Choose Your Own Theme: The Moth Radio Hour
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Chloe Salmon. I love thinking up the themes for these episodes and finding stories that fit. But stories speak to us all differently, so why should I get to have all the fun of deciding what unites them? In this episode, you'll hear five wonderful tales. The theme? I'm staying out of it. You get to decide. What common threads do you hear? Maybe I'll tell you what my vote is at the end of the episode, and you'll have a chance to send yours into the moth. But until then, I'm all ears. Our first story comes to us from Boston, where we partner with public radio station WBUR. Here's Harold Cox, live at the Moth.
It was a brilliant idea. At least I thought so. I was going to make a time-lapse photography video of me losing weight. I knew this was the right thing to do. So every day after breakfast, I made four photographs, one facing to the front, and then turned to the right, and then turned to the right, and then turned to the right. So I now had four photographs, and if you put a lot of them together, you would see me turning around kind of like a rotisserie chicken. So I was doing this because I had gained a lot of weight, and it was necessary for me to lose some. So my plan was that I was going to start drinking those godawful green smoothies. I don't know why people drink that stuff, but I was going to drink them.
And then secondly, I was going to ride my exercise bicycle, which, frankly, I had been using to collect all the clothes and lots of dust. And then thirdly, I was going to document this by making this photo exhibit which would show me going around and around and around like this rotisserie chicken, and I would then be able to see myself get thinner, and I would have an Academy Award presentation. Three weeks into this project, the bicycle was horrible because the problem is you go nowhere fast. And I wanted to get off of that thing. And then the green smoothies were really horrible. And I thought, well, maybe I could dress it up. So what I did was I need to do something that will make this actually all right.
I started making the smoothie and I put some kale and a cucumber. And then I thought, you know, I really like Grapefruit. So let's put some grapefruit in there. And then I put the peel in as well. All right. Here's what I would say about that. Don't do it. It's really bad. First, it looks like something you shouldn't eat. And then secondly, it was really nasty. But then I continued to make the photographs because I just wanted to, you know, I could see myself going around and around and around and it was really nice. So let's jump forward to a time when I had to go to Chicago for a presentation. This was a very important work presentation and I'd made this PowerPoint that would accompany my presentation.
I went to Chicago and I was in the auditorium, just me and the audio visual guy. I gave him the PowerPoint flash drive. You know where it's going. He made a mistake and instead of putting up my brilliant PowerPoint, I looked up and there was a picture of me. He had found one of those pictures and my arms were stretched out, my legs were stretched out, naked. Because how else are you going to see the changes that I wanted to see in my body? So I'm having a panic moment and I screamed to him and I said, take that down, take that down. He pressed a button and I started going around. So I'm going around in a circle and there was a woman who came into the room. She screamed and she went back out. I don't know who she was.
I didn't go back and check because I need to make certain that we came, you know, we took this thing down and he wasn't moving quite fast enough. So I went over and I just yanked all of the plugs out of the thing because I needed to stop this rotisserie of shame. He and I could not make eye contact the whole time. I went ahead and I had my presentation. I couldn't make eye contact with anybody in the audience. And then I got out of Chicago and I have actually never been back again. So what I have learned about freedom is that freedom is really when you let go of blunders and when you learn about your last blunder.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:12–5:34
2
What challenge does Harold Cox face with his weight-loss photo project and how does it go wrong?
5:34–19:36
3
How did a time-lapse 'rotisserie' photo end up humiliating Harold during a work presentation?
19:36–39:29
4
What made Dee Tsai enter a Chinese English talent show and how did her televised proposal win her the competition?
39:29–51:31