Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Austin-Ginness, the Moth's executive producer and your host for this episode.

New Orleans is all about live events. There's music, festivals, parades, opera, drag, and true personal stories at the Moth story slams. There's a certain energy in the

Big Easy. We asked Alex Zamanovic, a New Orleans story slam producer, their thoughts on these

personal stories. And they said, our venue, Cafe Istanbul, is an intimate space. It feels like

you're in someone's living room.

Telling a story there really brings out the vulnerabilities in people. I myself have been to

a few of these New Orleans story slams, and I wholeheartedly agree. Now, New Orleans is so

much more than Mardi Gras. But with Mardi Gras day coming up in mid-February,

we wanted to celebrate New Orleans and its Open Mic StorySlam series.

Our first story is from Emily Barr, who told this at a, you guessed it, New Orleans StorySlam,

where the theme of the night was Fathers.

Here's Emily, live at the month.

Hey everybody, I'm Emily, and starting from the time I was in third grade, I was raised by an

incredibly loving but also incredibly quirky single dad.

My dad knows a lot about a lot of different things.

He's a scientist, he's an artist,

he's a writer, but one area in which he is, I would say profoundly and perhaps even proudly clueless,

is fashion. Growing up, this had certain perks. Unlike a lot of my friends whose moms

kept strict watch over their hemlines and forbid the use of makeup.

My dad really took no notice of those things, apart from his occasional lectures about gilding

the lily when I had lingered a little too long in front of the bathroom mirror.

My mom's family, on the other hand, fell on the exact opposite end of the soratorial spectrum.

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