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- [00:00]
Rosetta Stone Representative
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- [01:09]
Dan Kennedy
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.
- [02:57]
David Harris Gershon
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.
- [08:57]
Dan Kennedy
David Harris Gershon is a blogger for Tikkun magazine, a freelance writer on Israeli and American politics, and a Jewish day school teacher in Pittsburgh. His controversial memoir, what do youo Buy? The Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill youl Wife, will be published on September 10. The next story you're about to hear by Peter Story, was told live at a Grand Slam in Los Angeles in 2011. The theme of the night was golden Opportunity.
- [09:30]
Peter Story
The fall of 2009 found me and my then fiance Megan, trying to plan a wedding, and we were unemployed. We came from humble beginnings, and no matter how much we tried to crunch the numbers or plan the most banal, menial wedding possible, it was just not going to happen. And we were a little upset, you know, because we were in love and we were ready to start our life together. And things were complicated because I had just gotten her to la, we had done a long distance relationship across to Michigan, and I had to leave her behind. She had to stay and run our apartment complex. That was my normal job. And I had to book out to Sacramento to work as an actor in a professional theater, where, ironically, we had met before. I was going to be gone for a long time. And right before I left, she said, you know, I think I found a way for us to have a wedding. And I said, what? She goes, well, I found this online contest. It's called the Southern California $100,000 dream wedding giveaway. I found it on a website called Broke Ass Bride. And I said, listen, the skeptic, the realist, you know, came out to me and I said, listen, the fine print, you're going to read it, you're going to find out it's not really doing what it's going to do. And even if we entered it, we're going to lose to someone with a terminal illness or an Iraqi war vet. It's just going to happen. So I blew it off. I went up north, I started doing my thing. She came up and visited me a couple times. And after the holidays she came and visited me again. She was only there until Friday. And on Friday she said, you know, today's the last day to turn in the form for the Southern California Dream Wedding Giveaway, please. And she Coerced me into it. And I said, fine. I started filling out the form and the perfectionist in me took over and I kind of started getting into it. These cute questions and how you met and what's your song and all kind of stuff. And we filled it out and like an hour before it was due, we turned it online with over 600 other couples. And I went done. And she went back to Los Angeles. About two days later, we got a phone call. Megan called me to tell me we made the top 10 finalists. I found out right before I was going on stage in the dressing room and I flipped because all my worry and my fear up to that point kind of dissipated because this was confirmation that there was a chance. There was a chance. And there were two more rounds of the competition left to go. We had a voting round and then there was a big party at the end that all the vendors and sponsors would go to. So we started a massive campaign. It was Internet voting, and it was kind of tricky because it was only one vote per IP address. So basically, in layman's terms, it's one vote per computer. Couldn't hammer the vote button 100 times. You had to reach out to everybody. So we got a Facebook fan page and we were calling, doing bulk emails, getting a hold of teachers and relatives we hadn't talked to in years, didn't want to talk to for years, just begging anyone to vote. I was driving around with my laptop in my passenger seat in my car, pulling over in front of restaurants. I had WI Fi and linking in and voting. I was doing a show at the end scene. I had a tuxedo. So I came out in my tuxedo the lobby and met every patron and handed him a flyer to please vote for us. And Megan was doing her best down in la, but no matter how many votes we get, we couldn't top Amber and Tyler. And Amber and Tyler were this couple that just kept pulling ahead. And they were every fear I had personified. Tyler was a firefighter battling testicular cancer. Impossible. So we had to dig deep. So I got. My buddy Jacob, was friends with Panic at the Disco, which was this huge band, and we got them to put on Twitter to tweet our link to vote. And it went out to 90,000 people. Bam. Overnight. Overnight, we went from hundreds of votes down to hundreds of votes ahead. And they responded. Tyler's mom contacted the Livestrong network and thousands of cancer votes just started piling in. There's nothing we could do about it. We went underneath, but you Know what? It wasn't over yet. There was one level left the party. And even though we got second place in the votes, it all came down to the decision at the party. And the problem was I couldn't go. I was in Sacramento and Megan was in Los Angeles, and I couldn't make it. I didn't have an understudy. There was no one to cover me. And my sister's putting the fear of God in me going, you got to get down there. Showing up is 90% of it. You're going to lose. There was nothing we could do. So Megan, brilliant, cuts out huge cutouts of my face and puts them on popsicle sticks and hands them out to four of our friends that went to the party. So even though I wasn't there in body, in every photograph, I'm there in 2D. And they bring all the couples up on stage for one final kind of dating show game Q and A. And they asked my wife, you know, what do you think about Peter? What makes you think about him? And she talked about the kiss and how it felt like home. And it was beautiful. Melted people's hearts. And then we went to Amber, and Tyler wasn't there because he was recovering from surgery. And they asked Amber, what's funny about banking? Because apparently she was in banking. She goes, what's funny about banking? He goes, yeah, tell us something funny about banking. She goes, I don't think there's anything funny about banking. And she looks at her sister, her sister freezes. Her sister looks at the MC and goes, can we have another question? She tanked. She tanked. And everyone that went to the party that night said that when went up to her, she was a cold fish. And I just. I closed my eyes in hope. We went to bed that night. Megan went to bed. I went to a friend's house who had been with us the whole way. And he said, dude, just enjoy the journey. You lost it. They can't not give it to them. The public backlash from, you know, not having the cancer winner, it's just enjoy the journey. So I went to bed two days later, 9:30 in the morning on Valentine's Day, we got the call and we won. We won the whole thing. And the fine print was we got the ice sculpture and the cigar bar and the photo booth and the free dress and the tuxes and the hotel rooms, and it was unbelievable. And for two kids on unemployment, it was a dream wedding. And three weeks today, we celebrate our one year anniversary. And true story. Amber and Tyler broke up.
- [15:34]
Dan Kennedy
Peter story wants you to know that that is his real name. He's a performer and lover of storytelling. He lives in LA happily married to Megan and currently tours the country performing a one man show based on the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. You can find him on social media as the Peter Story. Also, here's something we're really happy to tell you about after all these years of hearing amazing stories. The Moth's first book is coming out. It's a collection of 50 moth stories and it'll be out September 3rd. You can pre order it now at Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, books, a million Apple ibooks and also indie. Next and just wanted to mention before we go, the Moth main stage is appearing hearing for the first time in Oklahoma City at Rose State College. That's going to be Thursday, October 3rd. For tickets and for a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, visit.
- [16:35]
David Harris Gershon
Themoth.Org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit.
- [16:44]
Rosetta Stone Representative
Available now.
- [16:45]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.