The Moth Radio Hour: To Thine Own Self Be True

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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 1 of Hamlet, where Polonius famously offers his son some advice.

This above all, to thine own 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.

Here's R.

Eric Thomas telling his story on a night when he was the host live from Ben Arroyo Hall.

Tonight's theme is high anxiety and I was very excited when they asked me to host this 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 couple minute long

story about a time,

I guess probably about 10 years ago now.

No, yeah, 10 years ago.

I'm almost 30 at that point.

I know you can't tell, it don't crack, but

so at this point, I'm almost 30.

And

as you are wont to do, as you get till your late 20s, you start to take stock of where you are in life, where I was, it wasn't 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 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.

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 more covert about being gay.

I could be gay, but just sort of not like gay.

Whatever that means.

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.

I was like, this seems great.

I was looking for wrestling, but they didn't have it.

I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to be so masculine.

I'm going to go play this game.

And then I was like, I don't know how to play softball.

So I Wikipedia it.

And I found out two things, that you throw underhand and that the balls are bigger.

That's what he said.

And

I was like, well, we're all set.

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 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 get assigned to this team.

And they have a little uniform shirt.

And you could wear

baseball pants or whatever.

But I brought these really cute shorts from American Apparel.

They were super adorable.

Because my legs are really great.

And I showed up to the team and 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 going to put you in far right field.

But

if you really put your back into it and

you work hard, you can advance to other positions.

And I was like, oh, I don't care about this at all.

Far right field seems a-okay 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 bibbity-bobbity boot, you know?

Or bibbity-bobbity bro, I should say.

Like, that's,

I didn't know that I was going to 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 feel seems like a great place to just sort of strut around in my little shorts.

And I was very happy out there

because inside the actual playing area,

they were very serious about softball,

which was offensive to me.

I thought it was going to be a whole bunch of queens quoting a league of their own.

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.

I did get to be a little bit concerning as we continued through our season.

And we didn't have like a great record.

And I was not helping anybody.

When the ball would come my way, I'd be like, no, thank you.

And I was making plenty of jokes from out there, just sort of yelling into them like, that's what he said.

But I started to realize, I was like, maybe I'm too gay for the gay softball league.

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 and camp for me, they became this like this place of huge anxiety.

And I tried to get better, but I was not practicing and I don't have any skills

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

and The implication was like if you didn't really get it at the skills day, maybe this wasn't your spiritual journey.

I was about to be kicked out of of the gay softball league.

So I was like, I'm going to go to this game or whatever, and I'm going to play or whatever.

So, you know, I watched A 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.

Show up.

I got my glove, unused.

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-baled softball.

And so the ball comes to me.

It's a good pitch, I guess.

I don't know.

And I swing hard, and I miss hard.

I miss so hard that my foot pops up, like when they kiss in the movies.

And the coach, This beautiful soul, turns to me and she said, okay, that was a fine attempt,

but it was a little gay.

Maybe you want to think about like butching it up a little bit.

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.

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 got to do.

You got to stick your butt out and you got to wait a little bit longer before you hit it.

And I was like, that's what he said.

Incorrigible.

But 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.

Please, thank you.

Yes.

Yes.

I hit one ball, please.

I will sign autographs afterwards.

I thought everything was going to change for me after that.

I thought I'd be good.

I watched, you know, Angels in the Elfield.

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.

But the fact of the matter was, 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.

And I found a boyfriend.

So,

that's all I really needed to do.

R.

Eric Thomas is a writer based in Baltimore.

In 2020, he released his best-selling 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, quote, 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.

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.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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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 U.S.

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 storyworthy 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.

She told this story at an Atlanta slam where we are presented by Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Here's Renita live at the moth.

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 the 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.

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 is going to have some hot ass poems.

This is going to 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.

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 going to rewrite the poem and I'm going to do an anti-soul plain 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.

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 going to 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 going to be bad, but I'm going to do it because I didn't wrote 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.

So I get up there and the first line is, is 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.

And I don't let that stop me.

I just keep running head on.

Like I'm going to say what I got to say.

We've been bamboozled.

Let astray.

Run them up.

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 chair.

And I got hyped.

I felt like a poetry rock star.

I wanted this crowd surf, but I'm like, it's like 50 people in here.

So that's going to be an epic fail.

Don't do it.

They're crazy.

So I just did my poem.

Everything was great.

I got off the stage.

Everybody's shaking my hand.

People are like, I don't even want to 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

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.

About how she won't sell her soul for this trash movie.

And you gotta pay her.

And they found bamboo, let astray, run amok, but the check clear.

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, she, quote, can understand.

Our next story is from Haley Dunning, who told it at a story slam at Rich Mix in London.

Here's Haley.

Hello, so I had been single for four years when Andrew joined our

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 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.

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 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 that

that's what really gets me going.

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 pressure to have 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.

So I was really glad that he wasn't looking at me at that moment because I swear if he'd looked in my eyes, he would have seen that little bit of my heart break.

The very next day, we were in a meeting, and he noticed that my eyes are different colours.

And they're 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 realized that my feelings had to change.

I wanted us to still be friends,

and I wanted, and this stupid fantasy of 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.

He was a little kitten that I'd had since he was a kitten and he'd grown into this 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.

So I wrote a version of this story.

I wrote kind of my Nan Andrews' 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.

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 round, 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 he 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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, 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 months, he asked to sit down and have lunch.

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, husband's needs.

He has a name, I'm just not going to use it.

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.

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.

And he said, well, if that's what it takes.

And I said, where do you think he's going to go?

And he said, that's not my problem.

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.

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 going to have together as a blended family.

And on the other side was the life I was now going to 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.

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 it's like, fuck if I forgive that guy.

And it's been years now.

And

if I haven't found 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 going to be a cost worse than the one I had already paid.

Which means there was never going to 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 and curious, delightful soul, he deserves nothing less than complete belief in him and unwavering support.

And anything less than that will no longer be tolerated in my home.

Thank you.

Heidi Stuber is a writer and businesswoman who lives with her red-headed 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.

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.

If any of these stories have inspired you to tell your own, check out Slams Near You at our website.

After the break, the origin story of a famous musician in an unlikely place.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Jay Allison.

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.

Hello.

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, you know, 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.

I'll give you an example.

I was recruited by two much older guys, I was 17 by now, a bass player and a drummer, who wanted to form a jazz trio.

And after a a couple of rehearsals, the drummer announced that he got us a gig at the Portsmouth Irish Club.

What?

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.

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.

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.

fagins 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, but a Birmingham accent is sort of rather nasal and

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 17-year-old self there.

That's all right.

Cheerful naivety.

That's all right.

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 Philemonic 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.

But he invented things like the clario saxa trombophone and 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 have in England.

You know,

I'm deneath the arches,

I dream my dreams away.

You know, those sort of 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.

These guys made the skin heads 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.

And we realized after a short while that we could do anything we liked and no matter how silly it was, it was fine with them.

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.

It was more like, you bloody bastard, you bloody bastard, over and over again.

And you know, so things just got sillier and sillier.

Martin's Frankenstein tendencies came out and he played things like a teapot with a trumpet mouthpiece attached to it.

And some of the other characters at the Admiral Drake included the landlady, was a great character.

And I think largely because of her, the place always seems 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, 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.

Which in fact it had.

And

locals would line up outside the ladies' room and jeer at whoever came out.

And

this was considered great sport.

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 15 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.

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 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 you just mayhem, bodies piling on top of each other, beer spraying everywhere, and the Marine's mates 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?

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 Beckstein.

And I said, yeah, I know, but,

you know, it was a good piano once, but now it's just knackered.

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 realized 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 realized 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 the 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.

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.

That was Joe Jackson, and this is one of his most popular songs.

That shine

electricity so fine,

look and dry your eyes.

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.

If 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.

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 designs 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 in my life.

He said, oh, that's great because we're spending all this money.

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.

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 instituted, $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, you know, touring the United States or doing 350 shows per year.

It was the fact, there was one internal and one external.

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.

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

I am a single mum, so I

had just that week told my daughter that if she practiced swimming really hard and swam to the other side of the pool, that I would take her snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.

And incredibly, she did it.

So I thought,

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.

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 buzzer 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.

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 at TheMoth.

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.

This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was hosted by me, Jay Allison.

I also produce the show along with Catherine Burns and Meg Bowles, co-producer Vicki 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 Cluche, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Gladowski, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Caza.

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

Our pitches came from Tim David and Linda Kent.

Our theme music is by The Drift.

Other music in this hour from Lionel Hampton, RJD2, 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 Rhys-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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