Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host this week, Chloe Sammon. There are few experiences

as simultaneously embarrassing and thrilling as a childhood crush, whether you were brave

enough to approach the object of your affections or were more of a pining from a far type.

In this episode we have two stories of childhood crushes and all of the highs and lows they

entailed. My very first crush was on Kyle S in my kindergarten class. He had boy band

hair, could run really fast on the playground and just generally made my five-year-old heartbeat

fast. I don't think I ever had the courage to actually say one single word to him, a

crush theme that would follow me through my childhood, but I still remember getting

goosebumps whenever I saw him smile. Our first storyteller was a bit braver than I was in

his pursuit of young love. Tim Lopez told this story at a New York City Grand Slam where

the theme of the night was Fuel to the Fire. Here's Tim live at the Moth.

All right, hello. All right, so it was the first day of sixth grade, which was the last

year of elementary school, and the quasi-romantic but completely non-sexual attention was running

high. Years of simmering feelings, required and or unrequited crushes, and general preteen

angst that come to a boil. In this, our last year altogether before being scattered to

the winds of junior high. Everybody knew who they liked, everybody knew who they liked,

and the social order was basically pretty much determined. There was this crazy sense of

urgency in the air, like a manic, it's now or never a kind of feeling, like you're up

before the war. And into this powder cake of proto-hormones, walked what could only be

described in today's terms as a game changer. Her name was Renika Powers, and she saw

it into our classroom, but if she'd sprung from the pages of a J. Crew catalog. She had

very long curly blonde hair, bright blue eyes, faint dusting of freckles, and this kind

...