that person's past that nobody really talks about. But in our case, our dad had become a character in all these articles and in five books and now this movie. So it just. It took a lot longer for it to fade away, but it eventually did. And then a couple years ago, I got a text from a friend saying, andy, Jake Gyllenhaal is playing your dad in a movie. And she had, like, five exclamation points at the end of it. And I was not stoked to hear that because it meant that it was going to be reopening this chapter that my family had thought was closed. We didn't think that there was going to be another version of the same story where Scott Fisher, the character, dies at the end. But I went to see Everest last year at the AMC 16 in Burbank. And overall, it really was not nearly as terrible or as offensive as that first movie had been. But I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't think it was cool. And I still felt sick watching his death scene. I personally don't know anyone else besides my sister who's watched two different actors play their dad die on screen. A couple weeks before the movie had come out, Katie and I had lunch with a client on my dad's 96 trip. And she had actually been the one who paid for the construction of his chorten, which is a. It's a stone monument that Sherpas build to remember climbers who passed away in the Himalayas. And we told her that we'd seen pictures of it for years. It's on the trek up to Everest base Camp. But we just had never found the money or the time to get out to see it for ourselves. And she couldn't believe that we'd never been there. And so she said, you guys gotta go. I'll pay for your flights. You need to see it. And so two Weeks later I'm on a flight to Nepal and before we know it, we're hiking in the Himalayan mountains and we see our first glimpse of Mount Everest. And I think I had expected, I almost wanted that to be an emotional experience because we were looking at our father's grave site for the first time, not in a picture. And the whole trip felt like it was supposed to be this significant pilgrimage where we are reconnecting with our father. But I almost had to push away some feelings of guilt because Katie and I were just having so much fun. You know, we were best friends and we don't really get to see each other that often. So we were just hiking around, having a great old hilarious time in the most beautiful place on the planet. And then the night before we ended up making our ascent to see the Chorten. We bought WI Fi at our lodge for 700 rupees. And we stumbled across this article. I was interviewing a really good friend of my dad's, another client on the 96th trip, Dale Cruz. And Dale had gotten altitude sickness high up on the mountain. And my dad turned him around and accompanied him back down to Base Camp, saving his life. But instead of resting and staying down at Base Camp like he probably should have, my dad turned around and he met up with the rest of his team high up on Everest. And many people believe that that extra trip down and then up is what led to his exhaustion and then ultimately his death. And when Dale heard that his friend Scott didn't make it back alive, he ran all the way from Base Camp down to the airport, condensing what's normally a five day trek into a one day sprint. And the article quoted him as saying, his picture's still on our refrigerator. Pictures of him next to Everest and the other mountains we've climbed. He was one of my best friends and he helped save my life. And we had read the article out loud and out of nowhere we both were crying because, I don't know, the significance of the trip had found us after all. And the next morning was the only day on our entire trek that it snowed. And we'd heard that the views from where we were were supposed to be amazing. But all we could see was this dull white because we were essentially hiking inside of a giant cloud. And we walk up what seems like this endless hill and finally the ground levels out and we see just hundreds and hundreds of chortons. And I thought about how each one was remembering a different person who had just taken a trip into the mountains and never come Back. And then I saw my dad's. It was bigger than most of the other ones, this big painted white boulder. And on it was this plaque that said, in memory of Scott Eugene Fisher. And up until that point, I really had thought that I had fully grieved my father, that the process had completed itself years ago. And I felt proud of my perspective on it because I wasn't a victim of my dad's death anymore. It had happened. And so then, for whatever reason, it had to have happened. But as soon as I saw that monument, I just got pummeled by this wave of grief. It was like my body was acknowledging the passing of somebody who was directly responsible for my existence. And all of the articles and the books and the movies, the simulations and the stories of his death, none of them had ever been as real as just staring at that rock. And it occurred to us that he's still parenting us, because if he had been an insurance salesman who died in a car accident, we would never have found ourselves staring at his memorial stone in Nepal. And I don't know that I'll ever really get to know who he was as a person. Katie and I are still learning about him by discovering qualities that we share that don't seem to come from Mom. And I definitely will never know what exactly happened on Mount Everest in 1996. But standing there that day with my little sister, we knew that he was still our father. And he's still gone. Thank you.
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Dan Kennedy
Beautiful story there from Andy Fisher Price. I remember just last summer, early in the summer, we were touring that story as part of the main stage show. And we had just finished doing a show in Vancouver and we were out to dinner and Andy told me about a book. He actually made an excellent observation. He said one thing that bothers him is most of what is written about his father's life is focusing on the story of the last week or the last couple weeks of his life. Obviously, Into Thin Air was just about that, about the Everest expedition. And Andy told me about a book called Mountain Madness. It's by Robert Burkeby. And that book actually focuses on the years leading up to the Everest climb. So you have, however, 40 something years of Scott Fisher's life where you get to see all the beautiful moments, all of the successes, all the times. He was a warm father, a great husband, and just an incredibly fun soul. Just a really spirited guy. And I can't say enough about starting the story of Scott Fisher from that starting point. It's called Mountain Madness. Thanks for the recommendation for that book. Andy and thanks for sharing your story with the Moth. Andy Fisher Price is an LA based musician. He's a songwriter and also a semi retired actor who lives with his black Labrador, Poppy. He frequently tours as a bassist and vocalist for the band Smoky Nights. Those guys are finalizing mixes of their new album, doesn't have a title yet, but it is coming out in early 2019. And he's also a dedicated pareidolia photographer and you can check out his work on his Instagram for that stuff. Also, for pictures from this story, just Visit our site themoth.org.
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Sophia Stefanovich
Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock.
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Intuit Sponsor
On and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller.
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Dan Kennedy
With the Moth Podcast, production by Timothy Lou Lee. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.