Pod Insights The Moth The Moth Podcast: Hot Child in the City About this episode This week, stories all about making it work in the city.
Hosted by: Jodi Powell
Storytellers:
David Brown acclimates to Boston in a surprising way.
Randi Skaggs finds clarity in the infamous NYC blackout.
Podcast # 718
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1:01 Speaker 01 Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Jodie Powell. This episode is all about city living. There's a couple of common refrains you've probably heard about the lifestyle. It's expensive, it's loud, it's crowded. And take it from a New York City resident, they're all true. You might even be able to hear some of the noise in this recording. What's not so easy to put in a neat list are the moments that keep us in the city. The joy that springs up every once in a while to remind you why you came here in the first place. So our two stories this week are all about finding that beauty in the chaos of the city. Our first storyteller of this week is David Brown.
1:43 Speaker 01 David told this at a story slam in Boston where the theme of the night was voyage. Here's David, live at The Moth.
1:56 Speaker 02 So I moved to Boston 20 years ago. I moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to take a job at Channel 5 as a morning meteorologist. I had never been to Boston before I moved here. I believe right now that Boston is frickin' awesome. 20 years ago, I didn't even know what frickin' and awesome put together what that meant. On paper, Milwaukee and Boston are the same. Same population, both cold and snowy. In Milwaukee, it's beer and brats. Beer and Fenway franks in Boston. Both are located by large bodies of water. Both have great TV series set there.
2:40 Speaker 02 Laverne and Shirley. And Cheers, where everyone knows your name. That's what I thought. So I loaded up my Chevrolet Barretta, I got my TripTix, and I drove all the way to Massachusetts. It wasn't until I got to the rotary at Ale Wye off of Route 2 that I realized that Boston and Milwaukee are nothing alike. I got into that rotary, and I got cut off, and flipped off, and mouthed off, all by a really pretty young woman driving a Volvo with two car seats in the backseat, a baby onboard, a 26.2 sticker, and a "This car went to Mount Washington" sticker.
3:23 Speaker 02 All I had was a cheese head sitting in the front seat. My first six months at work were kinda tough. The hours were brutal, I had to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning, wasn't used to that. The cities in Wisconsin, they are hard to say, because they're hard to say. It's like Oconomowoc, Waukesha, Manitowoc, Menominee Falls, Sheboygan. Cities here, alright, cities here are tough to say. I don't know why, but it's like peebody, peebody, peebody, Worcester. Uh, the Boston Herald would call me a weather himbo. It was hard.
4:05 Speaker 02 I didn't quite warm up to the, the viewers. They would call up and say, "Hey David, my mother loves ya," or "My sister Heather thinks you're hot." "But why are you always wrong? You suck. Seriously."
4:23 Speaker 02 "How can I get a job in which I'm always wrong and get to keep my job?" "No, seriously, I want that job."
4:31 Speaker 02 And then they'd always end the phone call with, "You're not from here, are you?"
4:35 Speaker 02 And that winter, it was the winter of 1995, 96, it broke all records. So by March, I was ready to leave, but instead, I got a two-week, all-expense-paid, all-inclusive trip to Jamaica. Jamaica Plain.
4:52 Speaker 02 On March the 28th, I, I drove to work normally, felt like hell. I drove away from work at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and instead of going home, I went to the Faulkner Hospital, because I just knew something deep inside wasn't right. Parked my car, I ran in, and I started getting violently ill. They took me into a, an emergency room, and this woman says to me, "Do you have a sore neck?" And I said, "Oh my God, my neck's been killing me." At that point, everybody starts to throw on the white surgical masks, and she says to me, "We think you have bacterial meningitis." I'm like, "What?" And at that point, I felt like I was a foreigner in a country in which I didn't even know the language, because bacterial meningitis is an inflammation of the menengi in the spinal cord and around your brain.
5:37 Speaker 02 And they were asking me questions like, "Where are you from? What's your name? What year were you born?" I knew the answers. I was trying to say it, but all that came out of my mouth was gibberish. And then they said, "We're gonna give you a spinal tap." And at that point, I didn't hear anything, except the doctor say, "The last person that came to Faulkner with meningitis died. You don't want to be 0 for 2."
6:01 Speaker 02 So I woke up and I looked around and I was in a different room and I saw people that looked different, but they all had that white surgical mask. And this woman walked over to me and I looked up at her and I said, "Mom, what are you doing here?" She says, "I've been here since Friday." And I'm like, "What's today? It's Newsday." Like, you've gotta be kidding. I missed the Boston Herald's headline saying, "Local weatherman prompts meningitis scare." I missed the reporting on my station. I missed the reporting in the Globe. But what
6:41 Speaker 02 I got to learn that week is really true Bostonians. The nurse that took the overnight shift so she could be at home during the day for her kids. Dr. Kay McGowan, the infectious disease doctor who nursed me back to health. I got a Get Well card from Dick in Wayland, a weather watcher for 30 years. I got another card from Sheila in Magnolia. I got a card from Ron in Lunenburg. I got a card from Mayor Menino, but I also got homemade cards from school kids that just said, "The weatherman at Faulkner Hospital," because I'd gone to their school. And I went back to work after a couple of weeks on April the 15th, 1996, which was the 100th running of the Boston Marathon. And I got to broadcast live from the top
7:26 Speaker 02 of Heartbreak Hill. And I saw the runners coming up for the very first time. And I knew, and they knew, the exact same thing, and that was, "Boston is frickin' awesome." Thank you.
7:49 Speaker 01 That was David Brown. David spent 18 years forecasting the weather at WCVB TV Boston. Currently, David is the Chief Advancement Officer at the Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. He oversees their Boston Marathon team, Team With A Vision, the largest team of blind runners and sighted guides. To see some photos of David from his days as a weatherman, head to our website, themoth.org/extras.
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10:18 Speaker 01 Up next is Randy Skaggs. Randy told this at a Louisville Storieslam where the theme of the night was happy. Here's Randy, live at the moth.
10:34 Speaker 04 It was my first summer as a New York City schoolteacher, and I was enjoying a lazy day at home while my roommates were out working when the power went out. I wasn't really that worried until I heard on the radio that there was this massive blackout affecting the entire Northeast and that some suspected terrorism. Like many New Yorkers, I'd lived through 9/11, and I wasn't sure that I could stomach that again. Plus, I had this boyfriend, Dave, who was working in a skyscraper on Wall Street not too unlike the Twin Towers. So immediately, I got on the phone and I dialed his work number, but the call didn't go through. At this point, I would have called his cellphone, but Dave had this theory that having a cellphone
11:18 Speaker 04 made you accessible to others 24/7, in essence, making you society's slave. So he didn't have one. So I found myself alternating between hating my fucking boyfriend's fucking guts for not having a fucking cellphone. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? And then, he has one now. And then, praying to God that my fucking boyfriend was alive. I knew that the wise thing to do was just sit at home and wait there in case he came there or called, but I was just too antsy for that, so I started taking walks in my East Village neighborhood. First, just short little jaunts around the block, but every time I passed by in front of my building and I didn't see him, my heart sank deeper and deeper into my stomach, so
12:03 Speaker 04 I took longer and longer walks in the heat. And I thought about Dave and me. I was 27, Dave was 31, and we were each other's first major relationship. We came from these families where our parents communicated by either ignoring each other or cheating on each other or screaming at each other or beating the crap out of each other. So we didn't really have any background knowledge as to how a healthy relationship should work.
12:31 Speaker 04 We were terrified of commitment. I mean, we'd been together for a year and a half, but we dated like we were in high school. Seeing each other maybe once or twice a week. We didn't have keys to each other's places. We didn't leave toothbrushes over. We said, "I love you," but there was always a catch in our voice, like, "I know you could fuck me over at any point, so I'm really not gonna get too invested in this, okay?" And what good had it done me? If he was dead, then I had just spent a year and a half of my life keeping someone at arm's length, rather than just being happy. Sweat was starting to pool under my breast, and I was getting that film... The women know what I'm talking about. And I was getting that film that you get on your skin in New York in the summer, so
13:16 Speaker 04 it was time to go home. And when I rounded the corner that last time, there he was, sitting on my stoop, looking more adorable than ever. He stood up, and we ran to each other, like in the movies, and we hugged fiercely. And then we did something we'd never done before. We just gazed lovingly into each other's eyes. It was our most intimate act to date. And then I heard his story. When the power went out, he wasn't taking any chances. He went down thirty flights of stairs, rather than risking the elevator, and then he walked twenty blocks to my apartment, in the heat, in a suit, because the subway wasn't working, and because he was as worried about me as I was about him. We were both too giddy to just sit still, so we just kept walking, all around the city.
14:00 Speaker 04 And little by little, we got the full report, that it was not terrorism, just a blackout, you know? Shop owners were handing out free food, rather than letting it rot. People were just drinking beers outside. We saw this guy, rollerblading down the street, buck naked. And everywhere you looked, New Yorkers, these jaded New Yorkers, wore shit-eating grins on their faces. Night started to fall. We headed to Tompkins Square Park, and there were bonfires, and drum circles, and people camping out in the grass. We wove through the crowd, stopping intermittently to just make out, or dance, holding hands so tightly, the sweat dripped from our fingers. And then I had this idea that we should look up at the sky, and I was right.
14:42 Speaker 04 There, amidst the black ghosts of the buildings, we could see the stars in New York City, and on that night, you could even see Mars.
14:52 Speaker 04 We headed back to my apartment. My bedroom faced the street on the first floor. So normally that meant that I kept my window and my curtains shut tight. But that night, I just opened them up wide to the world. We lie in bed, listening to the voices of the passersby. Typically, conversations were loud, drunken, obnoxious. But that night, everyone whispered, as if everything were sacred. We had absolutely the best sex of our lives to date.
15:22 Speaker 04 Just been some good times since.
15:25 Speaker 04 And then we just passed out in that inky darkness. A year later, we were living together in Brooklyn. But Dave brought me back to that stoop to propose to me.
15:39 Speaker 04 Because it was there that we learned a really important lesson. Happiness is terrifying, because it's so unpredictable. You know, you never know when it's just going to come crashing around you, like those two towers did that one day. But if you don't give in to those sweet moments that can happen at random, then life really isn't worth living, anyway. Thank you.
16:10 Speaker 01 That was Randy Skads. Randy is a middle school language arts teacher and storyteller based in Louisville, Kentucky. She loves competing in story slams and is slogging her way through writing a memoir for her New York City years. Randy also produces a storytelling show and podcast called Double Edge Stories with her husband, David Serschuk. Together, they are co-parents to two story-worthy kids. To see some photos of Randy and Dave from their time in New York City, head to our website, themoth.org. That's all for this week. We hope these stories reminded you that no matter where you choose to spend your days,
16:48 Speaker 01 in the city, the country, or somewhere in between, there's magic to be found. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.
17:06 Speaker 05 Jodi Powell is a producer on The Moth's main stage and Story Slam teams. Jodi also directs and teaches with our community and education teams. She says the spark that ignites her is that moment when a storyteller is center stage and you can feel the audience listening. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by me, Julia Purcell, with Sarah Austin Jenness and Sarah Jane Johnson. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Kluchay, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski, and Aldi Kazep. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything
17:51 Speaker 05 else, go to our website, themoth.org.
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