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- [00:00]
Sponsor
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- [02:10]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth podcast and welcome to 2018. I'm Dan Kennedy. Every year we try to make it happen, or at least we hope that we'll finally follow through on our resolutions to start living life as our best selves. And we give it a year, but in reality can take a whole lot longer than that for things to even begin coming together. Our first story today comes to us from Kemp Powers. Kemp has been on the Moth Radio Hour. He's been on the podcast both of those, I think a few times before, but he told this story back in 2011. The theme of the night was point of no return. Here's Kemp.
- [02:50]
Kemp Powers
I'm 37 years old, and I wasn't really very good at much of anything in my twenties, least of all marriage. But the decision to get a divorce wasn't an easy one. It's interesting because for a lot of people, the legal tangle is what stops them from getting a divorce. But in my world, that wasn't really a big decision maker. It was because we had a daughter, and going through with that meant that on some level, I was going to be losing her, if not literally, then figuratively. So when people have a really bad breakup, it's not uncommon for one parent to be left feeling like basically their kid is better off without them. And in my case, it wasn't very hard to convince me. To put it very simply, I really, really, really sucked at being a dad. When my daughter was a small infant, I swore that she was going to break some kind of record for falling out of bassinets, falling out of cribs, falling out of beds. And it always seemed to happen when I was the one that was watching her and I was hardly ever around. I traveled so much for work, and in the rare occasions that I was there, any effort that I made to try to bond with her always seemed to backfire. I bought her this. When she was three months old, I bought her this gangly little puppet that I named Sanchez after my favorite reggae dance hall singer. And she was really into Sesame street. So I really thought that this puppet was going to bring her a lot of joy. Instead, it terrified her. And from there, things just continued to get worse. I mean, by the time when she was six months old, I decided that it was really smart for her to know that fire was dangerous and it was something that she should stay away from. So one day when I was making a cup of tea, I picked her up, holding her in one hand and the hot kettle in the other. I explained very carefully that you should never, ever, ever touch hot things because they could hurt you. At least I did in my mind, because in reality, by the time I got to the word touch, she'd already reached out and grabbed the bottom of the steaming kettle and burned herself. So by the time my daughter was 1 years old, I was already pretty much afraid to be left alone with her. She suffered from a febrile seizure at 18 months and vomited in the middle of the night and inhaled it, almost choking to death. She was in the hospital for a week, and I remembered looking at her in that incubator with the tubes up her nose. And the butterfly IV in her hand and thinking to myself, dude, you're just going to fucking get somebody killed. And so I didn't fight because I didn't really think I had any right to. I didn't fight the incredibly restrictive visitation rights that I had. I didn't fight when her mother asked for my approval to relocate to Phoenix. And I didn't even fight when the visitation that we did agree upon fell by the wayside, because at the end of the day, they were too busy in their life out there for her to keep up with her schedule of visitation in Los Angeles. So my friends, they were really supportive, but they weren't really able to offer me any counsel. It was this really bizarre twist that we had all grown up in this world where divorce was just a fact of life, but suddenly I found myself in this adult world where every single family that I knew was nuclear. It was like we were suddenly back in the 50s, only I didn't have to drink out of a separate water fountain, and I didn't have to worry about getting lynched from having had a kid with a white lady. But every single person that I knew my age was either so happily married that it bordered on kind of sickening, or so relentlessly single that it bordered on parody. And my friends love me, and I love them, too. But to all of them, to the. To the friends who were married, I was basically that single guy that they could live vicariously through. And to the ones who were single, I was the divorcee with all the responsibility that proved to them that them not having any kids and not getting married had been the right decision to make. So I basically went on with my life and got used to the routine that we had. That was all I really had. The sporadic phone calls, the grudging pickups that happened at the halfway point between Los Angeles and Fusion, Phoenix, in an aptly named shithole of a town called Desert Center. It was a barren place filled with more scorpions and dust devils than people. And our drives out of the desert. My daughter and I hardly ever spoke. And I was pretty glad about that, because not talking meant that I never really had to explain why we were in the situation that we were in. So one day, back in March, I get this telephone call early in the morning, and it's from my daughter. And I'm pretty surprised because she almost never calls me. When I answer, she's distraught. She's crying. She says, dad, a tsunami has just destroyed Japan and it's heading for California. You need to get out of bed right now and get to a high point immediately. Now, initially, I just had to assure her that there was no chance that a tidal wave was going to wash away Koreatown anytime soon. But she was still too worried to be calmed down. So to assuage her fears, I had to talk to her. And we talked. We talked about her piano lessons. We talked about her upcoming 13th birthday. We talked about her now 6 year old brother who lived with me, who she missed dearly. And we talked about me, who she missed just as much. It turned out that she still had her puppet Sanchez, which she hung on the wall next to her bed. When my daughter's 13th birthday came around, we made a pact. Going forward, we would speak every Sunday at 12pm no matter where we were. And when we spoke, she would get to ask me one question. It didn't matter what the question was, I had to give her the answer. And this was something that made me a little bit nervous because I was finally going to be held accountable for something. When the first question came, it was what was my favorite book? After that it was what was my favorite movie? A week later, what was my favorite song? And as the weeks turned into months, these questions revolved about the things I'd done, the places I'd been, and how I was living my life. My daughter is 13 years old and 5 foot 10 inches tall, but I can still pick her up and I can still hold her in my arms. We talk every week now. And when I hold her, every time that I see her, and when I do, I just make sure that I keep that hot kettle just a little bit out of reach. Thank you.
- [09:27]
Dan Kennedy
Kemp Powers is a playwright, screenwriter and author. His award winning play, One Night in Miami is currently being adapted into a feature film. He was most recently a writer on the television show Star Trek Discovery and now resides in Los Angeles. Kemp's daughter is now 19 years old. She's a sophomore in college in Arizona. They sometimes spend the holidays together and they actually spent their New Year's Eve together earlier this week. Several years ago, they started this tradition of going on one big family trip every year, usually to someplace new and often to someplace out of the country. Kemp tells us it's been a wonderful bonding experience, but not just for the two of them, for the entire family. We hope they have many more trips to come and many more stories to tell. When we asked our next storyteller, Madison Perry, what his New year's resolution for 2018 might be, he said that he's going to go to a Meditation retreat for seven days. Mostly to get calm and centered, but also not to watch the news for seven days. Madison told this next story at an LA slam back in 2013. The theme of the night was fall from grace. Here's Madison Perry.
- [10:42]
Madison Perry
Good evening, everybody. So about five years ago, I was living in New York City and I was at a one year anniversary dinner with the girl I was dating at the time. And it was going kind of awkward. And the reason was neither one of us had said I love you in that year. And that's a long time to go without saying that. I had noticed in the last couple months that both of us had started avoiding the word entirely in any context. Like you'd be at lunch and be like, oh, this is a great turkey sandwich. I liked it. I liked that turkey sandwich. So you have to be careful because you don't want to rate the person you're dating below a sandwich. So it gets tricky. And so we exchanged cards at this dinner and they were weird because we couldn't use the L word. So they were weirdly impersonal for anniversary cards. It was kind of like we were signing each other's yearbooks. It was like, it's been great getting to know you this year. Stay cool this summer. XOXO your boyfriend, you know, that's good. You know, I think we kind of both knew we weren't the one, but we were nice people, we didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. And it was going good enough, so we'd stayed together. So about a month after our anniversary, I'm at a bar and my girlfriend is out of town for the weekend and I meet this girl and her name's Lindsay and she's really cool, she's pretty and she's dressed hip and we just, we strike up a conversation. She's a friend of a friend. And it's just one of those conversations, it flows really well. We like all the same things. We laugh a lot. She has a great sense of humor, by which I mean she thinks all of my jokes are funny, which is really what guys mean when they say they want a girl with a sense of humor. So we're talking and it's going really great. Just a time where you meet a stranger and you just really connect. And we're talking for several hours and all our friends have left the bar and we're still there alone talking and we're sitting next to each other and it's very intimate. And when I lean in to talk to her, I can smell her Hair. And I don't know why, but other girls hair always smells better than your girlfriend's hair. Science can't explain it, but it's true. And so we're talking and drinking and talking and it's late in the evening and then there's that pause, that moment, that moment where we're staring at each other and we're supposed to kiss. And my conscience is like, you can't kiss her. You have a girlfriend. You're a nice guy. Nice guys don't cheat. And I'm like, you're right. But like, don't people say the things that you regret the most are the things you didn't do and shouldn't? Isn't it better? Who cares about being nice? That's overrated. We should be embracing the moment and living life, right? And I check in with my conscious and he's like, these are some good points. And so I do it. I lean in and I kiss her. And she kisses me back and it's passionate. And I take her in my arms. And now we're making out right there at the bar. And we don't care who's watching because we're young and we're drunk and it's 3am in New York City and we're doing something wrong. And it's amazing. And it's this great kiss. It's fantastic. It's like the kind of kiss people write songs about and people go to war over. We're doing it, it's life. And we're doing it right now in this bar. So it's a good kiss. So I'm worried now though, because I've cheated. And to defend myself, I will say, on the scale of cheating, like on a scale of one to Arnold Schwarzenegger, this is like a two at best. You know, we made out drunkenly in Europe, it'd be considered a friendly hello, what we did, but we're in America and so it's cheating and I get caught. It turns out I'm really bad at cheating because I get caught less than 24 hours later. Here's how I write an email to my best friend telling him all about it. Mistake number one, if you cheat, don't put it in writing. That's not. If you need to tell someone, call them. And even then you should be on like a burner cell phone, like you're a drug dealer on the wire. You just throw it away after. My second mistake was the subject line I chose for this email, which was, and I quote, so I cheated on my girlfriend. Yeah, very inconvenient when she went to Google something on my computer and noticed an email from my friend titled Re so I cheated on my girlfriend. She was a bit curious about the content of that email. So we get into this big fight, of course, and she's yelling at me and she says, I can't believe you'd cheat on me. I can't believe you'd sleep with someone else. And I'm like, aha. I didn't have sex. We just kissed. I say. And I'm like, this is a great defense. I'm at least getting some points back, you know? She counters with that's worse. Kissing is worse than sex, she says, which no.
- [15:30]
Rachel Lee
No.
- [15:31]
Madison Perry
That's like saying speeding is okay if you wreck your car. Like that's one is below the other for sure. Also, I wish I had known that kissing was worse than sex when I was busy not having sex. I wish we'd discussed those rules prior to this. So we we break up. Not that night. Amazingly, we stayed together for a few months because I was guilty and inertia and fear and you're dumb when you're 25. You're like, we'll save this. Yay. And so we stayed together for a few months and by the time we broke up, it was too late for me to call Lindsey and find out if it had been a one night thing or a long thing. And so I did learn some things. I made two resolutions after that relationship. The first was to never stay in a relationship with someone I didn't truly about. I wasn't passionate about being with because it's unfair to you and them and it's dishonest and it leads to bad things. And my second resolution was to be a lot more thoughtful about my email titles. I'm Madison. Thanks.
- [16:35]
Dan Kennedy
That was Madison Perry. Madison is a screenwriter performer, two time winner of the Moth Grand Slam Storytelling Championship and the host of the monthly Moth Story Slam in Los Angeles. Madison's book A Memoir of Heartbreak, Hookups, Love and Brunch is out now in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. Madison's work has also appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney's Cosmopolitan, and the Daily Beast. Learn more@madisonperry.com Resolutions are never an easy thing. And and plenty of times to get the things we want, we have to do some of the things that we don't want to do. And our final storyteller today shared this story at a Chicago Moth story slam called Extra Mile. Here's Rachel Lee live at the Moth.
- [17:29]
Rachel Lee
So I've been in marketing since I came to Chicago. And surprise. It's awful, and it's horrible. I really hate it. I work for a lighting distributor now, and it's really awful to know that you're selling people things they absolutely don't need. But there was one instance in my whole marketing career that I just. I killed. I absolutely killed. I had spreadsheets, I had Excels, I had fucking pie charts. I had everything possible that you could have, and all of this so that one woman would fall in love with me. So I met this woman at a bus stop, got her number, don't know how I got it, and we hang out. She comes over to my house at like, 10pm after she goes to a work party. And after she left, I decided, wow, I'm, like, super in love with her. I want her to love me. I want everything with her. I want to know what it's like to watch a movie with her when it's raining. I want to know what it's like to walk around when it's cold out. I absolutely want all of it. I want to marry this person. So the minute she leaves, I go, okay, I gotta sit down. I gotta figure this out. I stay up all night. So I put together a swat. And if any of you know what a SWAT is, it's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So I go, all right.
- [18:55]
Madison Perry
All right.
- [18:55]
Rachel Lee
I go, my strengths. I'm like, well, I'm nice. I guess that's really all I have going. But then I, like. I realized I was like, wait a minute. I've been broken up with before for being too nice. That's fucking bullshit. And so I was like, let me put that on the back burner. And I was like, all right. Well, I'm also, like, pretty polite, so that'll be something. And so then I go right on over to the weaknesses. As you can tell, there are going to be several. So I go, okay, weaknesses. Well, she's heterosexual. That's not gonna help. And so I'm like, okay, so by default, my vagina is gonna be a weakness. So then I'm like, okay, location. That's gonna be a big deal. She lives downtown. I live in Lakeview. That's not gonna work out. And then also another weakness was that she was very fashionable. And she's originally from Mexico. She's been all around the world. She knows several languages. She's very cool. And I was like, I'm just from the Midwest. I've been to Canada twice. And, like, that's really all I have going. I like pork rinds, and I like rollerblading at inopportune times during North Lakeshore Drive. That's all I really like to do. And so that's where I'm at. And then I'm like, opportunities. Well, she could be my girlfriend, and that could, like, totally changed my life. And then I'm like, at the threats again. That kind of coincides with the weaknesses. Vagina. So then after I go through that, I'm like, all right, let me make some Excel charts of, like, how I would how based on the strategies that I choose, how my goals would excel. And so. So that kind of goes down. And I'm like, okay, well, let me. And I kind of came up with, like, a variety of options. I chose digital marketing. That's where the text came in. Y'all know that that always helps. Then I came up with, it's called incognito marketing, where you don't know that you're being marketed to. And then I came up with, fittingly enough, relationship marketing, where you kind of, like, gain a relationship and decide you get this person to really be loyal to you, and so they don't really flee anywhere else. So I did that, and I kind of implemented these things very slowly. So the digital marketing, I would text her every day at the end of the day to be like, how was your day? At first I thought that was going to be awful because I thought that would be very annoying. But it worked. And then incognito marketing, when we started hanging out, have you ever been on a date and you didn't really know you were on one? I did that. And so I was just, like, very chivalrous to the point where, like, you weren't aware of it. Oh, fuck. Okay, well, fast forward, like, way ahead. And we're sitting on my couch and we're like, we're reading this Dr. Seuss book. I don't know if you guys know this one, but it's called, oh, say, can you say these are some terrible tongue twisters. And we're right at Freddy fries, French fried fish on Fridays or some shit. And she turns to me and goes, hey, I really love you. And I go, all right, so my marketing scheme totally worked. I absolutely hate marketing. It's the worst thing in the world. This was the one time I believed in what I was selling, and this was the one time that, believe it or not, this was people who actually really needed and belonged to each other. Thanks.
- [22:59]
Dan Kennedy
Rachel Lee is a marketer, freelance writer, and the host of a mostly weekly show called the Hot Chicken Podcast. She enjoys refrigerator magnets, soup and mental health activism. Rachel wrote in to tell us that she and her mystery woman recently separated due to differing career paths. Rachel stayed in Chicago while her partner moved to New York. They've stayed friends, but Rachel is holding out hope that they reconnect in the future and she writes there is nothing quite like missing her so much. When we asked what resolution she might make this year, she said, I want.
- [23:36]
Rachel Lee
To feel definitely a better sense of self. I feel like I pretty much just started over when my girlfriend went to New York. Like I was forced to think about myself and just I think figuring out what I enjoy doing again. And it does suck missing her for sure. But I think by this time next year instead of I usually, I'm so pessimistic and I usually wake up in a pessimistic mood. So I think next year I'd like to wake up with like a spirit of possibility. You know what I mean? I always try to roll with progress, not perfection. So if I can even just do that, I would consider it a success.
- [24:16]
Dan Kennedy
That's all for this week on the Moth Podcast. Thanks to you guys for listening. We wish you a story worthy week and also a story worthy year.
- [24:27]
Sponsor
Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller.
- [24:34]
Dan Kennedy
With the Moth Podcast production by Timothy Luly. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.