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From the producers of Anything for Selena and the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Suave comes My Divo, a podcast about roots. Dive into the legendary life, music, and lasting influence of Latin America's most prolific songwriter and showman, Juan Gabriel El Divo de Juarez. Hosted by Maria Garcia, this is
My Devo, an Apple original podcast produced by Futuro Studios. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts. This autumn, fall for moth stories as we travel across the globe for our main stages. 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 main stage 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.
From BRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jay Allison, producer of this radio show. This time, we have a live performance from the Union Chapel in London. The event celebrated the release of our book, How to Tell a Story, in the UK. Here's our host of the night, writer and performer, John Good. Welcome to the Moth main stage here in beautiful London!
My name is John Good. I will be your host for the evening. We're so excited to be here with you. We have not been here since 2019. And we've all been through a lot. We've been through a president. You've been through a prime minister. We've all been through a global pandemic. Let's get a round of applause just for being here this evening, for making it out.
We're also super excited. We're celebrating our 25th anniversary this year at the mall. 25 years of one stage, one mic, one storyteller telling stories to let us all know that we have more in common than we have differences. To celebrate our 25th anniversary, we've released a book, How to Tell a Story. It is filled with wonderful tidbits and guidelines and anecdotes. You might even find a quote from someone you recently met.
So our theme for tonight is holding on and letting go. And I've hung out here in London for a couple of days, and there are definitely some things I'm going to hold on to. One is how delightful and wonderful and warm the people of London are. I hang out in New York every so often. And it's very different in New York. Like in New York, if you are in the crosswalk, there's a solid chance someone might try to hit you with their car, and then they will yell, get out of the crosswalk and speed off.
But in London, if you're in a crosswalk, there's a solid chance that someone will still hit you with their car, but then they'll say sorry, and then they'll speed off. And I'm going to hold on to that. That's much more delightful. I feel warm as I go to the hospital.
And the thing I'm gonna let go of is the fake British accent that all Americans get when they've been here for five minutes. I'm gonna let that one go. I'm gonna let it go. You know what I mean? Soon as they say, "Is it good?" You'll be like, "Yeah, it is, isn't it?" You know, so you do that the second you get here. I'm gonna let that go. But I'm gonna hold on to the warmth of the building and all of your beautiful smiles as we move into this fantastic program. Are you ready to go? Fantastic.
All of our storytellers, they're fantastic bios in the program which you probably have on hand. So they will be introduced to the stage by way of a question. Tonight's question is: What is something you wish you still had? So when I asked our first storyteller, he answered: Air conditioning for his car. Please put your hands together for Kevin McDonald! My parents are Irish, but I was born in Bradford in Yorkshire. Where I lived was quite working class, quite poor.
but everybody kept the gardens clean and the windows clean. It was also a great place to play. I used to mess around in all these derelict mills and they had wonderful weird names like Pigeon's Graveyard and The Devil's Spine. And I also used to play in World War II air raid shelters and abandoned railway tunnels. And PC Craven, the local police officer, he used to run boxing lessons at the youth club. My parents split up when I was a child.
and my mother struggled to bring the four kids up alone. She took cleaning jobs when we were at school and sometimes in the evenings one of my big brothers would look after me and my sister. We always used to go to church, St Joseph's, every Sunday and it was always the same people sat in the same seats. Mrs Casey, my teacher, the Brogden family. And when I was nine years old I became an altar boy and it was the first time in my life that I had any responsibility
and I took it very seriously. I'd ring the bell, I'd light the candles, I'd pour the altar wine and when I swung the furrow-bull I'd often see my mother's proud face looking back at me through the incense smoke. And it was around this time I became fascinated by Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. The TV show was all the rage at the time. It was on every Thursday evening at 7:30pm. Basically Steve Austin was an astronaut involved in a horrific accident and he was rebuilt using bionic parts.
And he was my first real hero and he was who I wanted to be when I grew up. So it's hard to put into words how happy I felt when I got the six million dollar man action figure for my birthday. I took him everywhere with me and he had a little hole at the back of his head and you could look through it and it was his bionic eye. And I used to throw him over walls, dangle him from trees, send him down streams, bury him in sand. And he never let me down. He was my best friend.
But I wanted to give him something that he really deserved, the holy grail of Six Million Dollar Man accessories, the Bionic Rocket Repair Station. Basically, the Bionic Rocket Repair Station was just a rocket, but when you unfolded it, it turned into an operating theatre, and you could plug him in and do all sorts of stuff with him. And it was in the toy shop in Carter's in the window, and I always used to look at it.
and my mother would sort of pull me away. She'd buy me it there and then if she could, but the money just wasn't available. And I was too young to get her milk round, too young to get her paper round. So one day I was out playing with my six million dollar man, and this kid called Billy Crossan came up to me. Now Billy was five years older than me, and had a reputation for stealing bikes and painting them. And Billy Crossan's family was somebody you didn't want to mess with. But he said to me, "I can get you a Rocket Respares station tonight if you want."
You've just got to help me. I was all ears. He told me he'd heard Gary Bateman's mum talking on the bus. She worked at a local warehouse. And apparently she said that she'd been packing rocket repair stations to send off to shops throughout the UK. Billy said that they were doing some work on the roof and they'd covered a hole with a plastic sheet. And if I helped him get into the warehouse, he would get me a rocket repair station. And I thought, as long as I'm home at 6.30 for my bath, I'm going to do it.
So we walked towards this toy warehouse and it was in the middle of these Victorian mills and it was very satanic and it had a big gate with a long chain and big padlock. And we got there, Billy said to me, "Right, your role is to stand here. If you see anybody, walk away. And if I don't see you at the gate, I know there's something wrong." I said, "Yeah, okay, fair enough." So Billy got over the gate and disappeared.
And all I could think of was, "Well, what am I going to do tonight? Am I going to send a $6 million man to space or am I going to operate on him?" And I looked round and I saw Billy get to the top of the scaffolding. He ran across the roof like a cat, pulled this plastic sheet and disappeared inside. And now I was very worried. Every footstep, every car engine filled me with terror. I was stood alone at the gate and how I wished I had a bionic eye at that moment.
But then I thought, hang on a minute, Steve Austin, the $6 million man, he won't be doing this. In fact, if Steve Austin, the $6 million man was here now, he'd jump over the gate, find Billy and bring him to justice. I realized I was on the wrong side of the law. I wanted to go home to my bedroom, but I couldn't leave now because if I left, Billy would be out to get me. I had no choice. I had to stay. Seconds seemed like days, minutes like weeks. And then I heard,
"Is it clear?" I said "Yes." He said "Right, get over the gates and catch these." So I got over the gate as fast as I could and suddenly the courtyard was bouncing with frisbees. Billy shouted "Grab the frisbees and pile them up by the gate." So I was running around like a ball in a pinball machine trying to catch all these frisbees and a nine-year-old can only carry so many at a time. But then I thought "Hang on a minute, where's my rocket repair station?" Billy never mentioned all about frisbees.
But before I got the chance to ask him about it, a car screeched to a halt and a blue light was flashing. I looked round and PC Craven got out. I couldn't believe it. I've never been scared of PC Craven before, but he was wearing a black glove and he beckoned me towards him. I thought he was going to send me to jail or even worse, send me to hell. He put me and Billy in the police car and for Billy it was just another day at the office.
For me, I always wanted to ride in a police car, but not like this. My world had come to an end and I thought, "What's Father Baron gonna think of me?" "What will my brothers and sister think of me?" "What will my mother think of me?" So when we pulled up outside my house, I could see the curtains twitching. Somebody came out pretending to empty the bin. PC Craven took me to the door and my mother let me in. He explained what had happened. Somebody from a tower block had seen us acting suspiciously among the police.
He said I would only get a warning. Billy Crossan would be taken to the police station as he was a repeat offender. The tears flowed. The public shame of me being brought home by the police devastated my mother. The following day, I had to be that altar boy again. I was old enough to go to confession, but to be honest with you, I didn't want to tell Father Barron what I'd done. But maybe he already knew. When I was up on the altar, I looked down at the congregation. Mrs Casey, my teacher, seemed to have a frown on her face.
The Brogdon kids were sniggering. I couldn't even look at my mother. I was too ashamed. I never did get my hands on that rocket repair station. I'm not even sure if they had one in the warehouse or Billy was just playing me a fool all along. But I lost something very precious that day. I lost the innocence of that little boy playing with his toys. I never got Steve Austin, the six million dollar man, out much after that. I put him in his box and he lay under an avalanche of toys and football annuals.
I couldn't be trusted anymore. I was a criminal. No bionic parts could fix that. Not even Steve Austin, the six million dollar man, can go back in time. Thank you. Give it up for Kevin McDonald! Kevin...
Kevin MacDonald hails from England's largest county, Yorkshire, and is the son of Irish immigrant parents. He's an author with a background in journalism, has had a short film script produced, and is now having a crack at stand-up comedy. Kevin came to us through our pitch line, by the way, and you can too. Just check at themoth.org on how to record a pitch for us. It's easy. We find a lot of storytellers that way.
or 877-799-MOTH. In a moment, our host, John Good, takes a military swim test and a woman pays a visit to her outcast uncle. 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 Jay Allison. We're bringing you stories from our main stage show in London with the theme holding on and letting go. The host for the evening was John Good. And here he is telling a story of his own. So in my senior year of high school, I was I applied to and I was accepted to the university of my choice.
And I was very excited about this, so excited I told my father. My father said, "Congratulations, that's amazing. All you got to do now is pay for it." And in high school, I had a fairly decent grade point average GPA. Mine was 3.4, but they don't really give scholarships for 3.4s. By example, our valedictorian, she had a 4.9. A 4.9 on a scale I was told only went to four. So I was like, "What are you, taking classes in the future? How is this even possible?"
So I was feeling somewhat anxious about my chances of going to college. And I don't know if you watch nature shows at all, where they talk about how sharks can smell blood in the water. But military recruiters can smell anxiousness in high school hallways much the same way. So before I knew it, there was a Marine Corps recruiter parade resting by my locker, and he said, "Hello, Jonathan." And I was like, "How do you even know my name? What kind of Marine Corps psychic madness is this?"
And he informed me that he knew my name because he'd seen my ASVAB scores. The ASVAB is an aptitude test that lets recruiters know your aptitude for military service. He said my scores were fairly high, an 85 out of 99. It's no 4.9, but I'll take it, I'll take it. And as he was talking, I began to think about the fact that my father and I had a brother and I had a sister. They'd all been in the military. And here I was being asked to join the Marines, the toughest of the tough.
And as I'm having that thought, he says, you know, the GI Bill can pay your way through college. And that's how I found myself on Parris Island in South Carolina training to become a United States Marine. Now, there are four hurdles you have to jump to become a Marine. The first is the physical fitness test. I was young. I was in great shape. Passed the physical fitness test. The next is the rifle range. No one has ever confused me with Annie Oakley, but I can hit the target enough times. I passed the rifle range.
The next is the thing called basic warrior training. I was 18, so I was basic. I wanted to be a warrior. I was trainable. I passed basic warrior training. And the last hurdle you have to jump is the swim qualification. Now, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, in the city.
and we had a public pool about two blocks, two or three blocks from my house. And every couple of days, me and all of my friends, we would walk those two or three blocks, go to the pool, and we would stand in the water because there were actually too many kids in the pool to actually swim in the pool. It was kind of like a black kid soup. You know, it was like a ghetto gazpacho. You know what I mean? It was refreshing but not very informative. So none of us really learned to swim.
So here I am at this swim qual. At the Marine Corps swim qual, you get three chances to pass. You have to jump off a 20-foot tower and swim halfway across an Olympic-sized pool. On the first day, everyone is there. It's like a sea of faces. The Marine Corps was 85% white at the time. Sea of white faces. The second day is for everyone who failed, and it was nothing but inner-city black kids that I'm sure went to the pool every day and never learned to swim.
So there we are. And so on the day, on the second day when you fail, they teach you how to do the backstroke. And they teach you a version that makes it look like you're having an actual stroke. But that's what they teach you. So I failed the first day. I failed the second day. And here I am, my last chance to pass the swim call.
And I'm feeling somewhat nervous and somewhat anxious because I know, you know, this is it. And I don't want to go home and have to face my dad and my siblings having failed. And I also don't want to miss out on the opportunity to go to college. So I'm up on a 20-foot tower, and I got my toes over the edge. I'm feeling nervous. And I take my pants pockets. I pull them inside out, hoping that as I jump off, the air will go up my legs and fill the pockets, and they will serve as a flotation device, just so you know that doesn't work.
So I jump off. I go down into the water, I surface, and then I immediately start to drown. Immediately. The drill instructor, he jumps in, he grabs me, he pulls me to the side, he pulls, you know, he jumps out and pulls me out. And he says, "Get in line." Then he jumps back in the pool because everyone is drowning. Everyone is drowning. So I'm on the side of the pool, I'm taking some breaths, I'm happy to be alive. And I stand up, and I look, and I notice that there are two lines.
There's a line for people who failed, and then there's a line for people who passed. And his instruction was to get in line. So I got into the line for people who passed because one thing they teach you in the Marine Corps is to follow directions, and that was his direction, get in line. And that is how I passed the swim qual. I became a Marine, and I've learned a few things since. Number one, since then, I have learned how to swim. It still looks like I'm having a medical event, but I can do it.
I can do it. And number two, I learned that sometimes getting what you want out of life, it's just about standing in the right line. Thank you for listening to that story. So when I asked our next storyteller, what is something you wish you still had? She said, my own room. Give it up for Runa! I was in America. I'd gone there for a girl.
A girl probably being the only reason one would spend three months of their world-travelling sabbatical adventure in Baltimore. And I was in Baltimore and my mother called me. And in her usual desperately attempting to be light and cheerful way, she asked me how I was doing. And she said, "Oh, Baltimore, yes. I have an uncle there."
Now for context, my mother was being light and friendly, but was whispering because she was either at the very end of her garden or some far corner of her bathroom talking to me as quietly as possible so that her husband, my father, wouldn't overhear her talking to their gay, ostracized, waste of a child, direct quote, me.
And so again, trying to be light and pretending everything's fine, she says, "Oh yes, Uncle Ruffy, yes, he's my father's brother. He lives very near Baltimore. You should go see him. His wife's just died." Now, Asian family isn't really something I identify as having, what with the ostracized black sheep deleted off the family tree thing. So when my mother says this, my immediate response is a very quick, "No thanks."
Now things were going quite badly with Baltimore Girl at this point and eventually it got to the stage where hanging out with an 88 year old Asian man grieving the loss of his wife of 66 years was definitely better than another afternoon of lesbian drama. So off I went. Now I was expecting your standard Muslim Pakistani uncle. For those of you who aren't familiar,
This is the sort of man who has a beer belly from the other golden liquid, ghee, who would sport simultaneously furrowed brows of concern and wide eyes of horror that I was still unmarried. Someone who would offer holier-than-thou proclamations about white people and their alcohol and their miniskirts and their divorce.
and their care homes for the elderly. The sort of man who would hold court in his house while a wife scurried backwards and forwards, laying out a spread of every dish, every snack, every drink imaginable. Basically, I was expecting the entrenching of childhood trauma, judgment, cruelty. But off I went. The first clue that he might not be quite what I thought was his address. A care home. A fancy one at that.
I remember walking into these wide carpeted hallways with big oak-panelled walls, behind which white face after white face after further old white face passed, until I came to the one brown face in the building. And some dusty sentimentality sprung up in me, and I scoured his face for resemblance, for connection. He looked absolutely nothing like me.
But he took me to lunch and he ordered a ghee-free meal and a glass of wine. And he spent the entire lunch entirely uninterested in my marital status because he was so devastated that his own had just changed. And he told me about Ellen, a white German woman who had found herself in 1940s Lahore, Pakistan,
surrounded by mosques and minarets, visiting her brother-in-law, my uncle Raffi's neighbor. And he told me about falling in love with her. And he used that word, love, a word that had been a dirty word in my house growing up. Definitely not the proper basis for a marriage.
And he told me how, falling in love with her, he wanted to marry her. But he was an army doctor in post-independence Pakistan and absolutely forbidden from marrying a foreign national. The family was outraged, hot with anger that he was seeking to break with tradition. So he went to America for a girl. And as he told me about Ellen, perhaps some dusty sentimentality rose up in him.
And maybe he sensed I needed to hear it, or maybe he'd noticed who dropped me off. But he told me that whatever body Ellen had been born in, male or female, he would have loved her just the same. And then, me being the only relative he'd seen for decades, he started telling me about our family.
Now things were continuing to go terribly with Baltimore Girl, but I had promised I would stick with her through the summer. But instead of actually working on the relationship, I just went and saw Uncle Ruffy a lot. And we got this huge blue sketchbook from one of his classes at this care home. And we started sketching out a family tree. Huge thing.
And he transported me into India of the 1700s and 1800s and 1900s and he told me about a great, great, great uncle whose job was to be the lion protector of the village. He'd have to climb up into this tree and look out for lions and presumably do something about them if he saw them. LAUGHTER
And he told me about another great-great-great uncle who was responsible for the first Persian to Urdu dictionary, which he wrote by candlelight. And he told me about another great-great-uncle who'd had four big strapping sons, all of whom had died in cricket accidents. And I got completely lost in all these magical stories, these connections to family that I'd never known about before.
And somewhere towards the end of the summer, I sat back and I looked at this big family tree. And I remembered that every time Uncle Ruffy had sort of not quite remembered a name or not quite remembered a person, we just left a blank. I'd said, oh, that's fine. We'll leave a blank. Maybe you'll remember later. And when looking at this family tree, I suddenly realized something. All of the blanks were women. All of them reduced to a line connecting them to a man.
Someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's sister. And I guess 1700s and 1800s and the 1900s weren't a time where women had the sort of adventures that people recalled and celebrated and told stories about and passed down through the generations. And I guess the stories and adventures they could have had were limited. The breadth of the life they could have lived was limited.
Uncle Ruffy remembered two women in particular, not their names but their stories, his mother's sisters. And he remembered them because they were quite unusual. Neither one of them had gotten married. At the time, a completely scandalous thing to do. Now the first one, the older one, he said, well she'd had polio and that had left her quite disfigured and not very attractive, so that explained that.
The second one, and he remembered this very clearly, she had chosen not to marry, despite how awful that would have made her life, how difficult that would have been. And something about that made me suddenly realize something that I'd never thought about before. It can't be in this huge family tree, this huge list of faces and people,
that I'm the only woman that didn't want to marry a man. And I can't be the only one who didn't want to marry a man because she wanted to marry a woman. But I must be the first one who's been able to do it. And thinking about these rainbow ancestors of mine with their untold stories, their faces lost, their struggles, their wishes, their reckoning with themselves, brought this deep, deep grief into me.
And I suddenly felt connected to a heritage that I had lost. And I thought of them incessantly. And though I'm agnostic, some part of me hopes that they know I'm here. That they can see me or feel me or know somehow that I am living. That I exist with my wife, with my children. That I'm free. That I'm safe.
that my friends and my loved ones will remember us and celebrate us. And that I stand here a little bit prouder because thanks to my fellow black sheep, Uncle Ruffy, I discovered them one summer. Give it up for Runa! Runa is a writer, a Desi LGBTQ activist, a yogi, and a mom.
Runa's wife and their son were in the audience as she told her story. Her son was named, in part, after Uncle Ruffy. And also, in case you were wondering, Runa's wife is not Baltimore Girl. To see a photo of Uncle Ruffy and Aunt Helen, and a photo of Ellen as the young German lady he fell in love with, visit our website, themoth.org. ♪
When we return, a newly married man considers adoption in our final story from this London show. 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 Jay Allison. We've reached the final story in this live episode from London. Here's your host, John Good. When I asked our next storyteller, what is something you wish you still had? Our next storyteller answered his virginity. Please give it up for Nick. All right. I am a great believer in marriage.
I myself have been married for 56 years. Unfortunately to four different women. And my present wife, Jenny, was also married previously. And when we got together, some 36 years ago, we did not want to make the same mistakes that had sort of ruined our lives before.
And so we sat down and we asked each other what it was that we wanted. And the only thing that Jenny desired that caused me any apprehension was that she wanted to have children.
I already had a son from a previous marriage and I knew what a child could do to a relationship but I really wanted to make a life for this woman so I wholeheartedly agreed and we leapt into the business of creating a family which obviously involves lots and lots of sex and you know endlessly everywhere you know but after a year and a half nothing happened
which is not only dispiriting, it also engenders a sense of inadequacy. But, you know, we forged on into the world of fertility experts. And the first thing they want from the guy is a sperm test, which actually, that phrase alone, almost defines the word inadequacy.
And this is back in the mid-1980s, and these tests were sort of do-it-yourself affairs. You found a container, you put your specimen inside, you took it to a fertility clinic, they told you what was going on. At the time, I was working in New York, I was doing a play, and...
One freezing February morning, I had made an appointment at noon with a fertility clinic on the east side of New York. The same day, it turned out, I had a voiceover audition on the west side of New York at 10 o'clock.
And the problem was I couldn't carry this specimen around all morning because it has to be freshly delivered and if it's cold, it will die. So I had to get this deed done between being in the voiceover audition and the fertility clinic, which is how I ended up masturbating in the gents in the Grand Central Station.
for a truly humiliating experience and it was made no better by the fact that the only container that Jenny had come up with that morning was a Hellman's mayonnaise jar. It's a big jar.
Anyhow, I did my duty. I thrust the jar deep into my pocket and I keep it warm and I hightailed off to the fertility clinic where I filled out the forms and then handed them in to the woman behind the desk along with my specimen. And she took one look at it and she said quite audibly, "That's it?" And I hastened to explain, "It's a big jar!"
She said, "What was the method of delivery?" I'm sorry, what? The method... I mutter masturbation under my breath. She takes out a magic marker and she writes this huge M right over the front of the form. And I see that M following me for the rest of my existence. A sort of shadow over my entire life.
"Oh, Mr. Arlott, you're perfect for this job!" Unfortunately, there's the matter of this M. And then two days later, the doctors tell us that my sperm has low motility, does not swim well with others. Now,
My self-esteem, which had not been doing well since the test, took another nosedive and I found myself feeling useless, emasculated, you know, really truthfully worrying about, you know, really, is it all worth this bother? Do I want more kids? This is, you know, but Jenny was insistent and on we went. But nothing worked with the fertility doctors, so we ended up with adoption.
And this was where my real fears began because I already had a child. I understood how I loved that child, how instinctive that was. How would I feel about one that was not biologically mine? And that really worried me. But by that time, we'd already engaged an adoption lawyer in California who had in his practice a pregnant 16-year-old.
Now, California is an open adoption state, which means that the birth mother gets to choose to whom she gives her baby. Our job was to write a letter enclosing photographs of ourselves, explaining who we were, what we did, and why we would make wonderful parents to this as yet unborn child. This letter was then sent to the young woman, along with other letters from prospective parents.
the young woman reads all the letters and then she makes her choice. And it started to feel to me in my worried state
rather like a rather weird reality show somehow this choice business and I got very worried and I was going you know we're both actors is that good or is it bad Jenny at the time actually was on a weekly television show and had a sort of kind of minor celebrity therefore easily trackable would the young woman turn into a stalker would she blackmail us while these paranoid fantasies
kept building, she chose us. All those fears went away. We were absolutely thrilled. But then the real business of adoption began.
You have to register with child services. They send people to your houses. Two people show up, go through your entire house, every room, your wardrobes, your closets. It's very intrusive. They took our fingerprints. They investigated our backgrounds for criminal activity. And through all this, this nagging doubt kept bedeviling me. What the hell? I mean, how am I going to feel about another kid?
I mean, that isn't mine. And I started really truthfully kind of freaking out and also doubting whether do I really want more children and things? And this was not a fear that I could share with Jenny. I had, after all, committed to this. I couldn't back out of it. And at the time, I was on tour in a national tour of a musical, Me and My Girl.
and we were playing Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles, which is where I live, and it's a big old theatre. And one night, during the intermission, a friend of mine came to the stage door and told me that the young woman in question had gone into labour, and that by the time I got home, Jenny would be on a plane flying to Charleston, North Carolina. These were the days before mobiles. You actually had to talk to people.
to explain things to them. And the next day, a baby girl was born into Jenny's hands, basically. And the next morning she spent with the child and with the young woman, and then clearing up the legalities that allowed her to take a baby out of a hospital and put her on a plane and fly back to Los Angeles. That plane would get in at 11:15 that night.
So I go to the theatre and I explain to my fellow performers what's going on. And I say, listen, I have to meet that plane. I mean, this is a watershed moment in my life. I cannot not be there. I must. And they go, OK, fine. Yeah, you can. I go, yeah, but to get there, we've got to knock 10 minutes off the show. So they go, they're accessing.
Come on, piece of cake. So the show starts exactly at 8 o'clock and we talk fast. We sing fast. We dance fast. We don't stop for any laughs. Me and my girl whizzes by this bemused audience. What? What?
And then the stage door guy has got my car outside and it's running. And I leap out and I jump in the car and I roar off to the Los Angeles airport. And I get there and because these are the days before security, I run to the gate and I get there and there's nobody there at all. And I sit down.
And in that moment as I sit down, every fear, every doubt, every apprehension, every worry that I had had about other children and dealing with a child that wasn't biologically... Everything formed itself up into a sort of cannonball and smashed into me. And I was completely panicked. Stricken. I mean, I was... It was... I can't explain it. It was like being hit with a two-by-four. And I'm terrified...
and I can't move and then the plane rolls by the window and I'm thinking, "God, what if I don't have any feelings for this child?" Can I fake it? And if I fake it, can I live with that lie for the rest of my life?
And if I lived with that lie, what would that lie do to this child? I'm going to destroy a human being's life! You know? And then the doors to the gate open, and instead of passengers coming out, flight attendants started coming out. First one, then another, then another, and they're sort of coming out in this V-shape. And what has happened is that on board, they made an announcement that they have this tiny baby, literally...
less than 24 hours old on board the plane whose father has never seen her and if everybody wouldn't mind waiting for a couple of minutes before they get off the plane they would like to make this into a special presentation. I don't know this, this phalanx of these flight attendants keeps coming towards me and they're all, you know, they're Americans, they've got 48,000 gleaming teeth.
And they're all smiling. I can't move. And in the middle is Jenny with this tiny baby. And she walks right up to me and she places this child into my shaking hands. And she says, say hello to your daughter. And in terror, I look down. And in that one moment, love literally suffused my entire body.
I started getting warm and felt wonderful and I could feel the sense of this endless love running over me and I'm looking down and I am completely besotted by this beautiful tiny child in my arms and then I'm surrounded by passengers.
And they're all wishing us well and they're patting me on the head. And some of them are bestowing blessings on us. And I go, wow, what a fabulous way to come into the world. To have your birth recognized in this public fashion. My daughter's 34 years old now.
And Jenny and I went on to adopt another girl. Jenny and I are still together. And I love my daughter. She's terrific. She's a wonderful young woman. We've had our ups and downs, but there's one thing about her that has never changed, which is there's a part of her that is always that tiny child in my hands.
in the LA airport because from that moment onwards there was one thing that was absolutely crystal clear to me that's my kid thank you give it up for Nick Olley oh
That's what I love about these nights. You will hear stories that will make you laugh, make you cry. Some will make you do both at the same time. It's amazing, man. But as I said earlier, the stories always show that we have more in common than we have differences. What a talented storyteller will do is they will weave the narrative thread that pulls us all these disparate swatches, pulls us all together and makes us one thing, this one thing that can keep us all warm, this quilt to cover us all. One more time for Nick Ullrich and that wonderful story.
Nick Pellett came to America on a boat. He was half of a British comedy team. He wandered the country with his partner, trying to make Americans laugh, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, among others. And he's worked in advertising and tap danced on Broadway, and he's still an actor. ♪
If you have a story to tell us, you can pitch it right on our website, themoth.org, or call us at 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684. Leave a two-minute pitch. We listen to all of them, and a lot of the stories end up here on the Moth Radio Hour. ♪
Remember, you can share these stories or others from the Moth Archive and buy tickets to Moth storytelling events in your area all through our website, themoth.org. There are Moth events year-round. You can find a show near you, come out, tell a story. You can find us on social media, too. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at The Moth. The Moth.
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. This live London show was hosted by John Good. John is an Emmy nominee, the host of The Moth Atlanta, and the author of the novel Midas, and the poetry and short story collection Conduit.
This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, Catherine Burns, and Meg Bowles. Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The stories were directed by Meg Bowles and Michelle Jalowski.
The rest of the Maltz leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jeunesse, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cloutier, Leanne Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Wlodowski, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Kaza. Special thanks to everyone at our British publisher, Short Books. Maltz stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.
Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Marissa Anderson, Dee Dee Horns, and Hubert Laws. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and 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.