Women Up: The Moth Podcast

March is women’s history month, and to honor that, we're sharing two stories of women who faced challenges and … woman-ed up. This episode was hosted by Kate Tellers. Storytellers: Alison Stewart gets through a difficult experience, and meets a hot doctor along the way. Tess Birch guides a group of girls through a zoo.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Moth. I'm Kate Tellers. March is Women's History Month, which, in the U.S., honors women's vital contributions to American history, culture, and society. Of course, these contributions are too numerous to be uniquely celebrated in one month, and certainly not on one podcast. So let's take one moment for the U.S. Olympic Women's Hockey Team, shall we? Phenomenal women. And now for two stories of women who faced challenges and womaned up. First, Allison Stewart told this story when she hosted a New York City main stage, where the theme was "Only in New York." Here's Allison, live at The Moth.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  I had a very fancy day planned in New York in February of 2024. I was scheduled to have breakfast with the head of the Brooklyn Museum to discuss their 20th, 200th celebration. It was a great celebration they had planned. I wanted to support it. It was a beautiful buffet, pretty room. There were about six of us seated around the table. The music director, she talked a bunch, and I nodded a lot. I just really didn't feel like saying that much. And I actually, you know, I wanted to talk, but I tried, but I really didn't feel like it. Nothing really came out. It was Thursday, and I had planned a trip to Miami on the weekend, and I still had

• 1:29Speaker 01

  a show to do at WNYC, so I thought, just save my voice. I left the museum, and I realized something was wrong when I texted my friend on February 22nd, 2024, and the text said, "I am having the trouble speaking. I'm trying to text. I having a hard timing. I've had had speaking. I speak, but there's no there there." I went to the office. I tried to write a paragraph, and it took me an hour. Didn't make a lot of sense either. I figured, I'm just fritzing out. I just needed somebody to unplug me and plug me back in. It works with my computer. My coworkers told me, "You should call your doctor."

• 2:12Speaker 01

  So after a brief conversation with my doctor, which ended with a "Go to the emergency room", I did what New Yorkers do. I took the subway. I took the subway to the ER.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  At 2:00 PM, I was in the ER. And after a few quick scans, my doctor said, "I wish I had better news for you, but you have a mass on your brain. We're going to send you to Lenox Hill, and you'll meet a really great surgeon." Mass, my brain. Surgeon, as the person who is going to cut into my brain to look for the mass. They put me in an ambulance, and I'd like to say I was whisked away to Lenox Hill. But I didn't really go anywhere. I noticed we hadn't moved. And I thought, "Oh, my God, I'm dying. I died in an ambulance." But I realized I was in traffic. There was a protest. My hospital... I was stuck in the middle of protests. My hospital stay was eventful,

• 3:11Speaker 01

  all the usual reasons. MRIs, cognitive tests, IV drips. And my surgeon, of all things, he was really, really hot.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  My friends called him Doc Hollywood, McDreamy. I really didn't notice until much, much later. I had a few things on my mind. But he was kind and smart. And I found out later he was from Brooklyn, the son of a single mom, an immigrant mom, played in a punk band before he took a turn into neuroscience, as one does. And you know what? You can see him on your ads, on these ads on the subway for this sort of sleek, fitting, flattering kind of scrubs. They're called Hypothesis. You can see him on the 4 to 6 train. It says, "Father, bass player, neurosurgeon." My speech was very limited, and it didn't matter.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  By Saturday, my voice and my mind were going. By Sunday, things got really bad. My test, I couldn't tell the difference between a clock and a ruler on a cognitive test. They asked me, "Alison, do you know where you are?" And I said, "I'm on the Hill." Doc Hollywood needed to do surgery soon. And it was quite Shakespearean, right? The mass was right on my speech center. And what do I do for a living? I talk on the radio. And he said, "Oh, yeah, I want you to be awake during your surgery, by the way."

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Awake during my brain surgery. I have two words for you about awake during your brain surgery. Cold breeze. That's all I'm gonna say. I was in the hospital about five weeks. I had to learn to walk again, but mostly to talk again. I had to do so much speech therapy. I made up words. I told people I had asbismia. There's nothing asbismia. I meant aphasia. Aphasia is what it is, but mm. And one of my final trips I had to take before I could go home with more therapy was I had to go to a Starbucks and place an order. I looked like I had been in a car accident, but I'm supposed to order a latte to get

• 5:24Speaker 01

  out of the hospital. So I said my order over and over in my head, which didn't help because I have no memory. But I did it. My physical therapist took me to Starbucks. She's like, "You can do it. You can do it." I approached the counter. I was like a gladiator, ready to order. I'm not sure what I ordered, but I got an oat milk blonde espresso with caramel drizzle. I didn't know you had caramel drizzles, but apparently I ordered it. I had to learn to be in New York again, by myself. I had to learn to walk around the corner by myself. I had to learn to avoid protests. This one was labor one, by myself. I had to deal with rudeness. To have problems with people, it takes them a long time to talk. I'm talking to you, the guard at the Met.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  I remember you. And I still get a cold sweat before ordering at Starbucks. And somebody asked me, "Well, why do you do this?" And I said, "Well, I'm a New Yorker."

• 6:28Speaker 00

  That was Allison Stewart. Allison is the host of WNYC's show, All of It, and hosts their book club, Get Lit, with the New York Public Library. She's also a contributor to The Atlantic Live. As they say about New York, if you can make it here, you'll make it anywhere. This is a place where rats steal your pizza. It torrentially rains inside the subway, and the rent, as one poet said, is too damn high. Allison is just one of this city's many inhabitants who shine with the spirit of our beloved Lady Liberty, arm raised triumphantly above all the chaos that swirls around it. And if you happen to be in New York City on March 20th, we've got a very special main

• 7:08Speaker 00

  stage at NYU's Skirball Center, where Allison told her story, and where some incredible people will get up on stage and tell stories that dig deep into the idea of the American Dream. For tickets, go to themoth.org/events. After the break, a story about a woman who struggles with some girls. Back in a moment. Welcome back. Our next story is from Tess Birch, who told this at a Melbourne Story Slam, where the theme was control. Here's Tess, live at The Moth.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  So, when I turned 18, I decided I was gonna become a Brownie leader. And before we go through the next five minutes with you thinking I'm obsessed with baked goods or something, I'm just gonna make it perfectly clear that when I say brownies, I mean Girl Guides, and when I say Girl Guides, I mean the girl version of Boy Scouts, except we're trying to move away from that, because when you define yourself in relation to something else, you're just marketing yourself into an antispace, and no one wants to be in the antispace. So, for the purpose of this story, I run a youth group for children. But I didn't want to be just any old Brownie leader, you know? I had grown up with these amazing women as my Brownie leaders, and I wanted to be the best Brownie leader ever. But there was only one problem with that, which is that I am a good cop. Now, really, there's nothing that bad about being a good cop.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  I mean, the kids like you more, and they were generally really well-behaved kids. But, you know, you'd have the odd occasion where it would be 3 a.m. and you're on camp, and they decide to practice for a fire alarm, and you haven't asked them to. And in those situations, it's kind of good to have someone just to crack the shits and send everybody back to sleep. But luckily, I did brownies with my sister, Emma, and she's taller than me, and she's really scary. Anyway, together, we made a great team. And we decided we were gonna take the brownies to the zoo. And there was a baby hippo at the zoo. And we kind of have this philosophy in Girl Guides of letting the kids lead the activities and we don't tell them what to do. But we were tactical about this and we made a scavenger hunt and all the best animals are worth the most points. So this way we're like, we're guaranteed to see the good animals. So there was too many kids for us to all go away, go around in a group.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  So we split up into smaller groups. And I had my kids and I'm ready to see the baby hippo. And I'm like, right, where are we going? And they say, Australian animals. And I was like, you have got to be kidding me. I was like, if you wanna see a kangaroo, just go drive on a country highway, look out the window. Like, anyway, we go to the Australian animals. It's dead boring. And I'm thinking like, okay, like baby hippo, like baby hippo's coming. Next thing they wanna go to is the bird aviary. And I am shit scared of birds, but you cannot tell that to children. Pro tip, don't tell kids you're terrified of something if they have control over you because they will just drag you to that thing. So we're going through the bird aviaries for what felt like my whole life. And then finally, we stopped because they found a playground that was themed like a sewage system.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And they spent the next hour playing on this giant toilet paper roll and getting wet. Until finally, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation. And I said, girls, if you don't get off that giant roll of toilet paper, I'm calling Emma, my sister. And they all just got off straight away. And so I'm like, right, bad cop time. We're going to see the hippo. And they were like, walking behind me so slow and they were so tired and they were complaining. And I'm like, girls, I'm doing this for you. How many baby hippos do you think you're gonna see in your life? Like, keep walking. And they hated me. And to get to the baby hippo, we had to go through the lemur enclosure. And I don't know if you've been to the zoo recently, but it's like the freaking butterfly house. Like, you have to all be in the one room with the door closed before you can open the other door.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  And it was so busy and the lemurs are like free roaming, so it's just lemurs everywhere. And I'm like dragging these kids through. I'm like, come on, come on. Okay, so we got through the lemur enclosure, rushed past the gorillas. I was like, not today, boys. And then we get to... We get to the baby hippo and it is glorious and I am just loving it like highlight of the day, highlight of my brownie leader career and I decide, okay, I've seen the hippo, probably need to number off and number one is missing, Jamie. The littlest brownie is gone and I, I'm like, okay, it's fine. And the girls are like, oh, I think she's just gone ahead to the spider monkeys so early, just like, you know, kind of briskly walking to the spider monkeys, she's not there. So now I'm kind of flipping out a bit and I think the girls are sensing my panic and

• 11:18Speaker 02

  they're finally behaving, they're not saying anything, they're just quietly like coming behind me and I run up to the zookeeper and I was like, I've lost a little girl, she's six, she's really small, her name's Jamie, she's got a yellow backpack on and check the security cameras and the lady's like, oh, don't worry about it, it happens all the time and she is totally chill but anyway, she kind of shoves us into a little waiting room so that we're not just flipping out in public and ruining people's time at the zoo. And meanwhile, I have to bite the bullet, I have to call my sister and I call, I dial the phone and like, hey Em, like, don't want to panic, it's all fine, but just so you know, I've lost Jamie, okay, bye, hang up before she can get angry. Anyway, we're waiting in this waiting room, the zookeeper said that they've got everybody

• 12:01Speaker 02

  looking and then I get a call from another brownie leader and this is basically confirming the worst news ever, which is that I am the worst brownie leader ever because I left a child in the lemur enclosure. Basically, her sister opened the door and she was there and she was just like, hey and her sister's like, what are you doing here and she goes, lost and she was totally fine, she just stayed there with the lemurs. Anyway, we um, got everyone home, it was all good, good day at the zoo in the end, I saw the baby hippo, we returned with the same number of children that we left with and the next year we decided to go to the zoo again, this time we were smarter, we went to Warrabie Open Range Zoo because I learned that you can, doesn't matter if you're

• 12:44Speaker 02

  a good cop or a bad cop, when all the kids are locked in a bus, you have total control of them. Thank you.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  That was Tess Birch. Tess is a corporate lawyer and stand-up comedian, sometimes simultaneously. Her work takes her around Australia, from outback communities to capital cities, mining towns to music festivals. On these adventures, she loves to soak up the scenery and the stories. Tess is actually still working with the Girl Guides, and since the story took place 10 years ago, some of these girls are now volunteers with her. She said, quote, "It's a huge privilege to be a part of a movement for women and girls that fosters collaboration, confidence, and community. My role now is focused on supporting the adult volunteers, who I tell not to put too much pressure on themselves. I find the adults slightly easier to keep track of, and, so far, I haven't left anyone

• 13:41Speaker 00

  else in the lemur enclosure." If you'd like to see a photo of Tess and her troop before anyone was lost, we'll have that on our website at themoth.org/extras. I have never been a Girl Scout or lost a Girl Scout, but every year, I do my civic duty and relieve the Girl Scouts of so many of their cookies. I support women and emerging women. I hope you do, too. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thanks so much for joining us. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope that you remember to listen to women's stories, no matter what month it is.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Kate Tellers is a storyteller, host, senior director at The Moth, and co-author of their fourth book, How to Tell a Story. Her writing has been featured in Mick Sweeney's and The New Yorker. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Gina Duncan, Christina Norman, Marina Kluchay, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardinalle, Caledonia Cairns, Suzanne Rust, and Patricia Uranya. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey. Special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese Dennis. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.