The Moth Radio Hour: The Places We Tell Our Stories
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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. From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. The places where we tell our stories can transfigure them. I'm George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth, and I've been all over the world listening to tales told in the most remarkable venues. The spirit of the place always seeps into the story. ♪

For example, a summer night in the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. 478 acres of marble mausoleums and statuary and ancient oaks.

the final resting place of Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Louis Comfort Tiffany, and thousands of others. And all of them gathered, along with some living souls, for a moth that we're performing in the middle of the graveyard. There are moths and bats and sometimes planes flying out of LaGuardia. And we launch with a moment from our own resident spirit, Edgar Oliver.

It's not a story he tells so much as an evocation, just to draw us all together. Remember, whenever you listen to Edgar, his voice isn't an act. It's how he sounds every day. I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, with my mother and with my sister Helen. One of our favorite places to play all throughout my childhood was in cemeteries.

We would go get fried chicken at the Woolworths on Broughton Street, and then we'd go with our sketch pads to the Colonial Cemetery to picnic atop the family vaults that were all shaped like gigantic brick bedsteads. Helen and I loved to climb on the strange bed-shaped vaults

and to lie on the gently curved bellies of the vaults and play at being dead. And while we played, Mother drew in her sketch pad. It was beautiful to lie there in the golden light, feeling so alive, pretending to be dead.

At the very back of the cemetery was a playground with old rusted iron swings that shrieked when you swang in them. Helen and I loved to swing high and make the swing shriek mournfully, the cry of our flight.

On the other side of the brick wall overlooking the playground rose the Savannah Jailhouse, a tall old building with a tower topped by a red onion dome. High up in the jailhouse wall were dark, arched windows where you could see the silhouettes of men's heads, the prisoners watching us as we swang.

Welcome to the moth at the Greenwood Cemetery. That was Edgar Oliver. Edgar's most recent play, New York Trilogy, got rave reviews from The New Yorker and The Times and everybody else. It was dreamy in that graveyard with the honeysuckle and the stars and the sleeping souls all around us.

And after Edgar, the novelist Sherry Holman told us this story. Does any human being ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?

This is about the only line that I can remember from Our Town, which was sort of the brief highlight of my very short but heartfelt theatrical career. My junior year of college, I got to play Emily, and she was just sort of a normal girl who knew exactly how her life was going to go until she unexpectedly died in childbirth. And for the whole third act of the play, she found herself in a cemetery full of folding chairs.

And I was acting the hell out of this part. I believed in it completely. And our final night, we got a standing ovation. And I looked out into the audience and like the 11th or 12th row, I saw my mother. And my mother was sobbing hysterically.

And of course, I was kind of secretly delighted by this because we live to torture our parents, right? And so here I was, you know, success. And I looked out and she was sobbing and sobbing and she was still crying at the end of the play when I came out to give her a hug and she was still crying. I was like, Mom, Mom, it was just a play. And she's like, don't you ever die on me again. And I promised her I wouldn't. And I...

And my mother was with me through all of these amazing milestones. And she always used to say to me, whenever I would kind of panic her like this, she would say, I'm going to get my revenge when you have children of your own.

And so she was with me for the birth of my daughter, and two years later, a little less than two years later, she was with me for the birth of my twin sons, Linus and Felix. And this was probably the most poorly timed pregnancy ever, because their due date was the exact day that my third novel was supposed to be published, and I had this elaborate book tour planned. And my mother and my aunt came along to each take a six-week-old baby, and

You know, and they carried these babies while I, you know, sleep deprived, gave readings up and down the East Coast, and I would sit in the back of this minivan, and I would have one baby on this boob, and I would have another baby on this boob, and I would nurse them in the back of this van. And it was while I was nursing my sons that I started to notice that something was a little bit unusual about my son Linus.

And I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but when babies nurse, they sort of, they gaze up at their mothers like this with this kind of love and you have this amazing connection. And my daughter had gazed like this and Felix had gazed like this, but Linus was

when he was nursing would sort of look like off and away. And it struck me as very odd. And I couldn't think of why a baby wouldn't look at his own mother. And I thought, you know, could he be autistic? But I knew that there was, it was way too early to diagnose something like that. And my mother noticed it too. And she's like, yeah, you should, you should check that out. And so I

We got back after the book tour to Brooklyn, and I went to the two-month well visit, you know, for my son, and the pediatrician took a look at him, and he's like, no, no, he's fine. You know, you're a new mother. You're anxious. You know, maybe he's a little behind, but don't worry about it. You know, bring him back in a month. But something told me, no, something's just not right. And I remember that night so vividly. I was...

the whole family was sitting in the kitchen and it was my husband and myself and my daughter and Felix was in his little bouncy chair and Linus who'd had his shots where he was kind of pale and he was in the baby swing and he was swinging in the dark

in the living room and I could kind of see him through the archway in the darkness and he just felt like he was on the other side of a divide. He felt like he was swinging away from me and I got this just horrible pit of the stomach feeling and I was like, you know, fuck that doctor. And so I called her back, you know, the next day and I was like, listen, I really want to get him checked out. She's like, all right, we'll get his eyes checked before we start doing neurological testing. So I made an appointment with an eye doctor and

And this was the winter and all of a sudden New York City was hit with this terrible blizzard. It was 2003, December 5th, and the whole city was just like snowed in with this horrible blizzard. And here I was, I was going to take this three-month-old baby on the subway in a blizzard because I had a bad feeling. But I went ahead and I did it and I got to the doctor's office and they dilated his pupils and the doctor got very, very quiet.

And he disappeared into the back room and he came back with a business card for a man named Dr. Abramson, who was the world's leading specialist in retinoblastoma, a very rare kind of cancer. And he said, your son has a massive tumor on his retina of his right eye and you need to go get it treated right away. And a week later, we had started chemotherapy. And

I never knew a child so young could even get cancer. I'd never heard of anything like this. And so my husband and I went into like straightforward battle mode. It's like we were going to take care of this, we were going to be in control, we were going to do everything that we could. We went to Sloan Kettering every three weeks. They would gas him, they would examine his eye, they would find a new tumor. We'd go back three more weeks, they'd gas him, they'd examine his eye, they'd find another two or three tumors. It was ultimately 13 tumors in all.

And I kept looking for answers. It's like, what could cause something like this? I would ask the doctors. It's like, you know, what caused this? And it's like, nothing caused it. It's a random mutation. But I couldn't believe that. It's like, clearly it wasn't my son's fault. He was three months old. You know, he hadn't smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. He hadn't been lying in the tanning bed. You know, something must have caused this. And it must be me because I was his mother and it was my job to protect him. And I had failed at

at the one job that a mother is given, which was to protect my son. And it was about this time that the dirty diapers started. When my daughter was little, we had this beautiful house in Clinton Hill, and it had a front porch. And one morning when my daughter was maybe seven or eight months old, I come out and I just almost tripped over this like dirty diaper that was sort of rolled up on the welcome mat.

And I was like, "Ugh, you know, some random piece of garbage. It's Brooklyn." So I picked it up and I threw it in the trash and I didn't think anything more of it. And a couple of days later, I came out and there was another dirty diaper that was right on the welcome mat. And I'm like, "Hmm, this doesn't feel so random anymore."

and maybe another week would go by in another dirty diaper. And I couldn't figure out where they were coming from and who I'd made an enemy of. And then I remembered that our babysitter had gotten into some turf war with another babysitter on the playground. And I was like, "All right, this is a language I don't even speak. I'm not going to get stressed out about it." But now it came when my son was sick. And I walked out with the double stroller, and I almost tripped over another dirty diaper again.

And this time I just kind of lost my shit, I'll be perfectly honest. And I was like, who is out to get my family?

And the dirty diapers kept coming and I couldn't figure out who it was. And about the same time, my daughter, who was three years old, started to get weird on me too, and she wouldn't go into the boys' bedroom. And every time she'd go into the boys' bedroom, she would point at the closet and she'd start crying and she's like, "A bad gnaw lives there! A bad gnaw lives there!" And "gnaw" was her three-year-old word for bird.

And she's like, "There's a bad bird that lives in that closet." And so I'm freaking out. It's like there's, you know, like diapers coming, there's a bad bird that lives in the closet, my son has cancer. So I did what any rational mother would do. I went to Chinatown and I bought this enormous plastic dragon that was so big, I'd seen it in a store, and I thought, "This somehow will protect my children," because this is a fierce-looking motherfucking dragon.

And it's like, this should scare the blackbird in the closet, right? So I hung the dragon over the crib. And the very next day, I walk into the boys' bedroom, and the right eye of that dragon is on the floor. And Ella says to me, she's like, the knob pecked it out. And I'm like, get a grip on yourself. I got a hot glue gun. I put the eye back on.

I went to bed the next night, Ella comes screaming into our bedroom with a doll that she has that she's been giving for Christmas and she's like, "My doll's eye is missing! My doll's eye is missing!" And the right eye of her doll was gone. And my husband, who's not superstitious at all, even he was freaking out at this point, and he went under her bed and he found the right eye of the doll. It was under her bed.

And so by this time, I'm like, I'm reaching out to anybody. I reached out to a neighbor who is very well-versed in the art of Santeria. And she's like, oh yeah, somebody's got it in for you. You have definitely been cursed and you need to get a priest in here and exercise this house and you need to sleep with...

in the window of the boys bedroom but I'm rational and like I'm not gonna go to some punk ass botanica and Park Slope or on Smith Street it's like I'm gonna go to the Sloan Kettering of botanicas so I get on the number two train and I go straight to Flatbush and I'm walking around like looking for I don't even know what the hell I'm looking for but it's like I find this botanica

And it's like love potions and money powders and, you know, the candles of the Orishas that are masquerading as Catholic saints. And I walk in there and there's this guy that's sitting behind a wall of bulletproof glass, like at the liquor store. And he's got, when I remember about him, he had these, he had this like blue white eyes that were like cloudy with cataracts. And he was like eating from a styrofoam bowl of cup of noodles, right? So he's like slurping these noodles. And I walk into this pentanical

And I walk in and I'm like, excuse me, someone has put a curse on my house and my family and I need something to fight back. And he just looks at me and he kind of nods. He nods at the shelf that's like down below and it's all these brown bottles of something called La Bamba. And I look at it and it's like, it's floor wash. It's like, I don't, it's like, what are you taking me for a chump? It's like...

And so I turned back to him, I was like, no, no, no. I don't think you understand. Somebody is waging supernatural warfare on my family and you're trying to sell me floor wash? I need something that will fuck somebody the fuck up. And he just, he looks at me and he sort of leans in and I come up to the bulletproof glass, it's all scratched up, and he says to me, he's like, lady, if somebody's trying to put a curse on you,

"Why don't you go home and figure out what you did to deserve it?" And I was like, "Okay." I paid for the La Bamba and I left. And he'd hit it exactly on the nose because he'd spoken to me my exact fear. What had I done to deserve it? And not what I had done to deserve my own bad luck, but what had I done to bring this down on an innocent baby?

And I went home and I poured that fucking La Bamba all over my front porch and I'm like mopping it in the middle of the night and it's like stripping the paint off my porch. And I'm thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves and how random everything is and how random bullshit comes for innocent children every day all over the world.

And earlier I'd connected the dots and I told myself a story that saved his life. It got him to the hospital and it got him treatment at a time when he could have died. And then later on, in all the agony and the fear and the despair and the guilt, I told myself another story and I connected the dots in another way that made me to blame.

And I got to a point as a mob in that fucking porch. And it's like, why do we tell ourselves these stories? And why does so many of our stories slip into ghost stories? And I realized the only control I had over this situation, my own personal Santeria, was to let go of the story that I needed to tell myself and live more like Emily had said in our town to realize life every, every minute.

And when I woke up the next morning, it was like a bright and beautiful and clear winter day. And Ella started talking about the blackbird. And I'm like, let's go to the playground. And we went outside and it was a beautiful day. And I said, you know what?

Let's eat this day. Let's eat it. Like take this perfect day. Who knows how many of them we're going to get. And take it inside you and let's chew it and let's swallow it so that we can have it for later and it can always be with us. And we started to eat the day, my family. And one day Ella walked in, you know, to the boys room and she's like, "That na is gone."

And I already knew that Naa was gone because I'd felt it. And I'd felt this dark spirit lift from our house when I stopped connecting the dots. And I thought about the only other line that I remember from our town, something that I always thought was so beautiful. And I think about it every time I try to tell a big story. And I realize what we really need most often are just postcards, just moments.

And there was a beautiful moment in our town before Emily died and found herself in a cemetery when she was falling in love. And somebody sent a postcard to her fiancé to be his little sister. And I think of it addressed to my son Linus. And it goes, Linus Redmond, 364 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, the United States of America, the planet Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the infinite universe.

punishing, most merciful mind of God. Thanks. That was Sherry Holman. I wanted to find out if Sherry's son made it okay through his cancer. How is your family doing now? How's your son? Thanks for asking. The family's fabulous. My son is now a brilliant, witty, very sarcastic 14-year-old boy, and the whole family's doing great. He just started high school.

And having gone through this experience, is there any good that you got out of it? Well, you know, there's always this kind of sort of Damocles hanging over your family. There's always the dark cloud and you always have to be vigilant. But I think it really taught the entire family to just appreciate what we have and don't look too far into the future and be incredibly grateful.

You know, you were telling a story about appreciating every moment of life. And actually, all the stories told in the graveyard that night were really about that. The graveyard as a venue to tell this story about the appreciation of life, did it make it richer?

I think so. Well, number one, I'm Southern, so, you know, graveyards have a huge place in our culture. It's like you tell stories in graveyards, you make out in graveyards. And so it seemed perfect to tell a moth story in a graveyard. But one of the things about having a baby that's diagnosed with cancer, you know, he was only three months old when he was diagnosed.

is you are stripped of the illusion of this 76, 78 years of life being real. You realize front and center we are all born to die.

And there's just no more illusion about it. You know, he didn't do anything to cause this. It's just this is what's coming for every single one of us. So telling the story in the graveyard and sort of like celebrating my son's life and being there with this remarkable audience and you and my friends and my family, it was, you know, life in the midst of death, which is what we're all walking around carrying. We just don't open our eyes to it most days. Yeah.

My favorite of Sherry Holman's novels is The Dress Lodger, a 19th century thriller set in the midst of the cholera epidemic and featuring a prostitute and a doctor whose sideline is grave robbing. Run and get it. We'll be back in a moment with a tale of an American soldier in Vietnam who has a date with a beautiful woman in Bangkok, but first he has to fight and win a battle. That story and more

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 George Dawes Green, and we're talking about the places where we tell our stories and how they inform and enliven those stories.

the special power of being at a particular moth on a particular night. A few years ago, we gathered at the Players Club in New York City for a night of tales about the Vietnam War. The night was called 19 Years and 180 Days. We always keep a special table for our raconteurs, and on that night, the little group of Vietnam vets and survivors seemed powerfully bonded.

and they were cheering each other's stories and embracing when they came down from the stage. Last to come was this strange love story that sprang from that terrible war. Here's Captain Larry Kirk. In the early autumn of 1969, I was a hot mess. Not yet 26 years old, I was finishing up my second one-year tour in Vietnam.

I had been at war altogether here and there for two and a half years at that point and had no idea what I was going to do in the future. I knew exactly what the problem was. There was a girl, Omi, who I should have married and didn't. And that was the whole story at that point. She was smart, meltingly lovely, strong.

she had a fierce belief in the possibility of occasional magic and I could have married her and I didn't and That was it and I had no idea what to do. I'd come back on active duty to Spend a second year in Vietnam because I hadn't found a place for myself in a very changed America when I went back from the first and here I was at the end of the second year and still didn't know what to do now and

This sad tale is not just me. This is my mother as well. We raised one another. We practically grew up together. She was a girl when I was born. And then we raised my two younger brothers. This is a woman who supported me all my life, and she heard that Omi had married another man, and she said, "You stupid boy. You stupid, stupid boy." And didn't talk to me for several weeks.

That's a pretty pathetic figure, but this hopelessness, I knew what the focus of it was. And I just had to hold it in because I couldn't show it to the world. I led the Khantou Mike Force, 600 mountain tribesmen and 17 Green Berets, and our job was to be the cavalry when special forces camps along the border areas came under siege.

And so they expected me to be steady, to be serious, and I presented as steely and as hard-faced as I could to the world. Well, I guess I was probably off-putting enough that nobody in the gang noticed when I got a letter. A letter. Some of you may not know what a letter is. It's what we did before Snapchat and Twitter and email and so forth, and it came on paper. I got a letter from the girl, Omi.

She said, I'm divorced. Period. Bang. She said, I thought I would be traveling perhaps in Southeast Asia. Probably at the end of August. Well, that happened to be just when my tour... I'm sorry, the end of October. That's exactly when my tour ended and I knew later, I mean, I sorted it out, that she had been talking to my mother. Well, I went into...

military precision mode. I started by getting a car and driver in Bangkok where we were going to meet. I mean, the way she put it, let's just meet in Bangkok. As if, well, you know, two people who knew each other vaguely would go to the Oriental Hotel and have tea.

But I knew this was serious for her, and so I wanted to make everything just right. But the timing was the crucial element, because this is a woman who hadn't had, in the years I had known her, $10 in her purse. I mean, the same $10 at one time.

And I knew if she managed somehow to buy this ticket to Bangkok, that she was going to arrive broke. And so I had to be there. And so my planning on time was meticulous. I figured out how long it would take. I added one day for every movement. Every time I had to change planes, every time I had to walk across the street, we add a day. I'm going to get there four days early as my target is four days early, and then I threw in another three days. Look, I'm playing for my life here. Okay?

And then very quickly, you know, we're getting into the middle of October, and the fellow who's relieving me has reported for duty, and I've signed over the equipment and the weapons to him. We've shaken hands. It's essentially done, and I don't get out the door quite fast enough when a message comes in and says one of our posts on the Laotian border has come under siege, and we have to go do our part to save them.

I could have left, but in truth, none of my guys expected me to because the new guy didn't even know everyone's name yet. And you can't really expect him to march off to war when he's just, hey you, sort of relationships. So I put down my packed bags and went back to the war.

We went up to the camp. It was an ugly bit of business. They were being shelled by heavy mortars and artillery. And we pushed back the forward observers, the eyes and ears of the artillery, and then we went after the guns themselves. And eventually it was all over, and I had a day left. But I rushed to an airplane without being on the manifest against the rules and got down to Saigon, and I had one day to find a way to Bangkok.

I was five days till the next commercial flights went across and three days until the embassy courier flight went to Bangkok. And at the end of a long and very frustrating day, arguably the darkest day of my life, a guy said, "Captain, you can't get there by the 28th even if you hijack an airplane." I felt like I couldn't breathe. I felt like I had somehow been hit with something. And so I went to the Special Forces Club

The bar there was opened seven days a week, 24 hours a day for eight years, all in all. And I went there and I had a lot of money in my jeans. I was, you know, and so I drank good scotch. And after three scotches generously poured, it came to me. I could fix this. I was going to drink myself to death in that bar. I told myself, you're not leaving here until they carry you out dead.

And just as I had started into that mode, in through the door comes Martha Ray, Maggie Ray, the patron saint of the Green Berets. Now, some of you may not know who Martha Ray is or was. She was born in 1916. By 1921, she was a headliner in vaudeville. She made her first movie in 1934, made 30 more of them.

three times with Bob Hope, but my favorite movie, Monsieur Verdot, she played with Charlie Chaplin. She acted him right off the screen through the entire movie, and he was the director and the producer.

So Maggie came in and she and I had known each other since the beginning of that second tour of mine. And we had a good relationship. We had shared common interests. We liked good coffee and vodka and movies. And we spent a lot of time talking about that. Well, she walked in, surveyed her domain there. Maggie, you know, had been there six months a year for seven years.

and it wasn't to do shows and it wasn't to promote herself or her career or anything. She just came and largely just hung around with the guys, with the Green Berets. She was our cheerleader. She was our confidante. Well, she walked in. As I say, she surveyed her domain, and then she looked at me, and she sat down, ordered a drink, and gave me a huge stage frown. Tapped my hand and said, Larry, what's wrong? I said, Maggie, I've just screwed up my whole life. There's one girl...

She's going to be in Bangkok. I'm not going to be able to get there. I don't know what I'm going to do. I've just ruined everything. I've just completely fouled this whole thing up. And I said, she's going to arrive in Bangkok. She's going to be broke. She's going to wait a day, maybe two, and then she's going to have to go home.

And Maggie thought about it for a minute, and she said, Larry, are you sure that this girl is that important? Because there are an awful lot of ways to have fun in this world without, you know, just invent it yourself all over again. I said, no, Maggie, she's absolutely the girl I want, the girl I need, the girl I want to marry. This is everything. She's it. She's it.

And she gave me another pause and then she said, "We'll fix this. We're going to go tomorrow and see the head of the 7th Air Force," that's a four-star general, "and we're going to fix this. We'll get you a ride to get in Bangkok on time." And so I went to my room and woke up and 10 minutes later the adrenaline in me had burned off all the hangover and I was ready for the day. And I marched out to meet Maggie and off we went to see the head of the 7th Air Force.

Well, we walked into the building at Tan San Ud Airfield that said Headquarters, 7th Air Force, through the door, and there are signs that say Executive Suites, this direction. Maggie understood that the real head of the 7th Air Force was not the four-star general who got in the pictures. It was the senior non-commissioned officer who really ran the place. Command Master Sergeant Francis Patrick Mahoney. Not Mahoney, dear God, no. Mahoney.

And so Mahani operates in a huge bay of people doing busy and important work in a sort of plexiglass cube. That's his office, so he can see in every direction. And I'm left to sit outside. Maggie is received like royalty inside. And her gesticulations get wilder and wilder. She's pointing over her shoulder at me.

But Mahani's head is slowly turning this way. And what was a smile has turned to a, oh my God. And the issue is in real doubt, I can tell, because Maggie cries. Maggie only cried on cue.

She's pulled out all the stops. So at any rate, this goes on for some time. I'm fidgeting, trying to look professional, fidgeting. And I'm finally called in, and he looks at me like I was something the dog drug in and said, Captain, we'd be glad to give you a hand with this problem. Be at Chalk 102 at midnight tonight, and we'll get you to Bangkok on time.

Well, I must have given him six thank you very much as I ran out to see Chalk 102. Chalk's just a circle on the ground with a number painted on it. It's a meeting place. I rushed back to my room, packed my bag, and with a flashlight, I went on to a very dark, very dimly lit Tonsenute Air Force Base.

I was having some questions about which way to turn when I got to the headquarters to get there. But then I saw there was a light shining, and that seemed to be in about the right direction. So I walked to the light. That light was right over Chalk 102. It's in a war zone. We're on an air base. It's dark everywhere except where I'm standing. I felt like Bogart in Casablanca. But along comes a major right at the crack of midnight, grabs my arm. He says, you're Kerr? I said, yes, sir. And we went there.

to the General's Learjet. There's a Lieutenant Colonel flying, General's personal pilot. This Major is a co-pilot, and there's a senior enlisted guy in the back who's a crew chief and occasional steward. And moments later, we're moving towards altitude in the General's plane. I'm leaning back, drinking some of the General's booze. Now, the surreal is part of the actual fabric of war. You see it everywhere. And I was...

I was at the end of any ability to generate any disbelief about anything. But this was strange even for Vietnam, and Maggie's mojo was sensational. So I got my way to Bangkok. I had enough time for a few hours sleep to get nice and clean and spiffy and go to the airport to meet this woman. It was a big green room, hospital green, cement block. It's a palace now, that airport, but then it was very basic.

And the gates emptied into the hall from a distance. And all of us waiting to see people were kept behind the lines at some distance off. So I'm peering very carefully to see her. And for reasons that she's never been able to justify, she's about the last person off the train. At any rate, I look for her. And I look for her. And finally, there she is.

She can't see me yet, but I can see her. Her eyes are shining. Her face is shining. She's ready for adventure. She's thrilled to be there. She's thrilled about making a new life with me. Well, a year later, I married the woman. Not as dumb as I look. And 46 years later, when I see her, when I go to pick her up at a ferry stop or a train or an airport...

I run through a mental catalog of my visions of her, and it always stops, bang, on that picture of her back in Bangkok in 1969. And the face I look for and the face I find is that same 1969 face. Dark eyes glistening, face shining, ready for an adventure. That was Larry Kerr.

Larry was a soldier, stockbroker, diplomat, and teacher. He retired to Bainbridge Island near Seattle, where he spends his time sailing, lecturing, writing poetry, and finding animal shapes in rain clouds. Do you have a story to tell us? You can pitch us your story by recording it right on our site or call 877-799-MOTH.

That's 877-799-6684.

The best pitches are developed for moth shows all around the world. Here's a pitch we liked. Hi, my name is Therese Wood. I live in Lansing, Michigan. I'm a registered nurse case manager. And about 12 years ago, I had a young man in his 20s come to me at the assisted living where I worked. Said his dad had early Alzheimer's, early onset Alzheimer's, and was very declined and needed to be placed.

but he wanted to preserve his dignity and he didn't know how to do it. His dad was a physician, well-loved, well-traveled, and still thought he was a physician, though he was going to daycare every day. So I brought him into the assisted living, into the office, and I faked an interview with him. I told him that we had an opening for an on-site physician and

and toured him around the facility, introduced him to all the staff, acted like it was a genuine position. I showed him an empty room, told him that would be his office, took him back to the main office, got out an employment form, talked it up a little bit more, and then broke the news to him that we couldn't pay him, but we could offer him room and board in exchange for his services.

He was tickled. He was thrilled. His son was in tears and thanked me. And he signed and moved in two days later. Remember, you can pitch us at 877-799-MOTH or online at themoth.org, where you can also share these stories or others from the Moth Archive. Next up, an Armenian-American college girl finds her way through first love.

when the Moth Radio Hour returns. 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 George Dawes Green. If you've never been to a moth, try to come to a Grand Slam.

These are amateur storytellers. They go to a moth slam, put their names into a hat. Their stories are judged. If they win, they're invited to compete at one of our Grand Slams, which in New York are held at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. The audience is always packed with fanatic moth fans and raconteurs. And our host, Dan Kennedy, is always sharp and spontaneous and otherworldly. And the nights can get out of hand.

This story you're about to hear is deep, but a little bit racy, so if any reference to sexual situations might be offensive to you, you should tune back in in about seven minutes. Here's Anoush Frunjan from the Moth Grand Slam in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's the summer of 2003. I had just finished my first year at Mount Holyoke College, and I was now beginning a summer job as a box office manager in Sharon, Connecticut.

and I'd be living in the dorms with everybody who worked there backstage. And this dorm, it was a small house, but more like a cabin. And when you walked in, the first thing you'd notice was that it smelled like cigarette smoke, and that the floors were lined with empty beer bottles, or what they would call empties. And...

I'm not really a partier. I never was. I was always an old soul and I was honestly more busy, busier being Armenian than having any time for drinking drugs or anything else. So I was 19 and I decided that I wanted to see how the other half lived.

So within my first week of work, I drank for the first time, I smoked pot for the first time, and I lost my virginity to the guy who operated the sound booth. And so I now had a boyfriend, kind of, and had also earned myself the nickname Tequila. But since...

But since I didn't have a big group of friends at the time to get advice from or ask questions to, I was kind of figuring things out on my own. Like, is it normal that my body hurts this much still afterwards? Or is it normal that he's not talking to me that much now as much as he did?

Or is it normal that my throat feels like I have a lump in it all the time? And if so, then how much of their sadness do women typically express? As opposed to the amount that they keep inside and forget about. So...

So after a while, I just couldn't take it anymore. And one weekend when I was visiting my parents and my family at their summer home, which was a couple of towns away from Sharon, I see my reflection in the porch window and I start to sob.

And my uncle, who's sitting a couple feet away from me in a wicker couch, looks over and says, are you all right? And I just ran away. And I swung open the porch door. And I run down the stairs down the hill. And as I'm running down, relatives are running up. And I bump shoulders with my dad.

And my dad and I look at each other and he looks at me and he goes, "What's wrong?" And I said, "Oh, nothing." And he looks at me again and since my dad has this way of just being able to read me really well, he said, "Oh, you had sex."

And I don't know what to say because I wasn't planning on discussing it with my parents. But my parents are really cool, but they're also Armenian. And my dad is also from Lebanon, so you never know. And...

So I look at him and I go, um, yeah. And he goes, did you use a condom? And I said, yeah. And he said, are you okay? And I said, yeah. And so he kind of pats me on the shoulder, like in a welcome aboard kind of way. And, um, and, uh...

And, um... And it says, okay. And I immediately felt better because now I could stop feeling guilty and mad at myself and just feel sad the normal way. And, um...

Later that night, everybody was going home. My uncles and aunts all went home, and my dad went home, and it was just me, my mom, and my little brother, Rafi, who was 10 at the time. And my mom somehow found out, and she lights a cigarette, and she sits me down, and she says, what the hell were you thinking? And

And my mom has a way of coming on really strong, till you realize that she's just, it's just her way of fighting for you. And she eventually just says, "I just don't know why you never look out for your heart." And I say, "Mom, who looks out for their hearts anymore?" And she says, "You know what? I think you should invite him over for dinner. I think you should invite him over for dinner to have dinner with me and Rafi. I think it would be fun." And I said, "What?"

And she said, "Yes, this is who you are. "If someone's gonna like you, they have to love all sides of you. "Don't you dare minimize yourself for somebody else."

And so I don't know what it was. Maybe it was my inner Mount Holyoke-ness or my inner Armenian. And I looked at her and I said, okay. So next day I go to the sound booth and I said, look, I know we're not getting married or anything, but my mom wants to know if you want to come over and have dinner with her and my little brother. And he goes, okay. And I go, okay. Oh, God.

And then, um, and so I'm setting the table for the most unnecessary meal of the century. And, um, and my mom is in the other room, like, cooking a very elaborate meal. And I'm like saying, Mom, why did you roast an entire chicken? He doesn't even love me. And then...

And I look through the window and I see his green Subaru drive up. And I hear the door slam shut and I'm just like ready. And he walks in and we sit down and everything's fine. My mom and him talk about bands that they both like. And my brother talks to him about instruments he wants to learn how to play. But something happens.

because my brother, who's 10, he's too young to know what's going on, but he kind of knows what's going on, and he gives me this look from across the table. It's kind of like, interesting evening, huh? And I just start laughing, and I start laughing and laughing and laughing, and it's noticeable. And...

But I'm just so happy because I finally have my voice back. And I realized that you can have a lot of courage to run away from home and to try new things, but it takes twice the amount of courage to be able to come back. And I realized that he wasn't the special guest that my mother invited to dinner that night. That special guest was me. Thank you.

That was Anoush Froonjan, a storyteller, improviser, and cartoonist. Anoush won that Grand Slam. To see a picture of her on that night and other photos of the Grand Slam atmosphere, go to our website, themoth.org. That's themoth.org. There are moths happening just about every day all over the world. We've had moths in dive bars and cathedrals.

in an old leaky scow on the Hudson River, in an abandoned dance hall in Tajikistan. Get a crowd of people and a microphone and someone with a story to tell and the spirit of the place will come out. You should be there too. To find out where moths are happening near you, go to our website, 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 George Dawes Green, novelist and the founder of the Moth. Katherine Burns and Jennifer Hickson directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Ginness, and Meg Bowles, production support from Timothy Liu Lee. Moth Radio Hour is brought to you by the Moth Radio Hour.

Most stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Tin Hat 07, Sam Amidon, Jessica Lurie, and Ara Dingjian.

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.