Chapter 1: What themes of memory and storytelling are explored in this episode?
This is the Moth Radio Hour, and I'm Katherine Burns. I've worked at the Moth for more than 20 years, and one of my favorite parts of my job is all the people I get to meet. The storytellers, of course, but also their friends and family.
There are so many people who I'd never get to meet in real life, but who I've had the privilege of getting to know a little bit when their loved one tells a story about them. This is especially true when a storyteller is talking about someone who has died. Through our stories, we're able to keep the people we love alive long after they leave us. I think of comedian Mike DeStefano's wife, Franny.
Two weeks later, they sent her out of the hospice because she started to get better. She was thrown out of hospice for not dying. And only she could pull that off. She was a young Italian girl and she was not interested in suffering and dying. Like, who is? But she was extra not fucking into it. Or Kate Teller's memory of her late mother, Lisa.
We're laughing about this and she throws her head back like she does. I note the shape of her nose and that her head is so small she buys her glasses in the children's section at LensCrafters. And I can see this because in the candlelight I can see the side, the arm of the glasses where it says Harry Potter.
To tell a story about someone who has died is to conjure them back to life, if only for a few minutes, and allow hundreds and thousands of people to meet them. This week's theme was actually inspired by Sharon D'Orsi, whose story about her mother, Adrienne, is the first up in this hour. I loved Adrienne and hope you will too.
Sharon told this at the Houston Story Slam, where we partner with Houston Public Media. Here's Sharon D'Orsi, live at the Moth. Shortly after my dad died, my mom moved in with me. There we were, two single ladies, one widowed, one divorced, separated by 23 years, but joined by 23 chromosomes and at least 23,000 memories. And that was the start of the adventures for my mother and I.
My mother was smart, she was kind, resourceful, and feisty. She also was petite, about the size of a chickadee. And she quickly determined that her favorite adventure was going to an expensive restaurant for dinner, and she would order two lemon drop martinis, a crab cake for an appetizer, an entree, and creme brulee. I was still working at the time, but sometimes I wanted to have some fun.
So I would say to Mom, pick out your clothes, Mom. We're going on an adventure. She liked it, we had fun, and she neither planned nor paid. But every outing that we had had a situation that made my list of things not to do. For example, I took her to an authentic 1880s Thanksgiving dinner in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
My mother is the one who asked if her apple cider could be traded for a lemon drop martini. Then there was the first time that we went dog sledding along the Canadian border.
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Chapter 2: How does Sharon D'Orsi share her adventures with her aging mother?
His name is Jimmy. He's really mean. He's not happy. He hates it here. His kids dropped him off. They don't come visit him. He's from Brooklyn. Don't take it personally. I go straight to Jimmy. I said, so, Jimmy, They tell me that you think the best pizza in the world is from Brooklyn and everybody knows the best pizza in the world is from Manhattan with Queens playing a close second.
He looks up at me, who are you? I said, hi, I'm Adrian, I'm the student chaplain. Is there anything I can do for you? Booze and broads, booze and broads, can you do that? No, Jimmy, I can't do that. But I'm the student chaplain. Is there anything else I can do for you? Gambling. Gambling. Can you do that? You know what, Jimmy? That I can do. I ran into the office.
I pull out the deck of cards that I keep with me because you never know when you have to play a game of solitaire. And I come back and I say, Jimmy, I don't know how to play poker. I lied. Can you teach me how to play poker? And he says, yeah, OK. So we play a couple of hands of poker. I lose miserably. And he throws the cards down. He says, this isn't gambling. There's no money.
Give me a couple of days, Jimmy. I'll figure it out. I come back a couple of days later with a jar full of pennies. sit down with my jar full of pennies, we get to playing, I start beating Jimmy ridiculously. And Jimmy says, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I know when I've been hustled. I've been hustled here. And this is, by the way, not gambling. These are pennies. I said, Jimmy, pennies are money.
Money is gambling. We're gambling. Let's play. And he says, aren't you a minister? I said, yeah. And he goes, won't you get in trouble for gambling? Yeah, probably, but let's have some fun until that happens, shall we? He's like, OK. And Jimmy begins to tell me his story. And we play poker for pennies two times a week for several weeks.
And he tells me that he's from Brooklyn, that he was adjacent to, but not in, the mafia. that his children convinced him to come down to Atlanta, but then moved him into the assistant living center and never come to see him. Jimmy was right about one thing. I got in trouble. I was called into the office, and they said, you are the minister. You don't get to gamble.
You don't get to gamble publicly. And I said, but wait a minute. Jimmy's doing well. You said the guy didn't talk. You said he was mean. Look at him. He's laughing. He's having a ball. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all well and good. But you don't get to gamble. You're the minister. Great. So I said, let's think about this. Tell you what we do.
How about at the end of every game, I scoop up the pennies, put them in the jar, put the jar back in my office, and then technically, there's no gambling happening. They agreed to that, and I said, aha, got to use my lawyering skills, so. This is good, this is good. So among other responsibilities I had was visiting the sick in the hospital.
You know, you'd go, you'd get a list of the residents who were in the hospital, you'd go and see them, tell them everyone's thinking about them, and you'd pray with them. And one day I'm at the end of my rounds and I get on the elevator and there's a woman crying hysterically. And I said, hi, how are you? And she said, oh, I'm terrible. I said, oh, okay, and got off the elevator.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Adrienne Lotson face as a student chaplain?
The only thing that Rhea wanted from me was that thing which I had always so effortlessly and naturally given her, which was my devotion and my awe. She just wanted me there in the room in love with her. and bearing witness as she took that last ride.
She just wanted me standing back in amazement and horror, but mostly amazement, watching as she went down, as she came out of this earth, not gently, but like a ship going down in a storm at sea, like the force of nature that she was. And in the end, the only thing that I could do for her in those last harrowing hours was nothing. It was nothing.
Except to surrender to my powerlessness and to have to let her go and to have to watch her go. And she went down swinging and battling to the last awful breath. And it was brutal. And it was beautiful. And she was brave. And I howled like a wolf when she was gone. And I will never stop telling the world her name.
Elizabeth Gilbert is the best-selling author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including Eat, Pray, Love and City of Girls. Elizabeth was raised on a small family Christmas tree farm in Connecticut, but she currently lives in New York City. And for those of you who aren't familiar with her, Raya Elias was a Syrian-born writer, musician, hairdresser, and filmmaker.
She was just 57 when she died. And her own book, Harley Loco, a memoir of hard living, hair, and post-punk, was published in 2013. On the one-year anniversary of Rhea's death, Elizabeth sent me a link to a Neil Young song. She wrote, Rhea asked me to ask you to play this song for her so, so loud today. Rock and roll is here to stay. It's better to burn out than to fade away. My, my, baby.
We hope you'll be inspired by this hour to tell a story of your own, maybe about someone you love who's no longer with you. That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us next time for the Moth Radio Hour. Out of the blue and into the black. This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Catherine Burns, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show.
Co-producer, Vicki Merrick. Associate producer, Emily Couch. The rest of the Moth leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Janess, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Caza. Audio courtesy of Random House Audio from How to Tell a Story by The Moth.
Special thanks to Devin Sandiford and his series Unreeling Stories, a Brooklyn-based organization providing a platform for people of color, women, and others who have been pushed to the margins of our culture. Most stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Blue Dot Sessions, The Swing Growers, and Neil Young.
We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
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