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- [00:00]
Kate Tellers
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- [01:02]
Sponsor Voice
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- [02:18]
Kate Tellers
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host Kate Tellers. The other night I was walking home from the subway with my two children, ages 8 and 10. We had just crossed an intersection when we heard squealing tires, immediately followed by the crunch of metal. When we turned around, there were two people lying in the street next to a smashed up motorcycle. I knew two things immediately. I had to call 911 and my children could not witness this. I quickly told them to turn around with their backs to the street and me as I described to the dispatcher what I was witnessing. After help was confirmed, I turned around to my children to see their tiny backs rigid, lit up by flashing blue and red lights. As the sound of sirens grew closer, they looked so innocent. I do not regret preserving some of that. Sometimes the right thing to do is to look away and other times we need to look life straight in the eyes. In this hour we'll explore stories from people who are grappling with this conundrum. And for all you big hearted people out there, I confirmed with the detective later that the two men in the intersection survived. They will thankfully be fine Our first story comes from Ali Griswold who told us at a story slam in London, England. Here's Ali.
- [03:43]
Ali Griswold
So I love my flat, except for its window. There's nothing inherently wrong with the window. It's even double glazed. The problem is that it looks directly into my neighbor's shower. This is the main window in my flat. It's the one I face when I'm sitting on my couch, when I'm eating dinner at my table. It's impractical to keep it covered at all times. It is unavoidable, as were they when they were showering. I've never met my neighbors in the building next door, but I feel that we're intimately acquainted. They were either very clean or very dirty. I'm unclear which, but as far as I was concerned, at least one of them was in the shower at all times, and often both of them together having enthusiastic shower sex. I considered what to do about this. I thought, I'm an adult, I should be able to work out a mature solution to this problem. We all live on the top floor of our respective buildings and it would be perfectly reasonable for them to assume they're in the privacy of their own home. I felt like it was my civic and neighborly duty to let them know. So I decided to go about it in the most British way possible by writing them a very apologetic note. I started with I'm sorry, which after several years of living in this country, I think is the best way to start a conversation with any British person. So I say Dear next door neighbors, I'm so sorry for the awkwardness of this note. I just wanted to let you know that your shower window isn't as opaque as you might think it is. Actually it's pretty see through in case you wanted to get a curtain. Wishing you well, kind regards. All the best, Allie. Early the next morning, I tiptoe over to my neighbor's flat. I've addressed the note to top floor flat because I don't know their names. I don't even know their flat number. I put it through the mail slot and I run back to my building. A week goes by. Nothing changes. The showering and the shower sex continue apace. At this point, I'm forced to conclude there's one of two options. Option one, they read my note and they don't care. Option two, which seems to me far more likely they didn't get or didn't read my note. I resign myself to the situation and in the meantime, I tell everyone else in my building about it too. And so, a couple months later, my neighbors in the flat directly below mine, Alex in Georgia, come by with some news. They tell me that the flat in the building next door is up for sale and their friends are buying it. They've already told their friends about the shower window and their friends are planning to get a curtain. I'm like, amazing. And what an incredible sitcom level solution to my sitcom level apartment problem. When are they moving in? Home sales close slowly in the uk, but several more months down the line, their friends move in. I know this not because Alex and Georgia tell me, but because one day new people are in the shower and they're taller. I won't go into too much detail other than to say that when you are seeing people through their shower window and they're taller, more is available at eye level. So I go back to Alex in Georgia. I say, hey guys, I see your friends moved in, but maybe you could remind them about the shower. They tell me that they're seeing their friends for dinner in a few weeks and they can bring it up then. In the meantime, they come over to my flat to sort out a problem we're having in the building. Just in time to see one of their friends step into the shower. Alex and Georgia pressed their faces to my double glazed window. That's Pete, said Alex. That's all of Pete, said Georgia. I suggested this problem was more urgent than dinner and maybe we could send them a text. A few days later, I'm sitting on my couch when I see it. It is a historic day in my flat. The curtain is going up. It is like the opposite of the Berlin Wall falling. I text all my friends the news. A few weeks later, Alex stops by and he knocks on my door. He tells me that he's been over to the friends for dinner, and they were looking at photos of the listing of the flat from when it was up for sale when he noticed something odd about the kitchen. In the kitchen, you can see the fridge, and on the fridge there is distinctly a single piece of paper. So Alex zoomed all the way in on the photo, and there, blurry but unmistakable in all of its awkward, apologetic glory, was my note. Not lost, not unread, but displayed in a place of honor for everyone to see. Thank you.
- [09:28]
Kate Tellers
That was Ali Griswold. Ali is a writer and former investigative journalist living in London. This is her first story for the Moth. She still lives in that same flat, but is happy to report that there have been no more shower incidents. Our next story is from Misha Merrill, who told this at a story slam in Miami where we partner with wlrn. Here's Misha.
- [10:00]
Misha Merrill
Hey, I'm nervous. Okay. So when I was a kid back in the 1990s. Yeah, it's not that long ago, my mom used to take my sister and I over to Blockbuster Video, and she would say, go pick out any video you want. And then we pick it out and we'd rent it and we'd bring it home, and she would make a copy of that video for us to keep so we could watch it whenever we wanted. Right. So that's illegal. And we did it for many years, and eventually Blockbuster kind of caught on, and the VHS tapes would arrive with a sort of lock on them that prevented us from being able to copy them. So we found another video store called New Concept Video, which was in Miami beach, was a great local video store. And we started doing the same thing there. And it was kind of a blessing because New Concept had this entirely different collection of movies, like all these eclectic independent movies and foreign films. And my mom was in heaven because she's a real film buff and she could kind of culture my sister and I a little with all of these eclectic movies. So while she had her head buried in the indie film section, I wandered around as a 9 or 10 year old in this video store and found another section which had this, like, partition with a red, like, velvety curtain. And I would poke my head through and see this, you know, like, ocean of just, like fleshy. Just porn. It was porn. And I was amazed and mesmerized because, I mean, not only, you know, is it amazing, but it's also, I was. I had no idea what sex was because we didn't discuss these things in My family, because despite the fact that, like, my parents are very open minded and my mother in particular, I kind of think of her a little bit as like an Annie hall, like a real life Annie Hall. She's very beautiful and very funny and warm, but neurotic and throws on, like, outfits that don't really work, but they look amazing, amazing on her. So she's like that. But she's also Kurdish and Muslim. So along with this Kurdish Muslimness comes a lot of other baggage, in my opinion. Especially, basically, she's sexually repressed. So, you know, and so we didn't talk about sex growing up. And she protected us a lot from that conversation, which meant that these videos that she was copying, she wouldn't just copy them, she'd also edit them, censoring out anything that she thought was too sexy or violent. So she just cut all that stuff out. So that means that when I think about watching a movie as a kid, I really can't remember one movie that I watched that didn't at some point just freeze with two characters on screen, clear, clearly about to kiss, and then frantically fast forward, and I was desperately trying to look past those gray, squiggly lines on the screen, but I couldn't see anything because it was just this chaos of fast forwarding all the way through the scene and then it would stop and the movie would continue. And she did this without fail with every movie that we rented. And then what happened is just to be safe and cover her bases, she wouldn't just, you know, cut out, like, sexy scenes. She also cut out just huge portions of the movie because she was suspicious that maybe there's some, like, subliminal sexual content in there that she's not quite picking up on. And just to be safe, let me cut out, like, this massive portion. So, like, for instance, like Grease, like the movie Grease, which I loved. My sister and I would watch Grease, and the way I watched, I thought, like, wow, like, what a weird kind of, like, avant garde experimental movie, when really it was this incredibly conventional musical because she had cut out like a third of the movie. Then there was the wizard of Oz, which I don't know if anyone remembers, there were these flying monkeys in that movie which terrified my sister. So she made another version without flying monkeys in it, which I have to say did not affect the story at all. So still a great movie without the monkeys. So, yeah, this is the way I grew up and how I watched movies. And, you know, I eventually, like, wanted to see the original format of these movies. And I did. I watched them and I have to admit, I mean, I was pretty disappointed with the originals because they were really fake and phony and they had these stories that made sense and like a plot that was, you know, had a through line and an arc and a beginning and a middle and an end. And I really like what my mom did because the movies she made, these versions, my mom's versions, they reflect a lot more accurately my life.
- [15:24]
Kate Tellers
You know,
- [15:28]
Misha Merrill
they're scattered, they make absolutely no sense, and there's very little sex in it.
- [15:39]
Sponsor Voice
Thank you.
- [15:44]
Kate Tellers
That was Misha Merrill. I asked Misha about some of the edits his mother made to the movie Grease that made it so avant garde. He told me that she cut out all of the early scenes of Danny and Sandy kissing on the beach. He thought it was an intentional decision that the audience know absolutely nothing about their backstory. A bold choice. In a moment. Spice Grannies on a plane, and beauty on the other side of bravery.
- [16:15]
Producer Voice
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
- [16:22]
Sponsor Voice
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- [19:23]
Kate Tellers
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Kate Tellers. Our next story in this show about the choice of when to look is from Madeline Berenson, who told this at a slam in Denver where we partner with public radio station kunc. Here's Madeline.
- [19:43]
Madeline Berenson
So I had boarded the plane to Portland, Oregon, where I was headed for my grandson's third birthday. And in my hand I had my boarding pass. And on my boarding pass was printed my row and seat 8B. And when I got to row 8 I saw that the women in seats A and C both had gray hair. And since I Am also a woman with gray hair. I found it kind of funny to be completing this little trio of crones on a plane. And when I sat down and I got a better look at my seatmates, I thought that it was even funnier than I thought because each of us had a very distinct style that reflected a different Persona. So we were kind of like the Spice Girls, Granny Edition. The woman in the window seat, Seat A. Was fit and thin, and she was wearing all Patagonia Sporty Granny. The woman in the aisle seat was wearing this drapey velvet dress and a crystal necklace. Mystic Granny. And I was in the middle in one of my cotton vintage dresses that I paid, like, $3 for. Thrift store Granny. So, you know, all put together in a row like this, we look like a real time 3D Buzzfeed quiz. Which modern, funky granny are you? And I was kind of proud of that. And I was feeling very pleased. Pleased with myself about the way we were redefining the post menopausal woman. Right? Like, look at this world. You don't have to devolve into the stereotypical cranky, judgmental busybody who's in love with Barry Manilow. You know, you can still be yourself. Not that there's anything wrong with Barry Manilow. Anyway, then this gorgeous couple comes on the plane and stops at the row in front of us, row seven. And I don't know their names because they only called each other babe the rest of the time. But for the sake of this story, we will call them Brittany and Dan. And Brittany took a look at her boarding pass, and she saw that they were assigned seats B and C. And she turned to Dan and she went ballistic. She was like, the middle seat? Are you kidding me? The middle seat? How many times did I tell you I needed the window seat? That was the only thing you had to do. The only thing. Oh, my God. You screw up even the simplest thing. At which point, the man in 7A had turned his back to them, closed his eyes, and was now pretending to fall asleep. Sporty Granny. Mystic Granny and I kind of shot each other A. Yikes. Look. And Brittany was going on and on, listing all the ways that Dan was ruining her life. And every now and then, Dan would say something like, sorry, babe. Sorry, babe. But it just made it worse. She was like, I don't want you to be sorry, babe. I just want you to not be lame, babe. Can you understand that? Can you just try to not be. Be so lame? Can you even try? Oh, my God. So she went on and on and on, all through the boarding process, all through takeoff. And it was getting worse. It was getting uglier and meaner. And at one point, I realized that Mystic Granny and Sporty Granny and I were all holding hands and sort of just kind of like we were bracing ourselves against this ugliness and this horror. And then I also realized that we knew this story. We had seen this before, right? The beautiful, abusive woman and the broken man under her spell, who can never do anything right, is responsible for everything and can fix nothing. And when we got to altitude and Brittany was still, still at it, Mystic Granny broke. And she reached up and she tapped Brittany on the shoulder, and she said, excuse me, you are not the only person in the world. There are other people on this plane, and your childish, selfish tantrum is upsetting all of us. It's time for you to stop,
- [24:13]
Boots Lupinui
Chris.
- [24:14]
Ali Griswold
Granny.
- [24:18]
Madeline Berenson
And Brittany turned and looked at her, and she burst into tears. And she got up and she went off to the bathroom, and she stumbled down the aisle, sobbing all the way. But now Sporty Granny had something to say. So she tapped Dan on the shoulder and she said, I don't care how pretty she is, it is not worth that abuse. And you know what? You deserve more. And realizing that we had just morphed from the Granny Spice Girls into the Granny Greek chorus, I thought, well, now it's my turn to add something. So I said, yeah. I said, that's not love. That's not love. And Dan was looking at us between the, you know, the space between seeds beat and his eyes, his big brown eyes were filled with tears. And he said, mind your own fucking business. So just then, Brittany comes back from the bathroom, and she's still crying. And she falls into her seat and she leans against Dan and she's whimpering. Oh, my God, she was so mean to me.
- [25:28]
Boots Lupinui
She was so mean to me.
- [25:30]
Madeline Berenson
And Dan's like, I know, babe. I'm sorry, babe. Meanwhile, back in row eight, we grannies weren't feeling quite so spicy anymore. We just kind of slowly retreated into our own little personal spaces. And cranky Granny in the window seat closed her eyes and went to sleep. Judgmental Granny in the aisle seat pulled out a book and started to read. And me in the middle, busy body Granny. I put in my earbuds, turned on my music, and listened to my Love songs playlist all the way to Portland. It's my favorite playlist. And I know what you're thinking, and no, there is no Barry Manilow on it. Not one song. Thank you,
- [26:22]
Kate Tellers
That was Madelyn Berenson. Madeline is a writer, ski instructor and a blissed out wife, mother and grandmother who passionately believes that minding one's own business is highly overrated. To see a picture of Madeline wearing one of her obviously vintage finds, please visit themoth.org. Did you know that we have a pitch line that you can call and tell us a two minute version of a story that you you want to share on a moth stage? We listen to everyone. Here's one that I love that reminds us that what we look so closely at one day may not be worth a second glance tomorrow. This pitch came in from Arnold Bremen.
- [27:12]
Arnold Bremen
This is a short part of a long humorous story. Of all the 2,000 performers that I presented, I think Ethel Merman was probably one of the most memorable. It was the late 1970s and she was in her early 70s. I was quite concerned that her voice wouldn't be as powerful as she was in her heyday on Broadway. At rehearsal she absolutely alleviated that fear. Her voice could be heard for miles without a mic. At performance time, the Broadway bell sang, danced up a storm and had the audience at the edge of their seats. After the finale, the audience jumped up and cheered the great legend backstage. Merman was Merman. She was totally herself. Loud, brash and boisterous. A hundred fans waited at the stage door. She was flattered when I told her what she said. Now that's terrific, hon. Now get rid of them. The following morning, before taking my star to the airport, I opened the local paper and the banner headline read, the old star should retire to old performers homes. The audience jumped up out of sheer sympathy. I prayed she hadn't seen the review she had and said to me, I had to come to this piss ant little town to get a view like that. There were 200 letters of complaint to the editor. The editor sent them on to me and I posted them to my star. I received a wonderful letter back that hangs on my wall today. It ended, oh, don't worry about that untrue and unkind review. I never pay any attention to them anyway. I always say, yesterday's newspaper wraps today's fish. Fondly, Ethel.
- [28:55]
Kate Tellers
Sing out, Ethel. Those are wise words. You can pitch us at 877799, moth or online@themoth.org where you can also share the stories from this hour or or others from the Moth archive. Sometimes the choice to look is not simple. Our next story is from Liz Mills who told this at a grand slam we produced at the Castro Theater in San Francisco where We partner with public radio station kalw. Here's Liz Mills.
- [29:38]
Liz Mills
My brother William is nothing short of Houdini when it comes to getting out of things he doesn't want to do. Literally no excuse or strategy is beneath him. And I'm really ashamed to say I've often been his accomplice. Nearly 15 years ago, he called me from his college dorm room and told me he was totally screwed for a research paper the next day. And so me, his ghost writer since high school, assessed the situation, and there was no way I could write 15 pages on the Ottoman Empire by the next morning. And so I said, william, looks like you're going to have to say our grandmother died. And he was like, liz, I did that at midterms. And so I joked, how about Grandpa? And he said, I did that one, too. Suffice to say, even Houdini runs out of tricks at a certain point. And William certainly did. He failed the paper. But the good news is, when it comes to the higher stakes stuff, William always rises to the occasion. About six years ago, he and I were on a bus on the way to Mountain View, and the driver lost control of it hit the media, and we flipped. And out of nowhere, William turned into a real life Clark Kent. He was saving the day, running around, helping people up, bandaging people up. He was making us laugh in the middle of the dark highway when it was pretty scary. He was our brightness. So it probably comes as no surprise that a thrill seeker like William ended up in an unconventional path. About a decade ago, he became a skydiver and then a skydiving instructor and then a base jumper, which means he spent over 10 years climbing up mountains and jumping off epic peaks with only a parachute on his back. Pretty insane, but kind of cool. And so, despite the fact that I'm epically less epic than him, I still am always his get out of jail free emergency contact. And I do that because I love him. He's amazing and one of my favorite people. So no surprise that I ended up in Switzerland two years ago when I got the call that he needed my help. He and his best friend Nate were on this bucket list trip to the Swiss Alps to jump off this mountain called the Eiger as a way to celebrate their newfound sobriety and just beginning a new life chapter. But things weren't going according to plan. And enter Liz. My task of the day was I was standing at a police station in some random town in the Swiss Alps and getting a list of to do's. I had to sign a Mountain of paperwork, make a ton of calls, pick up his shattered sunglasses, cremate his body, bring him home. My big brother William, at 32, had jumped off the Eiger, soared like Superman, seen the world from a vantage point very few ever will and not made it out alive. Grief defies words. And as I sat there with a police officer, I was shaking. I felt outside of my body, and I could barely process the fact that William, who got out of everything, some sort of magical part of him got out of everything, hadn't made it out alive. Where was the magic? As I was leaving the police station, the officer handed me one more thing. An SD card. William was wearing a GoPro when he jumped off the mountain, because base jumpers do that. And so he had the final minutes of his life recorded. So I know what you're thinking. I hope Liz threw that out and forgot it ever existed. But of course I didn't, because I had some sick belief that sister loyalty meant I had to experience that, too. I threw it out of my head for a while, though. But a few months after he died, I broke. And in, like, a manic frenzy, I pulled the video up on my computer. And I just imagined if I hit play, would I regret it? Would I just be screaming at the screen, william, pull the parachute earlier. Pull it now. It's now or never. You've got to do it now. I hit play, and the video was nothing like I expected. It was really cool. I saw from his vantage point being at the top of the mountain, looking around at some of his great friends. He was saying, I love you, man. How epic is this? He was doing high fives and everything. I saw as he brought his toes closer to the edge. And then he jumped. And for 45 seconds when I was watching the video, it was the two of us looking at this incredible escape ahead of us. This valley, it's beautiful. We looked to the left and to the right, and we took it all in, and I understood it. I mean, why stand at the tippy top of the Alps looking out on a vista when you can fly over it and behold the world, like, entirely on your terms? William started BASE jumping when he was in a really bad place. And it was a hobby that became a passion and a passion that turned him into the best version of himself. It was a part of the way he healed from bouts of tremendous depression throughout his life. So William's final gift to me was he showed me a way that healing has many different paths, some of which are bananas, like jumping off mountains and all of them are hard, but it's worth it. It's taken a huge amount of courage over the past two years for me to learn how to simultaneously hold grief and devastation with joy and hope. William was the one who showed me there's such beauty on the other side of bravery. The video ended. I was devastated. It felt irrecoverable. I could not imagine watching this video. It sickened me. But I paused and truly, it took a few seconds. I realized the magic in it because William really was Houdini. He was always escaping, all the way to the very end. He escaped social norms, the predetermined path, the idea that the way things are are the way they're supposed to be. He evaded that misconception we all have that the possibilities presented to us in life are representative of all our actual options. He didn't escape death, obviously, but none of us will. And my God, did he show me the extraordinary beauty of a life well live.
- [35:59]
Kate Tellers
That was Liz Mills. I asked Liz what it was like to share her brother with a room full of strangers. She said sharing William, both his life and his death with the Moth audience felt very right. He lived life in such an epic way, and as if he was intentionally teeing me up for a lifetime of moments where we could share the spotlight. Him as the protagonist, me as the storyteller. In a moment, a Hawaiian man goes hunting for the lost music of Kohala when the Moth Radio Hour continues.
- [36:49]
Producer Voice
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
- [36:56]
Sponsor Voice
This episode is brought to you in part by Claude from Anthropic. The best creative thinkers live in the details, the moment that changes everything, the contradiction that makes someone real. Claude is built for creative thinkers. When you're working through an idea, considering options, thinking outside the box, working through roadblocks, Claude sits with the messy parts and helps you see patterns you might have missed. It's a thinking partner for the kind of work that deserves your full attention. Turning scattered notes or incomplete thoughts into something clear. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Themoth and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Okay, quick question. Why are we still acting like sky high wireless bills are just part of being an adult. For years, I've watched my phone bill creep up, feeling like there wasn't much I could do about it. And then I remembered free will extends to my wireless plan, too. I've been looking at different options, and Mint Mobile is at the top of the list. With them, I can still get strong coverage and fast data, but with a much better price tag. Mint exists to stop the cycle of overpaying just because that's how it's always been. Their premium wireless plans start at just 15 bucks a month. You get high speed data and unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network. You can bring your own phone and number, activate with ESIM in minutes and start saving right away. No long term contracts, no hoops to jump through. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans@mintmobile.com moth that's mintmobile.com moth upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. D Mint Mobile for details
- [38:35]
Moth Mainstage Announcer
the American Dream. We all have a version of it. The notion that where you begin has nothing to do with where you end up. That anything is possible. Run for office live. Off the grid. Hit a homer. Build robots. Teach goat yoga. Anything. This spring, the Moth mainstage is traveling to cities around the country with stories of the American Dream. Does it even exist anymore?
- [38:57]
Arnold Bremen
For who?
- [38:58]
Moth Mainstage Announcer
What happens when that dream is dashed or deferred? And what happens when the dream is fulfilled? Let's come together and listen to people telling true personal stories of their very own. American dreams. Experience the Moth main stage live. Find a city near you@the moth.org mainstage.
- [39:25]
Kate Tellers
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Kate Tellers. Our final story was told by Boots Lupinui at our main stage in Honolulu, Hawaii, where we partner with Hawaii Public Radio. Here's Boots.
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Boots Lupinui
Aloha mai kakou. This is a story about magic. Not the kind with the top hat and the rabbit and the haughty lady getting saw in half. It's always a haughty lady. No, I saw real magic. You know how when you see a magician and they tell you where to look and you're still amazed when the trick happens? I'm going to tell you right up front where to look. So the magic I witnessed happen in Kohala. Kohala is a beautiful place. It's full of stories. Some of them are well known, like the one about how the people of Kohala saved the infant Kamehameha from being killed, hiding him from whole armies so that he might grow up and fulfill the prophecy and unite our islands. Kohala did that? I was born here on Oahu, on the windward side in Kaneohe, right thataway. But my roots reach back to Kohala. We'd visit as kids, and I knew. I knew that place was special. A few years later, I saw the amazing documentaries of Eddie and Myrna Kamai. Yeah, documentaries about special places and a way of life that was disappearing all too quickly. And I knew I wanted to make stories like that. But I. Regular guys, we don't get to do that kind of stuff. So maybe better we just leave it to the professionals, like Eddie and Myrna Kamai. But in the early days of 2017, Erika Mai passed away, and that line of storytelling ended. Later that same year, my wife Cheryl and I, we moved to Kohala. And we hadn't even been there for very long when I ran into a couple of guys I hadn't met in years. Two great Hawaiian musicians. They come over for dinner. They bring their wives and their instruments, of course, in that order, of course. We eat dinner. We move to the living room. The cases pop open, the guitars and ukulele come out, and we start playing. We're playing old Hawaiian music. We're playing local music that was on the radio when we were kids. There was a couple eagle songs in there, all kind of music. That jam session lasted until 4 in the morning. Yeah, our wives are thrilled. But the whole time I'm sitting there and I'm thinking about how good we sound. We sound like we're already a band. I'm thinking, I want to keep this feeling. I want to feel this again and again. So later that day, I tell my wife that I've had these ideas for telling stories for years, for making documentaries, but I never thought I could do that kind of thing. But Eddie Kamae only had so long to tell stories, and I don't know how long I have to tell stories. I told her I wanted to go hunting for the old, unrecorded songs of Kohala. I called them heirloom songs and asked the old families if they could share any songs. My wife foolishly agreed to help me because, let's face it, she married a musician and an artist, and now, apparently, a storyteller. So clearly she has poor judgment, but she can write grant applications. So she agrees to help. And with her help, I get to work. I ask all the film guys, ask the music musicians. Everybody says yes, because apparently everybody else in Kohala has poor judgment, too. I get a grant. I start a GoFundMe. I name our band the Kohala Mountain Boys. And we got to work. I put out the word on social media. I asked everybody I knew if they had any songs from any family in Kohala. And immediately I get a hit. How easy is this? One of my grade school classmates contacts me and says her grandfather, who was from Kohala, wrote a song in 1940 or 41. So I contact her by phone, and she says she knows she's seen the song, but she can't remember where. So her and her husband, they tear that house up, and in the last place they look, they find it Papa's papers. And they send me the lyrics. And she tells me about her grandfather, how he legally adopted her and raised her as his own daughter. How on long weekends and holidays, he would take her back to Kohala so she could meet some of her Kohala family. He's a good man. What she sent me was a page of handwritten lyrics. Makau lelo, Hawaii in Hawaiian language. My job was to take those lyrics and put them in the form of a finished song. So I took the lyrics and the time period that he wrote them, and I tried to craft a song that I thought might have been a hit on the radio here if you heard it in 1940. And just like that song number one done super easy, right? But it's funny, when we finally recorded that song for the documentary, we're standing in the boonies in this ancient part of Kohala, and we're in front of this old cabin, and we're surrounded by native plants and trees, and there's a stream running right here. We're dressed in period clothing and playing instruments that would have been available at the time the song was written. And we're playing this old, new song, and it could have been World War II era Hawaii. And yet right in front of me, there's a cameraman with a gimbal and a giant camera. And over here, there's a sound guy with a bank of digital, whatever they are. And I've got a wireless digital monitor in my ear. It's like 1940 colliding with 2019. But we got it done. We got it done. And then nothing. For months. Nothing. Nobody gave me any songs. I asked everybody I knew to ask everybody they knew, and nothing. And I'm thinking, these grant deliverable deadlines, they're going to come, and all that money is going to have to be paid back. And I don't even know what kind of limbs I'm going to have to sell to make that happen. But it's not so magical now. But I started this, and a small group of people stood up with me, and I knew in my bones that there is magic here. So I just had to keep trying. So I did. And a week before the film crew was to come up and shoot for the one and only time, my bass player tells me, I know a lady who has a song, but she's not going to give it to you. I don't even know what that means, but I'm desperate, so I called the phone number. She grilled me forever. And then she tells me to come to her house for round two of the interrogation. So Hawaiian. Just trying to root out my intentions. Okay. So I go and I sit down with her, and she tells me about her dad, about how he used to run a crew that maintained the famous Kohala Ditch Trail. And how he would take a couple crew members and some pack animals and hike into the forest, and they'd stay in this little cabin next to the Ditz Trail for days on end while they worked on it. And the whole time missing his family. And at night, he would lay in his cot, and while he's thinking about his wife and kids, the beautiful scent of gardenias from all the wild gardenia bushes around the cabin would come wafting in the screen windows. And he wrote a love song for his wife, comparing her to the lovely gardenias all around him. She thought it would have been about 1939 or so. the end of this hour, she smiles at me and says, I think I'm going to give you my daddy song.
- [48:12]
Liz Mills
Yes.
- [48:17]
Boots Lupinui
And then she says, it goes like this. And she starts humming La Da Da. No, no, no, no, no. That's not how. No. What? That's it. That's it. After all of that, that's it. Humming. So I said, does it have lyrics? And she said, oh, yes. And she pulls out a notepad and a pencil, and she starts trying to remember what they might have been. Right about. Then I started feeling like I was getting Covid, and I think I was contracting it from this song. But I recorded her humming on my phone, and I took her scratch paper lyrics home to write this song. With now six days left, just like the first one, I was shooting for a song that would have been popular here back in the day in 1939. When he wrote it, this one was easy. This one wrote itself. It was something about it that I felt like all I had to do is play it out loud and it would be real. And it was just like with the first song we recorded in the bushes on the wall of a. The rock wall of a kalo patch. And we got it all done on time. The last day of filming, Sunday afternoon, the Crew comes to me, and they said, we got all the interview footage shot. We got all the song footage shot. We got all the B roll shot. But we still have no idea what the story is that we're editing this footage into. There's no way I could have storyboarded any of this. Now this crew is leaving to go back to the airport to fly back to Oahu in a couple of hours, and I still don't know what the story I'm telling is. So now I'm in my head, and I'm running through all the interview footage, trying to play it back, and it hits me that I've overlooked the most important piece of this whole puzzle. I took my eyes off of the spot where the trick was happening. Both the ladies who gave me songs for this story, for this project, one at the beginning of the project and one at the end of the project, were both from the same old Kohala family. And yet they had never met. They had never even heard of each other. I didn't know how that was possible. But then it hit me that I can tell the finished story with one last shot. So I tell the crew to go get the first lady, the one who grew up on Oahu, take her to the family graveyard in Kohala. It's a beautiful little plot. She'd never been there before. Don't mic her up. Ask her to wait in the car, because I don't want her to explore the graveyard on her own. I go to get the other lady, the one who grew up in Kohala, and I asked her to come back to the family graveyard to meet a cousin of hers for the very first time. And she says yes. And we filmed them meeting in the graveyard, hugging and kissing the one woman pointing out the graves of both women's shared ancestors. They're holding hands, and they're smiling and walking and talking. And without microphones, we don't get to know what they're saying. That's not for us. That conversation belongs to their family. And it gives me chicken skin. Even now. I think about the fact that the only people who heard those words were those two women and their ancestors. And I was honored. I stood outside that graveyard, and I was honored to just be a silent witness to this sweetness in a graveyard. And that was it. There was the trick. It was revealed. I was watching the whole time, and I still don't know how the trick was done. But what I do know is these two guys, these two composers, these two men, these two sons of Kohala, they loved their family. And their home so much that even after death they were moving things around just to try and reunite or unite their descendants in their homeland. What kind of place, what kind of special place raises people who hold that kind of love and passion and loyalty even after death? Like I said, I don't know. I still don't know how the trick was done. And I don't care. Because I saw real magic. I saw what happens when an amazing place raises loving, loyal children. I saw real magic. No top hat and no rabbit and no haole lady. Again, cut in half. Real magic. Mahaw.
- [53:28]
Kate Tellers
That was Boots Lupa Nui. Technically we look with our eyes, but you will see Boots story more clearly if you listen with your ears. To end our hour, here is the Kohala Mountain Boys playing one of the songs Boots references in his story. It's called Lovely Lovely Gardenia,
- [53:49]
Boots Lupinui
Lovely gardenia, you're the flower of my heart. My sweet gardenia, you're my only sweetheart. Graceful gardenia, you're the flower of my heart My sweet gardenia, you're my only sweetheart. Each petal snowy white with fragrance so
- [54:34]
Madeline Berenson
sweet
- [54:37]
Boots Lupinui
reminds me of night when romance creeps night I dream of you.
- [54:49]
Kate Tellers
Remember. You can pitch us at 877799 moth or online@themoth.org where you can also share these stories or others from the Moth Archive and buy tickets to Moth Storytelling Events in your area through our website. There are Moth events year round. You can find a show near you and come out to tell a story. The Moth can be found on all major social media platforms. That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope this episode has inspired you to see stories around every corner. We hope you'll join us next time and though we cannot see you, we appreciate that you're here.
- [55:30]
Boots Lupinui
You are my only sweet home.
- [55:53]
Producer Voice
This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, J.L. and Kate Tellers, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show. Co producer is Vicki Merrick, Associate Producer Emily Couch. The Moth's leadership team includes Sara Haberman, Christina Norman, Marina Cluce, Sarah Austin, Janess, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardinale, Caledonia Cairns, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson and Patricia Urenia. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour is from Epidemic Sound and Boots Loop Annuie Podcast music production support from Davey Sumner. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at audacy, including Executive Producer Leah Rhys Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and to learn all about the moth, go to our website, themoth.org.
- [56:59]
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