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- [00:00]
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Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and this week on the podcast we continue our vaguely holiday themed episodes that don't contain holiday related stories. This week, two stories about being around family, which actually the more I think that's fairly holiday related somewhat. Our first storyteller is Eve Plum. You may know her portrayal of Jan Brady from the series the Brady Bunch. This story, I'm happy to tell you, involves love, mortality, final touch fabric softener and the phrase run for your lives, which I consider sort of the. Those are the four pillars of a good story right there. Eve told this story here in New York at a main stage show that we had in 2013. Here's Eve.
- [03:47]
Eve Plum
It's 1974, I'm 16, the Brady Bunch has been canceled, and my mom and I are on the set of a TV show called Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, a Saturday morning children's television show. My mom is with me because she has to be with me when I work on the set until I turn 18. It's the end of the day and we're ready to leave and my mom is talking to the prop guy of the show. She's found out that he has Florence Henderson's set chair from the Brady Bunch with the nameplate on it and everything. And she's convinced him to sell it to her because she loved to save everything about my career and that show, all the magazines that I was in and all the memorabilia. So it's time to leave and. And she's still talking. The set is this amazing two story thing all built out of paper mache to look like an underwater world. And I noticed that in one of the upper caves a light has started to smoke. A crew member comes over to see what's happening, but it bursts into flames. And then the flames start to spread and then they really start to spread. And then I hear, run for your lives. I say, mom, come on, let's go. We make our way to the corner door and I look back and she is dragging the chair with her. I say, mom, drop the chair. Come on, let's go. There are flames everywhere. We get to the door, we push through it and all the air that is escaping the fire pushes us through the small hallway and out the second door. My mom falls to her knees, and as I reach down to help her up, I look up and I see the huge soundstage wall start to crumble. I grab her, and she grabs the chair, and we get away. Soundstage burns to the ground. Fortunately, everybody got out okay, including the chair. I remember the exact moment that my acting career started. I was six years old, swimming in our backyard pool in Van Nuys, California, and my mom was talking over the low fence that separated the properties to our new neighbor, who happened to be a children's talent agent. After much discussion, my mother agreed to take me on an audition for a commercial for Final Touch fabric softener. I don't think she needed a lot of convincing, though, because she always loved show business. She had been a ballet dancer when she was younger. But then she met my dad and they fell in love. And after they eloped to Hawaii, she gave up all dreams of a career in entertainment to raise a family. My brother and sister. So we go on this first audition and go into the waiting room, and there are lots of moms and other little girls and everybody sort of nervous but pretending not to be. And I went into the audition room on my own because I wasn't really intimidated by adults. I went everywhere with my parents. So when they asked me how old I was, I said that I was 6 and that my mother was 44. I got the job. My mother was thrilled. My mom believed in all sorts of things. Past lives and astrology and Ouija boards, but most of all in positive thinking and affirmations to make your life go the way you wanted. Negative thoughts and words were really to be avoided because they might bring those things into your life. So you needed to be careful. So she'd say things to me like, people just like you. You like to eat vegetables. And also, we don't believe in allergies. So that first commercial led to a lot of other commercials, which led to parts on TV shows, which were a lot of TV shows. By the time I was 10, I had successfully fallen down a well in one episode and been in an orphanage in another. Episod of the Big Valley. I had been kidnapped and rescued on It Takes a Thief, run over by a horse on the Virginian, and drowned on Adam 12. I had been auctioned off by my drunk but secretly dying uncle on the Western Lancer, lost my Christmas gift puppy on Lassie, and died of leukemia on Family Affairs. That last one was really hard on my mom because they had made me up to look sick, and I'M sure that with her belief in the mind's ability to control the universe, that we had somehow attracted illness into our lives. So this career was our job. And she was always excited when I got a role and we'd work on the script. And she put my hair in curlers if need be, and get up early to go to the set. And she picked me up from school, and if I saw a nice dress in the car, I knew that I had another audition that day. So one day we go for an audition for a pilot for a television show called the Brady Brood. And we go to a big soundstage, you know, lots of kids and their moms, kids of every age and hair color. And we're all separated into groups of age and hair color. And I didn't make the cut. About a week later, I got a call back, and I met with the producer, Sherwood Schwartz, and the director, John Rich. And they looked at me and said, well, she looks like our girl. Which must have meant Florence Henderson. The Brady Bunch, as it came to be known, filmed for five years, and I played Jan Brady, the middle daughter. And so now my mom and I are part of a new family of sorts. There are five other kids on the show, and all of the moms were thick as thieves, sitting around laughing and talking and making sure we behaved ourselves. It was kind of like going to camp with your mom. She was always excited when famous people were on the show. She loved it that we got to meet Henry Kissinger and Joe Namath and Imogene Coca. One year, the Brady Bunch filmed in Hawaii, and wouldn't you know, they put us up at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki, which is the exact hotel where my parents were back in 1939. I have a picture of them from back then in front of that very hotel, looking so young and beautiful. And my mom told me stories about the gig that my dad had in Hawaii. Played saxophone with big band. Also on that trip was my mom's longtime friend that I called Aunt Effel from Oklahoma to Hawaii. And also I was really nervous about wearing a bikini. I. I had the normal teenage insecurities about my body, but I was so terrified to have to wear a bikini on television. One day we were in the room in our hotel room, and Aunt Ethel turns to me and says, why, Eve, you don't need to wear a bikini top at all. You could just put band aids over those little mosquito bites. Uh, gee, thanks, Aunt Ethel. My mom scolded her for being mean to me. She knew how nervous I was. I think that my mom really enjoyed being out in the world in a way that not a lot of people got to do. This career was a job and home life all rolled into one. When I turned 17. When I was 17, I got the role of dawn in the TV movie Dawn, Portrait of a teenage runaway about a girl who runs away from home and becomes a prostitute in Hollywood. Three days into the shoot, I turned 18 on the set. And now, suddenly, literally overnight, I go from being a kid on the set with my mom to being considered an adult actress who works 12 hours a day instead of eight. And now, all of a sudden, my mom's part of our job is over. One night we were shooting on Hollywood Boulevard, and there I was in my red vinyl jumpsuit and my rabbit hair jacket that kept shedding and getting into my eyes. And I was rehearsing a bit where I'm hitchhiking, and so I stick my thumb out and guy pulls up in a car and motions, you know, get in. How much? But this was a real guy. This wasn't somebody from our shoot. So I ran over to the director and told him what happened, and he says, use it. If my mom had been there, she would have been scared for me. But this was new territory, and I was charting it on my own. My mom had done her job well, but even though we stayed close, the professional part of her life had ended so abruptly. I'm the same age now that she was then, and I can only imagine how hard it must have been for her to let go. Couldn't have been easy. The years pass, and I'm planning the next production of my life, my big production, and planning my wedding. And my mom and I were having a rare argument on the phone about the guest list because I hadn't invited Aunt Ethel. I stood my ground about it, and we hung up, miffed at each other. A few days later, my sister calls in tears and says that mom has died in her sleep. You know how on TV and movies when people get bad news on the phone, their knees buckle and they fall to the ground. That's what happened to me. How could this be possible? I was devastated. The wedding was in five days. How could I do it without her? My sister, my dad and I talked about it, and we decided that in some way, the show must go on. Friends rallied around us and called the entire guest list and told them what had happened. We were going to go ahead with the wedding and make it as happy a day as possible. We interred my mom's ashes the same day of the wedding rehearsal, I remember standing in front of the closet thinking, all right, what's one dress I can wear to both of these events? Really rough. The wedding was wonderful, and we did celebrate my mom that day. My husband had lost his father a few years earlier, so with the parent dance, my dad danced with his mom. People like to ask me if I regret having a childhood, and I tell them I had an amazing childhood. I got to be with my mom all day. I got to do stunts. I got to work with trained animals and play act and dress up. Once I was in a costume fitting and I looked down and there was a Shirley Temple name tag sewn into the collar. My mom and I went on this wonderful adventure together. She taught me to have self confidence, and she taught me how to surround myself with positive thoughts. And she even taught me a secret trick for how to cry on cue. So when people ask me if I regret not having a childhood, I tell them my childhood was pretty magical. My only regret is that I didn't get to thank my mom for all the time that she spent with me and all the things that we got to do together to celebrate that. So thank you, mom.
- [15:46]
Dan Kennedy
Eve Plumb started her acting career at age six. After playing Jan for five years on the Brady Bunch, she's gone on to have a long career in tv, film, and stage. Eve can be seen in the upcoming film Monsoon and the upcoming live production of Grease on Fox Television. So our second story this week is from our Pittsburgh Story Slam series. The storyteller has asked that we only use her first name on the podcast. The theme of the night was busted. It's kind of starting to add up why she doesn't want to be identified. Here's Jesse.
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Jessie
Hello. So my junior year of college, I studied abroad halfway across the world in Kathmandu, Nepal. And my boyfriend at the time was in Washington, D.C. so we had never been apart for this long before. We were trying to keep in touch via email and shoddy phone connections. And about four months into my time in Nepal, he was turning 20. And I wanted to sort of do something special so that we could kind of feel closer together. And I thought, what could I send my boyfriend from halfway across the world that, like over the Internet that would make us feel closer together, you know? And so my Nepali roommate, who had probably never held hands with a boy before, we lived in like a 5 by 10 room together, went out of town about two weeks before his birthday. I very handily used the self timer on my camera to take some Choice photos, and I put them in a hidden folder on my computer. Now, for those of you who don't regularly use hidden folders, this is a mechanism whereby you can have an invisible folder on your computer, so when you want people to see it, they can't. It's very clever. And I put the photos in the hidden folder. About a week later, his birthday came. I sent him the photos. About a month later, I come home from Nepal. And about a month after that, my family went on our annual trip to Lost River State Park, West Virginia, where we, every year, from the time I was born, go and hang out with two other families and we play croquet and we play games and it's very wholesome. And the first. Our first morning in Lost river, everybody is over at our house for breakfast and we're eating pancakes and we're catching up on the year, and breakfast is winding down. I'm playing everyone music on my laptop and everyone starts watching my slideshow of Nepal pictures, which was my screensaver at the time. And I. And washing the dishes, and I'm like, honestly, I'm feeling kind of smug. I'm like, yeah, I was in a third world country. You know, there are some street children and here are the. Here's Mount Everest and whatever. And all of a sudden the room just goes silent. And a woman goes, oh, my God, Jessie. And I look over and like, there I am in all my glory. And this is like, men and women. And I have never moved so fast in my life. I mean, like, you don't even, like, you can't possibly imagine the, like, heat and the red and like, you can't. And I, like, slam the. I slammed the laptop shut and I'm just like. And everybody sort of handled this differently. The men who I wasn't related to, like, just left as quickly as humanly possible. One of the younger girls was like, oh, is that some sort of Nepali tradition? I was just, you know, I just, like, wanted to crawl into a hole and never make eye contact with anyone ever again. And my dad actually came up to me afterwards to ask me, so what was the deal with those pictures? To which I responded, like, I never want a t. Never want to talk about this. I. Yeah, so there was a really, really long time where I never told anyone this story. Like, I was just so embarrassed that I just couldn't imagine telling anyone. And I. I still go back to Lost River State park every year, and I still have this horrible fear that somebody's going to think enough time has passed. It's like, remember that time we saw Jesse naked? But what I've realized, what I've realized over six years is that while storytelling really does keep you connected to the past, it also has a way of giving you some much needed distance from it. And I also learned that hidden folders are not as hidden as you think they are. Thank you.
- [20:52]
Dan Kennedy
Jessie says that although telling this story in front of a Moth audience has helped give her some distance from it, it's still not quite enough for her to own it in front of the Moth's podcast audience. So there you go. Another Moth Podcast episode. Next week we have the Moth Radio Hours Holiday Special for you. A full hour of holiday stories that actually involve the holidays. Until then, you can find us on Facebook, also on Twitter hemoth. Thanks for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week.
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Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First, Rock on An American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with the Moth.
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Dan Kennedy
The Moth Podcast is produced by Whitney Jones. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City City supervised by Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast and the Moth Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.