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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, this is Mark Selinger, producer of The Moth Podcast. Today, we wanted to give you something a little special, a treasured episode from our archives. We think it'll take you on a fun, surprising journey. Also, The Moth's spinoff podcast, Grown, is up for a Signal Award. If you haven't listened to Grown before, check it out. It's filled with stories all about growing up. And if you have listened, we'd love for you to vote for it for the Signal Awards.
We'll have a link in the podcast show notes or just go to vote.signalaward.com. Without further ado, here's Dan Kennedy. Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. And today we have two stories on the podcast about finding your way through the thick of life and coming out on the other side, which is pretty much what life is, right? You think you got the ups and downs figured out, and then you realize it's going to throw the sideways at you and all the other stuff.
Our first story comes to us from Om Chowdhury. He told this at a story slam in Pittsburgh, and the theme of the night was jokers. Here's Om. So this is a story of two brothers, me, myself. I'm 29 years old, and my brother Raj, who is about 23 years old.
And we grew up in north of India and growing up, let me give you a little bit of an idea about my childhood days. Growing up in my country was no different from like growing up in ancient Greece. Like imagine yourself you are in Sparta where like if you are a guy you're not supposed to cry, you're not supposed to shed tears, your tear ducts are not functional. If you are going through something physical or emotional or mental problems,
all you have to do is put on a red cape and move on. That was my childhood pretty much growing up. Over the course of time, it presented with us a lot of problems. Also gave us a really unique signature. Now I don't have much, I mean I do have memories of my parents, but my younger brother unfortunately doesn't.
All the cultural values that I grew up with immediately came into perspective one single day when I was 11 years old and my brother was 5 years old. And instead of my dad picking me up from college, it was actually my grandma who picked me up from my school. And it was really surprising because she never comes and picks me up from the school. And I knew something was wrong. And I got home and I realized that my dad wasn't there anymore, which...
Which is fine, because a lot of us have gone through this, and everyone will go through this at some point sooner or later, so there are no sympathy points here.
But I look across the room and I really don't know what to do. I look across the room and there's just my five-year-old brother who's just sitting in the corner and he's crying and he's sad and he's confused. And one look into his eyes and it literally tore my heart. Like, what am I supposed to tell this kid? He's barely five. And no matter what I say, there is nothing I can do or say to make him feel better.
Now, I'm not a psychologist. I don't know why I did what I did next, but all I did was I ran from the funeral home, and I did. I went to the closest stationery shop, got red velvet paper, which you use in arts and crafts, made two clown hats out of it, and made two...
Took two pieces of red paper, scrambled them up and made two clown noses out of it. And I immediately came running back and I put one hat on myself and on my brother and I said, hey, do you want to go have an ice cream with me? And it was really surprising. The reason I did that was because my brother was in love with these street side vendors who would dress up as clowns and bring ice cream and balloons and he loved it. And now some people say, well,
One person once said that subtlety is a sign of cultural weakness. A man who's uncivilized knows exactly what he wants and he knows exactly what is right and exactly what is wrong. And in my case, it was pretty evident to me that what was right was making this five-year-old kid laugh. And what was really wrong was these social norms that I'm supposed to comply with. I do need a red cape at that particular moment, but instead I need a red hat and a red clown nose.
And that particular day, I ended up missing every single person in that funeral home. I took my brother out and we were gone, we were evolved for like almost a couple of hours. And I came very next day and finished all the rituals that I had to do. Now, I won't wish my trajectory on anyone. Next 18 years weren't exactly a walking park for either me or my brother.
There was no food for us, there was no money, there was no house, but somehow we got through it and both of us are doing really well right now. Both of us are like, he's in Tepper and Kat's got a business and I got my PhD from CMU and things worked out really well.
But over this course of like 18, over this course of next 18 years, I realized that me and my brother had formed this really super clownish bond where if one of us was struggling, the other person would always bring exactly two clown hats. And it was our way of saying to each other like, hey, the world hasn't ended yet and it is not going to end because I'm always going to have your back. Fast forward story, 18 years, about seven weeks ago,
I'm not sure I should be talking about this, but my world came crashing down. And I really thought that I'd seen everything that the life has to throw at me, but it did not. Hey, that's really good music. So, yeah, my world came crashing down. And three of the people I loved most in my entire life, I lost them in a single week. I was really, hey, once again, no sympathy points here because we all go through it. And if not, one of each day we will.
But I was really depressed. It took me 48 hours to get out of bed. I did not eat. I did not sleep. I did not drink. I did absolutely nothing. And at the end of the day, I ended up calling my brother, one of those normal conversations. And I was speaking to him, and he was like, now he's sitting halfway across the globe at this point. And he was like, hey, how are you doing? And I didn't want him to worry at all. So I was like, oh, I'm doing perfectly fine. How are you doing? And we had this normal conversation, and we hung up.
Exactly 23 hours and 47 minutes later, I get a call on my cell phone saying, dude, Pittsburgh is fucking cold. How do you live in this godforsaken place? And I'm like, wait, where are you? Where are you? And he's like, stop talking and just come pick me up from the airport. And I rush across the airport. I rush across all the traffic. I go to the airport and I see this guy who's
clad in jeans, blue jeans, a shirt that says, World's Clowniest Brother Ever, which he himself made it up. And the only thing he brought with him that day, halfway across the globe, was his visa, his passport, and two hats, two clown hats. And he tells me, I know it's really snowy out there, but how about we go and us two clowns have that piece of ice cream that we always wanted. So that's my story. Thank you.
Om Chowdhury is a computational biologist and bioinformatician. He received his PhD from the Joint University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Along with his love for science, he carries a deep passion for blues music, and he can often be seen dancing at blues events all over the Northeast.
Since Alm told his story, the last year has been a learning experience for him. He actually wrote in to tell us that he's learned a lot about embracing and loving life again, and that seeing his brother has helped motivate him to keep moving forward. Alm even had a moment of embrace at a science event that he was attending. He told us that a group of moth listeners recognized him from his story, and they ran across the floor to hug him in front of his colleagues, who were all pretty confused and perplexed about who these people were.
Alm's experience has helped him realize the importance of dialogue and community conversations about self-care and mental health, and he hopes that listening to the story today, he can share that with all Moth listeners, too. Up next, a story from Annabelle Gurwitch. She told this at a Moth main stage we did back in 2013 in Los Angeles, and the theme of the night was Around the Bend. Here's Annabelle. A few months ago...
I was in my home office and my 15-year-old son was sleeping and I could hear the sound of my husband watching television downstairs when an email landed in my inbox and it was addressed to the members of the council. Now, I don't currently sit on any board of any organization, but I knew exactly what this meant.
because that was how we referred to ourselves in the cult that I was part of in the 1980s. In the fall of 1980, I moved to New York to study acting at NYU, and I was really anxious to leave my insular Jewish upbringing in Miami Beach and head for Bohemian New York, and I loved it. When I moved to New York, my goal became to get listed in the New York phone book.
I thought you had to do something really significant to get in there. And as I was going into my second year in college, I had just returned from a summer studying abroad in London when I got a call from my parents that they had just filed for bankruptcy. Things had just completely fallen apart. Now, there had been a lot of instability in our family in the past, but this was just terrible, and I was going to have to drop out of college
And I was terrified. I knew I didn't want to go home, but I knew I also had no idea of how I was going to make this work. So I got the only job that I thought I was qualified for, handing out flyers for Arby's dressed as a clown. Now, I thought that the makeup was going to be a kind of punishment, but it actually turned out to be a gift because I was handing out these flyers in my own neighborhood. And with the makeup on, no one could recognize me.
But nobody wanted these flyers and I would just have to stick them in the garbage and then I would spend most of my shift crying in the alleyway as I was working my way through my copy of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which I was really relating to. And it was at this time that the guy I was seeing told me he wanted to introduce me to his psychic. So
We go to an apartment in the West Village, and we go inside, and it is just filled with beautiful antiques and textiles from the Far East. And everyone looks very artsy. And the man who answered the door, I would later learn was a classical pianist. He was in his mid-30s. Van Zandt was very handsome and charismatic and so warm and welcoming and
And he sat down, and he went into a trance, and he began channeling disembodied entities. And it's really hard to explain, but something about that just, it just clicked. And I knew that I had found my people.
And it was with these group of people that I spent most Friday nights for the next seven or eight years of my life. And we began to refer to ourselves as members of the council. And in these sessions, Van Zant would do psychic readings, and then he would channel these spirits. And we were in a dialogue. We were having a conversation about the nature of consciousness. And we were going to be ushering in the new age, the age of Aquarius to the planet Earth.
Now, we were told that we were the reincarnation of a family from the 18th dynasty in Egypt. And not just any family, it was the royal family. Van Zandt had been the pharaoh Akhenaten, and I was his daughter Meritat, and his favorite daughter, I might add. And everyone else in the group, they were members of the royal court and the extended people in this community. And Van Zandt took this role as patriarch very seriously.
and he really became the best gay dad a girl could ever have. He knew all the great thrift shops in Greenwich Village. He had a zest for life, and he had a love for me. And he believed that I could succeed in my career, and everyone in that group did. I started studying, and when I'd do performances, they would show up, and they became my family at a time when I was estranged to my family at that point.
And some of the psychic things he told me came true. It was everything from, "You'll find this pair of earrings that you lost behind a couch," to meeting a talent agent who was going to help me find work. And I just want to say there was never any money exchange. There were no recruitment policy, no secrecy. There was no enforced dress code. I never would have joined a cult that had poor dressers. Everyone was very fashionable. But there was also a prophecy.
We were in contact, regular contact, with the aliens who had seeded life on planet Earth. We were told that on November 25th, 1995, there would be a landing off the coast of Italy in Sardinia, and we were going to be part of the first recorded contact in Earth's history with the people, or the beings, that had seeded the planet. And as emissaries of the planet, we were going to go home.
to the original home from the people we had descended from outside our solar system. And we were all preparing for this event. We were working on ourselves psychically, and I was working on my career. And it was 1988 when Van Zant was diagnosed with HIV, and soon he had full-blown AIDS. Things began to decline very quickly for him, and we were taking care of him
And it was at this point that he told me that I should move to California. That that's where I would find my family and my life's work. And I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to go. But because he told me to do it, and I did everything that he told me to do, I moved to California. And within two months, he had died.
And the group completely disbanded. In fact, I wasn't even sure how I would keep in contact with everyone. For some people, I only knew them as their nickname that he had given them, like Feather or Angel or Rabbit or Miss Thing. But true to something he had predicted, within six months, I was starring on a comedy series on television. And I began to work hard.
And eventually I started a family, I got married, and I had a kid. And by November 25, 1995, that date passed without my even noticing it. Because, you know, when you have a kid in L.A., you're not thinking about intergalactic travel. You're just trying to get your kid into a good preschool.
And at this point in my life, this part of my life was completely behind me. I rarely ever thought about it except with a kind of remorse and embarrassment. I never told anyone about this part of my life. And if you know me now, you know I'm an atheist. I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in reincarnation. Anything to do with psychic phenomena just makes me break out in hives. And here was this
email now from a woman in the group who told me that she had spent upwards of 20 years now editing down the hundreds of hours of tape of recordings of these sessions into CDs and did we want to receive them in the mail. And I had completely forgotten that these sessions had been recorded
And here I was, being offered the chance to listen to my younger self in conversation with disembodied entities and aliens.
And now I was going to have the chance to confirm or deny the veracity of this experience. And it just sent me into this emotional turmoil and brought up all these unanswered questions. Did everyone else in the group truly believe this was an authentic experience? And why hadn't the aliens come? And what happened to that age of Aquarius? It really didn't seem like that happened either. And as I was wrestling with this,
My husband and I went to see the movie Prometheus, and afterwards I said to him, if I told you that I believe that I was destined to leave the planet and return to the home base, would you have married me? And he turned to me and he said, absolutely not. And I totally understood. I did, but that's who I was then. And now I felt I owed these people something.
a response. And I sat down to write this email and I thought about how these people were strangers to me now and how they had been strangers to me then, but they had showed me so much love and kindness at a time when I really, really needed it. That what I wrote was, Dear Members of the Council, Thank you.
I would love to have those CDs. And a few weeks later, a large package arrived. I took it upstairs to my office. I opened up a drawer. I put those CDs inside, and I closed that drawer. Thank you.
Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress and New York Times bestselling author who makes her home in Los Angeles. You can read more about the council and other families that Annabelle has joined, both accidentally and on purpose, in her new essay collection entitled Wherever You Go, There They Are, Stories About My Family You Might Relate To.
Annabelle received the recordings that she mentions in her story six years ago, and they're somewhere in her house, but she still hasn't listened to them. To see a picture of Annabelle dressed as Princess Meritaten from the 18th century, just visit themoth.org. That's all for this week. As we like to say from all of us here at The Moth in New York, have a story-worthy week.
Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First, Rock On, and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with The Moth. Podcast production by Timothy Lou Lee. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the public radio exchange, helping make public radio more public at PRX.org.