Pod Insights The Moth The Moth Radio Hour: To Thine Own Self Be True About this episode In this hour, stories about and by people who are unapologetically themselves. Knowing where you belong on the ballfield, writing as the ultimate means of self-expression, and the pub that serves as a home for a band of experimental musicians. This hour is hosted by Jay Allison, producer of this radio show.
In an attempt to put himself out there, Eric Thomas joins a gay softball league.
Renita Walls enters a poetry contest to promote the movie "Soul Plane."
Hayley Dunning decides to confess her feelings to her colleague.
Heidi Stuber is forced to decide between the needs of her husband and the needs of her child.
An extraordinary pub in southern England becomes the crate for Joe Jackson's lifelong dedication to music.
Podcast # 714
Transcript 0:13 Speaker 00 This is The Moth Radio Hour with more true stories told live. I'm Jay Allison. We're taking our theme this time from Act One of Hamlet, where Polonius famously offers his son some advice. "This above all, to thy known self be true." In this hour, five storytellers who stand up for their beliefs and accept themselves as they are. Our first story is from R. Eric Thomas. Eric is one of The Moth's beloved hosts. You may have heard him introducing storytellers at a main stage in Philly or a DC Story Slam. He told this story at a main stage in Seattle, where we partnered with Seattle Arts and Lectures.
0:57 Speaker 00 Here's R. Eric Thomas telling his story on a night when he was the host, live from Benaroya Hall.
1:03 Speaker 01 Tonight's theme is high anxiety, and I was very excited when they asked me to host the show because I have nothing but anxiety stories. And I'm skipping therapy to be here, so we have a lot to talk about. I'm just kidding. But I do want to share just this one, a couple-minute-long story about a time, I guess probably about 10 years ago now. Hmm, no. Yeah, 10 years ago. I'm almost 30 at that point. I know you can't tell. It don't crack, but...
1:44 Speaker 01 So at this point, I'm almost 30. And as you are wont to do, as you get to your late twenties, you start to take stock of where you are in life. Where I was, it was a great place, but I was starting to feel more confident about who I was, and I was starting to ask for what I wanted more. I've always... I've been the kind of person, even when I was little, even when I was like a little kid, where when I would walk down the street, some people would just turn to me, point at me, and say "gay", which is a strange thing when you're like seven years old, and you're like, "I don't know what that word means, but does it mean they like my shorter rolls?" Because, okay.
2:32 Speaker 01 By the time I got to 28, when this story takes place, I was a little tired of it, because I like recognition, don't get me wrong. But I was like, "I don't feel like I should be accepting this in the spirit that it's intended." This isn't an insult, in my opinion, but people were intending it as an insult. And I said to myself, "How do I become the person who is not always pointed at, and people yell 'gay' at him?" And I decided it was a problem with my masculinity, I just wasn't masculine enough. I had to be like more covert about being gay. I could be gay, but just sort of not like "gay",
3:13 Speaker 01 whatever that means.
3:16 Speaker 01 As I said, I was not quite where I needed to be yet as a person, but I was getting there. So I decided to do, I was like, "Well, what would a masculine person do? What would The Rock do? What would Vin Diesel do?" And I decided to do the most masculine thing I could think of. I signed up to join the Gay Softball League in Philadelphia.
3:39 Speaker 01 I was like, "This team is great." I was looking for wrestling, but they didn't have it.
3:46 Speaker 01 I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna be so masculine, I'm gonna go play this game." And then I was like, "I don't know how to play softball." So I Wikipedia'd it.
3:59 Speaker 01 And I found out two things that you throw underhand, and that the balls are bigger. That's what he said.
4:08 Speaker 01 And I was like, "Well, we're all set."
4:14 Speaker 01 I have to say, I was a little nervous about this whole thing. It didn't seem like a great plan, but I didn't have a lot of options. And my roommate was a really big sports fan. He was also a gay guy, but he was like very muscular and he would scream through the house when the Phillies won. And I was like, okay, well, he's a part of the softball league. And he seems to be well-adjusted. So the only difference between me and him are pecs and the softball league. And so I chose the latter. And so I joined, I get assigned to this team. And, you know, they have a little uniform shirt and you could like wear, you know, little baseball pants or whatever. But I brought these like really cute shorts from American Apparel. They were like super adorable. Because my legs are really great.
4:58 Speaker 01 And I showed up to the team and like they were very welcoming and they were very nice to me. And they're like, you know, we did some drills to test everybody's skills. And they're like, we're gonna put you in far right field. But if you, if you like, if you, you know, really put your back into it and you like, you work hard, you can like advance to other positions. And I was like, oh, I don't care about this at all. Far right field seems A-OK to me, Queens. Because I wanted to be, you know, I was like, if I'm on the team, that's masculinity. It's like bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, you know? Or bibbidi-boppy-bro, I should say.
5:43 Speaker 01 Like that's, I didn't know that I was gonna have to like participate in this. And I had a secondary objective, which was just to meet a boyfriend. So I was like, well, far right field seems like a great place to just sort of strut around in my little shorts. And I was very happy out there. Because inside, like the actual playing area, they were very serious about softball. Which was offensive to me. I thought it was gonna be a whole bunch of Queens quoting A League of Their Own.
6:28 Speaker 01 Some of them had never even seen A League of Their Own. I'm going around, there's no crying in baseball. And they're like, this is softball, nobody's crying. And I'm like...
6:45 Speaker 01 I did get to be a little bit concerning as we continued through our season. And we didn't have a great record. And I was not helping anybody. When the ball would come my way, I'd be like, "No, thank you."
7:01 Speaker 01 And I was making plenty of jokes from out there, just sort of yelling into them like, "That's what he said."
7:08 Speaker 01 What I started to realize, I was like, "Maybe I'm too gay for the Gay Softball League."
7:15 Speaker 01 And I was like, "This isn't what you came here to do. You didn't come here to crack jokes and look really good. You came here to be more masculine." And I just like, and so the games started to be like, whereas before, they had been this like source of like joy and flippancy in camp for me. They became this like, this place of huge anxiety. And I like, I tried to get better, but I was not practicing and I don't have any skills. And so I was just bad. Midway through the season, the whole league had to do a skills assessment. And if you got like, you were given a score. And if you got below a seven, you had to go to like a skills day.
7:55 Speaker 01 And the implication was like, if you didn't really get it at the skills day, maybe this wasn't your spiritual journey.
8:03 Speaker 01 I was about to be kicked out of the Gay Softball League.
8:09 Speaker 01 So I was like, "I'm gonna go to this game or whatever, and I'm gonna play or whatever." So, you know, I watched "The League of Their Own", and I was like, "I'm going to channel Gina Davis. We are the ladies of the all-American league. We're from cities near and far."
8:33 Speaker 01 I'm gonna show up. I got my glove unused.
8:40 Speaker 01 Got my little shorts. They're doing a batting drill, or clinic, when I get there. And there's a woman behind home plate, and she's coaching you through. And so, I'm watching people, they're like hitting or not hitting. And then it's my turn, and I'm like, "Okay, let's do this. You're the man, man, you're the man. You can hit this underhanded, large-balled softball." And so, the ball comes to me. It's a good pitch, I guess, I don't know.
9:14 Speaker 01 And I swing hard, and I miss hard. I miss so hard that my foot pops up, like when they kiss in the movies.
9:28 Speaker 01 And the coach, this beautiful soul, turns to me, and she said, "Okay, that was a fine attempt, but it was a little gay."
9:47 Speaker 01 Maybe you want to think about butching it up a little bit.
9:52 Speaker 01 And for all the times that strangers with amazing gaydar have turned to me on the street and yelled "gay," it never landed like that. When this lesbian woman turned to me and told me that my swing was too gay, I realized that I was on the inside of something, and that she could say it, and I could say it, and it didn't have to be an insult that I threw back at myself, because that's what I was doing. This performance was really just me working off all the nervous energy, all the anxiety that I had about being perceived as not enough, as not masculine enough, as not good enough at this game. If she was gay, and I was gay, and my swing was gay, we were all gay.
10:28 Speaker 01 That was the point of this whole thing. And so, all I had to do was hit a damn ball. So, she was like, "Here's what you gotta do. You gotta stick your butt out, and you gotta wait a little bit longer before you hit it." And I was like, "That's what he said."
10:55 Speaker 01 Encouragable. Well, I did what she said. I cracked fewer jokes. And the pitch came, I swung, and I hit it. And it went sailing out over the field. Thank you.
11:12 Speaker 01 I hit one ball, please. I will sign autographs afterwards.
11:18 Speaker 01 I thought everything was going to change for me after that. I thought I'd be good. I watched Angels in the Field. I was like, well, you know, the kid knows how to play baseball at the end of the movie. So that's me or whatever. I'm the natural. Whatever happens in that movie, I don't know.
11:34 Speaker 01 But the fact of the matter is, I had not come to this game with the right intentions. And I had not come to this game being true about myself or my intentions. And so when the season was over, I quit the team. The next year, I went back as a cheerleader.
12:02 Speaker 01 And I found a boyfriend. So that's all I really needed to do.
12:13 Speaker 00 R. Eric Thomas is a writer based in Baltimore. In 2020, he released his bestselling humorous memoir, Here for It: Or How to Save Your Soul in America, which includes a chapter on more of his exploits on the softball team. After his attempt at softball, Eric says, "I did not learn my lesson vis-à-vis my own sports abilities. I enthusiastically joined a gay kickball league last winter. Unfortunately, the pandemic forced the league to cancel before we could play, but I look forward to failing upwards, once it's safe again, to do so."
13:01 Speaker 00 Next up, storytellers from our open-mic story slams tell us about standing up for themselves at work, in their relationships, and in their poetry, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
13:19 Speaker 00 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
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15:14 Speaker 00 This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison. The next three stories come from our Story Slams, which are open-mic storytelling competitions that we hold in cities around the US and even across the globe. At Moth Story Slams, anyone can throw their name into an actual hat to tell a tale. That means you can go from the audience to the stage if the theme of the night fits some story-worthy event in your life, or you might learn the surprising backstory of the stranger sitting right next to you when their name is drawn. Slams are fun. So, next up, three slammers from cities around the world sharing stories of doing what they know is right, even when it's not that easy. First, Renita Walls.
15:59 Speaker 00 She told this story at an Atlanta Slam where we are presented by Georgia Public Broadcasting. Here's Renita, live at The Moth.
16:10 Speaker 04 So, when I was like way younger and way more open with my art, I was a slam poet. You know, I was allowing people to critique my art. And so, I was probably about 24 or so, and I decided to enter this slam. So, if you don't know what a slam poetry thing is, you perform a poem, you get some prize. So, this prize was for $500, and then it went on to like $2,500 because it was a promotional thing for this movie, Soul Plane. Have y'all seen this movie? Okay, so, if you have not seen this movie, imagine every stereotypical thing you have ever heard or seen or said or thought about a black person and put it together and thinking about it for like an hour and a half, and that's the whole movie. So, I'm like, okay.
16:55 Speaker 04 So, the thing was, the thing was to write a poem about soul, right? Okay, so, Atlanta is really known for poetry. If you don't know that, Atlanta is big on the scene, so I'm sure the promoters were thinking, "Atlanta's gonna have some hot-ass poems. This is gonna be fantastic," right? So, I joined the slam, and it's some big hitters. And I'm like really young in the game, I'm like so nervous, but I make it through to the finals. Okay, here we go. It's going well. Night before the slam, sitting at home, I'm looking at the promo for the movie. I'm like, this is some bullshit.
17:33 Speaker 04 Like, am I really about to write a poem or listen to people do poems about soul and their spirit and black history? For this shit? No, I can't do it. So my friend calls me, he's like, "Yeah, Nita, you getting ready for the slam?" I said, "I'm about to rewrite my poem." He said, "Hold on, the poem slam is tomorrow. That is a bad idea." "No, it's not a bad idea. I'm gonna rewrite the poem and I'm gonna do a anti Soul Plane poem tomorrow." He's like, "This is a bad idea, Nita." "Okay, bye," hang up the phone. Write the poem, memorize the poem, do the poem all night, don't sleep, go to work, do the poem all day, in the bathroom, in the mirror.
18:17 Speaker 04 I'm doing the poem all the way there. I get there, I feel like I'm going to pass out. I'm so nervous. So a friend of mine sees me, she's like, "Yeah, you got your poem ready?" I'm like, "Yep, I wrote it yesterday." She said, "What? This is gonna be bad. Let me hear it." Did it for her, she said, "Let's run it." "Okay, let's do it." I said, "Okay." So now I'm feeling a little hyped up. I stand up there. All my friends go, they are great, everything is going well. It's my turn. I'm like, "Oh, this is gonna be bad." But I'm gonna do it, because I embroidered it. I will stand on my moral high horse. I will not let this damn slam go awry. I'm here to represent the black people.
18:57 Speaker 04 So I get up there, and the first line is, "It's clear there is no soul in Soul Plane. Only Soul Souls for very low payment." And I look, and I see my friend who is the promoter's face, and it just says, "Oh, shit."
19:16 Speaker 04 And I don't let that stop me. I just keep running head on. Like, I'm gonna say what I gotta say. We've been bamboozled. Let us stray. Run amok. I really actually said these things. I was quoting Malcolm X. I was on the high horse. The biggest soapbox you have ever seen. I was on it. And everybody started cheering. It was like I was representing the people. Everybody felt this way, but nobody said it. They were all thinking about this $500. I put people's names in the poem that were in the slam. It was so relevant. People were losing it. Everybody's on top of their chairs. And I got hyped. I felt like a poetry rock star. I wanted to crowd surf. And I'm like, it's like 50 people in here. So that's gonna be an epic fail.
20:01 Speaker 04 Don't do it, they're crazy. So I just did my poem. Everything was great. I got off the stage. Everybody shaking my hand. People are like, I don't even wanna go up next behind her. People on this stage right now, I won't mention no names, but they did not want to go up behind me. Because it was so epic. It was fantastic. Until they sent the footage to LA. And they saw nothing but my angry black ass going off about this movie. And they were like, we are not cutting the check. And I'm like, are you serious? So my friend who was the promoter was like, look, she might can't go on for the big prize. I get it. You don't want her representing the movie. But she didn't break the rules. She wrote a poem about soul.
20:46 Speaker 04 About how she won't sell her soul for this trash movie. And you gotta pay her. And they felt bamboozled. Let us stray. Run amok, but the check clear.
21:05 Speaker 00 Renita Walls is a poet, storyteller, and nurse, originally from Baltimore, Maryland. She tells us she enjoys sharing her truth through performance art. Renita said her poem was not aired at the movie opening, which she, quote, "can understand."
21:35 Speaker 00 Our next story is from Hayley Dunning, who told it at a story slam at Rich Mix in London. Here's Hayley.
21:47 Speaker 05 Hello, so I had been single for four years when Andrew joined our office. I checked out all the new guys who joined the department naturally, but it was slim pickings. And I would say he was slim pickings. He was kind of scrawny, a bit skinny, and not that much taller than me. So not my normal type, because they make me feel a little bit indelicate. But his soft Scottish accent and twinkling blue eyes were enough to draw me in. So we bonded over a love of writing. We used to send each other haikus that we'd written every day. Sometimes they were, you know, serious and beautiful. Sometimes they were silly and throwaway. We had a lot of conversations that I might have considered flirting, even though they were mostly about grammar.
22:32 Speaker 05 I fell in love with him, though, when we went to interview someone together for a video. He'd printed out the questions that we'd prepared on an A4 sheet of paper and folded it in such a way so that when I turned it to ask the next set of questions, you couldn't hear any rustling from the paper that was picked up by the microphone near my chest. And it was so efficient and had so much forethought.
22:53 Speaker 05 That's what really gets me going.
22:56 Speaker 05 So, yes, so Andrew was perfect. That is, except for the wedding ring. He was always turning on his finger. So one day, we had an assignment that took us across the park together. And we talked about how difficult it would be to have a partner who was better at our own game than us, how the pressures of having children on our generation was misguided, about mortgages. And as casually as I could, I asked him, "What does your other half do?" And he said, "Oh, he's a UX designer."
23:24 Speaker 05 So I was really glad that he wasn't looking me in that moment because I swear if he'd looked in my eyes, he would have seen that little bit of my heartbreak. The very next day, we were in a meeting and he noticed that my eyes are different colours. And they're not, not quite, so they're both blue, but one of them has a big brown splodge in it that makes it look that way. But I had waited forever for a man to look close enough to notice. And so it hurt, but obviously I realised that my feelings had to change. I wanted us to still be friends, um, and I wanted, and this stupid fantasy of mine would get in the way of that. And obviously I wanted to find my own love. But still, I thought he was magnificent and I wondered if perhaps he should know that. Not long after that, one of my cats died. Um, he was a little kitten that I'd had since he was a kitten and he'd grown into this
24:07 Speaker 05 big, soft cat who was warm and soft and he'd been comfort itself to me. And then he and comfort were gone. And I said to Andrew, I felt like I'd lost some of the love in my life, some that I'd given and some that I'd received. He said that it was still there, even though I couldn't feel it. And I thought, everyone should know when they're loved. It should be a compliment. I wanted to tell him, but I didn't know how. At that time, I was doing a short story writing class. We had this assignment to write a story that was like a physical and an emotional journey. Uh, so I wrote a version of this story. I wrote kind of mine and Andrew's story, set against a physical journey where I was going to an office Christmas party and he would be there. The idea in the story is that I would tell him.
24:51 Speaker 05 But I get there and he's outside the pub and I go to tell him, but we're interrupted by a colleague and the moment is gone. And that's where that story ended. And my teacher loved it and my, you know, the other students loved it and that was great, but I still hadn't told him. And then, so New Year's Day came around and I was like, I've got to start this year off right. And so I decided to send him the story I'd written in the short story class. I sent it as a word doc attachment over WhatsApp so I could see those two blue ticks when he'd read it. So we read it and I waited and then little dots to show that he was typing. And finally he said, "I love you too buddy" and that was enough. Thank you. [applause]
25:38 Speaker 00 That was Haley Dunning. Haley is a science writer, covering cutting-edge research into everything from artificial cells to black holes. She's currently editing her first sci-fi novel. She lives in London with two cats and zero humans. She and Andrew are still colleagues and close friends. Haley says they have helped each other through the process of writing their first novels.
26:15 Speaker 00 The last of these three slam stories comes from Heidi Stuber. She told this at a Grand Slam, the ultimate storytelling showdown, in which the winners of 10 story slams compete for the title of storytelling champion. Here from Town Hall in Seattle, where we partner with public radio station KUOW, Heidi Stuber.
26:38 Speaker 06 So, it had just been a week since my son got out of the hospital when my husband moved out. My son was only eight years old, and he'd been recently diagnosed with autism, and he had to go to the hospital because of some pretty challenging behaviors related to his disability. And my husband was actually my second husband, so my son's stepdad. And he'd been a really good stepdad. He taught my son to read, and he taught my son to ride a bike, and he really loved him, and he was all in. On the day of our wedding, he put a medallion around my son's neck, and he promised to love him like his own son. But something about the hospital just broke him, and he bailed.
27:23 Speaker 06 He moved out when we weren't even there, and he didn't tell us where he was, and I was only allowed to call him one time a week for 20 minutes. And for months, we lived like this. And my son was a mess because he just got out of the hospital and the special ed nanny had quit. And I had this new job at a startup that I knew I couldn't keep if this man didn't stay in my life. And for the entire time he was gone, I just kept telling him, "No matter what you need, I'll do it. I am all in. I love you so much. I am here to give you whatever you need." And so after a couple of months, he asked to sit down and have lunch.
28:05 Speaker 06 He said, "I'm finally ready to share with you what I need." And I was so excited because I knew I was ready to give it. And so when I showed up at this really mediocre Mexican restaurant and sat down with him, he slid this piece of paper across the table at me. And in big letters at the top, it was like, "Husbands Needs."
28:31 Speaker 06 He has a name, I'm just not going to use it.
28:36 Speaker 06 And underneath that, he had listed out very clearly all the most difficult symptoms of my son's disability. And next to each one, he said, "I will no longer tolerate this in my home."
28:56 Speaker 06 And I looked at this list and I said, "This is impossible. How could you ever expect this? No eight-year-old can agree to never have a behavioral challenge, let alone a disabled one who just got out of the hospital." And he said, "I don't know if it's possible or not, but it's just what I need." And I said, "What are you possibly expecting from me? Like, what do you want? Do you want me to like, send him away?" And he sort of perked up.
29:28 Speaker 06 And he said, "Well, if that's what it takes." And I said, "Where do you think he's gonna go?" And he said, "That's not my problem."
29:40 Speaker 06 And then, he said the most incredible thing. He said, "I love you so much. And I love your son, and I miss you, and I want to come home and be a family again."
29:57 Speaker 06 And in that moment, it wasn't so much a decision as this chasm opened inside my chest. And on one side was this dream of a life we were gonna have together as a blended family. And on the other side was the life I was now gonna lead. And I pushed the paper back across the table and I said, "You promised me you would never make me choose." And I got up and I left the restaurant. And he wrote up the divorce paperwork that night. And I'd love to tell you that like, things got better. Like, I got rid of that loser. But the truth is, everything got worse.
30:42 Speaker 06 The divorce was nasty. And he was nasty. And he got the house. And he never even said goodbye to my son, who he had been raising half his life with me. And I was so mad for so long. I mean, I was furious. And all these people, like, I go to yoga and I try to be spiritual. And they're like, "Oh, you need to forgive him." You know, "It's not for him, it's for you." And I was like, "Fuck if I forgive that guy." And it's been years now. And if I haven't found
31:27 Speaker 06 my way to forgiveness, I've found my way to some sort of peace. Because I have had to go to the mat for my son again and again and again. And the gift that man gave me is there was never gonna be a cost worse than the one I had already paid. Which means there was never gonna be a barrier to advocating for him that I couldn't do. And that day in the Mexican restaurant, when I made that decision that was not a decision, what I realized was, my son, who is a beautiful and bright
32:11 Speaker 06 and curious, delightful soul, he deserves nothing less than complete belief in him and unwavering support.
32:24 Speaker 06 And anything less than that will no longer be tolerated in my home. Thank you.
32:37 Speaker 00 Heidi Stuber is a writer and businesswoman who lives with her redheaded son in Seattle. When her son was four, a pediatrician predicted he would end up in jail. She spent 12 years proving that man wrong. She's currently working on her first book, When Your Heart Won't Budge.
32:58 Speaker 00 Heidi says that after three stays at Seattle Children's Hospital from the ages of eight to nine, her son hasn't had to be admitted again in six years. To see a photo of Heidi at the story slam that she won, which qualified her for this grand slam, go to our website, themoth.org.
33:22 Speaker 00 If any of these stories have inspired you to tell your own, check out Slams Near You at our website.
33:31 Speaker 00 After the break, the origin story of a famous musician in an unlikely place.
33:40 Speaker 00 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
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34:33 Speaker 00 From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places. Today's episode is brought to you by Vinted. We've all got that designated chair or corner in the bedroom piled high with clothes we keep telling ourselves we'll definitely wear, but never actually do. My pile has reached critical mass, and it's past time for decisive action. Declutter or bust? Thankfully, I just learned about Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app that makes it easy to give your pre-loved fashion a second life and earn some extra cash in the process. Snapping photos and listing my pieces on Vinted can fit right into my afternoon routine without any hassle. The whole process is simple.
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35:55 Speaker 00 This song may sound familiar to a fair chunk of our listeners. It's by Joe Jackson, who is also our last storyteller in this hour. He told this story for us two decades ago. Here's Joe Jackson, live at the Players Club in New York City.
36:18 Speaker 00 Hello.
36:21 Speaker 00 My story this evening is about The Admiral Drake, which is not a person but a pub in my hometown, which is Portsmouth, which is a rather rough naval port town on the south coast of England. And this was the scene of one of my early musical triumphs when I was 17. But just to, before we get to The Admiral Drake, just to give you a little bit of context, I did my very first gig when I was only 16. And this was also playing piano in a pub. It's always a pub. But it was a great success, and it was almost too easy as it happened. And this sort of went to my head a bit, and I was rather pleased with myself. And I thought that I was launched on a glittering career as a gigging musician. It didn't work out quite like that, because the next few gigs I did were pretty disastrous.
37:05 Speaker 00 I'll give you an example. I was recruited by two much older guys. I was seventeen by now. A bass player and a drummer who wanted to form a jazz trio. And after a couple of rehearsals, the drummer announced that he got us a gig at the Portsmouth Irish Club. What?
37:26 Speaker 00 And I said, "The Irish Club? We're a bloody jazz trio. What are we doing at the Irish Club?" He said, "No, no, no, don't worry. It's not... They use it for all kinds of music and all kinds of people go there. It'll be fine." Well, we showed up at the Irish Club and the drummer was quite right about one thing. The audience was not Irish at all. It consisted of about a hundred skinheads. Now, skinheads in Portsmouth at this time were not really known for their appreciation of acoustic jazz trios.
37:57 Speaker 00 For a while, they just stood and kind of stared blankly at us and then they started to throw things. Nothing too dangerous. The purpose was really humiliation, so they threw pennies, you know. Peanuts.
38:12 Speaker 00 Faggins, or cigarette butts to your Americans. Fag packets, more pennies, you know. And after a while, of course, we were duly humiliated and scared shirtless. So what this did is it inspired in me a sort of defiant determination. I thought, "God, you know, there's got to be one decent gig in this godforsaken town." And I started to do a strange sort of pub crawl, where I walked into just about every pub in town just to see if they had a piano and usually walked straight out again. But I eventually found myself in the Admiral Drake, which was a shabby pub. And the landlord, his name was Charlie, was from Birmingham. I don't know if you know what a Birmingham accent sounds like,
38:53 Speaker 00 but a Birmingham accent, it's sort of rather nasal and, you know, one of the most unpleasant accents in the UK, sort of like that. So this is how Charlie talked. And he said, "Not only did he have a piano, he had a 1902 Beckstein." So I tried the piano and it actually was a bit beat up, but it wasn't bad. It was playable. And Charlie was interested in having some live music in his pub a couple of nights a week. So I said, "Great, great. Can I bring some mates in as guest musicians?" And he said, "Well, I can't pay you anymore." I said, "Well, that's all right." Slipping into my seventeen-year-old self there. "That's all right."
39:35 Speaker 00 Cheerful naivety. "That's alright, just pay us as much as you can and we'll split it between us." To which Charlie replied, "Well, in that case, you can bring the fucking London Philharmonic for all I care." Well, I immediately called my friend Martin, Martin Keel, who was one of the first musicians I ever worked with. He was a saxophone player. But to call him that doesn't do him justice because he played every wind instrument you could imagine. He had a huge array of instruments, anything you could blow, you know, Martin could play. And not content with this, he would try to invent new instruments by taking them apart and sticking bits of different instruments together. He was a sort of musical Frankenstein. I always found this vaguely disturbing, I wasn't quite sure why.
40:18 Speaker 00 But he invented things like the clarion saxotromophone and these things that just sounded absolutely bizarre. Anyway, I called him and he said, "Yeah, great, Admiral Drake, let's go." And he called his friend Phil the Mouse Mousley, who played drums, and that was the band. And we soon rehearsed a very large and eclectic repertoire that was everything from jazz standards to Beatles songs to these sort of dreadful old sing-along pub songs that they have in England, you know.
40:49 Speaker 00 "I'm beneath the arches, I dream my dreams away." You know, these dreadful old songs. However, right from the moment we first started playing, we were a hit. And the main reason for this is that the Admiral Drake, as it turned out, was the watering hole of a team of local marines. They were the Royal Marines Field Gun Crew. And these guys were tough. I mean, they were like made of iron, you know, they were bullet-headed, tattoos all over them. One of them, I'll never forget, had his name, which was Jock, tattooed across his throat.
41:26 Speaker 00 These guys made the skinheads at the Irish Club look like nuns, you know what I mean? Anyway, they liked us. So, you know, we were golden. The Marines liked us. They sang along, they bought us drinks, they steered dangerous drunks away from us. And it was just fantastic. We realised after a short while that we could do anything we liked, and no matter how silly it was, it was fine with them, you know. Martin used to play wearing an 18th century naval officer's coat with a dummy parrot stuck to the shoulder. And meanwhile, there was a real parrot. The pub had a resident parrot behind the bar. And the only thing it could say was "You bloody bastard."
42:10 Speaker 00 It was more like "You bloody bastard, you bloody bastard." Over and over again.
42:16 Speaker 00 And, you know, so things just got sillier and sillier. Martin's Frankenstein tendencies came out. He played things like a teapot with a trumpet mouthpiece attached to it. And some of the other characters that the Admiral Drake included, the landlady was a great character. And I think largely because of her, the place always seemed to have a sort of vaguely seedy, red light, kind of bordello feel to it. For instance, in the ladies' room, there was a poster on the wall, a sort of kitsch poster, of Adam in the Garden of Eden, wearing just a fig leaf. And the fig leaf was actually a little flap that was, of course, crying out to be lifted up. And when it was lifted up, there was a tiny notice underneath it that said, "A bell has just rung in the bar."
43:03 Speaker 00 Which in fact it had.
43:06 Speaker 00 And locals would line up outside the ladies' room and jeer at whoever came out.
43:14 Speaker 00 This was considered great sport.
43:18 Speaker 00 Anyway, things got sillier and sillier. And one particular night that I remember vividly, and one of the reasons I remember it so well is because my brother was there. And he was only fifteen at the time, and not yet the connoisseur of pubs that he would later become. But he ventured into the Admiral Drake, and we both vividly remember, we were requested to play the stripper. So Phil the Mouse started a boom, boom, boom, boom on the tom-toms, and we went into the stripper. And one of the Royal Marines field gun crew got up onto a table behind me and proceeded to strip. And I couldn't really see what was going on, but there were more and more choruses were demanded, and the noise grew and grew to like hysteria practically, until I looked around,
44:00 Speaker 00 and I saw a pair of naked hairy Royal Marine buttocks just a few inches from my face. This was followed by a deafening roar of approval, which was then followed by a deafening crash as the table collapsed. And just mayhem, bodies piling on top of each other, beer spraying everywhere, and the Marines mate struggling to get to his clothes before he could, so they could hide them. And then the bell was rung, "Time, gentlemen, please", and the evening ended with a rousing chorus of, "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when". My brother came up to me, looking slightly shaken and white, and said, "Is it always like this?"
44:46 Speaker 00 And I know that, I don't remember exactly how it came to an end, but I know it sort of soured in various small ways. For instance, the crowd sometimes was so noisy that we could barely hear ourselves. I mean, we didn't have any amplification. And I was pounding the piano so hard. At one point, I looked up and I actually saw a hammer come flying out of the top of the piano, something I would not have thought possible. At the end of the evening, I said to Charlie, "Look, you know, maybe the time has come to invest in a new instrument". Well, this was the wrong thing to say. I mean, Charlie was mortally offended by this. "That piano", he said, "is a 1902 Bixstein". And I said, "Yeah, I know, but, you know, it was a good piano once, but now it's just knackered".
45:30 Speaker 00 And he said, "Well, if you was born in 1902, you'd be bloody knackered too", and he stormed off. Anyway, things went downhill for one reason or another. And we eventually lost the gig, but not before I realised that it was possible to actually have fun playing music. The Admiral Drake has a special place in my heart because it was then that I realised that I didn't really want to do anything else other than make music. And it's still there, by the way, the Admiral Drake is still there. It's still a dump. But if you ever go to Portsmouth, there's just a little, brief postscript to this story, which is that after we stopped playing there, my brother ventured into the pub again. And he didn't know, I hadn't told him that we weren't playing there anymore.
46:14 Speaker 00 And the Marines grabbed him and said, "Oi, where's your brother?" And of course, he said, "Well, I don't know." And they said, "Well, never mind, you can play." And he said, "No, I can't." And they dragged him to the piano. And he was forced to play about a dozen choruses of the only tune he knew, for which he was rewarded with loud applause and free drinks for the rest of the evening. So that's my story. Thanks for having me. Cheers.
46:51 Speaker 00 That was Joe Jackson, and this is one of his most popular songs.
47:20 Speaker 00 Joe grew up in Portsmouth, England, where he played his first gigs to drunken sailors and skinheads before studying at the Royal Academy of Music. 2019 saw the release of his album Fool and a successful six-month tour, and his eclectic career is very much ongoing while his pop hits from the 80s endure.
47:50 Speaker 00 Do you have a story to tell us? You can pitch it to us right on our site, or you can call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684. The best pitches are developed for Moth shows all around the world. Again, you can pitch us at themoth.org.
48:12 Speaker 04 Growing up, my mother was an accountant. She worked for a big law firm in Providence, Rhode Island. My older brother went off to college, became a sound engineer, and my father designed nuclear submarines for the Navy. So naturally, I went off to college. It was the family way. Very quickly, I realized school was not for me, but I needed a backup plan. Can't just tell Dad you're quitting school. So I had one. Came back and said, Dad, I figured out what I want to do with my life. He said, Oh, that's great, because we're spending all this money. And I said, Hold on. Have a seat. I've decided that I want to be a professional magician. What do you think? And he said, Ha ha, oh, you're serious? No, Tim, see, that was fine as a hobby when you were 10, but this is the real world.
48:56 Speaker 04 You're going to have bills that you're going to have to pay. And he brought me over to the kitchen table, where all the bills were spread out, and he grabbed his calculator, and Mr. Science Logic Man tried to logic my dream out of me. He calculated right then and there it was going to cost me $800 a month to live at his house. So, New Policy Institute, $800 a month in rent. Do you think I went back to school? The answer is no. I looked at those numbers and said, This is going to be hard. I'm going to have to work hard and make it happen. Ultimately, I did. And the two moments that I realized that I was a success wasn't the touring the United States or doing 350 shows per year. It was the fact, there was one internal and one external.
49:40 Speaker 04 The internal one was when I looked at my taxes one year, and I'm like, Oh, my God, I made more money than my dad did. Basically, a nuclear physicist than I did as a magician. And the second moment was when my dad came to look at my first place, when I first moved out into my own. And he looked around and handed me an envelope. And inside the envelope was all the rent money that I had ever paid to him in cash. He knew all along what he was going to do with it. And it was a father saying to his son, I'm proud of you. You did it.
50:09 Speaker 00 A few years ago, my sister asked me to enter a popular TV family quiz show. I was a bit reluctant to do it because it's pretty uncool. But, um, I am a single mum, so I had just that week told my daughter that if she practised swimming really hard and swam to the other side of the pool, that I would take her snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef. And incredibly, she did it, so I thought, oh, I need to get some money. So I said to my sister that I would go on the TV show only if we won. So I had a really bad attitude about it, and I told my family that I would answer sausages to every question. So we got through the audition process, and the day came to film the show.
50:53 Speaker 00 So when it was my turn to go up to meet the host in the middle and a member from the other family, the question was, what is the top food that people eat when they go camping? Anyway, the woman from the other family hit the buzz at first, and she answered baked beans. And when it came to me, I said sausages, and we won $10,000, and I was able to take my daughter swimming on the Great Barrier Reef.
51:26 Speaker 00 Remember, you can pitch us at 877 799 MOTH, or online at themoth.org. You can share these stories, or others, from the Moth archive, or buy tickets to Moth storytelling events, all through our website. We have Moth events year round. You can find a show near you and come out and tell a story. You can also find us on social media. We're on Facebook and Twitter @TheMoth.
51:59 Speaker 00 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.
52:24 Speaker 00 This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was hosted by me, Jay Allison. I also produced the show along with Catherine Burns and Meg Bowles, co-producer Vicky Merrick and associate producer Emily Couch. Story direction by Leah Tao with additional Grand Slam coaching by Chloe Salmon. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Kluch, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Caza. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our pitches came from Tim David and Linda Kent. Our theme music
53:04 Speaker 00 is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Lionel Hampton, RJ D2, Oscar Schuster, Bruce Coburn, and Joe Jackson. The hour was supported with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
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