Moth stories have the power to bring you into a world that is often not your own and leave you wishing that you could live in that world

Just a little bit longer since 1997 the moth has shared more than 50,000 stories with audiences around the world through shows,

workshops and on the moth podcast and the moth radio hour once the curtains have closed the rooms emptied and the voice is

Quieted it's the stories still ringing in our ears that whisper over and over we are all of us more alike than we are different

Help us write the next 25 years of the moth story by making your year-end gift today

Text moth22 no spaces to 41444 to make your gift and help provide the space, tools and resources needed for more people to embrace the art and craft of

Personal storytelling in their own lives. Thank you.

From PRX this is the moth radio hour. I'm Meg Bulls and in this hour we'll travel around the country to hear stories from our live open mic story slam events

Louisville Kentucky San Francisco Burlington Vermont and Portland Oregon as well as the birthplace of the moth story slam New York City

The story slam started in 2001 back then poetry slams were all the rage in New York and our founder George Dawes Green thought

Why not start an evening where people anyone who wanted to could get up on stage and share a story

The first few nights were pretty rocky but people kept coming and the stories got better and today we have slams all over the country and all over the world

In every city the evenings are the same 10 storytellers drawn from a hat four teams of judges and one winner

When John Dubuque first went to the story slam in Burlington, Vermont he'd never been on a stage

He was a semi-pro football player who came for an evening out with his girlfriend what he didn't realize was she would end up putting his name in the hat

Here's John Dubuque live at the moth

All right, first I want to thank my lovely new fiance for volunteering me for this we got engaged last week

So thank you

I think it's important to preface this story by saying that like I'm a man's man I play football

I work at a juvenile detention center is like a hybrid Superman prison guard like I do a lot of different things

A year ago approximately at that juvenile detention center that I work at I was approached by the staff there, the director there that they were trying to incorporate some new programming

And that programming was going to be yoga for the kids not something that I do I mean I'm 300 pounds I play football and like roll around and drink beer

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