Andrew Solomon (3:11)

My senior year of high school, I decided it was time for things to change. My braces were off, I got contact lenses, my skin started to clear up, and my yearbook quote was, hi ho, the Glamorous Life. And I needed a summer job. And I applied for several jobs, including a job in the editorial department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that I didn't think I'd get because I knew there were a vast number of people competing for it. And to my total delight, I did get it. And I thought, my intellect. My intellect is going to change the world, and they can tell. So I. So I got to my first day there, and I went into the office of the woman who had hired me, and I noticed that the thank you note I'd sent her after our interview was on her little bulletin board behind her desk. And I said, polly, that's so touching that you've put up the thank you note that I wrote to you. And she said, you know, there were 200 applicants for this job, and basically what this job involves is filing, proofreading, and Xeroxing. And any idiot could do it. But your thank you note was on my favorite color of blue paper. So I decided that I'd give you the job. So indeed, the next few days were taken up with filing and xeroxing and an occasional little bit of copy editing. And I was given a desk in a room at the back of the editorial department where there were many other people with many other desks. And because of the architecture of that part of the museum, I had a sort of triangular piece of wall space over my desk with a nail sticking out of it. And I thought, I should hang something up there. I should hang up something in a frame. So I got home that night to dinner with my parents, and I said, there's a nail sticking out of the wall right above my desk, and I really should take something in to hang there. Something in a frame. Well, in my father's bachelor days, he had been a great fan of an opera singer named Luba Velic. And when he met my mother, he had a photograph of Luba Velic as Tosca that was hanging in his apartment. And when they got married, she said that she did not want photos of other women all over the apartment, but that he could hang Lubavelic in the bathroom if he wanted to. So all my life, my parents had a Photograph of Lubavelic in their bathroom. And that summer they were making some repairs in their bathroom. And so my father said, well, you can have Luba if you want to. So off I went to the Metropolitan Museum with my picture. And I hung it over my desk, and there it was. And three days later, the chairman of the editorial department. With whom I had until then had no interaction whatsoever. Came back into the room to get something. And suddenly this booming voice rang out. When she sang Rosalinda, New York laughed. When she sang Dona Anna, New York cried. And when she sang Salome, New York was speechless. Is that your photograph? He said. And I said, yes, thinking I could carry it off that I was actually the Lubavelic fan in the family. I said, yes, that is my photograph. And he said, you are coming out for a drink with me after work, young man. So off we went for our drink at the Stanhope. And he introduced me in the course of that drink to all of the big, high powered people in the department. And he said to me, what are you doing in the department anyway? And I said, xeroxing, filing, a little copy editing, some proofreading. He said, that's ridiculous. We'll come up with something else for you to do. I'll know by tomorrow. One of the people he'd introduced me to was the head of Classical Art, a man named Dietrich von Botmer. And the next day I found myself in the elevator with Dietrich von Bottmer. And we had a very pleasant chat. And I thought, these people aren't so scary. There was no reason for me to be so intimidated. And the doors of the elevator opened on the second floor to reveal two women who were knocking on a vase. And one was saying to the other, it's just as I thought. There's nothing in there. And Dietrich von Bottmer jumped out of the elevator. And he said, what did you expect to find in my amphora? Geraniums. You get out of the museum now, he said. And they turned and ran. I got upstairs, and John O'Neill, the chairman of the editorial department, said, you're going to do photo research for the Costume Institute catalog. And I thought, okay, I've arrived. The Costume Institute was a nexus of glamour. Even within the glamorous Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I was all revved up to go down there. So I went down and I started doing photo research. And I worked with two curators. And it was the 80s, and there was a lot of jewelry all over the place at that point. And one of the curators was wearing this amazing ruby ring, a kind of cocktail ring with this gigantic ruby in it. And. And she wore it every day, and I'd noticed that. And after about a week, she came in one day and I noticed she wasn't wearing it. And I said to her, your ring? And she said, oh, yes, she said, I lost it. And I said, but that's heartbreaking. I said, where did you lose it? And she said, in a caramel custard. And I said, I beg your pardon? And she said, it's happened to me before. Then a few days later, the phone rang and I answered it and someone on the phone said that there was one of the curators who owned a necklace that he had and that he wanted to return it and could I ask her to meet him on the steps of the museum at 5:00. So I told the curator about this and she said, ah. She said in her amazing French accent, she said, I'll tell you what happened. She said, I was at Newport at a party. I was wearing my yellow dress that's like this. And like this was a thing. I was there and I saw this man and he was not talking to anyone. And so I thought, well, to begin a conversation, I was wearing that necklace, the one that was my grandmother's, the diamonds. I walked over and I dropped it into his drink to begin the conversation. And then I saw some friends and I got distracted and I walked away. And I thought to myself, well, I do not know who he is, but you will find out who I am. So you see, now it has happened. She said, but I am quite embarrassed about the whole thing, so maybe you can come and wait with me on the steps of the museum. So at 5 o'clock I went with her and we waited on the steps of the museum. And a gigantic car drove up and a driver helped someone out of the backseat, and he came up and he presented this diamond necklace in a box. And there was an exchange of pleasantries and I thought, this is really my life. And he got back in the car and then drove off. And she turned to me and she said, I tell you what, my dear, I must have been very, very drunk indeed to drop my diamonds in that glass of scotch. So then I went back up to the editorial department and they told me, we've decided that you should be the one to edit the introduction to the catalog by Diana Vreeland. Diana Vreeland, who had been the editor of Vogue, who had. Who was now the consultative chairman of the Costume Institute, who was the most glamorous person in the most glamorous department in the most glamorous institution. And I was incredibly excited, and I thought they really realized my editorial voice. My editorial voice can do anything. So off I went for my meeting with Mrs. Vreeland, and I got downstairs. She didn't come in all the time, but she came in that day, and she walked in, and there was someone who answers the telephones, who sit behind a big glass desk in the Costume Institute. And Mrs. Vreeland walked in and looked at her and said, so you're the new receptionist? And she said, yes, Mrs. Vreeland, I am, and I'm very excited to be here. And Mrs. Vreeland looked her up and down and said, you'd be a lovely creature if you could grow legs. And then she walked over to where some other curators were looking at images of what was supposed to go in the exhibition. And one of them had just picked up a picture and said, my mother used to have a dress just like this. And Mrs. Vreeland said, that's the most bourgeois outfit in the entire exhibition. And I thought, right, editing, here we go. So off we went into the room, and I said, well, Mrs. Vreeland, I said very nervously, I said, I've made some edits, and I just want to show you what they are. I've worked from your draft, and here's the first one. And she looked at it and she said, why did you change that word? And I said, well, Mrs. Freeland, it's the verb, and it doesn't agree with the subject in the sentence. So I was just making it agree. And she said, does it have to agree? And I said, it is museum policy that the verb agree with the subject. And she said, young man, that seems to me to show an exceptional lack of imagination. So by the time we got done, I was virtually in tears, and I went back up with the somewhat edited version of it that I had. And I said when I got back upstairs, I said, that was hard. I said to the person who'd sent me down, he said, I know none of the rest of us could bear to do it, so we sent you. Well, a few days after that, Mrs. Vreeland and I had managed to hatch some little version of a reasonable relationship. She came in and the exhibition was almost ready to open, and she walked through the exhibition and she pointed at each of these mannequins, the exhibition, which I thought looked fantastic, and she said, her head has to move to the left. You have to change the hat on that one. This one is awful. It shouldn't be here at all, that one. And she went on and on, and I thought, ah, this impossible old woman is making everyone's lives miserable. But when she was finished, the exhibition looked about a million times better than it had before. And she and I then went upstairs and we were walking through the great hall of the Metropolitan Museum, and she put one of her small claw like hands on my arm and she said to me, young man, stop for a minute. So I stopped, and she said, I want you to look around this room and contemplate the fact that every one of these people went into a store in which other things were available and selected what they're wearing right now. I looked down, I looked down at her hand on the sleeve of my blazer, which I believe my mother had selected in a store where other things were available and hoped that I was passing muster. About a week after that, shortly before the exhibition it was to open in its final form, she came in one day and one of the curators had hung over her desk a photo. It's an amazing photo. Some of you may have seen it. It's Richard Avedon's photograph of Nureyev naked, leaping forward with his arms up in the air. And Mrs. Vreeland walked in and sat there and said, I see you have my photograph up over your desk. And the curator said, your photograph, Mrs. Friedland. And she said, of course. She said, I had it done when I was at Vogue. They thought it was such an extravagance, we had to fly that Russian boy. We had to fly him in from Paris. But I said to them, you wait and see. This will be the apotheosis of the dance. And indeed it is. And the curator said, well, that's very fascinating. What happened? She said, well, she said, I was with Dickie Avedon, and we went to his studio, which is like a cathedral, and we got ourselves settled in there, and I had my assistants and Dickie had his assistants, and we were all making plans and figuring things out. And then that Russian arrived off of his airplane and he came in and he said he needed to warm up, and he began to dance in among us. No music, he just danced right in between everyone. And, my dear, I must tell you, it was very strange, but it was rather beautiful. And then I said to Dickie, I said, my goodness, I said, this has to be a private moment. And so we sent all of his assistants out, and we sent all of my assistants out, and it was just Dickie Avedon and me and that Russian, and he went behind a screen to take off his clothes. And what happened? She said, gesturing vertically up from her crotch. She said, you know how it can be with men in the mornings. She said, when he came out, it was like that and we had to wait half an hour for it to go down. And I must tell you, my dear, it was very strange, but it was rather beautiful. I had gone from my family where there was a picture of Lubavelic on the wall, where we had windows that looked out on glamour. I had found the door and I had finally walked out into glamour itself. It was very strange and it was very beautiful, except that it was also often very ordinary and quite ugly. It wasn't much of a safe haven, but it felt safe to me, even though it was treacherous, because it seemed as though finally I might escape from glasses, from braces, from that tyranny of insecure anxiety that had ruled my adolescence. Thank you.

Calvin Trillin (17:06)

Andrew Solomon is a National Book Award winning author and his latest book is called Far and Away. Our second story this week is from Calvin Trillin. The theme was Illuminating the Night and it was in collaboration. Live from the New York Public Library, here's Calvin.

Event Announcer (17:28)

I live in Greenwich Village, which I usually describe as a neighborhood where people from the suburbs come on Saturday night to test their car alarm. Some years ago, I fell into the habit of taking out of town guests for a walk in lower Manhattan. We start out at my house, go through the Italian South Village, through Soho, spend an awkward two or three blocks in the machine tool district, then Little Italy, and then Chinatown, where after a dim sum lunch, the guest was permitted to play tic tac toe with a chicken. This was a real chicken in an amusement arcade on Mott street. Lived in a glass cage. The glass cage was outfitted with those backlit letters that you're familiar with if you wasted your childhood playing pinball. On the cage were words like bird's turn, your turn. And there were buttons you could push to put your exes where you wanted them. When you did that, the chicken would go behind what was called the thinkin booth and peck its answers. And if you beat the chicken, got a large bag of fortune cookies worth probably 35 or 40 cents and it only cost 50 cents to play. But the chicken was very good at tic tac toe. Everybody I took down there looked over the situation and said the same thing. The chicken gets to go first. And I would say, but he's a chicken. You're a human being. Surely there should be some advantage to that, and then many of them, not all of them, but a distressingly high number of them, would say, the chicken plays every day. I haven't played since I was a kid. They were wise to get their excuses in at the beginning of the game because none of them ever beat the chicken. Chicken was very good at tic tac toe. There were different explanations to explain why this was true. Some people thought a computer was involved. Some people thought it was a very intelligent chicken. In my house, it was common to refer to somebody we'd met who seemed particularly clever by saying, she's smart as a Chinatown chicken. Even before I started taking people down there, the writer Roy Blunt, Jr. Told me that from what he had heard once, the chicken had been trained by former graduate students of B.F. skinner, you know, the legendary behavioral psychologist. I always hoped this was true, since it was a refutation of the false teaching that gradual work is of no value in the everyday world. It turns out that Roy had been accurately informed. A former graduate student of B.F. skinner. Had gone with her husband to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and started training animals, including chickens who could play tic tac toe. In fact, it turned Hot Springs, Arkansas, into the small animal training capital of the world. It also happens to be Bill Clinton's hometown. As far as I know, those facts are unrelated. But there is sort of a cottage industry of animal training in Hot Springs. I once interviewed a man who ran a place called Educated Animals, the former IQ Zoo. He had a Vietnamese pig who drove a Cadillac, a parrot who roller skated, and an act that consisted of a chicken dancing while a rabbit played the piano and a duck played the guitar. I said, what tune do they play? He said, their choice. And then the chicken died. I was, of course, heartbroken. I was cheered by the story about it in the New York Times, which was a beautiful story. Obviously, somebody who had played the chicken many times had respect for an opponent. Even after being beaten by the chicken that many times. I've seen congressmen sent off with less effusive obituaries. There were still people in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who trained chickens. But the chicken was not replaced. Another one of those electronic games came in its place. From what I heard, the animal people had put some pressure on the arcade not to have the chicken. And they can be quite persistent. I once wrote a column about something I had heard on CBC Canada. That a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter. That's an interesting fact. What made me think was, does it weigh as much as two dimes and a nickel? But my daughters were sort of alarmed by how you'd go about weighing a hummingbird because they always seem to be in motion and to set their minds at rest. I said, well, we've all seen those nature documentaries where somebody shoots a dart, stun dart, into a wildebeest and after a while, after putting some tracer on, it wakes up and it's good as new. You do the same thing with hummingbirds. The hard part isn't even hitting him with that little bitty dark. The hard part is slapping them on the cheeks to bring him around the animal people objected to that once. I happened to mention in a column that corgis are a breed of dog that appear to have been assembled from parts of other breeds of dogs and not the parts those dogs were all that sorry about losing. You'd be surprised how many corgi owners there are. Well, my hopes for the replacement of the chicken were dashed when it was obvious that the animal people were not going to give up. They said that a chicken playing tic tac toe that was demeaning to a chicken. I wish they could have seen the film clip that I've seen of B.F. skinner himself playing tic tac toe with the chicken. B.F. skinner is smiling, but if you look closely, it's a nervous smile. Being one of the giants of behavioral psychology, he knows how good that chicken is. In tic tac toe, the chicken is looking supremely confident. He knows he is about to beat in tic tac toe. A distinguished professor Psychology from Harvard demeaning that chicken is stinky with self esteem. Thank you.

Calvin Trillin (27:37)

Calvin Trillin is a humorist, poet and writer at the New Yorker. If you'd like to see a video of this story and of our book launch event, just Visit our site themoth.org thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week.

Dan Kennedy (27:52)

Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer.

Calvin Trillin (28:00)

With the Moth Podcast production by Mooj Zaidi. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City and supervised by Paul Rue West. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.