From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Sarah Austin-Ginness.

This time, we have a live main stage from the Atwood Concert Hall in Anchorage, Alaska,

which was supported by the Anchorage Concert Association and Alaska Public Media.

The show took place in February and it was cold outside, but as you'll hear, the crowd of almost 2000 was very warm.

The theme was Twist of Fate.

And these stories are all from folks who moved to Alaska at some point in their lives.

Here's our host for the night, writer and educator, Jacoby Cochran.

Oh, my God, y'all are beautiful tonight. And to be real with you, I can't actually see most of you.

It's very dark.

It's hard as hell to get to this place, but once you get here, it's pretty damn nice.

This is the sixth time we've hosted a main stage here in Anchorage, but make some noise if this is your very first time seeing the Moth live. All right.

This is my very first time, not only in the great state of Alaska, but in Anchorage.

And the truth is, I didn't think that I'd ever have an opportunity to visit this place.

Growing up on the south side, we don't see mountains.

We do not discuss nature. The closest I ever got to outdoors was them Girl Scout

cookies I bought two weeks ago. And they was good. Make some noise for all of our

storytellers who are going to get up here tonight. The theme this evening is twist of fate all of the stories you hear tonight are going to be

about the unexpected things that people did not see coming all of our storytellers have a great bio in your program, but we're not going

to read their bio to you. We're going to introduce them by way of a question. And that question

is, what was something you did not see coming? When I asked our first storyteller tonight,

what was something you didn't see coming?

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