Pod Insights The Moth The Moth Radio Hour: Green About this episode In this hour, stories from Moth open mic StorySLAMs with the theme "Green." Gardens, edamame, and nervous novices. To quote Kermit the Frog, "it's not easy being green." This episode is hosted by Moth director Chloe Salmon. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media.
Storytellers:
Isthier Chaudhury puts his Youtube swimming lessons to the test.
Tannia Schrieber finds that her garden grows more than just plants during the pandemic.
Elizabeth Fritzler becomes the personal chef to a picky eater.
When Mark Fiedeldey's husband moves out, he leaves his journal behind.
Rosalind Croad is overjoyed to have her first boyfriend....until kissing enters the equation.
Having received many rejection letters, Akshay Gajria learns how to write them.
Podcast # 923
Transcript 8,235 words · 11 speakers
0:13 Speaker 00 This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon.
0:19 Speaker 00 My very first job at The Moth was as an assistant producer on the Story Slam team. Slams are our open-mic storytelling competitions. They happen monthly in 28 cities in the US and beyond. At each event, 10 storytellers are randomly selected to take the stage and tell a five-minute story on the night's theme. For a few years, I was in charge of choosing the slam themes for each season, along with my colleague Jody Powell. Twice a year, we'd hole up in a meeting room and come up with ideas for the next six months' worth of events. Slam themes are a delicate balance. You want them to be general enough to spark a wide range of stories, but specific enough to encourage a point of view.
1:02 Speaker 00 Fun enough to inspire creativity, but rooted enough to offer depth. There were other considerations as well. For example, a question we found ourselves asking every time: "How likely is it that people are going to interpret this solely as a sex thing?" Sigh. Bye-bye ecstasy.
1:21 Speaker 00 Each time, we'd come up with themes that felt fruitful. Scandal. Aftermath. Dinner. But we'd also try to throw in a curveball or two, ones that we were excited to see how the storytellers would interpret. Uniforms. Dirt. Doors.
1:42 Speaker 00 Those were my favorites, the ones that we flung out into The Moth universe and sat waiting, listening for the answering calls, and wondering what shapes they would take. For this episode, I decided to pick one of those curveball themes from a recent season and feature some stories that came from it. In April of 2024, the theme was "green." So, in praise of all of the storytellers who take a chance on a theme and put their names in the hat, stories of all shades of green.
2:12 Speaker 00 Starting us off is Istiar Chowdhury. He told this story at a slam in Philadelphia where the theme was, you guessed it, green. Here's Istiar live at The Moth.
2:30 Speaker 01 My wife really wanted to go scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef for our honeymoon. She'd actually gotten certified in diving. I literally could not swim to save my life. But it was gonna be okay. I had nine months before this trip to learn how to swim. So I procrastinated for the first eight months. And the month before the trip, I had the brilliant idea. I was going to learn how to swim from YouTube. I was on a business trip at the time too, so I really needed a teacher that could travel with me. I got back to my hotel room one night.
3:14 Speaker 01 I watched hours of videos on how to breathe, how to float, how to time your strokes with the breathing. I had my theory down. So the next morning at 6:00 a.m., I went up to that rooftop pool. I got in the water. I made eye contact with the lifeguards. And the lifeguards was a team of five pigeons sitting on the side of the pool. I took a deep breath. I let go of my fear. And I descended under the water. And I exhaled. And I came back up. Breathe in, go down. Breathe out, come up. I practiced my breathing for a couple of days. I progressed on to floating.
3:59 Speaker 01 By the end of two weeks, believe it or not, I was swimming. I could swim half the length of the Marriott pool. I was so ready for this scuba diving trip. So we get on the boat. We get out there for our trip. We start easy. We're gonna start with snorkeling first, right? And so I put on the gear. I jump off the boat. So proud of myself. I learned how to swim for this trip. I swam 10 feet from that boat and my brain finally clicks and says, "You are going to die." This is how it all ends. And I panic. I scramble. I get back on that boat. I climb up. I take everything off. I tell the crew. I tell my wife. I tell everyone else on the boat. I'm like, I'm good.
4:44 Speaker 01 I'm gonna stay on this boat. I'm gonna read my book for the next two days. We're here for my wife. She's happy. She's gonna dive. I'm happy that she's happy. Let's do this. And the crew sits me down and really tries to convince me that scuba diving is actually better than snorkeling. And I'm gonna love it. And I tell them, you're crazy.
5:07 Speaker 01 And somehow, 30 minutes later, I'm standing on the edge of the boat again in a wet suit with my scuba diving gear. And I take a deep breath. I let go of my fear. And I let myself be pushed off the side of the boat. I plunge into the coral sea. And I open my eyes, even myself out. And I'm okay. And it's a miracle. I can do whatever I want. I'm in this protective, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.
5:38 Speaker 01 The rest of the people come down. We descend. And the guide is so kind. He's dragging me around to look at the different things. Because, let's be honest, I can't swim.
5:50 Speaker 01 And sometimes, he'll leave me to go guide the others. And I'm just floating there, slowly turning upside down.
6:01 Speaker 01 I'm like an underwater astronaut,
6:06 Speaker 01 enchanted by the underwater marine life, the colors, the sound of peace under the ocean. I go on another dive that afternoon. I hand over my money for the night dive. We go down and brush the sand. And I see the little glowy, glowy things, like the movies. And if I hadn't taken that leap of faith, I would've missed out on an entire new world of wonder, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But I think back to that experience and ask myself what I was really afraid of as I was trying to learn how to swim, something that everyone around me seemed to have done when they were a child. How could I, you know,
6:50 Speaker 01 overcome that embarrassment and go and learn something? I decided and convinced myself my time to properly learn how to swim had just passed. And so I waited for eight months and then went to YouTube and talked to the pigeons. And I figured out it wasn't the danger that I was afraid of. The pigeons were watching over me. I was fine. So I got home from that trip. I took one more breath and I finally let go of my truest fear. And I signed up for adult swim lessons at the local Y.
7:29 Speaker 00 That was Istir Chowje. His love of stories comes from working in college admissions, where every year he gets to learn about hundreds of students through the stories they tell while applying. He and his wife Catherine have been together for 15 years. And while their relationship doesn't depend on his swimming skills, he likes to think that his efforts helped. When I asked Istir what inspired him to tell his story that night at the slam, he said that the first thing that came to mind when thinking of green was the experience of learning something new. And, you know, being new to Philadelphia, he said he quickly learned how many people in the audience associated green with the eagles. He plans to tell more stories in the future, though he may have to wait a little while longer
8:14 Speaker 00 as he and Catherine just welcomed twin baby girls to the world. Congratulations. I'm sure you'll have them in the pool as soon as you can.
8:40 Speaker 00 During a story slam, it's fun to see how widely the same theme is interpreted by the 10 folks who take the stage. In this episode, you'll hear from four different cities: Philly, Denver, London, and New York City. Our next story was told in Philadelphia on the same night that Istir told his, though with a much different take on green. Here's Tanya Schreiber.
9:12 Speaker 02 So, a few years ago, I got really, really into gardening. My husband had been injured, and he was at home, but I was taking care of him. And I was bored out of my mind, and I was looking for a way to distract myself because everything the specialists and surgeons were presenting as our future was just terrifying. And I needed to find something to distract myself besides the radio, who kept talking about this virus in China. And then they were talking about the virus in the cruise ships, and then Italy and Iran.
9:53 Speaker 02 And I decided to build these raised beds on my front yard. And it had to be in my front yard because my backyard is an alleyway, and so there wasn't a lot of other space. And so I was just going to make something beautiful. I was going to get some physical exercise. It was February, but, you know, I could dig as soon as it started to get a little damp and I could start digging in it. So, I, along the way, between, I guess, the seed catalogs and looking at COVID and Zoloft, Facebook kind of created this algorithm.
10:33 Speaker 02 And decided to feed me to the liberal preppers Facebook group, which did wonders for my anxiety. The raised beds were only, you know, I mean, they were the width of my yard, which is about 30 feet. No, it's like a third of the size of this stage is my entire property. So I have not nearly enough land and had not been prepping. So these liberal preppers had nothing, all they could suggest was get seeds and learn something. At this point, the only thing I'd ever grown was some tomatoes and some pepper plants. But with nothing but time, I started to do research on how I can maximize this land
11:18 Speaker 02 and go vertical. So by the time the world shut down, I had cabbage, I had Brussels sprouts. I had been, every time the weather got cold, I'd been throwing plastic charps down to keep these things alive. My neighbors thought I was out of my mind. They were all just living their normal lives. They have no idea why I've been trapped in the house for the last few months. But by the end of March, I was the entertainment of the neighborhood. Because nobody had anything else to do but walk their kids by my house. Where we were hanging out and had nothing to do but explain to them what little we
12:00 Speaker 02 knew from reading a few books. And so, we got to teach little kids who their parents swore would never get to eat, would never eat vegetables. And we'd be like, I promise you, if I let your kid pick something, they'll put it in their mouth. Broccoli, cauliflower, the works. And we felt very, very proud of ourselves. My mom, I would pick her up every day and bring her over. And we'd sit on one side of the six-foot, thank you God, raised bed. And the people were on the other side. And we would just hang. And I got to listen to people talk about their grandparents' farms and visiting them and growing up. People
12:42 Speaker 02 asked me how they could start their own stupid-looking garden. As we kept, kind of as the summer kind of hit, I realized that I'd learned a lot about irrigation and making compost and amending the soil, but I hadn't read enough about pests. And so, squash vine boers kind of came through and killed a lot of that stuff. And then, the cabbage moths came and got the rest. But the beautiful thing was that during this time, where nothing in my life was going the way I had thought, I mean, if you'd looked at me a year ago, I didn't expect to have my husband disabled, I didn't expect to be living through a global pandemic with my kids, learning how to garden. But all of a sudden, I had this beautiful
13:25 Speaker 02 garden where I'd met so many neighbors. And the wild thing was that even as things died, and almost everything I planted died.
13:36 Speaker 02 Something else grew in its place. And my neighbors knew me as the chick with the corn, right? At the corner. And so, my kids are getting all excited about researching new things to grow, and I'm getting to meet all these people. And we were pulling about 10 pounds of food every day out of this thing. But it was almost all tomatoes. My friends got tomatoes, my family, the food banks, friends of family, family friends. Everybody was getting tomatoes.
14:16 Speaker 02 And in all that time that I spent digging, all I kept thinking is, you might not get to choose what the world gives you, but if it gives you plenty, and it gives you connections, and it gives you joy, then just be grateful for it. Thank you.
14:45 Speaker 00 Tanya Schreiber is a Philly native who still lives in the area with her two boys and husband. When she's not gardening, she's working as a strategy consultant and career coach. Tanya's garden is still going strong. The grapes, berries, and asparagus that she planted that first summer come back bigger and better every year. Her sons are both teenagers now, but still help out with harvesting from time to time. And some wonderful news. Tanya's husband recovered and is doing better than anyone imagined was possible. And how did she come to be on stage that night? Her friends. They asked her to try her hand at telling a story, and when she saw the theme, she knew she wanted to talk about the greenery of her garden.
15:29 Speaker 00 Friends and gardens for the win. To see some photos of Tanya and her family in the garden, you can head on over to themoth.org.
15:48 Speaker 00 In a moment, a personal chef meets her match and a broken-hearted man is left with an unusual memento when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
16:04 Speaker 03 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
16:15 Speaker 00 This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon. In this episode, we're hearing tales that hail from story slams on the theme of green. Elizabeth Fritzler told her story in Denver, where we partner with public radio station KUNC. Here's Elizabeth, live at The Moth.
16:36 Speaker 04 So I work as a personal chef, and during the pandemic, I was still relatively green in my three-year-old business. And normally, I cook in people's houses, but it turns out that nobody really wants you in your house when there's COVID afoot. So one day, I got an email from this lady asking if I could cook for her 80-year-old diabetic father and his live-in girlfriend. But she wanted me to cook the meals in my house and deliver them. Normally, I would have turned this sort of thing down, but I was desperate for the business. We all know that desperation is the place from which all the best things come. So I agreed to it. So on the first meal delivery day, I walk into this very
17:19 Speaker 04 nice house in the suburbs, and there's a gaunt man in a wheelchair waiting for me in the hallway. He introduces himself as Jim. Both of his legs have been amputated, so his thighs are wrapped heavily in bandages, and he has thick glasses and swollen, purple, infected fingers. So it's clear to me that the diabetes is very advanced, really taking a toll on his health. So he says, "What did you cook for us today?" And I start listing off the meals, stuff that's healthy. I get to the word salmon, and he gets this disgusted look on his face, and he goes, "Ugh, that one's gonna be a loser."
18:01 Speaker 04 I don't like salmon.
18:04 Speaker 04 Now, I have pretty thick skin when it comes to feedback about my meals, okay? But saying that one's gonna be a loser right off the bat, it does seem a little harsh. However, I realized that I probably needed to temper my expectations about this man's diet. He had probably been eating a diet of canned vegetables and meatloaf from the Black Eyed Pea for his whole life. And I needed to figure out what else I could cook for him. This also made me think of people like my 92-year-old grandpa, who will not eat my mom's Thanksgiving turkey because she uses herbs, and he, quote, "doesn't want all that green shit on the turkey."
18:46 Speaker 04 So, spectacularly, they did not fire me.
18:52 Speaker 04 But Jim was impossible to please, extremely picky. I had an agonizing time trying to figure out what I was going to cook for him every week. But after a month, his daughter actually emailed me to tell me that the meal service was going quite well. Shocker. I stuck with it. So one day, I'm standing outside in the driveway with Jim, and I ask him how he liked the fried rice that I had made for him the previous week. And he goes, "I don't like lima beans."
19:21 Speaker 04 I was like, "Lima beans? What are you talking about? I've never cooked lima beans in my life, let alone put them in a fried rice. What?" But then he said something that gave me pause. He said, "I don't like a lot of things, but it's okay. We'll get there." And the phrase "we'll get there" threw me off. It struck me as odd, because I wasn't sure whether he meant "get there" in terms of getting to a perfect meal plan, or if he meant "get there" in terms of getting physically well again.
19:57 Speaker 04 And then it occurred to me that maybe Jim didn't realize that he was dying.
20:04 Speaker 04 Even though his daughter had basically told me as much.
20:09 Speaker 04 And then I thought about sitting with my grandma, right before she passed, and how I was sitting at the edge of her nursing home bed, and she looked me in the eyes and she asked me if she was dying.
20:23 Speaker 04 And I said, "I don't know, Grandma. What do you think?" And she said, "I think I am."
20:30 Speaker 04 And I said, "Are you okay with that?"
20:33 Speaker 04 And she said, "Yes."
20:36 Speaker 04 And in that moment, I had the privilege of watching my grandma move from denial to acceptance about her death. It was the last conversation that I had with her. And so there in the driveway with Jim, I was thinking about this dichotomy between denial and acceptance when it comes to love and to death. And I thought that maybe this meal service was more for Jim's daughter than for Jim. That maybe she thought that she could just prolong her dad's life a little bit longer by feeding him better food, and she wouldn't have to face his death quite so soon.
21:15 Speaker 04 Because the hardest thing about love is that it will, in the end, be lost.
21:22 Speaker 04 And so a few weeks later, I was packing up the meals to deliver to Jim, and I texted his girlfriend to let her know that I was running late. But she texted back that Jim had actually passed away the day before.
21:36 Speaker 04 And I was in shock. I was standing there in my kitchen with all these ready-made meals and nowhere to put them. And I really hoped in that moment that Jim's daughter had a chance to move to acceptance about her father's death, just like I had with my grandma.
21:54 Speaker 04 I haven't had any more difficult clients quite like Jim since then. But that man did tell me and teach me how to face criticism and how to stay grounded in the face of nonsensical comments about things like lima beans.
22:09 Speaker 04 But for whatever it's worth, those green things in the fried rice were enemame soybeans. Not lima beans. Thank you.
22:28 Speaker 00 Elizabeth Fritzler is a personal chef and freelance copy editor from Denver. After several years of cooking, she's hanging up her apron to edit food writing and recipes. Her favorite meal to cook, one she knows the client will love. For Jim, that was a shrimp vegetable stir fry with brown rice and a sauce of toasted sesame oil, garlic, ginger, and coconut aminos to keep it low in sugar. Elizabeth originally developed this story a few months before her grandpa passed away, when she was reflecting on what matters at the end of a life. She says seeing the way Jim's family showed up for him made her think about how she wants to show up for the people in her life every day.
23:10 Speaker 00 When she saw the theme of the story slam, her time with Jim and the lima beans he hated came to mind, and she decided to put her name in the hat.
23:31 Speaker 00 Our next story is told by Mark Fiedeldey, who shared it at a story slam in New York City, where WNYC is a media partner of The Moth. Here's Mark.
23:49 Speaker 05 So, my husband and I were always very different people, right? We were like Monica and Chandler from Friends, but not funny. I'm like a Jersey loudmouth, he's a reserved southerner. I'm clinically OCD, very unnecessarily type A. He could end up on an episode of Hoarders if left to his own devices. Like many couples, we sort of, our biggest problem was communication. We communicated very different styles. You kind of learn that from your family, your peers, your culture. I was raised by a bunch of children and grandchildren of loud immigrants from New York that basically told you, "Stand up for yourself, don't take shit from anyone. If you have a problem, address it right away," as loudly as possible. His family was all about, you know, keeping up appearances, making sure that, you know,
24:32 Speaker 05 you pretended like everything was okay, even if there was a problem. So you can imagine how this went. So, last summer, right after our one-year wedding anniversary, he told me that he wanted to sleep with other people. And I was just taken aback because we had been together for years and it'd never come up. And so, you know, he sort of gave it to me as an ultimatum. He was like, you know, I'm really nervous that if you don't allow me to do that, that I'm gonna go behind your back and do it anyways. And I was like, alright, well, I mean, I guess I'll do it. I was like crying. So I agreed to an open marriage with certain rules and restrictions, obviously. But I was not happy about it. And he consoled me because I was very upset. He said, you know, you're the person that I love. I want to have children with you. Like, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And two weeks later, after I cried for two weeks, he told me that he was leaving me.
25:17 Speaker 05 So, we agreed to a six-month trial separation and that he would move out of my apartment at the end of the month. So it was three weeks later of purgatory, where he was basically sleeping on the couch, because I'm not sleeping on the couch. And so finally, the day comes right that he's going to finally leave and move out. And my best friend from home took the train in from Jersey, and he was the best man at our wedding. And we went to the Met to see an exhibit. We sat on the top of the steps at the Met like we were Blair and Serena in Gossip Girl. Because I was a Blair, even though I always wanted to be a Serena. We went to brunch, I got really drunk. We went to Washington Tour Park. We ate CBD brownies, because I needed to get fucked up. And I went home to a much emptier apartment,
26:02 Speaker 05 and there was, obviously, there was a mess. You know, he was the tornado on a path to self-destruction, leaving like a trail of like tears behind him. So, I stripped naked, because I was like, you know what? I'm a single lady. Like, I'm gonna clean up this apartment naked. And as I'm walking around, I see a green leather book on the TV stand. And I was like, well, that's deliberate. Like, what is this book? I open it up, and it's his journal. So I sat there, and I sat down, cross-legged, naked, in the middle of my broken home, in my living room, and I read every single journal entry that he had written.
26:38 Speaker 05 And, you know, most people think it would be traumatic, but it was actually this, like, huge relief because it was all the truths that he had never told me for six years. It was all the worst things you could ever hear about yourself or about your relationship that you could possibly imagine, written by who I thought was the love of my life. But it was like, this green little book gave me, like, freedom because I finally had gotten the answers that I'd asked for for the past six years, and I never got it. And I was broken, but I wasn't shattered. And I, you know, I realized a few years ago that I deserved to have a happy life, and I realized this year that I deserved love, just not from him. Thanks.
27:20 Speaker 00 That was Mark Fiedeldey, a New Jersey native who spent his adult life in New York. He recently moved to the UK. Dedicating his career to nonprofit and charity work, Mark has worked for a labor union, a girls' rights organization, a community foundation, and LGBTQ rights organizations. In his spare time, he runs, bakes, and explores the world with his partner. I had a chance to chat with Mark about his story. So what inspired you to tell your story at the Greensland? Did it come to you right away? Were you, like, did you have to kind of think of it and find it?
27:57 Speaker 05 So when I saw that that theme was coming up, it was right around the time that I had, you know, started my separation and divorce proceedings. And it just, there was no pause. It jumped right into my head. I was like, the one green thing that, like, you know, affected me so much at that time was this journal of my ex-husband's. And it just, I knew immediately that would be my story.
28:17 Speaker 00 Yeah. Did you, had you known that he had a journal? Was it something that he used regularly?
28:23 Speaker 05 I saw the journal, I was like, what the hell is this? And I opened it up, and it said the, like, sort of starting date on it. It was only a few weeks prior. And I was just shocked that it, you know, not only did I have no idea, but it also had all these secrets and things in it, so. And I think that it, you know, just for the fact that he needed to say those things and he couldn't say them to my face, so he let the words left behind without him there to not deal with the consequences.
28:49 Speaker 00 So, and you said, you know, when you were reading the journal, you're getting these answers to these questions that you had and you felt something kind of like relief, which is this, I think maybe like a surprising thing to feel in that moment. I'm sure you felt other things as well, but were you surprised at feeling relieved reading it?
29:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, especially considering the like content of it was, you know, so traumatic to read, but the relief was shocking and felt so good at that moment because it had been such a tumultuous and terrible time for me. And to finally feel some form of, you know, for lack of a better term, closure on something that was still a very like open wound at the moment, just, I don't know, it felt good. It felt like someone pouring water on a fire at that moment. You know, it wasn't completely out, but it was, it was steaming a little.
29:43 Speaker 00 That was Mark Fiedeldey. For anyone wondering if he ever confronted his ex about the journal, he did not, decided to take the high road instead. Although, when boxing up the last of his ex's belongings to drop off before moving to a new apartment, Mark made sure to place the journal at the very top.
30:07 Speaker 00 Did Mark's little green book, or any of our other green stories so far, remind you of your own story you'd like to tell? If so, you can pitch us a story right on our site, themoth.org, or call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684.
30:25 Speaker 06 When I was a kid in the Philly suburbs, my brother and I were just allowed to try about anything with almost no supervision.
30:34 Speaker 06 Although the home was loving and supportive, we had hobbies that bordered on the dangerous and were always non-conventional. Unusual pets were a normal thing in our house. One of my favorites was my green iguana, Iggy. He was almost thirty-six inches tip to tail, but was a terrible pet as he regularly bit us while feeding and frequently ran away. After seeing a wildlife show depicting marine iguanas swimming around the Galapagos Islands, I wondered if my iguana would like to swim in our neighborhood pool. I transported him there by putting him on my head, full of longish curly hair, and riding the two blocks on my bike.
31:17 Speaker 06 I snuck him in early in the morning and the swimming went very well until we were kicked out by the lifeguards. Fast forward to 1970, and I was married to a wonderful girl from the neighborhood and planning our first life adventure of a new job in western Maryland. During a family dinner at my parents’ home, the talk turned to describing the weirdest person you ever saw. My new wife described a kid with a big lizard on his head, riding his bike past her home near the pool. The family almost died laughing at her shock, being told that she had married that weird kid.
31:56 Speaker 00 Remember, you can pitch us at 877-799-MOTH or online at themoth.org, where you can also share these stories and others from the Moth Archive. The best pitches are developed from Moth shows all around the world. When we return, a girl prepares for her first kiss and a writer has to pen his first rejection letter, when the Moth Radio Hour continues.
32:47 Speaker 03 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
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34:50 Speaker 08 Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, board certified OB-GYN and menopause specialist. My podcast, UnPaused, is the place for bold, unfiltered conversations about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life. Every week, I sit down with medical experts and leading voices to talk about the health issues that matter most. Because UnPaused isn't just about the years you live, but how well you live them. Listen and follow UnPaused with me, Dr. Mary Claire Haver, wherever you get your podcasts.
35:21 Speaker 00 You're listening to The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon, and in this episode, we're hearing stories on the theme of green from a constellation of our live Story Slam events. Our final two stories were told across the pond at one of our London Story Slams. First up is Rosalind Croad, whose take on green concerns a trial we all braved differently: A First Kiss. Here's Rosalind, live at The Moth.
35:47 Speaker 09 Thanks. So, I'm sitting in class when I feel a tap on my shoulder. So I turn and I see that somebody is passing me a note. So I take it and I open it, and inside is a question that I've never been asked before. It reads, "Will you be my girlfriend?" And then down below, I saw two of the most beautiful words that I could imagine ever side by side, because this note was from Matthew [BLEEP]. Now Matthew was gorgeous.
36:29 Speaker 09 He had dark skin and moldy features, and he used to tough his hair up straight like this with Daxwax, just like the Backstreet Boys. And at 12 years old, I had never had a boyfriend before, so I was elated. However, my delight was short-lived, because I soon realized that I had a big problem on my hands. Now that I was Matthew's girlfriend, he might ask to pash me. Now, pash in New Zealand is the word that we use for something I believe here you know as a snog, or some may know as a French kiss. And at 12 years old, I did not know how to kiss. In fact, at 12 years old, basically none of us kids knew how to kiss.
37:14 Speaker 09 And the way that we were trying to figure it out is that we would entrap young couples in a pash circle and demand to watch the deed. What would happen is some kid would shout out across the field, "They're going to pash!" And then a hundred kids would run like a tsunami, encasing them, insisting on seeing what we came for.
37:40 Speaker 09 We would oogle and start to chant, "Pash, pash, pash, pash, pash." Now, the thought of being entrapped in a pash circle and not knowing what to do utterly terrified me. So, I tried to practise. I would take my toy trolls and try and make them kiss to see if I could understand the mechanics. "I love you, Rose. I love you, Jack. I'm sorry about the boat." But it wasn't very helpful. I passionately made out with my mirror to see if I could see from a 3D view if this helped me. And then to try and understand the sensations better, I had make-out sessions with my pillow. But I still didn't feel prepared. And then one day after school, as I was about to leave to go towards the gate,
38:25 Speaker 09 Matthew approached me. And he said, "Would you like to hold my hand?" And inside, I was thinking, "Oh, my God. Yes, I want to hold your hand." So I put my hand out, and he took my hand, and we started to walk together towards the gate. One, two, three, four. Inside, I am feeling amazing. I have never had these romantic feelings before. There are butterflies doing parkour and acrobats inside of my stomach. So I look down at him. We're 12, so he only comes up to my shoulder. I look down at him, and he's looking up at me,
39:07 Speaker 09 and I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Five, six, seven, eight. And then I start to notice around me that some of the kids are also noticing us. And I see some of them pointing and whispering. And it dawns on me that at any moment, one of them may call a pash circle on us now. Nine, 10, 11, 12. I start to panic. My heart is beating hard, and I'm going into protection mode. I am thinking I need to prevent myself being stuck in a pash circle by any means possible. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. I pash dash away from Matthew like Usain Bolt,
39:52 Speaker 09 without explaining anything. I sprint through the gate. I'm running down the streets. I'm running so hard I can feel my backpack banging on my back with my lunch flying all over my homework. I run, and I run, and I run until I have streets away from the school. And I slow down. I can feel hot, frustrated tears running down my face. And in that moment, I am mortified. I'm so angry at myself. And honestly, right then, I hate myself.
40:20 Speaker 09 Things for Matthew and I went downhill pretty quickly from there. I pash dashed away from him again at the school disco mid macarena because I again thought that he was going to try and kiss me. He called me one day and said he was breaking up with me. I seemed, I guess, a bit too committed to my cross-country training, and I didn't have the courage to tell him what was actually going on for me. So at that time, I decided, I am not one of those people that can figure out how to kiss. I'm writing this off. Bring it on, nuns and cats. I am done with boyfriends. And I put boyfriends out of my mind. Fast forward, four years, and I'm 16, and I still haven't kissed anyone. Except one day, I am sitting in a park on a bench with a new boy,
41:03 Speaker 09 who is my new boyfriend, my first boyfriend since Matthew. And we're not surrounded by a bunch of kids. The only thing surrounding us is trees and the roses. And it's the evening, so the moonlight is shining down and it's lighting up his face. And I see that he's looking at me, and then he leans in and he stops. And I realize that he's indicating he would like to kiss me. And then I feel myself lean in, because I realize I would also like to kiss him. And then we kiss. I have my first kiss. And luckily, he's a much better kisser than my ex is to that point. A mirror and a pillow. It was amazing. It was wonderful. And I found out that I knew exactly what to do. And I was going from one period of life to another.
41:48 Speaker 09 I was pushing myself so hard, expecting that I would know exactly what to do. But if I could be patient and wait for the soil and the conditions to be right, I would bloom when the time was right. Thank you.
42:07 Speaker 00 That was Rosalind Crowe, a curious Kiwi whose life decisions have always been motivated by what will create the most adventures. After many years working as a film and event producer around the world, her latest adventure has taken her to a coffee farm in Colombia, where she's perfecting her Spanish and listening to the moth while sorting coffee beans. When thinking of a story to tell that night, Rosalind ran into a common problem. Her first ideas were more along the lines of anecdotes or punchlines. She dug deeper, trying to think of times in her life where she attempted to do something she had no idea how to. And then it came to her, her first kiss. An experience that still causes her some embarrassment to recall, but in that juicy vulnerability, as she puts it,
42:52 Speaker 00 she knew she'd find the best kind of story. Though, if she could go back in time, she'd offer this advice to her 12-year-old self. "Sweetheart, practice on an ice cream, not a mirror."
43:06 Speaker 00 In case you were wondering, Rosalind did eventually pass Matthew, even if it took a few more years. She says he never asked her to explain the running. Good man.
43:25 Speaker 00 Our final story comes to us from Akshay Gajria, who took the stage just before Roslin told her story that night in London. See if you can spot the green. Here's Akshay.
43:45 Speaker 10 I'm obsessed with organizing my inboxes. And I, there's one folder that I have, which is tagged "green", which I keep at the very bottom of my inbox, so that it's just hidden and out of sight. It's called "rejections", and it contains all the rejection letters that I've received from all the years of writing stories and trying to get them published. I've submitted it, I've submitted to all the magazines that you can think of, from Granthar, Glimmer Train, Shimmer. You name a magazine, I've got a rejection from them.
44:23 Speaker 10 Every rejection that comes your way, it feels like it's a sting. It's almost like the words are saying, "You're not ready. Stop pretending to be a writer." And the worst one is, "Your work is really worthless." That's not what they say, but that's what it feels like.
44:50 Speaker 10 But through some twist of fate, I became an editor for a magazine. I had posted a photo on Twitter about editing my story with green ink. And one of my editor friends, who had published a small piece of mine online, he said that, "Hey, do you want to be an editor for the magazine?" I was like, "Yes, definitely." And I got in. And initially, I just started to subtly correct a few typos here and there, leave a small suggestion, "Hey, this word could be changed around", maybe correct a little bit of the grammar, but I didn't do much. But my editor, Srinath, he had a master plan in mind.
45:34 Speaker 10 He's an engineer. He is Indian. He is going bald. We had everything in common. So we became really good friends. And he's like, "Hey, I want to take a backseat from this. Do you want to take over?" Suddenly, I had the role of accepting and rejecting stories. Like Spiderman said, with great power comes great responsibility.
46:03 Speaker 10 Initially, I was hesitant to reject stories. I accepted most of them. I was very happy to read all the stories. Most of them were really good. But then, one day, this one story came in that,
46:20 Speaker 10 the grammar was all over the place. The language was just not good while I was reading it. I kept stumbling over the words. The story was very nascent. It wasn't eked out yet.
46:33 Speaker 10 I had to reject this piece.
46:36 Speaker 10 But I couldn't. I just, I didn't send out the rejection email. Ten days, it sat in my inbox. And then later, I just like, okay, I need to write this email. And I started, "Hi.
46:52 Speaker 10 The story you've written is crap." Backspace. "Hi. This is not up to our standards. No, this doesn't feel right." I left it again and I just, I didn't look at the email for a while. And until the writer followed up with me saying, "Hey, what happened to my story?"
47:17 Speaker 10 I picked up one of the rejections that I had received, copy paste, send.
47:25 Speaker 10 It crushed me. I had taken the hopes of one writer and thrown it down the drain. I knew how that felt like. How could I do this? And then, one more piece came in that had to be rejected. Another copy paste, another send, another sinking feeling in my stomach.
47:48 Speaker 10 I confess to my friend, Alisha. She's kind and wise. She, I told her that this is too hard. I can't reject stories like this. I know how it feels. She said, "Look at all the rejections that you have received. You work hard on your stories because of those rejections, those conversations that you have with yourself, thinking you're having a conversation with the editor to convince that, hey, your story is really good, has helped you. What you're doing by sending them rejections is helping them. And you're playing a very small but significant part in their journey." I agreed with her.
48:31 Speaker 10 That's when I started writing those emails myself. I tried to not just read the story, but go into the depth of it, understand what the writer was trying to say, leave a line, one line of criticism with one line of encouragement. I distilled all the hope and encouragement I could into those emails and sent them out. That's when I started reading my own rejections. And suddenly, I realized all the editors on the other side have been distilling all their hope and encouragement in them. And now, when I look at that entire folder of rejections that I have, I don't think of them as something, as people saying that I'm worthless.
49:14 Speaker 10 It's just a band of cheerleaders cheering me on. Thank you.
49:26 Speaker 00 Akshay Gajria is a London-based storyteller, writer, and writing coach. His work has appeared in Tamarind Literary Magazine, Constellations, Futura Magazine, and more. His advice for anyone writing their own rejection letter? Keep it short and simple. If there's a possibility of adding a reason, do so. It's a short, sharp sting, and there's no point in elongating it by writing too much, or worse, apologizing. Akshay hadn't actually planned to tell a story at the slam that evening. He was going through a tough time, being battered by a stream of rejections while searching for a new job. And while writing yet another cover letter, saw a call for volunteers for the Moth Story Slam that night. So he signed up.
50:10 Speaker 00 He hadn't told a story onstage since moving to London in 2022, but decided to put his name in the hat. And when he was called, he says the only green thing he could think of was the tag he placed on that folder of rejections, a folder that had doubled in size over the years. The confidence he felt after leaving the stage surprised him. As Akshay puts it, "Turns out, he was the person who needed to hear that story the most that night."
50:37 Speaker 00 That's it for this very green episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We have monthly story slams in 28 cities in the US and beyond. I hope that these stories have inspired you to check out one in your area. You can find out more at themoth.org. Thank you to our storytellers for sharing with us and to you for listening. We hope you'll join us next time.
51:08 Speaker 03 This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Chloe Salmon, who also hosted the show. Co-producer is Vicky Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Sarah Austin Janes, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Kluch, Leanne Gully, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Urenya. Special thanks to the producers of the Slam Cities featured in this episode: Aman Goyal and the wonderful team in Philly, Rhonda Williams in Denver, Chloe Munoz in New York City, and Adam Cohn, Jack Rans, and Charlie Morgan in London, as well as all the rest of our Story Slam producers who tend to the
51:53 Speaker 03 communities that bring us stories from all walks of life. Our pitch came from Jay Bellinger Temple of Philadelphia.
52:03 Speaker 03 Moth Stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Haduk Trio, Caribou, Bitters from Blue Dot Sessions, Charles Bertue, Ry Cooter, and Ronan O'Snodick. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and to learn more about The Moth, go to our website, themoth.org.
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