The Moth Radio Hour: Signed, Sealed, Delivered - Stories about Letters

The Moth

Arts, Performing Arts

4.6 • 25.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Special delivery!—a Moth Radio Hour all about letters. At work, for romance, and to the Tooth Fairy. This episode is hosted by Moth Executive Producer, Sarah Austin Jenness. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media.

Storytellers:

Meg Ferrill's letter is read aloud in her human sexuality class.

Danielle Dardashti is surprised by the severance letter she receives.

Matty Struski pens a letter in an attempt to win back his ex.

Lu Levin strikes up a correspondence with the Tooth Fairy.

Otis Gray gets a job writing rejection letters.

Stacey Perlman visits a medium, who knows of a letter to the great beyond.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin-Geness. In this episode, stories
0:19.4	all about letters. It turns out letters are not a thing of the past. Some people, like
0:26.0	me, are still writing and stamping, opening and reading them. Our first story is from Meg
0:33.1	Farrell. She told this at an open mic story slam in San Francisco, where we partnered
0:38.6	with public radio stations KQED and K-A-L-W. Here's Meg live at the Maw.
0:44.9	It's 1998 and it's my second year in college. I know. I look exceptionally young. I had just picked
0:59.3	my major and I had done this by going into one of the buildings on campus where they house all
1:04.6	the banners, one for each of the majors, and I looked up and I saw it and I was like, that's it.
1:09.6	And it said, leisure studies. And I was like, I can do that. I can do that really, really well.
1:18.5	And so like the exceptional leisure studies major I was, I decided to push out all my core
1:26.0	requirements and just focus really intensely on my electives. And so I chose human sexuality
1:34.8	because it sounded exotic. And yes, I was naive and innocent at the time. And I also chose it
1:40.4	because at the time I was also dating my first girlfriend. And I thought it might be relevant.
1:48.0	So the class started and it started first with STDs. It was just like picture after picture after
1:53.8	picture after picture after picture of STDs. It was just really hard on me because I'm a visual
1:59.5	learner. And then we quickly moved into sexuality. And because it was the 90s, we really just covered
2:09.5	homosexuality by sexuality and heterosexuality because like at the time, you know, we didn't
2:14.1	talk about much. I mean, like if you were a man and you had a piercing in your right ear by
2:18.5	urban legend, you were gay. Like what do we know? We all wore scrunchies. We were like a confused
2:24.4	nation completely. So I should also tell you that I went to school in North Carolina and North
2:31.6	Carolina is not the liberal hotbed that you think it is. At least it wasn't in 1998. And the other
2:40.1	thing you need to know is that I've never really been much of an activist. Like yes, I did adopt
	...

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