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- [00:00]
Dan Kennedy
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- [02:20]
Simon Doonan
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by Audible Dot, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 150,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature. For the Moth listeners. Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. You may like listening to Little A Memoir by Gary Steingart. To try Audible Free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.com the moth that's audible.com themoth the moth is supported by makers 46, a handcrafted bourbon that begins as fully matured maker's mark. Then makers 46 is aged longer inside barrels containing seared French oak staves, and only during the cool winter months when bourbon matures more slowly. The result is a more complex taste, highlighted by bigger vanilla oak and caramel flavors. Online at makers46.com makers46 Bourbon whiskey, 47% alcohol by volume, distilled in Loretto, Kentucky, reminds listeners to drink responsibly. Okay, and now it's time for one of my favorite storytellers here at the Moth. The story that you're about to hear by Simon Doonan was told live in New York in 2012. The theme of the night was Heart of Darkness, Stories of love and war.
- [03:48]
C
My parents were both runaways. Yes, both of them ran away from home. My mother was born in rural Northern Ireland, and her dad was like a raving drunk. And her mother was a religious maniac. And I'm not trying to stereotype the Irish or anything. And her brother was in and out of prison. You get the picture. When she was 13, she left school, because that's when everybody left school, and she got a fabulous job at a pork butcher. So There she is, 13 years old, cutting the giblets and genitals and ears off pigs and standing in animal feces and thinking, there has to be something better than this. So war broke out, and she threw some nylons and a lipstick in her little purse and she ran away from home and joined the Royal Air Force. So then there's my dad, who actually, his circumstances were more dire than my mother's. His father was an astrologer. And one day he got up, found a gun, and shot himself. So that plunged the family into poverty. And my grandmother started to hear voices. She started to display all the signs of terrible mental illness. And his brother started to go crazy, too. So age 15, my father, he ran away from home. So he also ran away from home, and he joined the Royal Air Force. So there's my mom in the Royal Air Force, like Rosie the Riveter, you know, and there's my dad. But they don't meet. They don't meet until the end of the war. And at the end of the war, there were these weird, terrible homes and soup kitchens for displaced military people who had nowhere to go. And I think the end of the war, my parents weren't sure. Like, okay, we ran away from home. Should we go back? Or what's the deal? So they were kind of trying to figure it out. And my dad was hanging out in this soup kitchen called Sandy's Home. And one day this chick walks in in red, tomato red suede platform shoes, and she had fabulous legs, which I've inherited. And she. She walked in and my dad thought, okay, that's the one. Two months later, my mom and dad went to the registry office where you could get married. You get a little marriage certificate. Two months after meeting, they go to the registry office, get their little certificate, and then they go next door to the pub for a celebration. And they got thoroughly smashed, you know, so they got thoroughly smashed and they lost their marriage certificate. So for my entire childhood, for the rest of their married lives, which was until they died, they never had a wedding anniversary. And they thought this was terribly amusing. You know, we don't. We don't celebrate wedding anniversary. You can't remember when because we were so drunk. So as a little child, I didn't think it was so amusing. I wanted that white bound album of wedding pictures with a coach and horses with white plumes on and zhush. And I wanted a sense of occasion. I wanted. So, you know, I was already watching Busby Berkeley movies and Shirley Temple movies. And, you know, I was so jealous of her tap dancing with, like, ringlets. And, you know, I already was an aspirant, a gay aspirant, like, dying for zhush, for theatricality, for a sense of occasion. So this, my expectations, had nothing to do with the reality in our house. Especially because for some reason, my parents decided that once they were settled, they would move in all the relatives into our house that they'd escaped when they were younger. So in comes my grandmother, who by this time had had a lobotomy. Yes, few chuckles there. Not sure why, but. So grandma moves in, post lobotomy, my poor Uncle Ken, who was also paranoid schizophrenia, moved in. My blind Auntie Phyllis moved in. So this, they were creating what they were creating. I wanted the Partridge Family. And they were around me was the Addams Family, the Munsters. So it just was not going in the direction that I had in mind. And so things reached a breaking point when one day my Uncle Ken, he was such a lovely person, but crazy, completely schizophrenic. He said he was going to get himself a girlfriend. So he got up from the dinner table, walked down the street to the biscuit factory, which was down the street. And every Thursday night they had a glee club. And at this glee club on that night he met this benevolent divorcee, this pink cheeked, benevolent lady, and he married her. So I thought, great, finally a wedding. Some zhush, a sense of occasion. So let me describe this wedding. The guests, the guests arrived on town buses. And not because it was chic or avant garde or very reverse chic or anything like that, Just because they arrived on town buses. Ritz crackers on paper plates and apple juice because she was teetotal and you know, every expense was spared. So I vowed that when I got married, when I grew up, there would be dry ice and white elephants and, and zhush and carriages and it would be like Siegfried and Roy meets Liberace. I vowed that when I got married, there would be a sense of occasion. Cut to 1994. I'm living in New York City and a friend sets me up on a blind date. And at this blind date, I meet the love of my life, Jonathan Adlow. So he wasn't wearing red suede platform shoes, but he did have really cute eyes and eyebrows. And I looked at him and I thought, he's the one. And if we could have gotten married two months after meeting, we would have done. Except back then in 1994, no one really talked about marriage. Gay people didn't talk about marriage. It wasn't the mod du jour the way it is now. So. But we were, you know, there was no shortage of marriages going on around us because Johnny had been to Brown University with all these highly strung, hotsy, totsy, fancy New York girls. And they were having these weddings that you just can't believe. Like, you know, hollowing out Rockefeller center and having the wedding in the ice rink and, you know, these unbelievable fancy weddings. So every weekend we were going to another one. Of course I was in a rage, in a jealous snit the whole time going to these weddings, which, you know, had such a pronounced sense of occasion. Then 2008, suddenly gay marriage is legal in California and Jonathan and I are both scheduled to be there in September. So we thought, oh my God, let's get married. Why not? So when people heard we were getting married, of course, not without justification, they thought, well, they'll have the blowout of all time. You know, the fashion icon, stretching it a bit, but Mary's design czar, you know, what's this going to Be like, it's going to be just the most incredible wedding. So here's how it went down. On a sunny September morning, we went to city hall in San Francisco and there was a long line of lesbians coming out of city hall. One or two of them were wearing softball uniforms. Some of them had like, one thing I noticed. Several had like large butterflies tattooed on their calves. That was a light motif. And it was a very jolly, joyous group of people. Not so many gay men mostly, as I say, a long line of lesbians. And we were joined by my future mother in law, Cynthia, and my future sister in law, Amy. And they were online with us. And the lesbians ahead of us, of course, mistook them for a May December romance and thought that they were going to get married, which, you know, caused many chuckles, as you can imagine. So we went in, got our little piece of paper, got our marriage certificate, and then we went to Jonathan's store, of course, and I started re merchandising and Johnny was sort of, you know, rearranging the furniture and we were plumping pillows and, and chatting to the salespeople who were profoundly shocked that this is what we'd elected to do on our wedding day. We were re merchandising his store. So they said you have to go for lunch. Just go and have a nice lunch. And they sent us to this very esoteric San Francisco eatery down the street where of course they were serving like pig's ears and giblets and you know, a pancreas or two with some kidneys. It was that kind of locavore, locally harvested, demented San Francisco food. And I couldn't help thinking what my mother, how amused my mother would have been to see us because she's long since passed away, but to see us sitting there eating couture giblets, you know, all the things she'd longed to escape when she was dreaming of becoming Lana Turner and getting away from the pig abattoir. So after this tasty lunch, we went back to our hotel where the locally harvested rabbi was waiting for us. Yeah, my assistant, through a gay nun that he knew in San Francisco had located a gay friendly rabbi. So this very nice rabbi was waiting for us in the hotel room to perform the actual ceremony. And he was a very genial guy. And we had a short, very nice ceremony. Quite poetic. There was one slightly jarring moment when Johnny took it in his head to ask the rabbi if he could wrap me in a napkin and stamp on me. And the rabbi found this rather alarming so we had a lovely ceremony with Johnny's mother and sister present, my new relatives, my new in laws. And then there's a knock at the door. In comes room service with this gorgeous little cake which Jonathan's mother had ordered. And on the top of the cake were these two little figurines, you know, the kind, they sort of look like Rock Hudson or Mitt Romney, you know, like they look like little televangelists in tuxedos. And so I look at these poignant little plastic figurines in their spiffy little 50s outfits and think, and then I looked at me and Johnny and what we were wearing. What were we wearing? We had pretty much replicated my parents wedding and we were wearing what we had on. I had some old sport coat on, he had a Lacoste shirt, I had jeans on. We wore what we had on. And I thought about my parents and they'd stayed married for 60 years and slept in this tiny little bed. And I thought about my dear Uncle Ken and his incredibly difficult life. And he had stayed with his wife for all that time. And then I thought about all the girls from Brown who we knew who were now filing for divorce. And seriously, and I thought, you know, if it's the right person, you really don't need the zhush. Why be formal when you can be fabulously feral? Why be conventional when you can be happy? Thank you.
- [17:45]
Simon Doonan
Yeah. With Simon Doonan here on the Moth Podcast. Simon Doonan is a writer, bon vivant, window dresser, extraordinary extraordinaire and fashion commentator. He's worked in fashion for over 35 years. He's written six books and won many awards. Simon lives in New York City with his partner, the ceramicist and designer Jonathan Adler, and their Norwich terrier, Liberace. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 150,000 downloadable titles across across all types of literature and featuring audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. To try Audible Free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.com themoth hey, if you are in New England, around maybe New Hampshire, let's say the Moth main stage is coming to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That'll be Saturday, March 8th and for tickets or a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, just visit themoth.org.
- [18:47]
Dan Kennedy
Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit, available now.
- [18:56]
Simon Doonan
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.