Transcript
Intuit TurboTax (0:00)
This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was waiting and wondering and worrying if you were going to get any money back and then waiting, wondering and worrying some more. Now Taxes is matching with a TurboTax expert who can do your taxes as soon as today. An expert who gives your taxes their undivided attention as they work on your return while you get real time updates on their progress so you can focus on your day. An expert who will find you every deduction possible and file every form, every investment, Every everything with 100% accuracy all so you can get the most money back guaranteed. No waiting, no wondering, no worries. Now this is Taxes. Get an Expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service real time updates only in iOS mobile app. See guarantee details@turbotax.com guarantees as we approach the end of the year, I'm thinking about the next Next year is the year I finally make my Spanish better than my 9 year olds. Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program available on desktop or as an app and it truly immerses you in the language that you want to learn. I can't wait to use Rosetta Stone and finally speak better than my 9 year old who's been learning Spanish in his own way. Rosetta Stone is the trusted expert for 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean. I could go on fast language acquisition. Rosetta Stone immerses you in many ways. There are no English translations so you can really learn to speak, listen and think in that language. Start the new year off with a resolution you can reach today. The Moth listeners can take advantage of this Rosetta Stones lifetime membership for 50% off visit rosettastone.com moth that's 50% off. Unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your Life. Redeem your 50% off@RosettaStone.com.
Meg Bowles (2:21)
From PRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Boles from the Moth's artistic team and I'll be your host this time. At the Moth, we provide a microphone and invite people to take the stage to share their stories. We produce Moth shows all over the country and today we bring you four stories from those stages. We have a story about a woman who kept an unimaginable secret from friends and family for 32 years. One man's true Hollywood rags to riches stories and a girl's plot to sabotage the wedding of the man she loved. And our first story from Simon Doonan. Simon told this story at the great hall of the Cooper Union in New York at an evening we called Heart of Stories of Love and War. Here's Simon live at the mall.
Simon Doonan (3:05)
Let's get this down to Gary Coleman Height. 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. 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 celebrate wedding anniversaries. You can't remember when because we were so drunk. So. 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 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 schizophrenic, 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 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. There were 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 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 Adler. 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 part of. It wasn't the mod du jour the way it is now. 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. 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. So 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, that's 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 and then we went to Jonathan's store of course, and I started re merchandising and Johnny was sort of rearranging the furniture and we were plumping pillows 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. 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. So I look at these poignant little plastic figurines in their spiffy little 50s outfits. 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. I 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 Zhoshua. Why be formal when you can be fabulously feral? Why be conventional when you can be happy? Thank you.