Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Michelle Jalowski, your host for this episode.

If you've only ever listened to the podcast or radio hour, you might not know that most of our shows feature a live musician.

An instrumentalist opens each act and then stays on stage throughout the show, acting as a sort of timekeeper,

letting the storyteller and the audience

know when the teller is over their time limit.

We're all about storytelling here at the Moth,

and music tells its own sort of story.

Our musicians help set the tone for our curated live shows,

and we've been lucky to work with some incredible musicians

over the years.

On this episode, we'll be celebrating

how instrumental instruments are at the

moth, with two stories about learning how to play. Plus, stick around. We just might be sharing

some music from a live moth show. First up, we've got Alistair Bain. He told this at a Denver

Story Slam where the theme of the night was pride. Here's Alastair, live at the mall.

So like a lot of queer kids in the 80s, I ended up on my own pretty young, and there were some harsh parts to that, but there were some awesome parts like that

Wednesday when me and my best friend Candy were in a dive bar in New York seeing 10 local bands for a dollar

Thanks to our new fake IDs. I was a little bit worried about mine that said I was a 40-year-old white man named Norman Schwartz

But this was a kind of bar where it was like,

eh, we're all human.

When the fourth band came on,

the singer was like the second coolest person

...