Chapter 1: What inspired Busy Phillips to host this episode?
Hi there, and welcome to The Moth. I'm Busy Phillips. I'm an actress, author, and podcast host. I'm obsessed with storytelling in all forms, which is why I am so excited to be here hosting The Moth.
I recently became very obsessed with the Tony Award-nominated play Liberation, which weaves together the stories of seven women in the year 1970, searching for their own individual liberation while debating how to effect real change in the collective. It also asks the question, as women living now 56 years in the future, how did we get back here, fighting for our rights and equality again?
On this episode, we've got three stories that'll take us from the middle of the ocean to a nude spa in Santa Fe to a rest stop in Texas. But all of them are about breaking free, about finding yourself, about liberation. Plus, I'll have a chat with the playwright and director of Liberation, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bess Wohl, and the Obie-winning Whitney White.
Our first story is from Amanda Burrell, who told this at a New Bedford, Massachusetts main stage, where the theme of the night was lost and found. Here's Amanda Burrell, live at the Mock.
So as a child, it was as though I was always searching for something, whether it was scouring the woods for quartz, which was the currency of my youth, or rowing this boat from shore to shore on the lake looking for artifacts. Every summer, I wanted to find a bigger artifact. Or in first grade, every day I'd get home from school and I'd go run two miles.
And I had like the first edition of the Timex watch and I'd time myself. And that went on for like six years. And what it looked like to everyone else was this kid who was never satisfied, and what it felt like to me was Nintendo. This was the late 80s, and it was like every day was just a chance to level up.
I suppose it was this seeking what's next behavior that led me to take a Navy ROTC scholarship to college, figuring, you know, the military might unlock some adventure. and my plan was to be a jet pilot. And I got to train for it here and there throughout school. In my senior year, I failed my final flight physical. My eyesight had changed. So I couldn't be a jet pilot, and I ended up on a ship.
It wasn't as big as an aircraft carrier, but it was a huge 600-foot ship. But I found a way to maybe make it interesting. I saw these rescue swimmers doing their thing, and I asked my command if I could go. Now, at the time, rescue swimming was not a job for women, and to this day, it is not a job for officers. But I asked if I could go, and they said no.
So, I asked five more times, and I even wrote a memo. And finally, they didn't say, you know, go get them, girl. It was this begrudged, don't make us look stupid, So 56 of us started rescue swimmer school shortly thereafter. And five weeks later, five grueling weeks, I'm not gonna sell myself short, weeks later, eight of us graduated. So I was one of these Navy rescue swimmers and
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Chapter 2: What is Amanda Burrill's story about overcoming challenges?
But I find that this line that's supposed to have all this slack in it is tight. And so I think really fast, because I remember, don't make us look stupid. I grab the knife and I look up to my boss and I don't ask. I tell him, I'm cutting the line and I cut it. And I've just saved the day because otherwise I'm like stuck next to the ship.
And so the ship keeps going and I do, everything is normal. At this point, I've done this drill many times before and I pretend to rescue somebody because remember, it's a drill. There's nobody in the water with me. And what the ship does is it goes and it makes this wide turn and it just comes back and picks me up. Well, typically it would be me with, whoever I'm rescuing, but this is a drill.
So they're going to turn and come back and get me, except for the ship doesn't turn. It just keeps going and going, and it disappears over the horizon. And being on a ship is my job, so I know that horizon is three miles away. And I've been in the water hundreds of times in my life, dozens of times doing this very drill.
But I have never been out of eyeshot of either land or a boat or a helicopter or another human being. And I am just 100% alone. I thought, what just happened? It could be a mistake. It could be a conspiracy. They could have forgot about me. Or maybe, am I imagining this? Did I go crazy? And I looked around and the sky was so incredibly blue, but the water was black.
I know from outer space, the ocean looks like it's blue, but it is black. And there are these thousands of fathoms between me and the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but I can hardly see down to my own fins treading below me. And every molecule that touches me is suddenly a shark.
And I think jumping to the conclusion of sharks is pretty normal, but I go straight biblical and I start thinking about the enormity of whales. and how Pinocchio ends up just chilling inside of a whale's belly, and how Kramer in Seinfeld, he hit the golf ball and ends up in the whale's blowhole. And then my thoughts go real dark. I'm little. I could probably fit in a whale's blowhole.
How long could I survive in there before it blows me out? And how long could I survive here in this water? And how long before my body would decompose? The rescue swimmer needs a rescue. Where is the ship? What can I do? So I tread a 360 and I scan the entire horizon and there is nothing and it forces me to be present. The ocean is inconceivably vast and what I saw, it wasn't
little white crashing waves. It was these football field sized rolling waves. And the water was comfortable. The sun actually warms that top layer. And the sound around me, it was like this amniotic hum. It was like I was safe in the world's womb. And this feeling rose in my chest. It was like some divine cord was just pulling me through time and space.
And this calm that washed over me left me wanting for nothing. The vastness of the ocean of nature had taken the pressure off. There was no more go, go, go, because there was nowhere to go. And it allowed me to let go. It unlocked this feeling that I didn't know I had been looking for. Peace. And there's no leveling up from that.
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