The Moth (2 page)

If “I’ll never feel the same” is the moral of every good story, “We’re all in this together” is the moral of every Moth occasion. Of all the alchemies of human connection—sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship—the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.” This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature. No one will ever know exactly how it happens, but however it happens, it is what makes The Moth fly too.

Adam Gopnik

O
nce on a porch on a Georgia island, while a troupe of moths staggered around the light, while cicadas kept time in the live oaks, Dayton Malone told us of the night he’d let 6,000 chickens escape from the shed he was supposed to be minding. I’ve forgotten the details (too much bourbon), but his easygoing frankness has stayed with me. He was simply unsuited for the job of chicken-minder. He’d left a door unlatched and gone to bed. In the morning, the girls were gone. He went out and searched the horizon, and saw a far-off smear of white—the last of them—receding.

I loved Dayton when he told that story. This feeling surprised me, because we’d never really gotten along—he was a true son of the South and was always needling me about my newfound Yankeeness, my
“scalawaggery”
—plus he was always trying to shake salt on my food (he was a pro-salt fanatic). But his saga of the lost chickens seemed so candid and clownish and human, and everything about it—the hill-country cadence, the trailing-off sweep of his hand as he muttered, “Gone—every last one of them,” his sad whistle of defeat—struck me as…
well, not
honest
exactly (he was too much of a showman for that), but utterly revealing of the man.

We heard stories like that all night. If you were looking for literal truth, you wouldn’t find it, but on Wanda’s porch, you got such full doses of character and loss and destiny that you’d always come away reeling (of course the bourbon heightened this effect).

Years later I was living in New York, and one night I happened to be at some particularly dull and sing-songy poetry reading in the East Village, and I started missing Wanda’s porch, and wishing that the poet would lower her aesthetic screen for a moment and just
tell us a story
.

That was it—that was the germ. An idea fluttered through my thoughts: that I might organize a night of storytelling in New York City in honor of those nights at Wanda’s. I supposed it would be fairly easy: New York must be filled with frustrated raconteurs. And so several years later, after much fussing and feinting and overthinking, that idea finally launched. I hosted an evening at my loft in Manhattan. I hired a director, the brilliant and indefatigable Joey Xanders. We rented chairs. We served hors d’oeuvres. We called it The Moth, and it was a bomb.

The stories were all overcrafted, or too prettified, or too lugubriously confessional. And way too long. I didn’t tell a story, but in saying “a few words,” I managed to be as long-winded as any of them. My guests were polite afterward—someone even called the evening “noble.” But I wanted to crawl into a hole. However, late that night, after many drinks, my friend Sheri Holman said, “Well, yeah, it was awful. Unquestionably. But there was still something moving about it. Just the idea of it. A night of stories!”

And the way she said, “A night of stories!”—it recalled
Wanda’s porch so vividly, so romantically, that suddenly I was hell-bent to try again. I got many friends to pitch in, and Joey scoured the city for raconteurs. We set down some guiding principles. All stories would be rehearsed, shaped. We would demand freshness and the non-jokey kind of wit that bubbles up naturally from true human predicaments. We would insist on pithiness. Pithiness above all: we brought in a saxophonist to be a timekeeper.

We began to put on Moths all over town. And to discover, one by one, true raconteurs.

Jonathan Ames was our first star. His style was frenetic and disturbing. Standing before us, composing on his feet, he’d dip into his bank of memories and drag to the surface whatever hideous artifacts he happened upon. He would not censor them. Once he told us of his first discovery of masturbation, and how he’d gone running exultantly to his mother with the news of it. If he was ashamed of that episode, he shared it anyway. With such passion would he plunge in! He’d get wilder and wilder; he’d seem out of control; I’d imagine him as some crippled storm-tossed ship bound for the rocks. Though the rudderlessness was all illusion: Jonathan was sitting calmly in the pilothouse and knew exactly where he was going. When he was ready, he would bring his story to a sudden, casual, shrugging close—and then stroll offstage while we caught our breaths.

Frank McCourt, author of
Angela’s Ashes
, had a sweet voice and scapegrace cheekiness. A sense of great loss accompanied him always. He laughed at that loss and held it in contempt, yet it was so present to us that all hearts were broken the moment he began to speak.

Whereas George Plimpton seemed truly buoyed by his defeats. He’d tried his hand gamely at various sports, and failed
spectacularly at all of them (except court tennis—he was a master of that one lovely oddball game). His pratfalls had inspired a half dozen great memoirs, and they were the source also of his power as a raconteur. We loved best the moments in his stories when his impostures would be revealed—when all pretension would be unmasked.

They were true raconteurs. Our Moth directors made them work, made them condense and tweak and reshape and condense some more, but those gentlemen never complained—because they truly
liked telling stories
. They liked telling them over and over.

Of course they all knew that the key to personal storytelling is owning up to one’s foolishness. They had learned Orwell’s famous lesson, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” But beyond that—each knew how to expose his humiliations in his own way; each had his own squint or stutter or palms-up gesture of hopelessness, and could make himself into a singular, full-body work of art up on our stage.

It was something to behold.

So much so that some of us boldly predicted that this new thing (new in the sense that these nights of raw personal stories, porch stories, were coming out at last from the kitchen to the stage) might well become the art of the twenty-first century.

To nurture that dream has been an enormous labor, and many folks have given up huge chunks of their lives (please see my thank-yous at the back of this book). In the impossible early years, I had to beg fortunes from friends just to keep us alive.
And of course there have been insane fireball clashes of ego, which attend I suppose the birth of any creative enterprise. So many prima donnas! The famous acrobat who scorned direction with a volley of insults and had to be scratched. The famous French philosopher who could recount his dull successes untiringly but who could not, when pressed, recall a single thing that he had ever failed at. The comedian who would not shut up no matter how loudly the saxophone played. The self-obsessed movie star… well, I know Catherine is terrified as she reads this and I probably shouldn’t tell you about the self-obsessed movie star.

But there are also nights when I’ll walk to one of our slams and pass block after block of people who’ve been waiting in line for hours because our nights of shared stories are so compelling. Or I’ll be at Cooper Union hearing Mike DeStefano’s tale of giving his dying wife, Franny, one last Harley ride, and I’ll look around and every man and woman within sight will be openly weeping. Or I’ll be sitting in on a high school slam rehearsal in a suburb of Atlanta and a shy teenage girl will be relaying the smallest possible episode—her encounter with a buck deer on her way home from school one day—and all of us will be grinning from ear to ear because her little vignette is such an immense pleasure.

Or I’ll be at the immortal Players Club in Manhattan, and the room will be dotted with my beloved friends, and one of our greats, Adam Gopnik or Juliet Hope Wayne or Joan Juliet Buck or Edgar Oliver, will be up on stage, approaching their tale’s climax, and there will be not a sound in the room. Every spine in the house will be tuned to the soul standing before the microphone. Everyone awaiting the word, locked into the rhythm of the teller’s breathing and waiting for whatever
perfect confession of futility and foolishness and humanity is about to come rolling down upon us—and at those times that silly little notion that I had sixteen years ago will seem quite smart.

George Dawes Green
Founder

I
n the early 1970s, my Mama heard that “a nice young woman novelist” was staying in a cabin down the lake from our house and called her up (having never met her before) and invited her over for lunch. One of my first memories is four-year-old me sitting down at our kitchen table to dine on mini pimento-cheese sandwiches and deviled eggs, and Mama introducing me to our guest, “Miss Harper Lee.” She had come to my tiny hometown in Alabama to do research for what she thought might be her second book.

When I thought back on this as a teenager, I was kind of blown away by my Mama’s kindness, but also her audacity. I said, “Mama, you just CALLED HER UP and invited her to lunch?!? She’d just won the
Pulitzer Prize
!”

But Mama just shrugged and said, “Well, I didn’t know about that, but she was new in town, and living down the street, and I wanted to be neighborly. You gotta get to know your neighbors. You never know who is in line in front of you at the grocery store, and what’s been going on with ’em.”

Thirty years later I’m in New York City at The Moth,
meeting and getting to know people with astoundingly diverse backgrounds. Whether it’s a grossly underprepared matador, a press secretary who overslept and missed Air Force One, or a grandmother of five who got up the guts to call our pitchline, our first conversation is always the same: “Tell me about yourself, tell me the story of how you became
you
.”

We ask people to share the biggest moments of their lives—the moments that changed them for the better (or worse). And while many of our favorite stories are about moments of triumph, stories about our
mistakes
can often be even more revelatory. The number one quality of great storytellers is their willingness to be vulnerable, their ability to tell on themselves.

Few of us will go into outer space like Michael Massimino, but who can’t relate to spending months preparing for a big event only to get there and be undermined by something as tiny as a stripped screw? We understand Alan Rabinowitz’s need to save jaguars on a deeper level after we hear about his debilitating childhood stutter. It’s hard for most of us to relate to their almost superhuman strengths, but their flaws help us slip into their shoes.

They share their stories; they don’t read or perform them. We help them shape their stories, but when they take that stage, it’s just them up there. That high-wire act is what makes The Moth so magical when it works. The audience’s faith in the storytellers becomes a safety net that allows them to explore the most intense moments of their lives onstage in front of a room full of strangers.

We strive to make every Moth night feel like an intimate dinner party, each storyteller a guest holding the attention of the table for a moment while they relay a spellbinding tale.

Trying to capture that feeling on the page was, frankly, daunting. But as we began transcribing and reading sixteen years’ worth of stories, we were astonished by their power in print. We considered more than three thousand stories, finally boiling down the list to these fifty.

As I sat down to edit them, there was not a story in the book that I hadn’t heard at least a dozen times in audio. I was worried they would lose something on the page, but it was just the opposite. Even if you’re a Moth fan who has heard many of these, we hope you’ll find new things to love as you
read
them for the first time.

You will also find brand-new stories that you would never have encountered otherwise, like the one told by the beautiful Anoid Rakhmatyllaeva. Her story—of finding the courage to stand down a room full of machine gun–carrying soldiers who were destroying the pianos in her music school during a civil war—was told at a show we produced in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The only surviving audio was captured in our rehearsal at the U.S. Embassy on a little handheld recorder that was set up in front of our interpreter, Anya, as she translated Anoid’s story into English from her native Russian. But the audio is so muddy that it would never have made it onto our radio show or podcast.

(It’s important to note that while these stories are among our all-time favorites, they should not be considered a definitive list—this isn’t “
Billboard
’s Top Fifty Moth Stories.” The idea of the book was that it would feature lightly edited transcripts of stories from the live recordings. Here we’ve chosen fifty that we felt worked best on the page.)

The world is becoming increasingly digitized: we sit in our
little boxes, staring at other boxes, communicating through our fingers on a keyboard. Human beings weren’t meant to live this way. All our little devices and programs are supposed to connect us, but they really don’t. They
kind of
connect us, but there’s always a block there—an electronic wall that keeps us from really experiencing each other in a human way.

As a society, we have forgotten how to listen deeply. Each Moth evening is a chance to practice listening.

At The Moth, people tell intimate stories, stories that are sometimes so private you could have known a person for five years without hearing them. Your neighbor who you think you have nothing in common with gets onstage, and you discover that you actually share a great deal. When you see them on the street the next day, your perspective of them is changed because you know something important about them.