Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Blaise Ferrer and with a five, six, seven, eight...

Yes. On this episode, we'll take a page from the great dancers throughout history.

We'll put on our dance shoes, we'll find our pelvis, and we'll move through the joy and the self-expression that anybody at any age can get from

dance. First up is Katie Rivard, with a story she told at a New York City story slam. Here's Katie

live at the mall.

So a few years ago, I decided to move on my own from Boston to Tucson, Arizona in July.

And the trip was ominous.

My car broke down twice.

I got there.

It was 120 degrees.

It was brown.

Everything looks like Mars to me because I'm from Michigan.

And so I spent the first two weeks on my own just like watching

Amy Schumer's train rack over and over in the theaters and like crying to myself.

But I moved out there for a teaching job and I felt pretty confident in my teaching abilities.

I'd been teaching for a while and so I thought I've got this. But then the school year started

and I realized that the school I had signed up to teach at was

similarly a train wreck.

And I switch into type A teacher mode.

I'm like doing anything I can to get control back into my life, like cutting up tennis

balls and putting them on the bottom of chairs, so there's no extra noise with the already excessive noise that's going on in my classroom.

But I'm struggling and there's one student in particular. I'm going to call her Maria for the sake of anonymity and we're just not seeing eye to eye.

...