The Moth Radio Hour: Shocks and Surprises
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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. I'm Katherine Burns, and this is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. Today, we're going to hear stories that involve big surprises. You're going about your life, business as usual, and then something completely unexpected happens that changes the course of things in an instant. A classic way to receive shocking news is getting a phone call in the middle of the night. I mean, does good news ever come at 3 a.m.?

Our first storyteller, Terry Garr, got that dreaded call. Terry is a legendary comic actress, best known for classic films like Tootsie and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and my favorite, Mr. Mom. Terry told her story at an event called La La La, Stories About Los Angeles. Here's Terry Garr, live at the Moth. November 18th, 1989, 4.13 a.m. at my home in L.A. My phone rings.

And this woman's voice said, "Is this Teri Garr?" And I go, "Yes, I think so." She goes, "Well, I just want you to know that I've been sleeping with your boyfriend since August."

And then I just caught him in bed with another girl this morning, three in the morning. And I threw all of his potted plants in the pool. And I got your number from his phone book. And I'm like, who is this? What? Hello? And so I listened to this. Well, that's very interesting. Yes, my name is Donna. And I was going around with this guy for quite a long time. And he always told me, I knew that he knew you. He said that you were business partners with him.

I was business partners with him. Okay. So I went, all right, that's interesting. And he would drive me around in your car. I had a Mercedes at the time, and he told me that it was his car. But this girl, who was this aspiring actress, took the initiative to look in the glove compartment and see that it was registered to me. So it was my car that he was driving her around, telling her that it was his car. All right. And I was, well, thank you very much. Thank you very much for the information. And I hung up the phone. And I thought a lot about it.

What should I do? I mean, I was totally blindsided. I'm completely naive about this. But I was starting to hyperventilate. So that was around 4 in the morning. So around by 7 in the morning, I thought, you know, he has left a few things at my house. This was a guy I was having a relationship with. We were actually trying to have a baby together. I was taking those fertility drugs, so I was a little bit crazy from extra hormones. Anyway...

So he had a few things that he left at my house in drawers. He was practically living with me, so I thought, I'll just put all these things in a box and I'll take them back to them now because obviously I don't need them anymore. So I put in the socks and the underwear and there's a few baby pictures and whatever crap of his was left at my house. So I was just throwing all this stuff in a box. I happened to see a hammer sitting there. I thought, I'll throw that in the box too. And I decided that I should take these things back to him. So I got in my car. I put the box in the car.

And I start driving up there to Bel Air, and it's like 7:30 in the morning, and I now realize how murder can happen because, you know, I was just so-- nothing was gonna stop me at all. I mean, if someone came up to me and said, "Here's a $1 million cash in $10 bills if you stop this car," I'd go, "You'll have to keep your fucking money, 'cause I'm going. I'm up there, and I'm not stopping."

So I pull up to his house, his little faux, you know, whatever, ranch house. They make a lot of these in LA. And I look at it and I go, I pull out this box of stuff and I walk up to the front door and I ring the doorbell. Nothing. Doorbell, doorbell, doorbell, doorbell, doorbell. Nothing, nothing. So I go, well, what the hell? So I pull out, here's your underpants and here's your socks and here's your stuff and here's your pictures. It's me. And oh, well, there's a hammer in there. What are you going to? So I pick up the hammer and I start breaking the windows.

Break, break, crash, crash, crash, crash. He lived in one of those houses that had like, I don't know what you call it, like Tudor, you know, like a lot of little glass. Break, break, crash, crash, crash, crash, crash, crash. Okay, here's the, and the front door, crash, crash, crash, crash. So I walk around and I hear nothing stirring in the house. I'm amazed. But anyway, I go to the garage. They have little windows up there. Crash, crash, crash, crash, crash, crash. On the side of the house, there's some windows on the side. Crash, crash, crash, crash.

I get back to the kitchen and I'm crash, crash, crash. And I see him in there like this, like staggering in a robe on the phone. So I think, well, who is he calling? The police? My God. And when I see him, I come out with some of my best Valley Girl talk, which was like, bastard, son of a bitch. I mean, he was looking at me. I really wonder sometimes what he was thinking at that moment. I know what I was thinking. And it was one of those moments that just changed my life. You know, I just thought, I'll never be the same after this.

It was a big wake-up call. So I started walking around the back. I figured it's time to wrap this up. He's on the phone to the police or something, so I guess it's got to be sort of... Maybe I better haul ass out of there.

So I walk around the side of the house, and as I come around the front of the house, around the side of the garage, there's this cop. It was a fake cop, Bel Air Patrol. I don't know what they are. And he's got a gun pointed at me. And for the first time in my life, I was very happy about this. He recognized me. And he said, Oh, Miss Gar. Are you all right? See, I think he thought I was the victim, which, of course, I was, but in a different kind of way. I mean...

So I said, well, I am now. And I went back and got in my car and drove away. And that was sort of the end of it. I went home and I sat around for a while. I was like puffing and puffing, walking around my house. Well, I did that. And now, you know, by this time it's like 9 a.m. or something. And I've done a lot of work since 4 in the morning.

So I start calling people up to tell them about this. And, you know, some of my friends said, oh, I told you so. I tried to tell you. And I said, I don't remember anyone trying to tell me about this guy. But anyway, some people just, you know, they tried to help me, calm me down. And I wasn't having any of that. So later that day, I decided not to let this stop me from my life. And I'm going off with my life, even though this horrible thing has happened. And I have all these raging hormones.

And so I went to this, I had been invited to this art exhibit, art opening in a gallery. Because, you know, I wasn't going to let this incident interfere with my sense of art and my whole aesthetic feeling. So I walked into this, this is a really L.A. Hollywood story. And I walked into this art gallery and there was people there like Angelica Houston and I think, oh, I'm kind of drawing a blank, that wonderful actress.

model with the gap tooth. Exactly. There are all different things. It's a big A crowd at this place. So I walk in, I'm just walking around looking at the art, and someone came up to me and said, so how are you? I said, how am I?

I'll tell you how I am. So I told everybody the story. I just broke all the windows in this guy's house because... So then, interestingly enough, all these other women came up to me and started telling me their story. Oh, you want to hear what I did once? I'm not going to say if it was Lauren or if it was Angelica or anybody, but there's a lot of good stories. Apparently this has happened to a lot of women.

So one girl said, you know, I went with this guy. It's always guys like this. He was very vain, and he had all these Gucci or Armani suits in his closet, you know, like a dozen of them. And I snuck in the house one night, and I just cut off the left leg of every suit. I said, very creative, very nice, very subtle, very nice. So the next girl said, you know, I just did something. I just put a little hose. I didn't know he was going away for the weekend. I put a hose in the bathroom window and turned it on and left.

And so that was, I think, nice and simple. Very nice. You did that. But there was a lot of these stories. One girl came up to me. This is one of my favorites. And she said, you know, I get so pissed off. And he started going over to this other woman. And we were having, you know, everyone's got this story about it. It was the perfect relationship. Of course, it wasn't. I'm sure. Anyway, she said, I went to the house. And I went and I shaved my name in the dog's back. So that...

You know, for the next six months, this woman who's there, I was like, who's Judy? Oh, never mind, never mind. And I thought that was very good. So...

This apparently happens to a lot of women because of the way men are. No, but I've decided now because of being in L.A. and being in Hollywood and, you know, hearing all these stories about how the actors and actresses of Hollywood, me being one of them, are sort of naive and narcissistic and self-centered. We don't see the truth until, of course, it's right sitting on our heads and going, oh, my God, he's fooling around with me. But here's the trick.

I think in every relationship, after a year or so, everyone gets to the point where they want to kill the other person. I mean, it just happens. And the trick is, you know, you have to kind of avoid that somehow. And you have to get just up to the part where you're going to kill, and then you have to not do it. Well, I think I recommend the windows. That worked for me very well. That was Terry Garr.

Terry was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the film Tootsie. She also starred in the movies After Hours and Young Frankenstein. And the guy in Terry's story? Don't worry, he's history. Coming up, a young nerdy boy growing up in Israel finds an unlikely hero when the Moth Radio Hour continues. Moth Radio Hour

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 Katherine Burns. In this hour, we're hearing stories about shocks and surprises. Our next story was told by Liel Leibowitz. Most kids idolize superheroes who can fly or have superhuman strength. But what about the kid with other ideas?

here at a live event at the Avalon Theater in Los Angeles, where we partner with station KCRW, Liel Leibowitz. I grew up in Israel in the 1980s, and my father's mission in life was to make sure that his only son, me, grew up to be a real man. And so, as soon as I turned four, every Saturday, he would take me shooting, which was funny because my arm was exactly the size of a Smith & Wesson .45.

And two or three years later, when I was six or seven, my father would take advantage of Israel's surprisingly relaxed car rental insurance policies. And he would rent a car to take me on driving lessons, which were terrifying because even sitting on his lap, I didn't really reach the wheel. And every two or three weeks, there was a special treat. We would stop the rental car by the side of the road.

and my father would make me go out and change tires, whether the car needed it or not, because in his mind, knowing how to change a tire was the epitome of manhood. I really hated changing tires, and I really hated spending these Saturday afternoons with him, but he didn't really care, because he was inducting me to the International Brotherhood of Macho Men.

And so every chance he got, he would take me to the movies to see his heroes. Men like Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris or Burt Reynolds. And I didn't mind these guys too much, but they were not my idols. My real idol was a real live person named the Motorcycle Bandit.

He appeared on the scene shortly after my 12th birthday, robbing bank after bank after bank all over Israel. He was in and out of the bank in under 40 seconds, never leaving behind any clue as to his real name or identity. And he just drove people insane.

He got so popular that Israel's most famous comedy sketch show, sort of like the local version of Saturday Night Live, devoted an entire episode to the bandit, speculating in one bit that he probably never robbed the bank in Jerusalem because he didn't particularly care for that city. So you can imagine what happened the next day when, in an apparent tribute to his favorite television show, the motorcycle bandit robbed his one and only Jerusalem bank.

People went insane. Women who worked at banks would write their names and phone numbers on little notes so that if the sexy heartthrob robber happened to hit them up, maybe when he got off work, he would find their number and give them a call. But the people who loved the bandit most were us teenage boys. For us, he was a complete hero. And on Purim, which is more or less the Jewish equivalent of Halloween, we all dressed up like him.

in a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet and a big shiny gun. So about a year and a half later, I'm 13 and a half, I'm walking home from the eighth grade and no one's home, so I sort of mosey over to the kitchen to make myself a snack, and I hear a knock on the door. But it's not a tap, tap, tap. It's a boom, boom, boom. So I open the door, and there are three police officers standing there. And they're not looking at me,

And none of them are saying anything. And finally, about half a minute later, one of them looks up and says, Son, we arrested your father a while ago with a motorcycle helmet and a leather jacket and a big shiny gun. And I remember my first thought was, Wait! You think my dad with a beer belly and the receding hairline and the terrible jokes, you think that guy is the motorcycle bandit?

But in the hours and the days and the weeks that passed, I learned that he was. The real story, as I soon came to learn,

began about two years earlier when my father, who was 35 at the time and the son of one of Israel's wealthiest family, was summoned by his father to have the talk. Now, if you've watched a couple episodes of Dallas or Dynasty or Knotts Landing, you know the talk. It's when the rich guy calls his wayward playboy son over and says, "'Son, it's time for you to grow up and be a man, "'take responsibility for your life and get a job.'"

And my father didn't like that at all. So he stormed out of my grandfather's office and he hopped on his motorcycle, because of course, and he drove to the beach and he's sitting there watching the sun set over the Mediterranean and he's thinking really about his life. And, you know, my father grew up in the 60s, so he believed in sayings like...

"Do what you love or follow your heart." So he decided to follow his heart and his heart led him to robbing banks. Now, as it turns out, he was good at it. He was great at it. He was an inventor, an innovator. He was the Elon Musk of the stick-up job.

And later I learned how he did it, and how he did it was incredible. He would rob a bank in under 40 seconds. He would run out, jump on his motorcycle, drive around a corner, up a ramp he had custom built, and into a van, where he would pause, and like some mad philosopher king, he would ponder the seminal existential question of bank robbing, which is, where's the last place you would ever look for a bank robber?

And the answer is, and now is the point in the story where any of you contemplating this line of work may want to pay attention, the answer is that the last place you would ever look for a bank robber is the bank. And so my father would take off his jacket and his helmet and tuck the gun back into his pants and walk out of the van calmly around the corner back into the bank, which at that point was a crime scene sprawling with police officers. And

And one of these police officers would inevitably run up to my father and say, "You can't be here, sir. This is a crime scene." And my father would look at him in this dopey look and say, "Oh, can I please just make a quick deposit? My wife will kill me if I don't." And the police officer would say something like, "Sure, but be quick about it." And my father would walk up to the bank teller and deposit the same exact cash he had robbed three minutes earlier

And this being the 1980s, and computers were still kind of new, he made the cash virtually untraceable. It was a work of genius. He was so good at it, and he became so popular that eventually he got cocky. He robbed one bank a day, and then two, and then two banks in two different cities. One time, he was riding in a cab on his way to the airport when the urge struck, and he

He told the cab driver, "Do you please mind stopping? I promise I'll only be a minute." It was literally true, he was only a minute. He robbed the bank, hopped back into the cab, drove to the airport and flew off for an all-expenses-paid vacation in New York. But you know how this story ends. Eventually, he was caught. And after he was arrested, life got really weird.

In no small part because Israel, as you may have heard, being a small state surrounded by enemies, has its own ideas about prison. And one of them is that prisoners get the one weekend out of the month off to go home on vacation. The logic being that since the country only has one really secure airport, if you want to go ahead and try to escape to Gaza or Syria, you know, be our guest.

And so every fourth Friday, I would stop, I would go to the prison to pick my father up. And we would go out and have ourselves a weekend on the town. And people would come up to him and say, you know, high five him and pat him on the back and say things like, Bandit, we love you, you're cool. But to me, he wasn't cool.

And he wasn't even the bandit. He was my dad, who had just done something so incredibly stupid that lent him with a 20-year prison sentence. But even weirder than that one weekend a month together were the three weekends a month apart. Because here I was, and it was Saturday, and there's no shooting practice, there's no driving lesson, no changing tires, no Burt Reynolds.

And I didn't know what to do.

So one afternoon I got dressed, which by the way was also an ordeal because when the police searched our house they took not only all of my father's belongings but because we were more or less the same size, also all of mine. So I put on one of the few outfits I had which was this really ratty, disgusting purple sweat suit with the Batman logo up front which I assumed the police just thought no self-respecting bank robber would ever wear.

And I walked out and started walking around town literally looking for a sign. And then I saw it. It was a sign above a theater advertising an all-male Japanese modern dance show. And I thought for maybe five seconds, and then I did something that I'm pretty sure my father would disown me for. I bought a ticket, and I went in. And I loved it.

Here on stage were these amazing, elegant, graceful men. And guess what? They weren't punching each other in the face. They were not riding Harley Davidsons. They were dancing. And yet they were so secure in their bodies and their masculinities. And I thought to myself, if that's another way of being a man, what other ways are there? And thus began a two-decade-long process of trial and error, of trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted to be.

And look, some of the things I learned didn't surprise me at all. I love bourbon, and I am the kind of guy who would watch as much sports as you would let him in a given day. But some things were really surprising, like some French poets really moved me to tears. And even though bourbon was great, you know what else tastes really good? Rosé wine.

And even though I'm really, really good at changing tires, if I get a flat now, I'm calling AAA. I didn't share any of these insights with my father because, for one thing, he's not really the kind of guy who's into, you know, insights. But for another, by the time he got out of prison, I was already a man in full. It was too late for him to shape who I became in any meaningful way. And he still comes to visit from time to time in New York where I live with my family.

And on one of these recent visits, he and I are sitting in my living room, not talking, as men do not talk, and my son comes prancing into the room, my three-year-old boy. Now that boy looks exactly like me.

just as I look exactly like my father. And if there's one thing in the world that that boy loves, it's his older sister. And if there's one thing in the world that his older sister loves, it's Disney princesses. And in prances the child dressed like Princess Anna from Frozen. And I look at my son.

And I look at my father looking at my son, who, by the way, looked amazing in this green taffeta with a black velvet bodice and some lovely lacing. And I know that my father is judging me. But you know what? I don't care. Because at that moment, I realized strangely that by going to jail when he did, he didn't just free me up of the burden of this macho nonsense. He also freed up my son to grow up as a happy boy who can pretend to be whoever he wants to be, even

or especially a pretty, pretty princess. And I can't tell you how grateful I am that instead of going through life mindlessly as two tough guys, my son and I are free to become real men. Thank you very much. Lial Leibowitz has written some books, most of which, he says, are about the beautiful and desperate things people do when searching for redemption. He's a senior writer for Tablet magazine, where he's a co-host of the podcast Unorthodox.

He also has a PhD in video games, which he says would have made his seven-year-old self very happy. Liel and I recently sat down to talk about where things stand with his dad. Where does he live now? Is he in Israel? He lives in an apartment in Tel Aviv, and he's...

Another way of answering that question. He lives in his own world where everything is kind of happy and everything he did is kind of funny and just a pleasant old memory. Like in a World War I flashback. Like, oh, remember those jolly old times where we robbed those banks? He's that guy. Which, you know, considering the alternatives...

You know, it's kind of like a sober recognition would have been terrific and like a good emotional closure. But that notwithstanding, considering the other alternatives, it's a pretty good emotional place to be in. Like you're always happy. Yeah, I can see that.

One of the versions of the story, like in different iterations of the story, you talked a little bit more, and I thought maybe you could talk now about how tough it was for you after all of this broke because people expected you to be the... To be the man. Yeah. To be the strong Israeli macho hero. Yeah. I mean, you know, that was kind of one of the more devastating things about it because

As I tell in the story, you know, I'm this kid with sort of very fuzzy plume type mustache just beginning to grow wearing like a uni color sweat pants, sweatshirt type combination with like the Batman pin always on. A short way of saying this is a big, huge nerd.

And all of a sudden, these people start talking to me because I'm the cool son of the cool bank robber. And some of these people are girls, which is completely terrifying because that had not happened before. And very quickly, there's this kind of question always kind of echoing in my mind. Hold on. Like, are these people interested in me? Because...

they like me and they want to talk Batman or whatever, or they hear because they want like a glimpse at like the glory that is like my famous dad. That is, that is, I can't say bad words, right? That is a mind twister, shall we say. She's so young. Yeah, it kind of throws you into this existential loop in which you have to like step back and be like, okay, who is what in this world? It,

It's a very good learning experience. The drama, though, around your dad kind of went on for years, right? Did you tell me there was like this ridiculous made-for-TV movie? Oh, there were several. There's one here in the States. It was an episode of a show called Masterminds. And the amazing thing about Masterminds, it's a Canadian production. And so to save a bit of dough, they shot...

in Toronto. Now, those who have visited Toronto and Tel Aviv, even those who haven't, know that these two cities look nothing like... I mean, say for like a Mountie riding a moose into the frame, like it had every trapping of like a Canadian city. And they hire these two young local Arab actors in their 20s to play my mom and my dad, who look absolutely nothing like these characters. And

The whole thing, watching your childhood staged in Canada, was a very surreal experience. My favorite bit about this documentary is that the very last shot, the director asks my father if he had any regrets, and he says, I lost everything.

My money, my house, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, my family. Thanks, man. Oh, yeah, that too. That was Liel Leibowitz. To find a link to that made-for-TV movie and to see photos of Liel and his family, go to themoth.org. While there, you can pitch us your own story. You don't have to have had a father who's a famous bank robber to tell a great moth story.

Leave a two-minute version of a story you'd like to tell by calling 877-799-MOTH, or you can pitch us a story right at our website, themoth.org. Coming up, a 13-year-old girl does something that shocks even herself when asked to read a poem in front of the Shah of Iran, 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. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. Our next storyteller is Nazreen Marzban. Nazreen is from a small town in Iran. She immigrated to the United States in 1985 after the Shah of Iran was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution.

She raised two daughters in Michigan and told this story at one of our open mic storytelling competitions in Ann Arbor where we partner with Michigan Radio. Here's Nasreen. This is my first time over here and I didn't know what am I supposed to do. My friends encouraged me. I came over here without preparation. I hope I do a good job.

But I'm going to tell you a story about my childhood. I've been born and raised in the Middle Eastern, in Iran, in a small town that doesn't even exist in a map. But anyway, this is a gift. First of all, I have to tell you, this is a gift that because...

very embarrassing and scary thing that happened during that time. I was like 13 years old. Now I couldn't talk for many, many years about this one. Now I could tell this one in United States, in your prison, and I think this is a gift for me. So I was around 13 years old, and during that time,

like Shah was ruling the country and people were really scared and respect and you know he was a powerful man and I was a girl scout at that time. So Shah was coming to visit our small town. The whole town was getting prepared for the Shah visit for like six months or a year

And my teachers and principal, they used to put me for some odd reason, put me in front of the people, like do stuff. So they prepared me for six months to go in front of Shah and read this poem and then go back for then some other people were going to greet him. So I was the first one to greet him. So this particular day comes and I'm

I'm ready to do this and they are working on me for six months and I am tired. And you know, one teacher comes to see if my dress is okay, another one comes practice with me again. And then I need to go to, excuse me, to bathroom, but they are not allowing me to go.

So this time comes and we go to city hall which is like they change the marble and there's 1,000 maybe more people in the town and the city hall and outside greeting the Shah and Shah comes like sits, stays there and then all around the Shah is important people. I am here facing the Shah like maybe 10 feet after me, all the audience

So, and also there, like maybe three feet after me is the Alda Girl Scott. So right now, and I am supposed to go and read the poem. I am not worried about the poem. I memorize, everything is great, but I have to go to bat. So I go back, turn back, I say, Mina, Mina. Mina is my friend and the Girl Scott. Can you come? And my principal said,

and everybody's doing this to me and I'm okay. I thought, okay, if I just let go a little bit. I did. So suddenly I realized I can't cry. Then I see like people are separating.

And there is a river. So I run outside, I go to forest and I feel like this end of me peeing in front of Shah is... So I go to the forest and I feel okay, something has to happen. I have to be... I have time, right?

So I need to disappear. But my cousin, older cousin comes and say, "We have to take you home. Don't worry." Like, you know, pretends that he doesn't know anything.

So he takes me to cab and you know in cab he asked me to sit down. I said no I'm just gonna stay in the cab in the back seat. So he takes me home and holds my hand and goes knock on door and says aunt here your daughter peed in front of shop.

So basically, I said, okay, end of school. I'm not going to school anymore. After a couple days, principal and other teacher came, and they say, okay, come back. We won't let anybody to tell, you know, tease you or anything. And plus, these kids, they don't know because kids weren't there really. And we asked your friend not to talk about it and stuff. You are safe. I say, okay. So they take me to school. And then the parents,

Principal call everybody and says come and people come all the student come and they say if you he she says if you tell from now on Nasreen peed in front of the Shah he will be grounded That was Nasreen Marzban. She's a chemist by trade and owns her own company. She currently splits her time between Northern California and Istanbul.

Our final story in this hour of surprises was told by Michaela Murphy way back in 2004. Here's Michaela live at the Moth. Thank you. Hi. I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and for my entire childhood, we were never more than 20 miles away from the core of our universe, the Kennedys. We were Irish. They were Irish. We were Catholic. They were Catholic. They were family.

We were like the relatives that they never got to see. But we knew, you know, they're busy. And we knew that they loved us. So anything that was happening to them was also happening to us. So their tragedy, plus our own tragedy, was a lot.

So this one Thanksgiving after dinner and a family fight at Grandma's house, we were in the car and we're driving home and the radio was playing this 10th anniversary of the JFK assassination. And I'm sitting in the back seat and I start to cry. And my sister Erin says, "Hey, Dad, Michaela's crying." And my father pulls that car right over to the shoulder of I-95. He stops it, he turns around and he looks at us.

And with tears in his own eyes, he says, "Don't you ever be ashamed to cry for that man."

So my parents grew up near Newport, and they got married in the same exact church as Jack and Jackie, St. Mary's. And my father gave exact replica jewelry to my mother that was replications of the jewelry that Jack gave to Jackie. And every Saturday night after Mass, my family would be in the living room, and we'd be happily ever aftering to the original soundtrack of Camelot.

And every year during the 70s, my four aunts would take me and my two cousins on their dream vacation. A rented beach house in Hyannis on the very cove sharing beachfront with the Kennedy compound. Every day for an entire week, my Aunt Pat would roll up her sister's hair. My aunts would apply sunscreen to the back of their necks, the backs of the hands, and the tops of their feet.

and then they would drag their beach chairs down to the beach, and they would set them up perfectly, not facing the water, not into the sun for tanning, but perfectly for spying on the Kennedys. They would sit there all day in the broiling sun with high-powered binoculars and keep a constant surveillance, and every year they'd have the same exact conversations. Usually around mid-morning, the first sighting would be made, usually by my Aunt Pat. She'd be, up,

They got Rose out, walking. Ethel looks drawn. And then about an hour later, my Aunt Gert would say, "How old is Rose now?" And Aunt Momo would make the calculations. Well, let's see. Jack died in '63 when she was 74. And Rose's birthday was two weeks last Thursday. And Joe died in '69, making her a widower 81, so 85. And then they'd break for lunch.

So after Lobster and Drawn Butter and hosing us down, they'd all hustle back to their posts and they'd watch. And every now and then there'd be something they didn't know. Hey, who's that? Who's that? Who's that? So they'd draw out the family tree in the sand. They'd analyze it. They'd come up with a profile and they'd crack the code. It's one of Bobby's. Now any mention of Bobby would always bring up the inevitable. Oh, I just pray to God they don't tell poor senile Rose about Bobby. It'll break her.

So then the long afternoon stretch would end with the inevitable annual observation, "You don't see Jackie much here." And then all of my aunts would drop their binoculars and look at each other meaningfully. Now, all of this meant that no one was paying any attention to me and my cousins in the water.

And the summer when we were nine years old, we found something. Now, had an aunt, perhaps in an effort to ease a cramp in her prying neck, just sort of glanced towards the water? She might have seen us climbing into this tiny, plastic, half-inflated boat. She might have cried out in alarm at the lack of oars and life vests.

She might have had a conniption fit to see us shove off and drift into the violent riptide that would sweep us within five minutes out to the open sea and the Nantucket-bound ferry. But an aunt didn't, and we did. It all happened so fast that we were swept out, and it wasn't until we realized that we could make out the specific features of the ferry passengers that we were really far from shore.

We were so far from shore that my aunts were now reduced to four hopping dots. Uh-oh, it was like Gilligan's Island for real. So an Atlantic swell crashes over our heads, and as soon as the water clears out of our eyes, a powerboat pulls up out of nowhere. And in this powerboat are David and Michael Kennedy. So David and Michael pull us up into the boat, and we are like, oh my God, we are saved by a powerboat.

So the powerboat sends us back to shore, and we're psyched because we're saved until we start to watch the four hopping dots morph back into our four crazed, livid aunts. We are so going to get it. Now, my family, under any circumstances, has this really weird thing. Well, they each have their own weird thing about yelling and getting into huge trouble. My Aunt Gur, she gets so freaked out that all she can do is yell out our addresses. Like,

Eileen and Kevin, 275 Hooper Street. Michaela, 180 Asylum Road. I swear to God, I grew up on Asylum Road. It's a very telling piece of my childhood. Or my Aunt Pat would do these things where she would say these things that were like actually kind of nice things, but she'd say them like they were death threats. She'd be like, yeah, I'll save you from drowning. You get on that beach towel and you lie in that sun. Now! Now!

Or she'd say, "I'm gonna buy you a birthday present. You eat that cake. Now!" So we knew that this is what was coming. The Kennedy boys didn't. So they're vivaciously tanned and they pull up to the shoreline and we brace ourselves. Now, what happens is our aunts are out of their minds. They're ready to flay us. But when they see us in the same boat as the Kennedys, it's like they don't have the emotional capacity to handle it. They kind of snap.

They're kind of like freaking out to yell at us, but they start fake smiling and trying to act all normal. And my Aunt Momo, she's like, takes on this like Kennedy-esque way of speaking, which is sort of halfway between Katharine Hepburn and like the Queen of England.

And we're like looking at them like, "What are you guys doing?" And they're smiling the smile, but when they smile at us, it's like, "You just wait." But they're like, "Oh, David. Oh, Michael. Thank you, thank you, thank you." And they're not mad at us for almost drowning. They're mad at us because the Kennedys had to save us. Like, "Don't those people have enough trouble? Now you?" Like, as if our almost drowning was yet another Kennedy tragedy.

So these poor boys finally pull and pry themselves away from my aunts. They get back on the boat and they're leaving and my Aunt Momo's going, "Please give our best to your grandmother." And now it's time for our for real punishment, which was that we, for the rest of vacation, had to stay on the beach because we did not have any respect for the water.

So it's 100 degrees out, and after about a half hour of whining and fighting and emptying out all the Coppertone and kicking sand, we break my Aunt Pat's last nerve, and she says, "All right, you can go in the water, but only up to your knees." So we're happy for a minute until we get in the water and realize how boring up to your knees is. And then we get the great plan of having chicken fights. So we start to have chicken fights, but it's kind of weird because there's only three of us.

But we're doing the best we can to have a chicken fight like that and knock each other off into the water so we get fully immersed. And then my Uncle Al, who never, ever played with us, ever,

comes into the water to play chicken fights with us. And he puts his daughter, my cousin Eileen, up on his shoulders. And then I get up on my cousin Kevin's shoulders and we're having chicken fights. And it's like actual family fun for a moment. And we're like, you know, hitting each other, falling in the water. And then I take my foot and I accidentally kick the side of my Uncle Al's head really, really hard. And his eyeball pops out of his head.

falls into the water and sinks. It pops out of his head and it sinks. Eileen, Kevin and I are in instant complete shock. Right this minute there is still a part of me that is on that beach screaming. Oh my god! We had no idea that he had a fake eye. I didn't know that you could have a fake eye. Why would you have a fake eye? They didn't tell us that Uncle Al had a fake eye because they didn't want us blabbing it to the whole neighborhood.

tell us so we didn't know and like later on you know there was Columbo and Sandy Duncan but this was way before that we had no idea so we're all standing there and it's like so horrible like I can't even like I'm like oh my god and and my cousins Eileen and Kevin are staring at me with complete hate like you broke our dad well Al is standing there and he's got the lid open so you can like see inside the socket where now it's just like skin and the eyeball gone

And like you cannot just say I'm sorry to someone that you just... So I don't know what to do. And my Aunt Pat is hysterically screaming because that eyeball cost top dollar. It was a special magnetized eye so it could keep up with the other one. And now I had just better pray that vacation was over and that they got that deposit back because now they were going to have to buy a brand new top dollar eye that was not in the budget.

So I just didn't know what to do. I was like, my life is over. I am no longer Michaela. I am now Murph's girl who kicked Al's eye out in the Cape. And it's awful, and everybody's just crying and pointing at me, and now my other aunts are getting in on it, like, and who's the blame part of the conversation's happening? So I just kind of back off into the water. I'm kind of, like, going back and, like, regressing back to, like, where life as I once knew it had ended. And I just stand there, and, like, I kind of wish I had drowned.

And I kind of wish the Kennedys hadn't saved me. And I bent off into the waves and I just started like sifting through sand and shells and pebbles and it's totally ridiculous. But like I will never stop looking for this eye. I'm going to look forever. And I keep looking and looking and I'm sifting through and then all of a sudden there is an eyeball in my palm staring right at me. And so I scream and I drop it back and it sinks back into the water.

But now we know it's possible. So everybody gets back into the water and now we're all sifting through and sifting through and I pray to God for no more future happiness until we find this eye. And I also kind of pray that it not be me the one that finds it this time. So after like an hour, my cousin Kevin finds the eye and he holds it up in triumph and he does not let go. And my uncle Al takes the eye, he like washes it off and just pops it back in. And

And then he kind of like tests it, you know, and it's like keeping up with the other one. So it's working still. And now it's the weirdest thing because now we know it's a fake eye. And now that you know it's a fake eye, it totally looks like a fake eye. And I can't believe that I never noticed it wasn't a fake eye before. So now vacation's back on.

And so everybody gets back into their beach chairs and they start to settle down to begin telling the story over and over like a million times about what I just did. And I have not really fully reintegrated back into the family yet. I'm kind of standing apart. And I notice that there actually has been like kind of a group of people who've been watching this whole thing. And then I see something that I didn't notice, that no one noticed. And that's that two of the Kennedy kids, David and Michael, had taken a walk on the beach.

And I can tell just by the look on their faces that they had stood there and seen the entire episode. That they had been there watching us. Thank you. That was Michaela Murphy. Michaela's work has been featured in The New Yorker and produced both off-Broadway and at the Clinton White House.

She's a co-founder of LIFE, Leadership Fueled by Entrepreneurism, an education platform for high school students in Detroit and New York City. She's currently director of education at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania. But Kayla says her family continues to surprise her in all the best ways. That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us next time for the Moth Radio Hour.

Your host this hour was the Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns, who also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Janess, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Liu Lee. Special thanks to Lindy Hirsch and Harriet Sternberg.

Mall Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Brian Bromberg, Koji Kondo, Yasemin Shahosseini, and Tom McDermott and Evan Christopher.

The Moth is produced for radio 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 your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.