Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Support comes from Zuckerman Spader. Through nearly five decades of taking on high-stakes legal matters, Zuckerman Spader is recognized nationally as a premier litigation and investigations firm. Their lawyers routinely represent individuals, organizations, and law firms in business disputes, government, and internal investigations, and at trial, when the lawyer you choose matters most. Online at Zuckerman.com.
The Moth is brought to you by Progressive, home of the Name Your Price tool. You say how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. It's easy to start a quote. Visit Progressive.com to get started. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.
This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows from New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more. The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.
To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. Hi, everyone. Producer Mark here. Just wanted to let you know that in the opening, our host mentions the existence of suicide and self-harm. If that makes you uncomfortable, maybe skip the opening. We hope you enjoy the show. Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Barron, your host for this week.
For 2022, we've been celebrating our 25th anniversary by going back through each year of the moth's existence. This episode, we're at 2014,
To mark the occasion, we're going to play two stories for you, one from Dublin and one from London. Now, hosting The Moth in London is a really special experience. I've lived in the UK for almost a decade, and in that time, I've learned this phrase that British people often use to describe Americans. And it's not an insult, but it's not quite a compliment either. The phrase is, a bit much.
So when I first started hosting over here, I felt this real pressure to dial down a certain amount of stereotypical American enthusiasm and positivity. The British audience, if we're just going to dip our toe in the water of a cultural stereotype for just a second, very generally, they're less openly emotional. So a swell of emotion from a British crowd, be it uproarious applause or all those tears starting to flow, it's
It's just way less of a thing here in the UK. But then there was this night when I was hosting a Grand Slam at this venue called Union Chapel. It's this beautiful old church in North London that's been converted into a performance venue. And midway through the show, this guy gets up named Michael Such. He's lovely, unassuming, sarcastic.
It's like a little bit nervous when he first gets up there, but then almost instantly he settles into himself and goes on to tell the story that was at different turns frightening, impossibly funny, and in the end, unbelievably moving about being in his early 20s, unable to manage the pressures he was under and deciding to end his own life.
The attempt was unsuccessful, obviously, and I won't go into all the details now. You can find the story in the show notes for this episode and on themoth.org slash extras, and we'll link to it there. For now, I just want to say I heard this story and was in floods of tears, laughing through the tears, and I remember thinking, come on, British people, like surely this one is going to get you guys too. If one is going to do it, this is the one. And sure enough, I look expectantly but subtly around at the rest of the audience, and of course...
They are all also in tears. Finally, not just keeping calm and carrying on or whatever stereotype we want to defer to here. They've rather been carried away by the story that from every possible angle was too moving and funny to let them do otherwise. It was, in my humble opinion, very classic moth, the moth, as they'd say over here, at its bloody best.
First up, we have Catherine Brophy. She told this at a Moth open mic story slam in Dublin, where the theme of the night was home. Here's Catherine, live at the Moth. This happened the very first time I ever travelled. That was in my extreme youth. And for some reasons, I don't quite know what. I wanted to see the Acropolis in Athens. That was my whole aim and object in life. So we decided to go to Greece.
And we went to Greece, we stayed in Athens, we saw the Acropolis, we were suitably impressed. But what blew me away was that it never rained. Any day. Didn't rain any day at all. Didn't rain at night. For an Irish person, that is a miracle. So, of course, when you go to Greece, you have to go to an island. And off we went. And we decided to go to Poros.
And the reason we chose Poros was because it was the cheapest fare. Now, we weren't being cheap, we were just very poor. So off we went to Poros, and we landed into the little village. And we weren't staying in the village because we were going to camp because we were very poor. And we walked outside the village and found a road that went round the edge of the island, and we found the perfect place to camp.
The land was sort of tiered and there was this bit which is completely flat. It had a pine tree on it for shelter. There was a wall and then on the next level there was some sort of an orchard or something. And it was overlooking the sea and we thought...
This is it. So we set up our tent, but it was so hot, we didn't even need to sleep in the tent. That was grand. That night, we lay there with the smell of the pine tree, and there was the Milky Way glittering in the sky, and the sound of the waves, and we fell asleep watching falling stars. And it was completely magical. And the next morning, we woke up.
And you know when you wake up and you know there's somebody there? You haven't seen them yet, but you know. And we looked around, and standing on the wall behind us was this old man and about five women. And they were all staring down at us, and we were staring up at them. And the old man started speaking to us in Greek, but it was all Greek to us, of course. And then he offered us fresh figs.
Now, I had never eaten, I'd never seen a fig in my life, never mind eating them. So that was terrific and fabulous, and we thanked him very much. And we used the one word of Greek that we had, which was kalimera, and they all smiled, and I think they thought we had more Greek than that, but in any event. Then the man did something. He was signing and talking away to us
And the implication was that he was going to go away and he was going to come back and we weren't sure was he going to come back with the police? Were we trespassing on somebody's land? What exactly was going on? So we decided we'd tidy up our things and have them ready to move just in case. And about half an hour later he returned with one of those, you know those Greek bags, those kind of woven bags, a huge big one of those. And out of the bag he took one of those little blue gas stoves and a bottle of water and a little pot and coffee.
and he made us coffee. And it turned out that he spoke a little bit of German, and I speak no German, but my two friends did, and he had worked in Germany for a while, and he told us that this tree, this pine tree, was his tree, and therefore we were his guests, and that's why he was bringing us coffee. So that was absolutely fabulous. LAUGHTER
But he came every single morning, every single morning. We had to be sure to be dressed before he arrived. Because you really don't want to be putting on your knickers and your bra in front of an elderly Greek man making you coffee. And as the time went on, he asked us where we were from. And we told him we were from Ireland, and he looked totally blank. And we explained that, you know where Germany is?
And then beside Germany there's Holland. Yes, he knew that. And then there's the sea. Yes, he knew that. And then there's England. Oh, you're English. No, no, no, no, we're not. So there's England. And then after England there's more sea and there's another island. Oh, the Isle of Man. No, no, no, no. I said, America? No, no. So it was like we'd said we'd come from Tiernan Oak. But in any event...
The day before we were to leave, he told us that we were to be there at lunchtime because he brought his wife. And his wife brought another big bag with another little cooker and she cooked stuffed tomatoes for us on this. And he gave us Retsina wine which had been made with the resin from the tree that we were sleeping under. And the tomatoes were delicious. The wine was, well, there's a reason they call it the divine paraffin.
It's an acquired taste. And we left the island the next day and of course I've never seen them again but in my head Sotirios, which is the old man's name and his wife, are my Greek family and that pine tree is my home from home.
That was Catherine Brophy. Catherine lives in Ireland and travels the world. She's been rescued by a circus troupe in Serbia, had breakfast with a Zambian chief, been kicked by a horse on the Mexican plain, and yes, she has a couple of tales to tell. Our next storyteller is Charlotte Mooney. She told this story at a moth story slam in London, where the theme of the night was tests. Here's Charlotte, live at the moth.
Four years ago, I was sitting on the edge of my bath, in my bathroom, holding a plastic pregnancy test for babies and waiting to see what was going to turn up in the window, if I was going to get a line or a cross. And the strange thing about pregnancy tests is sometimes you get a line and you're not pregnant and it is the cause for the most joyous relief ever.
And sometimes you get a line and it's crushing and crosses can pretty much go either way as well. And in that moment, I actually didn't know how I was going to feel. And a cross appeared and it was with huge relief that I realized I was happy. Fucking scared shitless, but underlying that happy feeling.
At the time my partner was away, it was his baby, that's not the way this story's going. He's a circus performer and he was performing a piece of abstract dance in a tree in Wales. And I thought, rather than tell him on the phone, I was going up to see his show at the weekend, so I thought I'll wait till the weekend and I will tell him then.
And so for the next four days, I found myself going back to this pregnancy test to just check. Like I thought the result might have changed and I would be wandering aimlessly around the house clutching it.
So that when Saturday came, it made sense to me to wrap it up in a little bit of tissue paper and put a bow around it and write, Dear Alex. And then I put it on the passenger seat next to me and I drove up the M4 to see him. And for the first part of the journey, I was full of these fantasies and daydreams about how he would open it and sweep me up in his arms and cry tears into his manly beard. But the moment I crossed the Severn Bridge...
and got closer and closer, I started to feel unease. Partly because I realised my fantasies were quite disgustingly sentimental. Partly I was starting to question the wisdom of doing a big, grand, romantic gesture with an object that I had essentially urinated on. And partly because deep down, I didn't know how he was going to react. I arrived late. He and the rest of the cast were already in the tree. So I...
Put the pregnancy test in my pocket and sat at the bottom and started to watch the show. I was a little bit relieved to have a stay before I had to tell him. And the show was, it was a piece of abstract contemporary circus with birds mimicry. It was batshit crazy, but I actually really loved it and I was really proud of him. It was very long. The first hour was great.
But, like, after hour two, hour three, hour four went on, I just started to get increasingly nervous. So that by the time he came down from the tree, I felt like a 13-year-old girl about to ask someone to get off with them. He ran towards me, and he did scoop me up in his arms. And he said, I've really missed you. I've planned a whole afternoon for us. And I was like, OK, OK.
And the first thing he and the other performers took me at the bottom of the oak tree, there was a spring. And if you followed the spring out of the town, it led to a wood and then it turned into a stream. And then after about half an hour, that became waterfalls. And after about an hour, it was a deep pool of clear water reflecting black in the way only Welsh water can, but beautiful. Beautiful.
And all the rest of them stripped their clothes off and started jumping in. And Alex said, you're going to love it, but I've got to warn you, it's shockingly cold. And I started to think, fuck, is it all right to jump in shockingly cold water when you're pregnant? Like...
I know you're not supposed to have really hot baths. Is it an extremity of temperature thing? But I couldn't tell him that I didn't want to jump in the shockingly cold water because I didn't want to tell him I was pregnant there in front of loads of other people. So I ended up taking off my clothes and jumping in for like the most short, polite amount of time possible for a great life-changing experience and then jumping out and putting my clothes on again. And then after that, we had a six-hour hike in the mountains and then we had a communal meal and then there was a fire pit and then singing and then a presentation.
So that by the time we were actually alone together, it was two o'clock in the morning. And I think what I actually did was something like this. I've got you a present. And he opened it and his face was completely blank. And I felt like a physical stab of fear there. He said, I'm really sorry, but I don't know what it is.
I said, "It's a pregnancy test." And he said, "What does the cross mean again?" And I said, "The cross means you're pregnant." And he let out a sort of strangled bird-like whoop and did an asymmetrical dance leap off the bed, none of which had been in my fantasies. But at that moment were the absolutely perfect reaction.
Thank you. That was Charlotte Mooney. Charlotte is a storyteller and circus artist based in London. She has told all sorts of stories in clubs, theatres, festivals and around campfires across the UK, including folklore, myth, science and history. She is also artistic director of circus company Occam's Razor. That's all for this week. From all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.
Sarah Baron is one of the fastest-rising comedians of her generation. A powerhouse live act, Sarah's two stand-up hours, For Worse and Enemies Closer, have sold out at both the Edinburgh Festival and at multiple runs in London's Soho Theatre. She was nominated for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, as well as receiving rave reviews from publications including The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Evening Standard, and The Scotsman.
As a writer, Sarah has published two essay collections, People Are Unappealing and The Harm in Asking. Her writing has also featured in Vanity Fair and On This American Life.
This episode of the Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Ginesse, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski, and Aldi Caza.
All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the public radio exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.
