The Moth Radio Hour: How You See Me

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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Jay Allison and in this show, we're hearing about the way we see ourselves versus the way others see us.

Spoiler alert, they aren't always the same.

Our first story comes from Enrique Garcia Naranjo who told this live on stage at the Mesa Arts Center in Arizona.

Here's Enrique.

So I'm getting ready for this poetry performance in front of 60 to 70 high school students in Douglas, Arizona, a town that sits about five minutes away from the U.S.-Mexico border.

And I'm getting to read this poem I wrote about my barrio, the barrio I lived in for the majority of my teenage years.

And as I'm getting ready for this poem, I look into the crowd and I see all the sleepy and uninterested faces.

And quickly I went them over with this poem I wrote about the holiness of tacos and the unrelenting spirit of Mexican grandmothers.

And right after that poem, I asked them to pull out pencils and paper for them to write.

I give them a prompt, one of my favorite prompts when I'm doing this sort of thing.

the city within my chest.

And after that, I leave the school with my partner Selena, who drove up there with me, and I'm reflecting on the students and their poems, specifically on the way they wrote these poems, right?

Bilingually, in English and Spanish, a real reflection of who they are as people, people between cultures, between languages.

Frontericas y fronterisos, people of the border.

And as I'm on our way back to Tucson, and the entire workshop is still fresh in my mind, We're passing Tucson, Arizona, where a border patrol checkpoint sits.

And if you've been there, you know that there's quite a few border patrol checkpoints.

And as we're passing it, I notice that it's closed, which is a rare sight.

So I try to make sure that I'm not, you know, seeing an illusion.

And as I'm doing that, I look in the rear view and I see a car catching up to us, speeding up.

And as I'm trying to do all these things at the same time,

and peering into the rear view and seeing who might be following us,

I see the flash of red and white and blue lights.

And at first, I think it's a cop.

But as we park and I see the officer step out of the vehicle, I see the green of their uniform.

And I realize it's Border Patrol.

My shoulders tense

and my heart drops.

And instantly in my head, I run the instructions my dad gave me when I was younger.

If I'm ever apprehended by Migra,

do these three things.

Sit

look the officer in the eye, answer all the questions.

In third grade, there was a white boy who stood up in class and started yelling, I'm going to call Border Patrol and deport all the Mexicans in school.

And I remember running as fast as my brown feet would allow with tears in my eyes, hoping I got home

to make sure that my parents were still there.

Because I lived in that reality, right?

I was born on this side, the American side, which makes me a citizen, but the majority of my family are undocumented.

We're a mixed-status family.

So I grew up with their stories of crossing the border, of what Border Britchell does to people who look like me.

And it was terrifying, right?

We lived in the shadows, and then the shadows silence the survival.

So all this is running in my head, and I see the officer walking towards us, and I realize, yeah, I am a citizen, but Selena, my partner, is undocumented.

And although she has DACA, deferred action for childhood arrivals,

and technically, you know, we got documentation that allows us and permits us to be here legally.

Documents fall flat in situations like this.

Documents don't change the color of our skin.

So the officer shows up to the window.

I put the window down.

to engage with the officer and I notice his gun.

And I

immediately think

about Jose Antonio Alena, a 16-year-old Mexican killed by Border Patrol in Nogales for holding rocks in his hand.

I'm stunned in that fear

and that dispowerment of not knowing how the situation would end up.

So the officer begins, you know, the interaction, asking us what our business is in Tombstone, where we're coming from, where we're going,

and asks Selena where she's from.

Selena says, Oakland.

Oakland?

Oh, man.

Are you going to stab me?

And we're both kind of like, what the hell?

And Selena says, no, thankfully.

Seleni proceeds to ask if he could go to the trunk to check if we had a dead body in the back.

Again, chuckling, and again, us being like,

what's going on?

What the hell?

So I'm like, all right, man.

I open up the trunk.

He goes back to review it.

And I realize he's making jokes.

He's making this

a light-hearted situation.

And for him,

that's the reality.

But for us, At any moment we trip up, at any moment we give him more suspicion, right?

Because we're already suspicious being brown,

three things can happen in that situation.

Detention, deportation, death.

I know the stories, I've heard them.

It's not unheard of for brown folks to go to those things.

Citizen or undocumented.

So he comes back to the window, Selena's passenger side.

and says, well,

you two look like you could be American citizens.

Have a pleasant day.

And he lets us go.

And as we're driving off,

Selena is boiling in her seat, breaking down every instance of that situation, running it by me.

And I'm quiet.

I'm running that sentence over and over and over in my head.

You two look like you could be citizens.

But what good does that do me?

How can I look like a citizen if I was stopped precisely for the reason of how I look like, right?

And it always comes to this, for a fronteriso or a fronterisa.

Always on the brink of being,

always having to prove that we're something.

And I think of that old Mexican saying, nidaqui, nida ya,

not from here, not from there.

and this flux and this brink that we exist in.

And I think about the students in Douglas.

I think about their poems and

their bravery to write their narrative and the way they speak.

And I think about my parents, I think about Selena, I think about myself.

And I realize how we, as fronterisos y fronterizas, are caught in this flux between citizen and alien, between silence and disruption, between here and there.

All told, the situation with the officer lasted about 10 minutes and never escalated far beyond the awkwardness and the microaggressions.

And through it all, Selena and I were happy that we still had our lives, right?

The thing we could have lost at that moment, if anything.

And we were happy for the most part

that we were still free.

Enrique Garcia Naranjo is an artist and culture worker based in Tucson, Arizona.

Garcia Naranjo's art and organizing centers on music and literature as tools for liberation and empowerment for marginalized young people.

Enrique says, I was able to leave that situation and continue living my life.

A lot of folks are not granted that privilege.

We'll be back in a moment with three slam stories about how we are seen by others when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and it's presented by PRX.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Jay Allison, and in this hour, we are hearing stories about how we see ourselves versus how others see us.

The next three stories come from our open mic story slam series around the country, where anyone in the audience can literally throw their name in a hat for the chance to get on stage and tell a story.

Slams give everyone a chance, first-timers and season tellers alike, and also let the audience connect with strangers who take the stage, people who may have been sitting right next to them for the whole show.

Our first slammer is Adria Walden, who told this story in Los Angeles, where we partner with public radio station KCRW.

Here's Adria live at the Moth.

So it's the fourth grade, and I am super in love with Spencer Williams.

He sits next to me in homeroom and he's so cute and he's got this like messy red hair and these blue eyes and those like mask of freckles across his nose and we spend the whole first half of the year getting in trouble all the time because we can't stop talking to each other during class.

So for the second half of the year, we start passing notes in class so we don't get caught, which is amazing because Spencer's never passed notes in class before, which means I'm changing him just like a good girlfriend should.

And this one time we were on a field trip and I fell down and he reached down to help me up and and when he gave me his hand, he didn't let go right away.

And in fourth grade, that's kind of basically like over-the-closed second base.

It was very exciting.

And the school we go to is one of these like experimental, like magnets, models where, you know, we can call our teachers by their first names and we have classes like outdoors or in graveyards.

And

in addition to like math and English, we have classes like enrichment and future thinking.

And we both go to this very progressive school and so I think that we are a very progressive couple and our relationship is progressing just like I wanted.

Until one day I'm like sitting at recess, like hanging out by myself and this like gaggle of girls rushes up to me, which is kind of exciting because gaggles of girls never rush up to me.

So I like take out my trapper keeper so I can like write all their phone numbers down.

And they're like, Adria, Adria, are you going around with Vincent?

And going around was our word for dating at that time.

And I was like, I don't know who Vincent is, but did you guys want it?

And then they were gone.

And I was like, all right.

And I kind of forgot about it and went back to my choose your own adventure book or whatever and and then later that afternoon like another group of girls comes up and they're like Adria are you going around with Vincent I'm like I still don't know who Vincent is but do you guys want it and then they were gone and I was a little upset because it kind of felt like mean girls being mean but like in terms of what bullying could be it wasn't really that bad so I kind of let it go until choir rehearsal that afternoon like after school and one of my very good friends was like Adria I hear you're going around with Vincent and I was like okay who is Vincent?

Also, we're nine.

Maybe it's cool we don't have boyfriends yet.

And she's like, and I was gonna know who that is.

And she's like, I can't believe you don't know who that is.

And she points out like to the back of the cafeteria where these like boys are doing boy things.

And I was like, I don't know who you're talking about.

Is it like that blonde kid with the red shorts?

And she's like, No, dummy, next to him.

And I'm like, uh, the guy with the ponytail and converse.

And she's like, No, in front of him.

And I'm like, Buzz cut and tank top.

She's like, No, Adria, the black kid.

Vincent is that black kid.

You should totally make him a boy stammer in mixtape.

And I was like, oh, well, I already like Spencer and I've already made him a Pixies mixtape, so I'm good on mixtapes.

And she's like,

she's like, why would you like Spencer?

And I was like, why would I like Vincent?

And she was like, because

you know.

And the bummer was that I did know because fourth grade was the year that I learned that I was black and it was a huge surprise to me.

And

I had no idea, I had no idea, and I didn't know that like people had opinions on that or that it sometimes mattered.

Because up until then, I just didn't know like when I would draw pictures of myself, I just wanted my pictures to look like everyone else's pictures, so I gave myself peach skin or pink skin, and nobody cared.

And then, one time, the first time I heard the N-word was in like a funny little song someone was singing in the hallway, because it's rural Texas, and that shit happens.

And I sang it for my mom, and I did not understand why she was livid.

And

fourth grade was also the year that some asshole decided we were going to start celebrating Black History Month, which like amounted to me just like trembling in the corner through the whole month of February while my teachers showed us pictures of like backs with scars all over them and fire hoses and German shepherds and like every other set of eyes in the room would look at me and be like, Adrienne, we're so sorry.

What was it like?

And I'm like,

I'm like, you guys, you guys have not even 10 yet.

The worst thing that's happened to me is not being able to go to anybody because on the blog concert because I was grounded.

Leave me alone.

And this whole thing with Vincent was this weird natural extension of that because Vincent, it was his first week at school that week and he was the only other black kid in this, in my class of like 100 or so.

And it was baffling to me that nobody, even though I got in trouble for talking to Spencer every day, nobody had any idea that I had a crush on him.

And even though I had not said one word to Vincent,

no one could figure out why we weren't basically married.

Like nobody, including Spencer, because that week he came up to me and was like, hey, Adria, you left your caboodle in future thinking.

And I was like, thank you, because that felt like excellent eventual boyfriend behavior.

I was very happy until he told me that he was playing soccer with Vincent and he could totally give him my number if I wanted.

And then even our teachers got into it.

And there's one teacher after school I knew was like, well, Adria, have we seen the new student and do we have a little crush on Vincent?

And I was like, no, Diana, we

do not have a crush on Vincent.

We do not have a cross on Vincent or anyone else anymore.

Thank you.

That was Adria Walden.

Adria is a writer and performer living in Los Angeles.

She is the creator of the Webby-nominated Jane Austen-themed web series called Black Girl in a Big Dress.

And she is happy to share her Pixies playlist with anyone.

Next up is Miles Crabtree, who comes to us from our Detroit slam, which is supported by public radio station WDET.

Here's Miles.

I was nine years old when it was announced that my fourth grade class was going to be putting on the production, How the West Was Won.

So our music teachers handed out the scripts to us so we could decide if we wanted to audition for a speaking part, which I, of course, did.

So I look through the script, I'm reading through, and I decide that I want to be the newsboy because I want to wear the really cool newsboy cap and I want to run out on stage with the newspaper and yell, extra extra read all about it.

So we had a week to prepare so I go home, I memorize the line, I prepare all these cool moves and when the day comes I go into auditions and I give it my most enthusiastic performance.

The only other kid to go out for the same part sort of just mumbles the line into his shoes.

So I figure I've got this one in the bag.

This is my part.

However, when I come into school the next day, I'm informed that the other kid who tried out is getting the part because the newsboy is really supposed to be played by a boy.

And you see, I'm transgender, so when I was in the fourth grade, I was actually a little girl.

Everyone saw me as a little girl.

That's not how I saw myself, and that is not the part that I wanted to play, but that is the part that I was forced into.

So I was told that I was going to be playing the part of Prairie Girl number three or something like that.

You know, thank God for whoever made that casting decision because we wouldn't want the parents of Melrose Elementary School to be accosted with an unrealistic portrayal of the history of the Western United States, right?

I can only imagine the chaos that would have ensued.

Becky, did you see the fourth grade production of How the West Was Won?

Sarah, I did.

And let me tell you, I was completely enthralled until that little butch girl ran on stage as a newsboy.

Talk about having to suspend my disbelief.

So anyway,

I sat all through those rehearsals wearing a bonnet and a scowl.

I had to pretend to knit during the entire show.

I had some one line that I can't even remember now.

But

I was

so filled with joy when our one and only production of How the West Was Won was marred by technical difficulties.

You see, as fourth graders, we'd made the set ourselves.

We painted this glorious backdrop on butcher paper that hung at the back of our stage, finger-painted.

It was very heavy from all the paint.

And so during our one and only production, it began to fall down on top of all of us like a tsunami.

But because I was at the front I was untouched wearing a bonnet and a smile

thank you

that was Miles Crabtree

Miles tells us he went on to act in nearly all of his high school's theater productions and was finally able to play a male role for the first time in his junior year of college 12 years after how the West was won.

Miles' love of working with young people, the great outdoors, and song parodies have led him to become an educator and career camp counselor.

He is training to become a music therapist.

According to his campers, if Miles were an animal, he'd be a sea lion.

Our next storyteller is Kimberly Rose, who told this story at our Boston Slam, where we're supported by WBUR and PRX.

Here's Kimberly live at the Moth.

I was sitting outside CVS.

I'd just gotten a packet of photos from my daughter's

fourth birthday.

It's a big packet of photos.

This was like 2009 when people still went to CVS to get photos.

And at least 60 photos.

And I was looking through them and and was real excited and they're pictures of my daughter and my other two kids and my husband who was the family photographer but somehow he still got in the picture and their grandparents and

none of me

so I kept looking and not even a picture of me and my daughter And I thought for sure there must have been a mistake.

I would have bet a million dollars there was a mistake.

And back then they used to give you an index, which was basically thumbnails of your photos.

And I was sure it was one of those underdeveloped photos, you know know, how CVS used to take sort of executive decisions and decide this photo will not be developed because it's too low light and, you know, or it's black.

And I thought, oh, they just didn't develop it.

You know, this can't be possible.

But it was.

And so sitting in that car, looking through those photos, I realized that there was no photos of me.

And

that's how my husband wanted the photo album of his life to be.

And all of a sudden, I realized that, you know, I was never in the photos, hardly at all.

There were no frame photos of me in our entire house.

And after eight years of marriage, I was sort of like a ghost.

When I met him, you know, we were madly in love.

I knew by our fourth date we were going to get married.

He was six foot two, muscular, honest,

wanted to get married, a good Jewish boy, a doctor to boot.

And I was the perfect Jewish suburban housewife.

I kept kosher.

I had five sets of pots and bans.

And

I went to parenting classes and parenting resilient children classes and parent teacher association meetings and Zumba class and gluten-nab classes and marriage counseling.

And we even went to the rabbi.

I did everything I was supposed to, but I remembered an earlier time where we had gone next door to dinner and our neighbors had pulled out, we'd started talking about honeymoons for some reason, and they pulled out their honeymoon album.

And there were all these pictures of the bride.

And I felt sick because at that point, I'd only been married two years, and I realized there were no photos of me for my new honeymoon like that.

I think at one point I forced him to take a picture of me because I was so happy I could fit into a La Perla bikini.

But other than that,

nothing like this.

And there was one photo in particular of her looking into the camera with these dewy eyes and like so much love in her eyes.

And I didn't have anything like that.

I had nothing.

Sitting there in that car in that CVS, I realized I was never going to get that.

I was never going to get that kind of love.

I was never going to be seen.

And I was disappearing.

One of the first things I did after my divorce was I hired a top national photographer

That I could not afford.

At that point, I was a single mom with three kids.

I didn't have time to go shopping.

I was not at my lowest weight, and I was not tan.

And it didn't matter.

They were very, very tasteful, boudoir, glamour shut.

They're awesome.

It was the best thing I ever did.

And I'll never forget the day that those photos came by email.

And I couldn't stop crying.

And it was as if my soul exploded and I had come out of the corners and the shadows and out of the slivers and the frames into the light.

That was Kimberly Rose.

Kimberly is a short story author, playwright, and screenwriter.

She's working on a short film based on some of her stories.

She told us that this experience relaunched her self-esteem and her writing career.

To To see some of those photos, visit themoth.org.

By the way, Kimberly says she has plenty of photos of her three kids, too, all of them in focus.

Coming up, our final story about the ways we see ourselves.

This one takes place on the set of Saturday Night Live when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and is presented by the Public Radio Exchange PRX.org.

You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Jay Allison, and we're hearing stories about how we see ourselves and whether it's an accurate view.

Our final story is a moth favorite from Jesse Klein.

Jesse told this story at a live event held at Summer Stage outside in New York City Central Park.

So, if you hear birds or trucks or planes, that's why.

Over 4,000 people were there listening to the stories, many sitting on picnic blankets as the sun went down.

A brief note in advance: this story contains funny stuff about sex.

Here's Jesse Klein live from New York.

One of my happiest memories as a kid, around nine years old, was of staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live on this old black and white TV that I had actually found in the trash area of my building and had convinced my parents to let me keep in my room, mainly so that I could stay up and watch Saturday Night Live.

And there was just something so magical and exciting to me about when that show would start and that theme music would play over that like cool New York-y montage of the cast.

And it just made me feel really hip and alive, like I was part of like a cool club and not like a nerdy girl who was watching a black and white TV that I found in the garbage.

So one of the highlights from when I was 10 years old and full disclosure There are no other highlights from when I was 10 years old, because I was 10.

But one of the highlights was that my best friend's dad took us to 30 Rock to see a taping of SNL.

And I remember that before the show started, I had to go to the bathroom.

And to get there, I walked down the hallway of Studio 8H, and it was lined with photos of like Gilda Radner and Bill Murray.

And I was just like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my God, they were here, I'm here, oh my god.

And when I got to the bathroom, I took like 15 paper towels and I put them into my pocket to bring them home and put into this little wooden box I had where I kept all of my mementos.

The only other, it had a unicorn on it, it was beautiful.

I think the only other memento in the box at the time was like an acorn I had picked up on a trip to Woodstock.

But anyway, on that visit to SNL,

the host was Tom Hanks and the musical guest was Aerosmith, so it was awesome.

And just when the night couldn't get any more perfect afterwards, my friend's dad took us to an incredible dinner at Hard Rock Cafe, the coolest restaurant in the world.

And I remember so clearly it was the first velvet rope I ever walked past.

And as I was walking past it, I was like, I feel famous.

Like, I feel like Justine Bateman must feel all the time.

So,

the most famous woman in the world at the time to me.

So

cut to 2009.

I am a grown-up and I have achieved, largely because of the influence of SNL, I have achieved my dream of becoming a professional TV comedy writer and I'm a stand-up comedian.

I've been working in LA for three years and I'm finally moving back to New York.

Mainly because LA is like sunny and perfect and I hate it and I can't live there anymore.

But anyway, I'm back in New York and I need a job.

And my agent sort of calls me out of the blue.

And he's like, you know, SNL is actually looking for new writers right now.

Do you want to submit some sketches?

And I was like, oh my god, yes, of course I do.

I just have to find them on my computer.

And by find them on my computer, I meant I had to run to Starbucks and panic and write some sketches.

And it's really hard to write anything.

comedy at Starbucks because there's no one around to tell you if your like commercial parody idea for a jockstrap for dogs is funny or not.

And if you're wondering, like, did you really submit a sketch that was a commercial parody for a jockstrap for dogs?

The answer is yes.

Yes, I did.

And I was like, all right, well, I'm not going to get this job.

But then a couple of days later, my agent calls me again and he's like, SNL liked your packet.

You need to meet with Lorne Michaels.

So I'm not going to gossip about Lorne, but I'll just give you a representative tidbit from the interview I had with him, which is, you know, I'm a little nervous, but I go into his office and it's one of those situations, I don't know if you've ever been in an interview like this, but like there's a very large leather couch and then also a large leather chair.

And I never know where to sit in that situation, so I just decide I'm gonna be sort of endearing and honest, you know, and I'm like, so where do you want me to sit?

And he's like, well, why don't you sit on the couch and I'll sit on the chair.

And I'm like, okay.

And then we have like a minute of small talk.

And after a minute, he goes,

you know, actually, I want to sit on the couch.

And I look to see if he's joking.

And he's not.

We got up and we switched.

And I was like, this is weird.

And

then 15 minutes later, I left.

And like, you know, I was like, not only am I not getting that job, I almost feel like I've been fired from the job.

I don't know how that would work.

But then a few days later, I am home and I am lying on my couch watching Animal Planet as is my want and I get another call from my agent and he's like, yeah, so you got the job.

SNL wants you and you're gonna start.

Thanks.

Wait till you hear the rest of the story.

So

anyway, I flip out and I call my best friend John and he comes over and we order pizza and I put on Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind and I put it on repeat because that's what people do when they're happy now.

And

I'm having, you know, one of those like very sort of that special moment in life.

I'm having that window in between when you get a cool job and you can tell everyone about it, but right before you've started the job and you realize what the job is going to entail.

And I was not prepared for what working at SNL entailed.

So I'll just give you like a little brief picture of how like the week works.

Basically it starts on Tuesday and the writers stay up all night to write the whole show.

Literally all night.

Like you get there at noon and you go home at 9 a.m.

Wednesday morning, like at best.

And maybe you'll go home and you'll sleep for a couple of hours, but then you have to come back to prepare for Wednesday afternoon's table read, which is this epic marathon affair in which Lorne and the whole cast and all the writers and everyone who works at the show squishes into the the writer's room and they read every single sketch that's been submitted.

There's about 40.

And it takes about four hours.

And afterwards, Lauren goes off with the supervising writers and it takes them a few hours.

They decide what's going to go in that week's show based on what got the most laughs.

And they have this sort of weird tradition where even though there's email now, the way they let you know what's going to be in the show is they sort of do it high school play style, where the writer assistant comes out with one piece of paper and everyone has to crowd around to see what's been circled.

And when I would ask people, like, why do we do it this way?

People would be like, it's just tradition.

My first Tuesday night, my first writer's night, I'm excited but a little nervous because I'm remembering that I am not a night person.

I am a morning person.

I go to bed at like 10.30 p.m.

every night.

But I'm like, all right, I'm just gonna power through.

and I'm powering through and then at about 1035 I'm like I'm so sleepy

but my work was not anywhere close to done because the host for that week was Blake Lively

the lead girl from Gossip Girl.

She was seemed super cool and funny and really nice and

I was gonna I was writing this sketch where I decided she would play like a wacky volunteer at an animal adoption center.

I don't know why, but I thought that would work.

So I was just really like anal about making it perfect and I stay up all night tweaking it and the hours are dragging on and on.

So in a nutshell, my first table read at Saturday Night Live, it bombs so bad.

The sketch bombs so bad in front of a room of people who I think are the funniest people in the world.

And I'm assuming that probably there's a few of you here who have never bombed in front of the writer's room at SNL.

So just to give give you a sense of what it's like, imagine that you're having sex with somebody that you really like, but they're not making any noise, no matter what you do to their body with your body.

And then imagine that there's also a room of people watching it happen,

and they're not making any noise either.

And it's terrifying.

And it's so terrifying that I'm like, this will not stand.

I'm determined that next week I'm going to get something at least least on to the dress rehearsal show.

So a little background on that.

Every Saturday, SNL actually does two shows.

And the first show is in front of a studio audience, but it doesn't air.

And any sketch that doesn't do well will not make it to the TV show.

So I'm like, I'm going to at least get that far.

And the host, my second week, is Taylor Lautner.

who's sort of the teen heartthrob werewolf from the twilight movies which i have not seen one because i'm 35 years old and two because if I want to see like pale people being angsty, I'll go home for Shabbat dinner and just like stare at my parents, or like look in the mirror.

I don't need to spend money.

But he seems really nice.

And he's really young, so I'm like, I'll write something where he plays someone really young.

So I write a sketch where he'll play Bristol Palin's ex, Levi Johnston.

And all he's gonna have to do is wear like a puppy vest and like mumble like an idiot.

And Taylor Lautner nails this.

And

it gets laughs, and it goes to dress rehearsal.

And I'm like, oh, this is a victory.

Or so I think, until I realize what dress rehearsal means, which is

Lorne basically sits, Mr.

Lauren Michaels sits under the audience bleachers during dress and he watches the show on a monitor.

And when your sketch starts, you slide into a chair next to Lorne and you watch it, you watch your sketch with him.

So my sketch starts, and then I watch Lorne watch my sketch bomb really bad.

And I'm assuming there's a few of you who've never watched your sketch bomb in front of Lorne.

So just to give you a sense of what it's like,

imagine that you're having sex with Lorne Michaels, and he's not making any noise.

So this becomes my life, right?

Like week after week, I am struggling to come up with material that I think will work on the show.

And it doesn't always go terribly, but I can never get it to go great.

And I sort of start to spiral.

Because my whole identity, personally and professionally, up to this point in my life, is that I am funny.

I can be funny.

And it's just like all of a sudden I can't crack the code.

on this show.

And before every table read, I am like gripped with fear.

And before every dress rehearsal, my stomach is in knots.

I am walking around sort of lost and confused, but in like a foggy way, like sort of like in a Keanu Reeves way.

And it just feels like there's a part of me that has become broken.

And without it, I'm becoming unhinged.

You know, like, first of all, I'm never seeing my friends anymore just because of the hours.

And on the rare occasions when I see them, they say things to me like, you don't look very good.

Or like, Jesse, don't cry in this restaurant.

We want to come back here.

I'm also not sleeping

because there's no time to sleep and on the occasions when I might sleep I'm too anxious and I'm just thinking about next week's guests and what I should write for them and I'll be lying there like okay Jennifer Lopez is gonna be on next week.

What should I write for Jennifer Lopez?

And in the midst of all the stress, I'm trying to like experience any kind of pleasure.

I don't have pleasure anymore.

And I can't like all I can do is go to the anthropology store downstairs at 30 Rock and spend too much money.

Like I remember I spent $280 on like a sweater with like a kangaroo pocket pocket on it or sometimes.

Girls know what I'm talking about.

And

I knew I was hitting rock bottom when the anxiety started to affect me physically.

And I started to feel like I was having heart palpitations.

And because I'm a neurotic hypochondriac, I was like, I'm dying.

So I went to my doctor.

I have a really good doctor.

So he was immediately able to diagnose me with being an idiot.

And he's like, you just need to relax.

And I was like, okay, well then give me some clonopin.

And he was like, no, you should do this without drugs.

And I was like, why are you a bad doctor?

So around this time,

a really good friend of mine, the one who told me not to cry in restaurants, sends me a link

to this series of lectures by this British Buddhist monk named Ajahn Brahm.

And she's like, listen to this.

It will make you feel better.

And I was skeptical because generally the only self-help I will accept is from a very close girlfriend of mine named Oprah Winfrey.

But I'm desperate, so I'm like, okay, and I immediately fall in love with Ajahn Brahm.

And basically he has given a weekly talk for like 15 years about every aspect of human experience in the world.

And they're alphabetized on the website.

Go look.

So like if your name is Mandy, you can look under M.

And they're all probably me a lecture entitled like, Mandy, here's what you should do.

It's really helpful.

So I start listening to these lectures like in bed.

Like literally I take my laptop and I put it by my pillow so his voice is in my ear.

And one night I listened to a lecture he did about death and dying and the theme was acceptance.

And it was accepting that life and death go together and are part of the same continuum.

And I realized even though I'm not physically dying, maybe I can integrate this sort of idea into the fact that my comedy is dying.

And I realized if I'm going to succeed at SNL, I have to make peace with bombing.

Sort of, you have to do that in life, is make peace with bombing, but especially on that show.

And I stopped writing things from a place of fear and what should I do.

And I just sort of start to write things that I think are funny.

And then I'm like, whatever.

And I hand it in.

And things sort of start to get better.

One of the last shows of the season, Tina Faye was the host.

And I love Tina Faye, and I really wanted to get something on when she was on.

And I remembered on Tuesday night that I'd written this sketch when I was submitting to get the job, and I was like, maybe Tina would be good for this.

And I hand it in, and we do it at Table Read, and it doesn't kill, but it doesn't bomb.

And it turns out Tina wants to try it.

And it's a commercial parody, not Chockstrap for Dogs.

It's a commercial parody, which means we're going to shoot it Friday and edit all day Saturday.

And I remember sliding in next to Lauren right before dress, and I was nervous that people weren't necessarily gonna get it, because it was a weird idea, and it was like a parody of like Duncan Hines commercials,

and like the way they show like lonely women, like substituting like chocolate for sex.

And so it was for a product called Brownie Husband, and the idea was that it was like a husband.

It was a brownie shaped like a husband, and you could sort of fuck it and eat it at the same time.

I was nervous but then as soon as they started to roll it people started to laugh and like they're really laughing like rolling hard laughter and Lauren is laughing and if you want to know what it's like to make Lauren laugh picture yourself having sex with Lauren and he's laughing.

And then when it airs it's kind of a hit and it becomes like a trending topic on Twitter like people want a brownie husband.

And anyway, it was the first moment in the whole snl experience when i was like oh this is what i thought it would be like when i was a kid so the season ends and um the other snl tradition is that uh they don't tell you until the end of the summer if you're hired back for fall so you have like months to stew but i found myself worrying less um about whether they would not want me back than I was worrying about, oh my god, what if they do want me back?

Because I was worried about going to a place that had made me feel so crazy.

But on the other hand, nothing felt crazier than the idea of leaving this job that every comedy person wants, that I wanted since I was 10.

And I started to think about what I would miss.

And I thought, oh, I'll miss that approval.

I'll miss the approval of the audience laughing and Lauren laughing.

But then I remembered that ironically, the sketch that got me that approval was one that I wrote at a shitty Starbucks by myself before I thought I was worthy of even getting the job.

And

when I did get the job, I didn't have the glamorous experience that I imagined I would have when I was 10 and I was watching that show on a black and white TV.

But I actually had a much more important experience because what I learned was to be brave.

SNL taught me that you can't be afraid to just put something out into the world that's yours and to do something that you believe in and that's totally different.

And so when SNL finally called my agent and they said they wanted me back,

I respectfully said no.

And that fall I took my laptop back to Starbucks and I just started to write something new.

Thanks.

That was Jesse Klein.

Jesse is an Emmy and Peabody Award winner for her work as the head writer of Inside Amy Schumer.

She's also the author of the New York Times best-selling collection of essays, You'll Grow Out of It.

People always ask us where we find our stories.

We find them at slam events all around the country, and you can find out about those at themoth.org.

But we also get them from our pitch line.

And you can call us up and tell us a short version of your story.

Here's the phone number: that's 877-799-Moth.

877-799-Moth.

We develop the best pitches for moth shows all around the world.

Well,

many years ago, I was a single mom and I was working and my son was a latchkey kid and he got in trouble.

He was kind of vandalizing the neighborhood in between the time he got home from school and I got home from work.

And he had damaged some guy's car, the paint on the car.

He had scratched some cuss words into it.

I heard about it.

I learned about it.

And I was taking my son up the long stairs to this guy's house to

have my son confess and ask what we could do to make restitution.

My son was telling me, no, I don't want to go up there.

This is a 10-year-old.

And he's saying, this guy's really big, mom.

You don't know how big he is.

Well,

I had to take him up there.

And I kept encouraging him all the way up and saying, you know, I'm right here with you.

He's not going to hurt you.

But you need to tell him that you're the one who did this and ask him what we can do.

So the guy opens the door

and he looks at me and he says, you.

And I was shocked.

And I said, what?

I said, my son needs to talk to you.

And he said, no, you.

He said, you're the one.

And he began to tell me about how he had recently lost his wife, like six months before this, and how

I had smiled at him every morning.

And he said, you probably don't even know me.

You probably never even realized that you were doing it.

But he said, every day we go to work at the same time.

And he says, I was suicidal.

I wanted to kill myself.

But I'd get myself up to see your smile, and you kept me alive.

And I thought, wow,

I've thought of that story now for 40 years, the way it happened.

Even the smallest thing can change a person or help them, give them hope.

Remember, you can pitch us your story at themoth.org.

At our website, you can buy tickets to storytelling events in your area, find out about SLAMs.

There are moth events year-round.

Come on out and tell a story.

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.

The stories in this show were directed by Sarah Austin-Janess and Catherine McCarthy.

The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles.

Production support from Emily Couch.

Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our pitch came from Elizabeth Galatler.

Our theme music is by the drift.

Other music in this hour from Yvonne Resendez, Rafique Battilla, Blue Dot Sessions, Mark Orton, and the Chandler Travis 3-0.

You can find links to all the music we use at our website.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.