The Moth Radio Hour: Live and Learn

The Moth

Arts, Performing Arts

4.6 • 25.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this hour, stories of lessons for real life. Navigating young love, learning to live in the moment, and how to drive stick shift. This episode is hosted by Jay Allison, producer of The Moth Radio Hour.

Storytellers:

Sam Bolen works on Broadway during the "season of the understudy."

Meg Ferrill uses her skills as a project manager in the lead up to the birth of her son.

Grace Topinka tries to learn stick shift.

Michael Maina has no idea how to handle his first crush.

Anh Vu Sawyer challenges the youth she works with to apply to college—but they in turn challenge her right back.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Moths Special Main Stage is coming to town.
0:03.8	Join us on September 29th at the Historic Guard Art Center for a night of vibrant true stories.
0:11.8	Five storytellers will share captivating true tales,
0:15.2	experience a night of unforgettable Moths' stories as they're recorded for future episodes of the Moths Podcast and Radio Hour.
0:23.4	By tickets now at themoth.org slash London. We'll see you there.
0:30.0	From Pier Ex, this is the Moths Radio Hour. I'm your host and producer of this show, Jay Allison.
0:47.9	In this episode, stories of life lessons from little nuggets of wisdom to life-altering epiphanies.
0:56.5	First up is Sam Boland. Sam told this story at a New York City Grand Slam where WNYC is a media partner of the Moths live from the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Here's Sam.
1:08.0	About two years into a certain global pandemic, I understood five roles in a big off-broadway revival of a musical.
1:20.0	The show was amazing. I saw it about 50 times. But what was hard for me was leaving the theater every night, not having done the show.
1:29.5	It was disappointing to me and it was making me feel sort of on the outside of it all.
1:35.9	And there was of course always a chance that I could go on. It was the Omicron Surge in New York.
1:41.1	My best friend called it the season of the understudy.
1:45.1	But for me, every time I got put on standby, I spent hours of that day tense ready to go on. They turned out to be a false alarm.
1:53.2	And so when I got a call on a morning at the end of the year, telling me to be ready to go on, I didn't think much of it.
1:59.0	I just dutifully ran my lines and waited. But then we got an email from the director, something that was new.
2:07.5	And he said to the whole company, I know there's a lot of confusion and distress about how we make the choice of when to put an understudy on.
2:16.7	These are uncharted territories for all of us. We have to make the decision based on what we know right now.
2:23.3	Sam, you're on. Have a great show. And the clarity of this email was like drugs.
2:32.6	I shot off a bunch of texts to my friends telling them that I was on that night and I raced to the theater for my very first put in rehearsal with the cast.
2:40.6	And finally, when I walked in the doors of that theater that night, I was the main character.
2:46.6	And everything was about making sure that I had a good show that night.
	...

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