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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 stamp on 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.
- [02:18]
James Brawley
This week we bring you two stories from our Story Slam series. As you probably know, our Story Slams are our open mic storytelling competitions, and we're doing those in 13 cities across the country now. Both stories are from James Brawley, a Moth Story Slam regular. His new book, Life in a Marital Institution, comes out this week. The first story was told live at a New York Moth Sleep story slam. In 2005, the theme of the night was cold.
- [02:51]
Thank you. My son Owen was born at home on purpose. And shortly after he popped out into the inflatable kiddie pool in our living room, his placenta dropped out into the midwife's hands, who put it into the little rubbermaid bowl that I bought around the corner at Ace Hardware, which I put, as instructed, into the freezer. And that's where it is today, right now, three years later, underneath the certified organic raspberries and the biodynamic grass fed beef and the lacto fermented pickle juice, which aids in digestion. My wife Susan went to seminary, and.
- [03:48]
Susan Brawley
One of the things she studied were.
- [03:49]
James Brawley
Ancient fertility cults, one of whom, unlike Western patriarchal male societies, believed that the placenta was not medical waste. It was a kind of soul food that you buried to feed the spirit of your child, which, when I first heard about, was just kind of flat out gross. And when I took it to the freezer, it was repulsive, but three years later is just rivetingly, obscenely repellent. And so one night, I tell Susan, I can't take it anymore. You've got to lose the whole. The placenta. And she says, I don't know where to bury it. And I say, anywhere but the freezer, Susan. She says, how about Central Park? And as far as I know, burying human remains is illegal in Central Park. So I tell her, susan, if somebody sees us digging up Central park, we'll get arrested.
- [04:59]
Susan Brawley
And she says, not if we do.
- [05:01]
James Brawley
It at night, swear to God. Although she adds, people might not come to the service if we do it at night. People meaning our friends, the service, meaning the funeral, the happy funeral. She wants to hold around the burial plot to spread the good feelings to the whole community. And I say, susan, whatever you do, just get rid of it. I'm losing my appetite for sex. And she says, don't use my placenta as a smokescreen, James. We've had problems long before the placenta came along, which is true, right? In addition to being Owen's mom and an earth mother, I've learned after 20 years of psychotherapy through the wonders of transference that she's also my emotional mother, but she is my wife, and having kind of quasi incestuous sex is hard enough without a placenta in the freezer. So I tell her, please, just get rid of a placenta. And she says, if only I had a country house, and Owen could go back there when he's older, right?
- [06:29]
Susan Brawley
So, in other words, she'll take a.
- [06:30]
James Brawley
Placenta out of the freezer if I take on another mortgage.
- [06:35]
Susan Brawley
So that night, instead of going to.
- [06:37]
James Brawley
Bed with my wife, like always, I go to my office and log on the Internet, find out the average cost of a two bedroom country cottage, and then plug those numbers into my financial software. And I find, once again, not surprisingly, that I cannot afford to have sex with my wife unless I experience an attitude adjustment.
- [07:04]
Susan Brawley
So a few days later, we're at.
- [07:06]
James Brawley
Kristen's for a birthday party. Kristen is a neighbor and she has a little boy, Owen's age. And there's the crush of the party and people are drinking lacto fermented pickle juice and saris. And Susan's over by the freezer with Kristen and she says, come here, James. Guess what? She has two placentas. Evidently, Susan thought Kristen had only one. Kristen being her kind of role model. And I say, really, Kristen, what are you planning on doing with them? And she says, burying them someplace meaningful. Women have been doing this for millennia. And I said, well, women have not had freezers for millennia, Kristen. And Kristin says, what do you mean? And Susan says, understanding me completely. He means that women haven't been able to save their placentas for years. They've had to bury them when they were warm, which makes me feel loving towards Susan, like she understands me. And I say, yeah, Kristen, don't you think it's weird to have to thaw yourself before you bury yourself? And Kristen says, not at all. Men have been destroying civilizations for years, right? Freezers are their way of giving back so that women like me can find meaning. Besides, she says, some women even eat their placentas.
- [08:41]
Susan Brawley
Which is the fork in.
- [08:43]
James Brawley
The road for me. It's one thing to bury yourself, but I don't think I can be married to a woman who will eat herself. And so I look at Susan to see how she'll react. And Susan looks back at Kristen and says, that's a bit much for me, Kristen. Which puts me on the same side as Susan all the time. I thought she was a freak, but suddenly I find there's a woman next door who has twice as many placentas as she does and is prepared to eat them. So we get pushed together a little bit closer in the crush of the party, and we clink our pickle cheese glasses. And it occurs to me that maybe I'm the one who's been extreme. Thank you.
- [09:34]
James won the slam the night he told that story and went on to tell this next story at a Grand Slam. A few months later, where he competed against other Slam winners and ultimately tied for first place. The theme of the night was swimming upstream. Stories of struggle.
- [10:01]
Susan Brawley
So I'm at a dinner party one night with my wife Susan in upstate New York, in Harlemville, this progressive little town we've just moved to to raise our kids in a more progressive natural environment at a neighbor's house, when suddenly, at the far end of the table, I hear Susan talking to our neighbor Joe about our son Owen's placenta. James is upset that it's still in the freezer, she tells him before going on to explain why it's there. Originally, after the home birth, she says she wanted to bury it in Central park and plant a fertility tree on top of it like they do in Africa. But someone warned her that burying human remains in Central park is illegal, someone being me. So she put it in the freezer to buy some time to find a legal burying ground, which is easier said than done. And it stayed there for three years, including one blackout, turning from red to.
- [11:11]
James Brawley
Brown.
- [11:13]
Susan Brawley
After it thawed. And refroze details she spared our neighbor Joe in the telling until the day we moved to Harlemville and she put it in an ice chest and in the trunk of our car and we drove it up here and put it in the freezer of our rental house until we find a little house to buy with some land. James, she says to Joe and to the rest of the table. At this point, James thinks I'm weird. At which point the dinner party looks at me. Three single moms, Joe's wife, Lilia, Susan and Joe, the only other man in the house who I'm locked onto right now, man to man, like we're in this together, when Joe says, very matter of factly, we ate our placenta. You ate Casey's placenta, Joe. Casey being Joe and Lilia's boy, who's running around the living room at this point chasing my son Owen. Why would you do that? It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. He said. My friend on the mountain in Santa Fe actually suggested it and I revere her in all things spiritual. She even suggested the recipe, says Joe. Pan roasted in cumin. Curry, says Joe's wife Lilia, correcting him like a non progressive spouse, which at this point is the only behavioral landmark at the time table. Don't you remember, Joe? It was curry. Curry cumin. It was something with a C, he says. Whatever it was, it was delicious. What did it taste like? I can't describe it, says Joe. Try, I say. You're in the food business. Joe's an organic food distributor. Well, he says, rising to the occupational challenge, it was more tender than filet mignon, but not mushy like liver. It was the most delicious meat I have ever eaten. You just fried it straight out of Lilia? No, says Joe. The home birth midwife doubled as the butcher. She removed the umbilical cord and filleted the meat, and he did the rest. Wow, says one of the single moms, putting down her fork, almost in tears at this point. That is so beautiful. Like Joe is every woman's dream. Not only does he not shy away from her most private parts, he cooks them and eats them like a man.
- [14:21]
James Brawley
See?
- [14:21]
Susan Brawley
Says Susan from the other end of the table. It's totally natural. Totally, says Lilia. It's the only meat you don't have to kill to eat. Lilia is a vegan now. I'm planning on raising my kids in this community, sending them over to their houses for playdates. It takes a village and they're it. So I asked the single moms around the table, did you eat your placenta? To get to know my neighbors a little better. And the first single mom says she didn't have enough support. She was in the hospital alone having an emergency C section, and the nurses took her place placenta. But today she says, I think I'd be strong enough to eat it. The second single mom says she adopted her daughter so there was no placenta to eat, but she would have if she could have. The third single mom says she buried her placenta in her backyard under a tree like Susan wants to do, only it died when she went on vacation and the neighbor forgot to water it. But she does have another neighbor who borrowed her food dryer to make placenta.
- [15:43]
James Brawley
Jerky.
- [15:48]
Susan Brawley
So she knows where Joe is coming from. Now I've just given up my entire life to move to this neighborhood. Sold my co op soldiers, said goodbye to my friends, packed my car with all our stuff, including Owen's placenta. This needs to work. So I start to think maybe I'm just being narrow minded. Maybe Joe is right. Maybe it is natural to eat a placenta, notwithstanding that it is medical waste and there's not enough curry in the world to get me to put that thing in my mouth and what am I thinking? So I make a joke to get my bearings. With Susan's permission, I say, I'd like to invite you all to dinner at our house. You bring the wine, we'll serve placenta. If Joe will do the honors of cooking. Nobody says about a word. You don't joke about placentas in Harlemville, evidently, because up here they're food, and someone might just invite you over to their house to eat one. So there's a kind of reverential silence that settles over the table as they weigh the gravity of the offer to eat my wife. Until finally Joe looks in the living room and breaks the silence. How old is Owen?
- [17:28]
James Brawley
Says Joe.
- [17:33]
Susan Brawley
I say he's three. James, says Susan, visibly embarrassed at this point. A placenta should be eaten fresh, like she's lived in Harlemville her whole life, making it painfully clear that one of us is a long way from home. Thank you.
- [18:02]
James Brawley
James Brawley is the author of the new memoir Life in a Marital Institution, in development for television by Meredith Vieira Productions. The first two time winner of the Moth Grand Slam. His credits include this American Life and and a critically acclaimed national touring monologue. James teaches autobiographical storytelling at Fordham University. Also one more thing the Moth Main Stage is coming to Kalamazoo, Michigan on Wednesday, May 22nd.
- [18:32]
Dan Kennedy
That's presented by Michigan Public Radio.
- [18:35]
James Brawley
For ticketing information and for a list.
- [18:37]
Dan Kennedy
Of all of our upcoming tour stops.
- [18:39]
James Brawley
Visit themoth.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit, available May 28.
- [18:51]
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.