Transcript
Rosetta Stone Representative (0:00)
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Dan Kennedy (1:09)
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by stamps.com with your busy schedule, we're sure making trips to the post office is the last thing you have time for. Did you know with stamps.com you can buy and print official US postage right from your own computer and printer? It's easy and convenient. Plus stamps.com will give you a digital scale. It automatically calculates the exact postage you need for any letter or package. You print the postage directly onto envelopes, labels, or even plain paper. Then just hand your mail to your mail carrier. There's no need for you to go to the post office again or even lease one of those expensive, expensive postage meters. Right now there's a special offer for listeners of the Moth podcast, a no risk trial plus a $110 bonus offer that includes the digital scale and up to $55 free postage. Don't wait. Go to stamps.com and click on the microphone at the top of the homepage. Then type in moth. That's stamps.com enter moth and if you're in LA, the moth is returning to UCLA live in Los Angeles on Tuesday, September 10th. Tickets are on sale now at the moth.org this week we're featuring stories from two Grand Slam competitors. Our Grand Slam is basically the event where the winners of our Open Mic story Slams all come together and compete. So basically it's the best of the best. This first Story by David Harris Gershon won this past January's Pittsburgh Grand Slam. The theme of the night was fish out of water.
David Harris Gershon (2:57)
I had never pretended to be a woman until the presidential election of 2008. I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina. Barack Obama had just secured the Democratic nomination and inspired by his rhetorical offerings, I had dedicated myself to work for his election. But when I went to the local campaign office, agree I could insisted that what they needed most was door to canvassing. In other words, strangers willing to bother other strangers at their homes uninvited. For a natural introvert such as myself, it sounded horrendous, but I was committed. So on a Saturday at 10am a couple days later, I went out with a group, voter registration forms in hand and addresses to hit. But I did not make it past the first three because of the first door. A middle aged man came with a Coors Light in one hand and a mousetrap in the other, seemingly unable or unwilling to speak. At the second door I heard nothing but dogs barking and a baby crying. At the third, a 20 something I promise came to the door virtually naked, holding nothing but a potted plant before his manhood. I threw up my hands, turned around as if petitioning the gods of democracy, and I quit on the spot. This is no job for somebody like me, but I was still committed and I thought, you know, maybe I can use my writing talents to help elect a bomb. You know, blog posts or op eds. But I knew that in order to have any impact I had to have real time interactions. But how did it do so anonymously? Well, I started researching the online abyss of anonymous chat rooms and found Yahoo. Messenger was one of the most used programs I downloaded. It created some profile like CoffeeDrinker123 and immediately found that of the hundreds of rooms where people were congregated by topic, only one was organized by location. Adult romance. Well, I wanted to hit swing state voters, so I sighed, entered a room for Ohio, and immediately found all of these avatars pulsing with light, most of which seemed to be male. So I said what the hell? I clicked on one Johnny Knoxville 987 and I decided to give my pickup line a try. Are you registered to vote? He responded, and M or F? Male or female? I said male, thinking nothing of my answer, to which he responded fuck off and disappeared. Now this type of interaction repeated over and over until finally when Johnny with a big johnson asked the same question, M or F, I decided F, to which he responded, have sex with me and I'll do anything you want. And suddenly I knew. I knew what I could do. I knew what I needed to do. Seduce horny hetero men online to vote for Obama. Now, this presented something of a challenge, because I had never pretended to be a woman before, nor was I equipped to do so. But, you know, I talked myself into it. This is a progressive duty, a political imperative. And so I created a new profile. A voluptuous brunette named adventurous Jen in limbo. Now, when I When I re entered the city, same Ohio room messages popped up immediately. Hey, sexy. What's up, Jen? Wanna do the limbo with me? I I picked a pink font, tried to create the literary facade of a bubbly woman who had stumbled into a romance chat room seeking political conversation, and started my replies. Conversations which, disturbingly, the men I lured immediately turned erotic and explicit and maybe even more disturbing. Conversations which somehow I was always able to conclude by typing the following on November 6th, if you send me a picture of you voting for Obama, then yes, I will definitely have sex with you. Now, after a month of this, I amazingly had built up a healthy harem of newly registered likely voters who would woo me every time I logged on. All except for one, a man named Trent from Akron. When I originally asked my question to Trent, are you registered to vote? He in turn had asked me a question. If you were to die today, would you regret the life you've lived? Is that a threat? No more so than your question. Answer mine and I'll answer yours. LOL. I'm registered, he typed. And voting for McCain, I entered a sad face and typed, fine. If I were to die today, I would regret many things. Name one, he demanded. I thought, spending too much time online living an impersonal existence. Now, Trent must have added me to his contact list, because every time I would log on after that, there was always something waiting for him, something mysterious or ethereal. The image of a draining sink that looked like a human eye. A video of an infant that appeared to be singing a single question. Why do we laugh? As the election approached, I began to log on just to find what Trent had left me, sifting through all of the flirtations to find something otherworldly every time, always feeling a little bit more myself than Jen when I would find them. Finally, on November 6th, I logged on in the evening and found dozens of pictures of men who had voted for Obama. Images. Images of their final ballot on the digital voting screen and their expectant messages, thinking I was about to come over and make wild love to them. But I sorted through all of those to find that Trent had indeed left me a message as well. And for some reason, he had decided to leave me his profile picture. I opened it up and what stared me in the face was the image of an elderly woman. And beneath her picture was a single message. Things are never as they seem. Thank you.