Navied Mahdavian
speaker
218 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Navied Mahdavian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
For you to see your grandmother or a parent in the curved lines of my grandmother's beautiful hands,
and to communicate without words, because words were never the point anyway.
Thank you.
My wife Emily and I, we were on our land for the first time, and we were trying to figure out where our tiny house would soon go, which was more difficult than we had anticipated because looking around, there weren't any reference points. It's just land for miles, sagebrush and dust for as far as we could see. It was the first time I'd ever been able to say, my land.
And I remember that day, saying it over and over and over and over again. And as I'd say it, I focused on the way it sounded. I exaggerated the motion of my lips and my mouth. My land. Emily said, stop doing that. It's 2016, and Trump has just been elected. And so I did what any reasonable Middle Eastern American could do at the time.
I moved to the middle of nowhere America, and not just anywhere, cowboy country. We had visited the state of Idaho the summer before on a whim. And immediately, we had fallen in love with its mountains, its landscape, its real estate prices,
And so we bought six acres in one of its most remote areas, sight unseen, and we made the decision to move from San Francisco, epicenter of American liberalism, to Mackie, Idaho, population 500 cowboys. But we could own a tiny house, we could maybe start a family, and most importantly, we could both pursue our dreams of becoming artists.
Before moving, I had been a fifth-grade teacher, but what I really wanted to do was to be a New Yorker cartoonist. And I know what you're thinking. If you want to become a New Yorker cartoonist, move as far away from New York as possible. Makes sense. But what I've learned about being a cartoonist is you have to see the world kind of askew.
You have to, in order to poke fun at things, to make connections other people can't see. And Mackie, Idaho was perfect for this because everything felt slightly askew, particularly for a city boy like me who knew nothing about farming or ranching. For example, it took me two years to realize that all chaps are in fact assless.
So for the first year, we mostly kept to ourselves, which was easy to do, because technically we were like 20 minutes outside of town, past the farmers for Trump flags and the Make America Great Again welcome sign.
And of course there was the occasional stare that went on too long, which may or may not have been because of the complexion of my skin, and the occasional pointed question like, you're not a Muslim, are you? which was definitely because of the complexion of my skin.
But when we actually made it into town, people were usually really welcoming and they were kind, and we got some of that small-town charm that we had moved there for in the first place. On one of these trips into town, we were buying groceries, stocking up for a couple of weeks, Emily stopped outside of the movie theater in town, and she lingered a little longer than usual.
The theater had been closed on and off for like 10 years, and it has this beautiful art deco marquee that's like a homing device, particularly for somebody like Emily, who is a filmmaker. So on this particular day, she drops her groceries, and she has her hands and her face plastered against the glass, and I could almost hear the gears whirring.
And as my arms are getting increasingly tired, I'm getting increasingly nervous, because if you could imagine a graph where the x-axis is the length of time that Emily spends quietly thinking, and the y-axis is how much trouble we're going to be in, this would have been off the charts. And so as soon as I saw her smile in the reflection, I knew that was that.
We were going to reopen the movie theater. On the drive home, she explained that this is what we can do for the town. We don't know anything about farming or ranching, but what we do know is movies and art. And now I'm excited at the thought, because if this was going to be our home, we needed some way to give back to the community, to become known entities, real members.
Instead of being that terrorist, which is something somebody had called me, I could instead be that movie theater terrorist. And so we started up an arts council, which allowed us to rent the theater for cheap. We found and refurbished the original 1940s popcorn machine.
And I rallied the community to help us clean up the movie theater, our community, which is something I hadn't been able to say before. And I remember saying it over and over and over again. And as I'd say it, I'd focus on the way it sounds, our community. Emily said, stop doing that. And so we reopened the theater.
The morning of opening night, I was sitting in, I was having a cup of coffee in the local coffee slash bait slash tackle slash beer shop. And as I'm sipping my coffee, I'm imagining the thunderous applause that we're obviously going to receive after the movie that night. You know, standing ovation, cowboy hats being thrown high into the air. When my neighbor at the counter, he asks me a question.
He's an older cowboy and his breath was hot with coffee and his handlebar mustache was glistening with sticky bun. And he leans in and he asks, you're not trying to bring that Boise, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, artsy fartsy social justice warrior crap here, are you? And I'm actually ready for this question, because Emily and I, we know our audience.
And I respond confidently, no, we're actually showing an indie Western. And he asks, John Wayne? And I said, no, Robert Pattinson, the Twilight guy. And so blank stare, he says, you should show John Wayne. John Wayne. That night, it's opening night, I'm too nervous to sit in the theater with everyone, and so I stood outside of the auditorium. And the theater was packed that night.
Showing 181–200 of 218 · page 10 of 11
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