The Moth Radio Hour: All the World's a Stage
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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, stories from the world of performance and ritual. A musician, an undercover revolutionary, an Iraq war veteran, and this first story from one half of Penn and Teller, the legendary magician.

Most folks would assume you'd be hearing a story by Penn, the garrulous half of the duo, but I'm really excited for you to hear, maybe for the first time, the quiet one. The show was in Las Vegas, where we partnered with the University of Nevada Black Mountain Institute. Here's Teller speaking out loud, live at the Moth. I get way too much credit when I talk. When I was five years old, I...

went out in the cold to make snow angels in the snow. About a week later I came down with a cold and it went straight to my heart. I don't remember much about the stay in the hospital except being strapped to a bed for a transfusion in the dark and a cold shaft of light coming under the door, but they fixed me and I went home to recover assisted by toast, tea, and television.

My favorite character from television was Howdy Doody. For those of you who don't know, he was a cowboy marionette with red hair and freckles. And he had a burly pal named Buffalo Bob. And there was a Native American princess named Summer Fall Winter Spring.

But most important to me was Clarabelle the Clown. Clarabelle the Clown expressed himself without words, only with facial expressions and actions and magic tricks. And I really liked Clarabelle. And so Howdy Doody was not shy about marketing to children.

So when they offered a Howdy Doody Magic Set, I dutifully sent away my 50 cents and my three Musketeers wrappers and my index card with my name and address on it and waited eagerly for the Magic Set to assist in my convalescence. It arrived about two weeks later.

It wasn't quite what I had pictured. I was sort of expecting a box, but instead it was a flat envelope, eight inches by nine inches, and on the front of it there was a picture, a drawing, of a young boy wearing a button-up shirt and a huge magician's mustache, a huge black handlebar mustache. He was pulling a rabbit out of a hat and had a whole bunch of magic props on the table in front of him.

And he was exclaiming, "Here's your Howdy Doody Magic Set!" in a speech bubble. I opened up the kit and what was inside was some pieces of cardboard about the weight of shirt cardboard, really quite colorfully and beautifully printed and scored so that you could punch out the pieces and make three-dimensional magic props. In the Magic Set there was a place where you had to sign your name and say you would never reveal the secrets.

That was 65 years ago. I think the statute of limitations has run out. My favorite thing in the kit was the magic chest, a small box that had in it, you guessed it, three miniature candy bars. And you'd show your friend the three candy bars and then you'd shake up the box and two of the candy bars would disappear. And it was really clever. It was really wonderful stuff.

For some reason, this just hit me in the forehead like a diamond bullet. I guess it was the fact that this was the first time in my life that I realized that you could look at something and understand what you thought it was, and that could not be true. You could look at a miracle, and it could actually be a trick.

And the idea that these two things could coexist, what was real and what wasn't, at the same time, in the same action, that paradox just dug deep into my brain, like a weed, you know, that I haven't, for the last many years, been able to rip out with even a weed stick.

I loved the magic hit and I performed for my parents and they were very happy that I had found something that I could do that wouldn't involve me running around and straining my heart. They supported this immensely. They snuck off to the local magic shop and bought me cups and balls and little directions that I followed to do.

And as I got older, I began to save up my money and I'd go to the magic shop. And the magic shop experience was always marvelous because you'd go in and the proprietor of the magic shop would do a magic trick for you on the counter. And if you were mystified and couldn't figure it out and were just eager to learn how it worked, you gave the guy the money.

And the guy would give you the prop, and then the greatest thing, the guy would take you behind the curtain, literally there was a curtain, and explain how the trick worked and all the nuances of performance while your parents waited out in the magic shop. 'Cause they weren't magicians and they could not be privy to the secret.

I began to perform maybe a little bit at Thanksgiving when relatives would gather. Now, I should say, magic is a very demanding form. There are only two settings. It's an on and off switch. Either it's a miracle or it's embarrassing. There's only those two.

There's no middle ground. It's not like, "Oh, I've missed the line." It's like it's no longer a miracle. And as time passed, I started to do shows for relatively well-behaved kids at neighborhood parties.

The big hit of my show was the one where I'd stir around some ingredients in a pan and then cover it over with a lid and pull off the lid and there would be hard candy that I'd distribute to the kids. It was a sort of automatic win. Give kids candy, they're gonna like your show. I should try that nowadays.

I went to the Philadelphia Public Library and I bought books on magic. And I learned from those that if you learn to do close-up magic, it could improve your social life. You could make friends more easily. So when I went to high school, I tried it. I tried doing close-up magic as a way to meet friends. If you are a high school student, let me tell you, it does not work.

The very last thing that you want to do when you are meeting a new friend is to lie to them. And magic is essentially a lie. So if you do a magic trick and someone says, "How did you do that?" and you say, "I can't tell you because I'm a magician," you're just screwed. I sort of retreated from magic and joined the drama club and had a wonderful drama coach

But presently I found out he was also a magician, had been a magician since he was a kid. So this magic was haunting me. He and I used to sit on the stage after rehearsals for hours and hours and talk about the strange place that magic occupied in the theater. In a regular piece of theater, you know what you're seeing is make-believe, but you sort of make it real to yourself. In magic, I mean, it's also a theatrical art,

And you also know that it's make-believe, but you want it to look absolutely real. And you want to bring to bear on it all of your skeptical abilities, and you want to fail. What an interesting, odd form of theater to become addicted to.

My favorite teacher in high school was Mr. Knapp, my Latin teacher, and I thought he had the ideal life. He came in, he did his Latin classes, and I thought, "I'm gonna grow up and become a Latin teacher, and I won't do magic for a living because nobody can earn a living doing magic. I'll become a Latin teacher and I'll do magic on the side." And so I went to college to study Latin and Greek.

And the only performances I could get there were for fraternities, which are only this much above the Cub Scouts. But there I made a discovery. I discovered that if I shut up, like Clarabelle, and if I did things that were dangerous-looking,

suddenly the frat boys would pay a little bit of attention. There's one show that sticks out in my mind that was in the college pub. There was this big sort of cylindrical room with several terraces and balconies above me with people sitting at tables.

And I walked in. Now, the piece of my repertoire that was the strongest was my razor blade swallowing trick. I would swallow ten razor blades and then five feet of dental floss and bring the razor blades up, apparently out of my stomach.

And I walked in and I had some light thrown on me and I just started dead silent in the pub on a busy night to perform the razor blade trick. I take the razor blades out, test them, show they're sharp, swallow them one at a time. The immediate response was cups of beer were dropped on me from all of the balconies exploding like water balloons everywhere around me. But this time I did not run away like I ran away from the Cub Scouts. This time I just kept going.

And when I had my mouth examined to prove that the razor blades weren't just hiding in my mouth, but I'd actually swallowed them, and when I swallowed the dental floss and brought up the razor blades all tied to the dental floss, I got a very strong round of applause. I felt like I'd learned something. I did become a Latin teacher. I taught for six years in Trenton, New Jersey, which is a little bit above the Cub Scouts.

At the end of the spring of the sixth year, two friends of mine, Penn and Weir, called me up and said, "We're putting together a performing troupe. Would you like to be a member of our troupe?" And I said, "Well, yeah. When are you doing shows?" And they said, "Through the summer and through October."

And I realized that I'd been in school, either as a student or a teacher, for 22 years. I knew nothing of what life was outside of a school. So I went to my principal and I said, "Could I have a year off as a leave of absence, as a sabbatical,

And, at the end of that, if I'm starving in an alley trying to be a magician, I will come back and I will teach Latin for you for the rest of my life." And he said, "Yeah, sure." He was an old marine and he was really cool. I loved him.

That fall I performed as a professional really for the first time at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. And I remember waking up one October morning at about 10:30 in the morning, hours after I knew my colleagues in the teaching profession had started their cars in the cold

the cold and had driven in the coffee-scented faculty room. And they were marking papers and they were making lesson plans. And I was there lying in bed thinking about how I was going to work on magic all day long. I was doing what I had dreamed of when I was five years old and went out in the cold and made snow angels in the snow. On my 60th birthday, my friend Gene, whom I've known half my life,

came and brought me some birthday presents. There were socks and there were books, and the last thing was in a shirt box. And I opened the shirt box, and I pulled back the tissue paper, and there was a picture of a young boy in a button-up shirt with a big mustache, pulling out a rabbit from a hat, with a bunch of magic props on the table. My friend had gone on eBay

and found a seller advertising a Howdy Doody magic set, the same kind that inspired Teller to go into magic. Of course, seeing images that I hadn't seen for 55 years, tears rolled down my cheeks. The objects were all flat and pristine in a plastic envelope, the way they should be, archivally preserved. And if I were anything like a proper collector, I would have kept them in that envelope.

But I didn't. I punched them out. I made the rabbit that jumped out of the hat. I made the mystic tray. I made the magic chest. And if you ever come over to my house, I want to show you three little candy bars in that chest. Shake it around, and they'll be gone. And I might just fool you. Thank you.

That was Teller live in Las Vegas. Teller has been the quieter half of Penn & Teller since 1979. The Penn & Teller show is the longest-running headline act in Las Vegas. Teller's also a writer, director, and filmmaker. To see a picture of the Howdy Doody Magic set,

that Teller said, quote, pierced me to the bone and chained itself to my soul, visit themoth.org, where, abracadabra, you can share this story or any of the stories you hear on The Moth Radio Hour. There are also a few pictures of Teller as a child doing magic that are pretty heart-melting. And side note, Teller's name is Teller, just capital T Teller. If you didn't know, that is called a mononym. ♪

In a moment, a winner of NPR's Tiny Desk concert talks about taking the show on the road when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX.

This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, we're talking about performing, and this next story is from Galen Lee. Galen is a violinist, singer-songwriter. She also happens to have a congenital disability, osteogenesis imperfecta, commonly known as brittle bones disease. She uses an electric wheelchair to get around, which figures into this next story. As

As for her music, one critic described it this way, Velvet Underground meets Little House on the Prairie. You'll get to hear a bit of it later, so hang on until after the story. Galen told this at the Historic Palace Theater in Los Angeles, where we partnered with public radio station KCRW. Here's Galen Lee. Thank you.

So I'm a musician from Minnesota and I've been playing a long time and I've had the good fortune of getting to know a few people that toured for a living. They kind of made it. They're from my hometown and they toured nationally and internationally and I got to know them and I always thought it sounded so fun.

such a cool thing to just tour all over and travel and play your music and I talked to one of them one day, an older guy, and I was like, you know, is it fun? Like, do you like it? And he's, I was like, it would be fun to try that someday and he's like, no man, touring is a grind. Like, you have a good job, you teach fiddle, like,

"Just don't try touring, it's a grind. "It's pretty hard." And I was like, "Okay, well, whatever." And then in 2016, I entered National Public Radio's Tiny Desk Contest, and much to my complete surprise, I won out of 6,100 submissions. So, yeah, thanks.

So because of that huge opportunity, my husband and I decided that we would try touring. We would try our hand at it. We sold our house, and we bought a van, and we quit our jobs, and we hit the road. And we've been touring basically full-time for two and a half years. I perform, and he does everything else, basically. And so I think the first day I realized that touring was a grind was the time I found myself...

in a bathroom stall 10 minutes before the show started while I was putting on makeup and eating beef jerky. And I was like, "Oh, I think I get what he means. This is really weird. What am I doing in here?" And so, but I didn't really think about how touring would be harder with a disability. So I went on a co-build tour not long after we started with another artist

And she'd been on the road for 10 years, and so after our two weeks together, she wrote a post on Facebook that really made me think, and she said, "I thought touring was hard, you know, it's long drives and you don't get a lot of sweeping,

And sometimes no one shows up and sometimes you make $12, which is true, I have done that myself. But I never thought about how hard it would be if you couldn't get into the venue and what Galen and her husband are doing is just like monumentally more difficult than anything I ever imagined. And I started thinking about it because

We walk into a venue and often the stage doesn't have a ramp even though my stage plot says, "Gaelin Lee is in an electric wheelchair. Ramps are required." But nobody listens to stage plots.

I get there and there's no ramp, and then a lot of times I can't get in the green room because it's in the basement or it's upstairs. And sometimes I can't even use the bathroom, and once in a great while, I actually have to be carried into the venue. Like, my whole wheelchair is like 300 pounds. And so it's like walking into an obstacle course every time we go to a new venue. And I hadn't really...

given that a lot of thought, but it explained why I wanted to sweep for like a week every time we got home. But I figured at least I was doing what I loved. Like I love performing and I love music and I love meeting people and I love traveling. And so I thought, well, this is just the way it is right now in our society, but at least I get to do what I love. And later on,

I met another artist. Her name is Kaylin Heffernan. She is the rapper in the hip-hop group Wheelchair Sports Camp. And Kaylin, she's awesome, and we have the same disability. And she told me how she was booked at a pretty big festival, and she was really excited to play. It was their first year. And she ended up getting put in...

a venue on the second floor that didn't have an elevator. And because she was pretty well known in the disability community, a bunch of people in wheelchairs had showed up to see her play and they couldn't get in and they were pretty upset. So she played a few songs outside of the venue before their show started and then she went upstairs and did the show. She said the next day they got a lot of angry emails from those fans that had wanted to see her play and couldn't get into the venue. And I asked her, kind of naively, like,

"Isn't that a little bit overreacting? Like, you didn't pick the venue, it was the festival that put you there." And she's like, "I don't really think so. I mean, it kind of sucks if you're a disabled performer and someone wants to see you and you can't even get into their show. Like, what kind of example is that?"

And I started thinking, and I was like, "Whoa." I had thought about how hard it was for me, but I didn't think about what if somebody showed up and couldn't even get into my show? How terrible would that feel? It hadn't happened yet. And so every time I ended up having to play at a venue that wasn't really accessible after that, it just felt gross.

increasingly hypocritical and disgusting because I am an advocate, right? And I don't really think that it's cool that places aren't accessible in 2019. And so eventually there was a last straw. And that last straw came at a venue in Boston, a well-respected folk venue that's in the basement.

And I was excited to play there, but I felt gross that it wasn't accessible, but I was like, "Well, you know, I'm just starting out my career. Someday, maybe I'll be able to just play accessible places." So I did the show. At that particular show, a fan of mine, he supported a Kickstarter, donated a lot of money to help me make my last album. His prize was to get to have dinner with me before the show at this venue. He also, as a bonus prize, got to lift my chair down an entire flight of stairs.

and then back up to get it out. And it was that day, I was like, this is dangerous for him, it's dangerous for my chair, it's dangerous for me. And it also just is a bad example of advocacy. So I'm like, I'm done playing in accessible venues. And on top of it, I'm done getting lifted up

onto the stage. If the venue doesn't have a ramp, I'm playing on the floor from now on because if things haven't changed in 30 years, which is how long the Americans with Disabilities Act has been around, I mean, think about that, right? Yeah, I know.

So, I mean, what has changed in music in the last 30 years? Like, every piece of technology, there's auto-tune, there's, like, amazing light shows, but we haven't managed to build, like, a wooden ramp in front of the stage yet. Like, that's not okay. So I decided that was my new policy. I was really excited about it. I talked to my booking agent. I was like, "I'm only gonna play accessible places." Well, you make a statement like that, and the universe has to be like, "Ha ha."

see what you really think when it comes down to it. So about a week later, I get a call from him and he's really nervous, my booking agent. He's like,

I just found out the place we're supposed to play in Detroit is not accessible. There's 12 stairs to get in. I know you really want to do this now. Like, what should I do? Should we cancel the show? So I thought, well, where can I play that's accessible, that is still possibly available 12 days out, and that would be willing to, like, work with an actual venue to, like, put on a show together? And I realized churches. Like, of

Of course, churches have sound systems, they have acoustics, like they're usually accessible. So I said, "Hey, man," I called this guy up, the owner of the venue, and I was like, "I know this is really weird and super last minute, but can we maybe move the show to a church? And you guys co-host it, and you tell all your guests to come to the church instead, and we'll see how it goes." And he thought about it for a while, and he's like, "Well, I have never done anything like that before, but I will try it, and we'll see what happens." So he located a church,

it went well and that was when I realized that this kind of thing was possible. So churches might not seem like the most hard rock place to play or whatever, but I think about punk when I think about this. I think punk is like going against the establishment, it's going against the grain, it's DIY, it's freedom, right? So I decided accessibility is the new punk rock.

That is my motto for life right now. And so I had a gig in San Francisco and it was at an office space because the promoter couldn't find an accessible venue but he was a great promoter, he did an awesome job, he sold it out. There were 100 people that came to this show in San Francisco.

I'm kind of milling around in the office space because there's no green room in an office space before the show starts. And I notice that a lot of people in wheelchairs are coming in the door and people with other disabilities. And we're kind of like waving and smiling. And I'm thinking, wow, this is so cool. Like, I don't think I've ever seen this many people with disabilities at my shows before. And I do the show and it's awesome. And I look out into the crowd and I would say about 25% of the audience

had a disability that day. And the reason that that number stands out to me is that's the estimated amount of people in the U.S. with a disability, 25%. And it shouldn't be so remarkable that we see them in a show. This should be every show, right? Just last week, I did South by Southwest, and I did an event. Oh, thanks. Thanks.

I did an event in Austin, Texas, and these two moms brought their little girls. They're both in wheelchairs. They're eight years old and four years old. And one of them has the same disability as I do. And we were talking after the show. I got to meet them. And I asked the eight-year-old, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And she said, "I want to play the trumpet." And I can't wait to see what she does. And I hope that it's a lot easier for her to do it than it is for me right now. So I am lucky.

but on the road I get to meet other disability advocates and other disabled artists. And we don't all face the same barriers because we're not the same. We don't all even agree on the best way to go about making change, and that's okay. But we all have one common goal, which is that we want to see the world become a more accessible place. And the truth of the matter is that we don't have to be the only people fighting for this.

Whether you're a performer, disabled or not, whether you are into heavy metal or bluegrass or jazz or folk or country, I want us all to unite so that the world can see the truth that accessibility is the new punk rock. Thanks. That was Galen Lee. At the time of this recording, Galen has performed in 47 states and 7 countries and says she's far from done.

You're listening to Galen's music right now. To see a picture of Galen, to hear more of her music, and to see when her tour is coming near you, visit themoth.org, where you can also download and share the story.

This next story takes place on a military base in Iraq. This one isn't about performance exactly, but does feature some age-old rituals. Daniel Sperling told it at our Story Slam in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Here's Daniel. I joined the Army after law school.

I wanted to serve my country. I thought that being an Army lawyer would help me grow in the legal profession in a unique and challenging place, and I graduated during the recession and I could not find another job. I knew that I made a mistake pretty much right away, but I did not realize how painful a mistake that was until the summer of 2010 when I got orders to deploy to Iraq with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

We were stationed at a small outpost about an hour south of Baghdad. It was about 115 degrees outside. I was the lawyer, so nobody liked me because I was the guy who told people that they couldn't do what they wanted to do. And even though combat operations were over, our base still got shelled pretty much every night by rocket attacks. Now, when somebody is shooting rockets at you, there's not much that you can do except get on the ground as flat as you possibly can and hope that they don't hit you.

We had this security agreement in place with the Iraqi government that said that we couldn't shoot back. So you can imagine that after about five months of this, everybody on that base was scared out of their mind, and I was really regretting the choices that I made that had gotten me here. The regimental command decided to do something about it. They decided to send out a questionnaire to every trooper on the base to see how we were feeling.

It was to gauge unit morale. So some of the questions were really basic. It asked, "Are you thinking of hurting yourself or others? Are you getting enough sleep?" But one question that really stood out for me was, "Do you have a spiritual support network?" Now, I was not a religious person, so I checked the box, "No," and I handed in my survey and I didn't think about it. The next day, I had a knock on the door of my containerized housing unit.

It was the regimental chaplain, Major Claude Bridian. Major Bridian was a Baptist pastor from Georgia. He had an enormous gap in his two front teeth that you could always see because even though there was a war going on, he was always smiling. The chaplain says to me, "Brother Daniel, I noticed that you are of the Jewish faith and you said that you do not have a spiritual support network. Would you like my assistance?"

Now, I don't remember telling the chaplain that I was Jewish, but he knew that I was a lawyer from New York, so he could have put two and two together.

I didn't think that I needed help, but here was this man standing in my doorway smiling at me, offering me the only kind thing that anybody had offered me the entire time that I was there. And who was I to say no to a Baptist pastor who outranked me? So I said yes, I would like some help. The next day, a box showed up at my door. It had four yarmulkes, a box of Hanukkah candles, a dreidel, and a pamphlet entitled "Judaism, Customs and Practices."

This was all stuff that I didn't really know that I needed, but I was very touched by the gesture. It wasn't, it was not until a month later that the chaplain approached me a second time and said, "Brother Daniel, I have found that there are other Jews who are living on this outpost. Would you like to get together with them on Friday night for Shabbat services?"

I had two major objections to this. The first one was I wasn't a very religious person. And the second one was something about my people's history told me that we shouldn't put all the Jews together in one place.

It was kind of like putting all your eggs in one basket. But here was this man smiling at me, offering me this kindness, and so I didn't want to say no. So on Friday night, I went down to the Post Chapel. It was a little awkward because it was a multi-use chapel, which meant that there were crosses and Christian iconography everywhere. Only one of us, only one of the three Jews on Post spoke Hebrew, and it wasn't me.

And the chaplain's assistant, I guess he had never really seen a Shabbat service before. He was very curious. So he kind of stayed in the shadows and watched us the whole time. So we got through the service. We said the prayer over the candles and over the challah. And we were about to say goodnight when the chaplain's assistant jumps up and says, wait, Jews, there's more. Follow me.

So we follow him to the back of the chapel and there's this closet. And he opens up the door to the closet and there's a box. And he says, "Open the box." So we open the box and inside the box are 16 glistening bottles of purple Manischewitz wine.

Not grape juice, wine. The chaplain's assistant says, "The service is not over until you've said the prayer over the wine and you've all had a drink." My lawyer alarm goes off like an air raid siren. I'm like, "Wait a minute, General Order Number One specifically prohibits imbibing intoxicating beverages in a deployed environment." The chaplain's assistant says, "No, lawyer, you're wrong. There's an exception to that policy for Jews. On Friday nights, Jews are allowed to have one glass of Manischewitz wine with Shabbat services."

Well, I'll be damned. So we raise our glasses, we say the prayer over the wine, and we all have a drink. And because it was the first time any of us had had a drink in about six months, that was all it took to get us completely smashed. I had found my spiritual support network.

So the alcohol and the companionship on Friday night, it really helped, but that in and of itself wasn't really enough to get us through the pain of a year-long deployment. What helped much more than that was knowing that there was somebody out there who was there watching out for us, helping us find the spiritual support network that I didn't know that I needed.

the war ended, or at least I went home from it. And I found out a few years afterwards that Chaplain Bridian actually passed away. He was in his early 50s. A lot of people came out to remember him because I wasn't the only one on that post who he helped out in a very dark time. There were about 1,200 troopers on that base, and he helped find a spiritual support network for all of us. So now on Friday nights when I drink wine, I drink to the kindness and the memory of a Baptist pastor.

Thank you. That was Daniel Sperling. Daniel served in the military for six years. He still works in the legal field, has become a husband and father, and yes, still celebrates the high holidays. To see some pictures of Daniel on base in Iraq or a sweet picture of Chaplain Bridian, visit themoth.org. L'chaim! In a moment, a young woman goes undercover in Chile when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.

You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Hickson. This hour we're talking about performing. Some might say that undercover work is the ultimate performance. It's often a life or death situation. Our final storyteller, Carmen Aguirre, ran a safe house with her husband in a small Argentinian city that bordered Chile. They delivered goods and information in and out of Chile on buses and small planes, all while living in fear of being discovered by the secret police.

As you'll hear, the nature of the work made her question what was real and what was imagined all the time. Here's Carmen Aguirre at a Moth main stage show in Dayton, Ohio. I was born in Chile and raised in Canada. In 1986, when I was 18 years old, I went back to South America for four years

to join the underground Chilean resistance movement against the Pinochet dictatorship. Thank you. Pinochet was an ultra-right winger who installed a fascist regime and a neoliberal economy with all the austerity measures that come with it.

My resistance activities involved running a safe house in a small Argentinian city that bordered Chile. My husband and I would hide resistance members in our house, and we would deliver goods into Chile on buses and in small planes that we had learned to fly. The dreaded secret police was everywhere.

and they operated through a system referred to as Plan Condor, in which the secret police forces of various South American nations worked together to capture resistance members. 180 Chilean resistance members had disappeared in Argentina. I spent those four years in a state of absolute terror.

Many of my fellow resistance members refer to our generation as the generation of terror because many of us were not arrested, not tortured, not murdered, but the paranoia was intense to the point where you really started to think, am I making this up? I've got to be making this up.

Living under a dictatorship will fuck with your brain that way. Sure, Big Brother is always watching you, but is he really? I mean, if he was really always watching me, wouldn't I be six feet under by now, what with all my underground, illicit activity?

It was in the late 80s that we got a memo. Now, memos came in the form of a roll of film delivered to a post office box that you had rented under an assumed identity. You would take the roll of film home and develop it yourself in this darkroom at the back of your closet, a secret darkroom.

The photographs were of documents in tiny print that you had to study with a magnifying glass and then promptly burn and flush. This particular memo was quite disturbing because it told us to watch our thoughts, to watch our paranoia. What had just happened was that an elder resistance member had just turned himself in to the secret police.

He had been walking through downtown Santiago with a briefcase full of top secret documents with meeting points, contacts, addresses, tactics, strategies, and he had become convinced that he was being followed and that an ambush was imminent. He ended up turning himself in to the militarized police, briefcase and all. The sad part is that he was not being followed.

But 17 years in the underground, plus the disappearance of his children, had finally broken him. He gave himself away, and many others whose details were in that briefcase. I thought back to a few years earlier, 1986, when I got my first paycheck, teaching English as a foreign language, which was my facade. Also, the Chilean resistance was all-consuming, but it didn't pay.

Gleeful that we could finally eat something other than crackers and cheese, my husband and I filled our shopping cart to the brim with all kinds of delicacies. Dulce de leche, rose hip jam, cans of tomato sauce, packages of spaghetti, blocks of cheese. I looked up from reading the ingredients on a package of breaded soya cutlets,

when my eyes met the steady gaze of a middle-aged man in a beige polyester pinstriped suit, hanging onto an empty shopping cart halfway down the aisle. He half smiled at me. My knees buckled. Every hair on my body stood on end. I went numb with fear. He was one of them.

one of the dreaded secret police. How did I know this? Gut instinct. I just knew. I whispered to my husband, and we continued slowly working up our way up and down the aisles, acting normal, filling our shopping cart, as we'd been trained to do by our superiors over a two-year training period. The man followed, always keeping half an aisle between us. Our minds scrambled.

It was noon on a Saturday and the supermarket was packed. We looked outside and amongst the pedestrians and the traffic, we saw an idling Peugeot 504 at the entrance with three men inside it. The car had two antennae, one in the front, one in the back, a secret police car. This was it. We were fucked.

But on our way into the supermarket, we had surveyed our surroundings as per our training, and we noticed that right next door there was a telephone company with mirrored windows, the kind where you can look out but people cannot look in. We slowly made our way to one of the checkout counters the man lined up just down the way. We loaded all our groceries onto the conveyor belt.

and when it was our turn to pay, we slipped out quickly instead, lost ourselves in the crowd at the entrance, and ducked right into the telephone company. A moment later, the man came running out, looking everywhere. His hand reached into his jacket pocket for his gun. He ended up diving into the waiting car, and they took off at lightning speed while we watched from inside the telephone company. I was so scared.

that my spirit left my body and clung to a corner of the ceiling. I was hollow with fear. We spent the rest of the afternoon zigzagging around the city, taking different buses, trying to lose the possible tail, which we did. In 1990, the dictatorship ended. Although Pinochet's neoliberal economy remains intact in Chile, we saw this as a huge loss.

The resistance disbanded. I ended up getting divorced and moving back to Canada. But the question always remained: What had I imagined? What was real? Twenty-five years later, I was writing a memoir about these experiences, so I went back to Buenos Aires to ask my ex-husband a few questions. We met at a pasta restaurant, and over a plate of gnocchi, I asked him if he remembered the supermarket incident.

He said he didn't. My heart sank. Had I invented this scenario and so many others like it? Was I just like the man with the briefcase? I went into great detail about the supermarket incident and he said he had no idea what I was talking about. I was confused. He remembered everything else, everything that had gone down, everything that we had done. He just remembered no incident of ever being followed.

I was ashamed. We said goodbye, and a few days later I saw a photograph in the newspaper. It was a picture of the man from the supermarket. 25 years had passed, but I knew it was him. I read the story. The man in the photograph was a Chilean secret police operative operating in Argentina in the 70s and 80s. He had just been stabbed to death by his 21-year-old gay lover. It was a crime of passion.

When the Argentinian police went to his apartment, the scene of the crime, they found a stack of boxes at the back of his closet. Inside these boxes were files with all the details of his secret police activities, including names of Chilean resistance members he had followed, the ones he had tortured and murdered. Still, how could I be sure that this was the man from the supermarket? How could I recognize a face a quarter of a century later?

I went back to Canada and a few months later, a fellow Chilean resistance member sent me an email with the subject title, "This will interest you." Somebody had taken it upon themselves to transcribe the contents of the files and now the document was being sent to those of us who had lived in Argentina in the 70s and 80s. I poured through this document, which was literally hundreds of pages long.

I finally came upon a short paragraph describing a following in 1986 in a supermarket in the Argentinian city that we had lived in. It described a young couple in their late teens. The girl was a Chilean exile raised in Canada back in Argentina to join the resistance. The boy was an Argentinian. Their trail had been lost that day.

The paragraph said what the intention had been: to pick up this couple, throw them in the back of the car, torture them to get as much information out of them as possible, then murder them and dispose of their bodies. I read this paragraph with my hand over my mouth, horror seizing me, but also a sense of relief, relief that I was not crazy, that I could trust my instinct, my memory, my life.

Many of my fellow resistance members have died young from all the stress, from the terror, the paranoia, and from not having the answers to so many questions. And one of the things that has helped save me is the gift of being able to witness the evidence of my own experience, to reclaim it, to own it, and to speak it. Thank you.

That was Carmen Aguirre. Carmen began her life as a resistance fighter through her parents, who were also revolutionaries. She first learned of their efforts when she was just 11 years old. It's all detailed in her book, Something Fierce, Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter.

Carmen now uses her performance skills in the actual theater. She's a playwright and an actress. You may have seen her on the Canadian television show Endgame or her touring one-woman show Blue Box. To see a picture of Carmen during the time of her story, visit themoth.org. Do you have a story to tell us? Have you ever, say, worked undercover? We would love to hear it. You can pitch us your story by recording it right on our site, themoth.org. ♪

That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time, and that's the story from the moth. ♪

Your host this hour was Jennifer Hickson. Jennifer also directed the stories in the show, along with Maggie Sino. The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Ginness, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Emily Couch. Moth Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Mark Orton, Galen Lee, The Klezmatics, and Gustavo Santolalo.

You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.