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- [00:00]
Rosetta Stone Advertiser
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- [01:07]
Apple Watch Advertiser
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- [01:38]
Stamps.com Advertiser
This podcast is brought to you by stamps.com when you're trying to find more time every day to get things done. You can't let trips to the post office slow you down. Use stamps.com to buy and print official US postage for any letter or package right from your computer and printer. You'll never waste value time going to the post office again. Right now, listeners of the Moth podcast get this special offer, a no risk trial plus a $110 bonus offer that includes up to $55 free postage. Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone and type in Moth. The Moth is supported by NYT now, your guide to the news from the New York Times. NYT now is the fastest way to get caught up with the news. Headlines and story summaries will get you up to speed quickly. Stories are curated by NYT editors and it include of the Times and from around the web. The new NYT now has an updated user interface with article recommendations, better Social and sharing. NYT now is now free. Download it today at the App store or@nytnow.com.
- [02:44]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. And this week on the podcast we have two of our favorite stories from our Moth Story Slam series. The first one is from a show themed Fame. So we actually reached out to you on Twitter and asked you, when was your 15 minutes of fame? Jacob Derwin said, I've been a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade clown for a few years. Got on TV dressed as a rabbit next to Richard Simmons. That's the way you want to get on tv. Basically, he hit the high water mark right out of the gate. And then this next person is named Meredith. Eresserlook is her name. She said, Chewbacca himself named a baby goat after me. Now I have to say, okay, let me unpack this for you just a little bit. The guy, the gentleman, the actor who played Chewbacca in Star wars is on Twitter, okay? And apparently he has a goat. That goat had four babies. He decided to name one of those baby goats after one of his Twitter followers who was Meredith, who is tweeting at us here. And then this is amazing. Chewbacca himself replies, oh, okay, I forgot to add a picture. Here they are. Here are our quads. The one on the left is named Meredith. Here's the thing. I never predicted about the future when I was a little boy watching Star Wars. If you would have told me that one day we would all carry around these thin little pieces of glass in our pocket and one of us would discover that Chewbacca has named a baby goat after one of the other people on this little piece of glass. I would have been like, the future sounds a lot weirder than the movie I'm watching right now. That is nuts. We asked our first storyteller the same question, when was your 15 minutes of fame? And David Crabb said, one time, as a fairly unpopular kid in high school, I wore a drag version costume of Freddy Krueger in full makeup, dress and heels. She was called Fredrica Kruger. And even though no one knew who I was under the latex mask, I was the most popular kid at the park. Or rather, Frederica was. Here's David Crabb.
- [05:15]
David Crabb
When I was little, I was obsessed with the show Silver Spoons. And I thought I could make that show. And I told my dad, I want a video camera for my birthday. I was turning 11. So he got me the video camera and I used it for two days. And I realized, wait, I'm on the wrong side of this equation, I don't want to make the show. I want to be Ricky Schroeder. So I zipped up the camera and I demanded that my mother enroll me in an acting class. And she did, at the John Casablanca School of Modeling and Performing Arts, which was in a strip mall between an H and R block and a tcby yogurt. So I'm taking my classes, and my dad was pissed off that I didn't want the camera and I thought I could be a movie star. And my dad was a good old boy, born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He wore trucker hats and cowboy boots and tight Wrangler jeans. And he drove around the south in his RV fixing people's telephones as a fiber optic technician. That was Larry. And at the time, he had just started dating a Korean woman named Young that he had met in Georgia. Now, this was the most exotic thing that had ever happened to me in my life because all of my dad's previous marriages and divorces were all to very white women. And at the time, I was obsessed with Susie Wong. Does anyone remember her? She had the Pearl Cream commercials. I loved her. And I had no exposure to Asian people. I had Mr. Miyagi, the guy that colored my mom's hair in the mall, and Kung Fu with David Carradine. And that was confusing enough because I actually thought he was Asian until I was like 15. I missed that part of the narrative. I didn't get it, but that was the whole point. So my dad is dating young, and he comes back on a little trip home because he's only home like a week, a month. And he says, david, you know, can I borrow that video camera? I'm going to take a road trip with Young. And I thought it would be really cool to film it. And I said, oh, okay, sure, here. So he took the camera and I moved on to really advanced scenes in my acting classes from shows like Charles in Charge and Kate and Ally. And my dad goes away, and he comes back a few weeks later, gives me the camera and I put it away and we chat and he leaves. So the night after he leaves, the phone rings. I'm like, hello. And it's my dad. He says, hey, David, how you doing? I said, oh, I'm good, dad. You know what? I like to think of us as friends. I know that you're still young, but I think of you as an adult, a young man. And I would like to think that even if you weren't my son, we would still Be friends. I did the damnedest thing. I left a video in that video camera I gave you back. And I just hope that you can respect me enough as your friend and your father to not watch it. Okay, so. So at this point, this is in the olden times, when you have a cord on the phone. The cord is. I'm testing the law of physics. I'm like, aha. Like, I'm, like, reaching through the house, like, to get the video camera. I'm like, curiosity. I want it so bad. So I finally get off the phone with my dad, like, yeah, see you in a few weeks. Hang up the phone, I get the video, and I put it in the VCR. Now I do have that moment, even at 11, where I'm like, what am I going to discover right now? Do I want to know what my father's life is like three weeks out of the month? And I push play. So it's a hotel room. The camera is obviously placed on that little sort of, like, side table between the two full beds. It's the same setup in every hotel. So it's kind of facing where there's the table and, like, a mirror and a dresser. So I'm, like, waiting. Just nothing's happening. It's, like, silent for, like, 15 seconds. And then all of a sudden, from, I guess a little stereo somewhere in the room plays. Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys. My dad strolls out from the side in the biggest cowboy hat you've ever seen. He's in tight jeans and one of those, like, cowboy shirts with, like, gold threads in it so it catches the light. He has a rolled up magazine, like, a microphone. And he proceeds to with more, like, zest and vigor than my father has ever done anything perform, as if he's in, like, the main stage at the rodeo. Mamas, don't let your babies. Thanks for coming out, y'all. How y'all doing? He's like. He's pointing at pillows, being like, ain't you a pretty thing? Mama stopped. He does the entire song, and then he finishes with a big. Every country song ends that way. And then he holds his hat and he stands there and he goes and he turns it off. I never told my father that I saw the video, but I had that moment afterwards where I thought, you know, this is strangely weirder than the bizarre, like, gay truck stop snuff film that I could have seen. Because this is just, like, weird and vulnerable, you know? Like, this is like, ugh. But we never did discuss it. But to this day, sometimes I wish my dad would have let me know that he had similar aspirations, because I think he would have been an awesome scene partner. Thank you.
- [10:57]
Dan Kennedy
David Crabb is a moth host and educator. He is author of the new memoir Bad Kid, based on his solo show about growing up goth in Texas. That show opens again in July at the Axis Theater here in New York City. Our second story is from Jia Jung, and it was told at a show here in New York City in 2013. And the theme of the night was fathers. Here's Jia.
- [11:26]
Jia Jung
There you are. It's as if there's this rule, right, that all our parents had lives that were tougher than ours are. And this was really true of my dad, who wandered away from his home when he was 3 and wound up alone in the middle of the Korean War, raised by American GIs and missionaries, just passing through. I mean, there's nothing you could say to this guy. We complained about food. He told us about how he would find his meals in the trash if he was lucky. We whined about walking to town, and he said he really wished he hadn't been locked up in a chicken coop one winter where he contracted rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 14. We griped about schoolwork, and he reminded us that his first exposure to formal school was entering the ninth grade in a part of Georgia where the film Deliverance was made and where he earned his keep by laundering the shit encrusted underwear of his classmates. And in the summer, subjecting himself to experimental surgery because he had nowhere else to go. Well, okay, all right. But, dad, why couldn't we have a dog like every other family, right? And his answer to this was a story about when a German shepherd was his only friend in all the world. And when the soldiers he was staying with got transferred off the base, well, they couldn't take the dog. And so apparently these guys had a lot of fun when they were leaving. Teasing the dog, slowing down the truck until the thing got excited and almost got there, and then speeding up again. And he said they did it for miles and miles, over and over. And the more I cried for them to stop, the more fun they had. And that, girls, is when I decided I would never have a dog again. Problem solved, dad. My sister and I cried straight for the next six months, and we never even asked for any kind of pet ever again. But, you know, when he wasn't being tough, my dad taught us some really gentle lessons about life, like the importance of letting go. And when we'd see TV stories about people on respirators who were brain dead. He'd kind of quietly say, I hope that's never me. Which sort of informed us when he died in 1998 of ALS, still hooked up to a breathing machine. And one thing we knew for sure was that he wanted to be cremated. But once we got that done, we had this little oddly heavy box, and we didn't know what to do with it. And he used to say, after the cremation, the do whatever you can, just throw me in the trash, and. Trash, no, no, no. Completely inappropriate. So we put him in his own closet. We didn't know what to do, and that might be illegal, so don't tell anybody, but he was there for years. And one day my mom was like, you know, I think what dad secretly wanted was for us to keep him in an urn that I make myself because she's a ceramist. So I was like, yeah, that's awesome. Do that, Mom. And she was like, no, no, I can't, I can't. So instead, she bought a cemetery plot for four people, and she used the first two plots for her mother's ashes and my dad's ashes. And by the way, those two never got along. And then she put her own name on this glossy mass grave headstone in this terrible font that wasn't Comic Sans, but damn near. And. Yeah, and then so I did the math in my head and I said, okay, there's one more spot left, so what the hell am I gonna do? And my sister are we just gonna shoot for it or who's gonna get that spot? And my mom said, oh, you girls will find plans with your own family someday. At that point in my life, I didn't even have, like a friends with benefits situation. So I was. I was really concerned. And so fast forward to summer of 2011. I was climbing Mount Whitney, which is the highest point in the contiguous 48 states. And I hiked alone in the dark. And when the sun rose, I found that I was on this plateau overlooking a beautiful valley. And to my left there is a river and really tropical looking plants bursting out of huge ice sheets. And the flowers were rainbow colored and there was a big marmot munching on them. And I was dehydrated. I was emotional. But I consider that I was pretty much all there. When I concluded, if I believe as I did, that death really is a recycling of the mind and body back to the earth. And the earth included this beauty that I was seeing, I was like, what I'm looking at right now is heaven. And I just sort of went home with that until a year later and I went into hysterics, screaming at my mom that we had to set my dad's ashes free. And she kind of looked at me in this deadpan way and said, look, if you can get 5000 bucks to exhume him, do whatever the hell you want. So that Father's Day, I went to his grave. I decided to go and see if maybe I'd get some mystical sign as to what he would have wanted. And I thought back to the days when I was little and he'd take orange juice out of the fridge and call on me, his little helper, to reach for the vodka. And so with this wholesome memory dancing in my mind, I made this colossal screwdriver and analogy and walked to the cemetery and took a seat and just started hitting that. And I was just spilling booze on the grass and talking to the headstone when a guy showed up next to me and he was tending to his own father's grave. And before I knew it, I was telling him all about the ash situation. And he listened for a really long time. When he went away, he looked back at me and he said, you know what? Just let him be. I think he would really like the idea of you guys sitting here having a drink. And that was the first moment of clarity I'd had in so long from somebody else. Something I could always get from my dad and missed so much in this muddled adulthood. And I decided right then and there I should start heeding the wisdom of the living and even if it comes from some stranger at a graveyard. So I let it be. Which means that this year I will be raising my glass again to a shrink wrapped box of dead dust six feet under. Or rather the person the dust used to be who isn't anywhere anymore except everywhere in the universe. And he's always in my heart.
- [18:09]
Dan Kennedy
Jia Jung is a writer, storyteller, and a two time moth story slam winner here in New York. Couple more tweet replies have come in. When we asked what was your 15 minutes of fame? Brooke Preston said, I once escorted Justin Timberlake to a private restroom at the Times Square touristaurant where I worked. Well, she's coined a term here that is that's entering the pop lexicon as of now and then she clarifies, but you know, not inside. So she wants you to know she didn't escort Justin Timberlake into the restroom, just towards it to it as it were. Catherine Briggs tweeted that her 15 minutes of fame was when I found myself on Google Street View, walking like the woman on Seinfeld who couldn't swing her arms. That is. I love that we just tweet to you guys from here in the studio and we get these little tiny stories, kind of the shortest stories you're going to hear on the Moth right back from you on Twitter. It's very fun.
- [19:14]
Stamps.com Advertiser
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- [20:22]
Dan Kennedy
There you go. Two moth story slam stories right here on the Moth Podcast. Thanks for listening and like we say, we hope you have a story worthy week.
- [20:32]
Stamps.com Advertiser
Dan Kennedy is author of the books Loser Goes First. Rock on An American Spirit. He's a regular host and performer with the Moth when he's not on Twitter.
- [20:42]
Dan Kennedy
Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City supervised by Paul Ruest. Podcast audio production by Whitney Jones. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx. Org.