Mike daisey what was lost the moth

The last question is the easiest to assess. At their core, these are motivational stories, in which extraordinary individuals pass through a period of adversity, emerging with some kind of moral, some realisation about the shape or direction of their lives. A boy with a paralysing stammer sees a jaguar in a cage at the Bronx Zoo. It ignites his love of animals, with whom he feels he can speak, and for whom he vows to provide a voice, assuming he can ever get a word out.

Years later, he finds himself in the jungle in Belize, where he encounters wild jaguars and manages to make good his boyhood promise of protection. An academic black girl from Indiana loses her scholarship and housing and ends up sleeping on outdoor furniture in her mother's garage. Determined to work her way back up, she takes a job as a home-healthcare aide, caring for a dying man who, to her horror, has a Klansman uniform hanging by his bed, not to mention a gloweringly hostile wife.

I had left Indiana to change the world. And I didn't; I couldn't. But I realised that even if I couldn't change the world, I could change a little piece of the world that I was in, and that was enough for me. This could stand as a motto for almost all the stories here, though the littleness of the piece varies.

Some of the narrators have made a considerable mark on the world. Dr George Lombardi recalls an incident from his early years as an expert in infectious diseases, in which he was summoned to India by a mysterious woman in order to save the life of Mother Teresa a task that required battling an exquisitely suited emissary of the pope.

The astronaut Michael Massimo provides a loping, self-deprecating account of trying to replace an instrument panel on the Hubble space telescope. Despite rehearsing the task for five whole years, an unexpected glitch plunged him into an abyss of loneliness, not helped by gazing down at his home planet, circling implacably hundreds of miles below.

These tales of exceptional achievement — winning the World Series, reporting from Afghanistan, competing in the Paralympics — are interleaved with another kind, in which people who have lost purchase on the world regain a sense of self-belief thanks to some unlikely concatenation of circumstance. An orderly in a hospital, utterly uninvolved in his own or anyone else's life, finds himself forced into action when he's trapped in an elevator with a dying man.

A transgender woman, returning to her home town for her father's funeral, is greeted with unexpected sweetness by the football team in which she was once a quarterback.

Many of these stories are intensely moving. The adaptation process is very time-consuming. Also, in the one-man show, I am standing there in front of an audience, so they know this is important to me.

The same is not true for film. MB: I want that to be the case! Did you come to that decision quickly? MB: In real life, the process was much more gradual.

There was a period of about three years where I started amping up my personal stories. In , I told my story for The Moth. It was a much smaller organization at the time—-there was no podcast or radio show. MB: Right. MB: I loved both episodes. WCP: Yes, he has. I just saw the new show at Woolly Mammoth. People deserve to know where their iPhones come from. The Chinese people deserve that, too.

The punch line is true, but what makes it funny is how few people are saying it, exactly. What do you fear most? In my dreams as a kid, many of them ended with a bear clawing me. But then again, that [bear detail] in the conversation never happened. Directing a movie is unimaginably harder. Get the newsletter for people who love local. Get the free newsletter. You're on the list.

There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. He did, however, find himself in front of a McDonalds, considering a McRib. This was just one of the many stories spun at the Paramount, where Daisey hosted an evening of storytelling with five raconteurs from The Moth, a non-profit based in New York dedicated to the art of storytelling. The Moth comes out of the storytelling tradition led by monologist Spalding Gray — , whose archive resides at the Ransom Center.

I realized these stories are important. Baer explained that Gray devised the questionnaire, asking himself questions a therapist might ask.