This week, a special episode of The Moth, live from a Mainstage show in London. Stories of going "All In" — in a new town, in an icy lake, and on the paintball course. This live show is hosted by Tiff Stevenson with additional hosting by Moth Senior Director Meg Bowles. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Storytellers: Kate Oliver remembers what it was like to be a "weird, androgynous, nerdy" teenager. Navied Mahdavian and his wife try to build a community in a new town. A difficult period leads Catherine Joy White back to a childhood passion. Podcast # 911 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the setting for this special Moth Radio Hour in London?
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. And today we're taking you to London for a live main stage show. Now imagine you're sitting in a darkened Gothic revival style church. The sun is setting through the stained glass windows. Candles illuminate the eaves.
The wooden pews are packed and the energy is buzzing as our audience awaits an evening of stories on the theme of taking a leap and going all in. Live from the Union Chapel in London, here's your host for the evening, actor, comedian, and writer, Tiff Stevenson.
Chapter 2: Who is hosting The Moth live show in London?
How beautiful. Welcome to The Moth. Hello, I'm your host, Tiff Stevenson. I'm local and cheap. Also, a sexually confident woman in my 40s. Yeah! The men are, like, frightening. People are frightened of sexually confident women in their 40s. It's what I went as for Halloween last year. People were like, hideous, kill it. Who's been to the moth before? Let me hear you cheer.
A few of you, about half, I would say. If you've never been to the Moth, let me tell you about the Moth. It's non-profit. Excellent. It's storytelling. It's first-person storytelling.
And we have storytellers coming up tonight telling true stories, personal stories from their lives because the Moth believes that building community and empathy through storytelling is more important than ever before. Yes. I think that's a beautiful sentiment. The storytellers will use no notes, no cheat sheets. We have three stories. This is how it's going to run.
Tell you how the night's going to go. We have three stories and a break where you can go to the bar. Yeah, see, that's how you know you're in the UK and not America. People will cheer going to the bar as a part of the evening. And tonight's theme for the show is all in. That's the theme for tonight's show. Stories about going all in, like the time I went to Paris. I went all in on mezcal.
I drank a lot of it. In fact, I was still throwing up on the way to the Eurostar the next day. I walked up to the desk, having done a little puke in a bin. I'm very classy. Let's get that out of the way. And as I walked up to the desk, the man behind the check-in counter said, is it contagious? Yes. I said, sorry, what? He said, what is making you sick? Is it contagious?
And I had to say, no, I did this to myself. It's beautiful, beautiful. So as I introduce our storytellers tonight, I like to introduce them with a little bit of a question to get you into the mood and the vibe of the evening. And because it's me, I've asked a question about fashion. I like to know when our storytellers have gone all in on fashion.
You know, I've gone all in on fashion plenty of times. There was the time I bought fingerless gloves and thought they were a good idea. Yes, exactly. Fingerless gloves, not a good idea. Not combined with a shawl. In London, when it's foggy. As I said, I asked everyone a question before this, and our first storyteller said, when she went all in on fashion, she said, I have to dress up for work.
I work with families in museums. In the last few weeks, I've been a pirate, a spider, a very sweaty anteater, and a spunky squirrel. Okay, so strap yourselves in and get ready, and please welcome to the stage, the moth stage, our very first storyteller, Kate Oliver.
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Chapter 3: What is Kate Oliver's story about facing fears?
I was frozen with fear, I couldn't move a muscle, as he lifted the gun up to point at my face, and he said, Now, I'd never been paintballing before. I'd never wanted to go paintballing. I'd never expected to go paintballing. The only reason I was there was it was my friend's 30th birthday and he'd got the tickets as a present.
And this in itself was surprising because neither he nor I nor the two people we'd gone with were the type. We are friends from being in the same gay show choir together. So... Our only previous engagement in sport together was choreography to Tina Turner songs. And I feel it really summed up our expectations of the event that he ended the invitation with, I hope they have pink paint.
When we arrived, it was not as we'd expected. We got dressed up in these kind of camouflage onesies, like the big jumpsuits, and we walked down into this basement arena for round one. Now, round one is where you're just with your friends, so it's just the four of us, and you're kind of trying to work out how it all works and what to do. And we're in this huge arena.
It's about the size of a football pitch. It's all underground. It's totally dark in there. There's these big black and neon shapes, these abstract shapes that you're meant to kind of dive behind to hide and shoot. And it's totally black and there's techno music playing. So it's silly. It's silly there. And we treat it like it's silly. We start shooting each other or trying to.
We're rolling around on the floor. We're doing movie scenes with each other. And all this lasts right up until the point that one of us actually hits someone else. Because paintballs hurt. LAUGHTER Paintballs bruise, paintballs can break the skin if you're getting too close.
And this is when our silliness started to turn to fear, because we knew that after this, we were going into round two, and in round two, you're not with your friends anymore, you're with groups of strangers. And as we walked up the stairs back to the waiting room, we saw all these groups of strangers, all taking it much more seriously than we were, including this group of eight teenage boys.
about 15 or 16 years old, one of whom raised his gun up to point at me. Now, if you haven't been to Paintball before, there are two groups of people there. One is this group of teenage boys. They go every weekend. The staff know their names. They've brought their own guns. You can bring your own guns to Paintball. And they are there to pray on the week.
And the second group of people, the weak, we are a bunch of gays who've just realized we're there for their target practice. But the reason I froze up so badly when this happened was not because I'm afraid of paint. This came from a far more primal place. I was flashing back to when I was this teenager's age, about 15 years old.
And in school, the most terrifying thing in the world to me was teenage boys. I was the weird androgynous nerdy kid in the class. You probably remember the weird androgynous nerdy kid in your class. If you've wondered how they're doing, we're fine. I'm fine, thanks. I had this big frizzy hair, like, swept straight back. I had these thick glasses on.
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Chapter 4: How did Navied Mahdavian's move to Idaho change his life?
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles, and today we're bringing you a live show from Union Chapel in London. The theme of the night was All In, and your host is Tiff Stevenson.
So, moving on to our next storyteller. When I asked him about the time he went all in on fashion, he said, two words, JNCO jeans. I said, I didn't know what they were. And he said, they were balloon jeans, the hugest, overly large jeans you could wear. I said, enough said. I get it. I get the visual. Please welcome to the moth stage, Navid Madavian.
My wife Emily and I, we were on our land for the first time, and we were trying to figure out where our tiny house would soon go, which was more difficult than we had anticipated because looking around, there weren't any reference points. It's just land for miles, sagebrush and dust for as far as we could see. It was the first time I'd ever been able to say, my land.
And I remember that day, saying it over and over and over and over again. And as I'd say it, I focused on the way it sounded. I exaggerated the motion of my lips and my mouth. My land. Emily said, stop doing that. It's 2016, and Trump has just been elected. And so I did what any reasonable Middle Eastern American could do at the time.
I moved to the middle of nowhere America, and not just anywhere, cowboy country. We had visited the state of Idaho the summer before on a whim. And immediately, we had fallen in love with its mountains, its landscape, its real estate prices,
And so we bought six acres in one of its most remote areas, sight unseen, and we made the decision to move from San Francisco, epicenter of American liberalism, to Mackie, Idaho, population 500 cowboys. But we could own a tiny house, we could maybe start a family, and most importantly, we could both pursue our dreams of becoming artists.
Before moving, I had been a fifth-grade teacher, but what I really wanted to do was to be a New Yorker cartoonist. And I know what you're thinking. If you want to become a New Yorker cartoonist, move as far away from New York as possible. Makes sense. But what I've learned about being a cartoonist is you have to see the world kind of askew.
You have to, in order to poke fun at things, to make connections other people can't see. And Mackie, Idaho was perfect for this because everything felt slightly askew, particularly for a city boy like me who knew nothing about farming or ranching. For example, it took me two years to realize that all chaps are in fact assless.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Navied face while reopening a movie theater?
Some people came on dates, some people came alone, everybody had popcorn. And as I stood, I thought about how some people even took selfies of themselves with the tickets underneath the glow of the marquee, which was now on illuminating Main Street. And so the movie's starting, and I lean into the curtains, because even if I can't watch it, I at least want to listen to it and enjoy it.
And I hear the words from the movie, "'There's a gangbang social tonight.'" And so I'm grasping the curtains, and I should say at this point, it's an important part of the story, that I actually didn't have a chance to watch the movie before showing it.
So by the time Robert Pattinson was masturbating a quarter of the way through the film, I was laying horizontally on the ground, the carpeting pressed against my cheek, and I could actually hear audible groans coming from the theater at this point, but that just may have been the sound of Robert Pattinson achieving completion.
So after the movie, needless to say, I raced into the lobby and I tried as much as I could not to make eye contact with anyone as they shuffled out of the theater, their eyes wide, their cowboy hats pressed tightly against their chest. And I really believed if I just don't move, if I stand perfectly still, maybe nobody will be able to see me.
Kind of like that scene with the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. Not a super auspicious start. A question we got a lot after that was, are you going to show new movies? These were new movies, just indie movies that nobody had heard of. We couldn't show big-budget films because we couldn't afford to, but that's not why we had opened the theater in the first place. That's not what we wanted to do.
We really believed if we show good movies, we can earn the community's trust, our community's trust, even if we were showing subtitled documentaries about whale hunting in the Faroe Islands. If you build it, they will come, became our mantra. But no one came. Night after night, I'd flip the switch on in the theater and it would reveal maybe one, maybe two people in the auditorium.
And so, we relented. We showed John Wayne. And everybody came, they really loved John Wayne, and I remember getting swept up in the excitement, and I decided that this time I'll sit in the theater with everyone.
We showed the movie The Quiet Man, which if you haven't seen, it's a classic story, boy moves back to Ireland, boy meets girl, boy meets girl's brother, boy fights girl's brother, and in the end everyone is happy and friends for life. It's a movie I've seen many times, and I've enjoyed it every time I've seen it.
But watching it that night, in that town, in that theater, the screen framed by the silhouettes of cowboy hats, watching John Wayne physically drag and shove Maureen O'Hara the five miles back from the train station, it felt different. And I'm a fan of John Ford, and I actually love John Wayne, and it is just a movie.
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Chapter 6: How did the community respond to Navied's movie choices?
I'm Jordan Robinson, host of the new podcast, The Women's Hoop Show. We're here for you every step of the way through the mayhem of March Madness. Each episode, I'll be joined by a rotating group of women's basketball experts to talk you through how your bracket's looking and which rising women's hoop stars to look out for in every game.
Listen to and follow The Women's Hoop Show and Odyssey podcast available now wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. You're listening to a main stage event we produced in London at the Historic Union Chapel. And here's your host, Tiff Stevenson.
I said I'm in my 40s. I'm a very sexy age now. I'm the kind of age where if I turn down an alcoholic drink at the bar, people are like, oh, are you, is she on antibiotics? Because they want to know. Sometimes I order a cranberry juice just for an air of sexual mystery. Keep it fresh and exciting.
I'll tell you how you can tell that you're middle-aged, when you start buying your clothes in places that also sell food. Yeah. That would be my fashion all in, you know. I like it, because if I can double down on a pair of shorts and some chicken wings, I'm barbecue ready. That's me. I'm good to go. Just those little signs.
So I asked our final storyteller tonight the same question that I've asked all the others. Tell me about a time you went all in for fashion. And she said, when I was 21 years old, I went to Jamaica for the first time to discover my roots and heritage.
We were going to a party on the beach and I decided that my outfit should be maybe the shortest booty shorts with the word Jamaica emblazoned across them. LAUGHTER and a top with Jamaica emblazoned across it, in case anyone had forgotten whereabouts in the world we were.
I hopped into the taxi to head to the party, and when we got five minutes away, I made him turn back and take me home, because I lost all confidence in it. So please, welcome our final storyteller for this evening to the Moth Stage. Are you ready? Catherine, I've just realised that I've not written your surname, but I know what it is. It's Catherine Joy White. Please welcome her.
So the first time I went swimming, I was five years old.
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