The Moth

Here is a city culture article I wrote about The Moth, a wonderful organization supporting the art of storytelling, that was published recently in my school's newspaper, Communiqué. It was also posted here on Columbia's The Morningside Post. 

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“What is this, ‘Occupy Crosby Street?’” a man asks as he passes by a line of people that has wrapped around the block in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.

Some in the crowd could easily be mistaken for the occupiers camped out a few blocks away, with their thick-rimmed glasses and their hip T-shirts advertising obscure bands you’ve probably never heard of. But in this same group stands a woman in her mid-forties, dressed fashionably in black and looking like she might have just stepped out of a nearby boutique.

The passerby gives this woman in particular a peculiar look. She is talking under her breath and making hand gestures to no one in particular, holding handwritten notes in one hand and her iPhone in another as a five-minute timer ticks away on the phone’s screen.

“No, it’s The Moth,” a girl in line answers.  The man turns to the girl and furrows his brow in confusion. “A public storytelling event,” she explains.

“Huh.” The man gives a slight shrug and turns away into the night, casting one last glance at the woman who, engrossed in her own narrative, has not even noticed him. The forward movement of the line snaps her back to attention, though, as this throng of New Yorkers eagerly presses in to get a good seat for tonight’s featured entertainment: story time.

Every week or two, crowds like this show up at standing-room-only venues in New York City and other major U.S. cities for a chance to hear personal stories told by ordinary people. These StorySLAMs, as they are called, are put on by The Moth, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling that began in 1997 as a gathering of friends swapping stories on a porch in Georgia.

Some people come just to watch and listen. Others, like the woman in black, come with stories in hand, ready to jump up on stage if her name is drawn and share a funny or touching tale with a room full of complete strangers.


“Tonight’s theme is ‘jokers,’” the StorySLAM host says from the small platform stage as people spill into the small Housing Works bookstore cafe, occupying every free space and even sitting on staircases. The chatter filling the air quickly dies down as the host opens with a few clever jokes that would only work on a literary crowd before launching into the rules of the game.

Ten storytellers’ names will be pulled from a hat. Each has exactly five minutes to tell a true, personal story based on the theme, which will be judged by members of the audience. No notes are allowed. May the best storyteller win!

With that, the host draws the first name. Stephen, a 24-year-old with a slight Southern drawl and boy-next-door good looks, steps up to the microphone.

“Around midnight I get a call from my friend, telling me that the donkey we just purchased has died in transit,” he begins, hands shoved deeply in his khaki pockets. This is his first time telling a story, and he is nervous.

He gets a few laughs at this, though, which encourages him.  For three weeks, Stephen has worked on perfecting this tale about a college prank to capture a rival school’s mascot. It turned out to be a joke on him, with his fraternity brothers falsely convincing him that he had killed an innocent farm animal.

It’s a good story, and the audience gives him a generous round of applause as he delivers his final line and exits the stage. But stories are always scored lower in the beginning, before the tone is set and the audience has had a chance to get a few drinks in.  Holding number cards in the air like in a game show, the audience judges give Stephen a respectable average of 8.2.

The stories that follow fare better with the judges. There’s Nathaniel, the class clown who won his class presidency in high school as a joke and then didn’t know what to do once he was in office. There’s a Jewish Levitical student who, through what he considered a divine joke, ended up spending Rosh Hashanah at Rikers Island prison complex. And then there’s a woman named Katie, whose father insists on displaying a pair of old toenails from 1929 left to him by his father to anyone who visits their home.

Photographs by Michael Falco for The New York Times

But the story that truly captures the audience’s heart is told by a fast-talking young man in a backwards baseball cap named Michael, who does a charming impression of his mischievous Italian grandmother. With a huge grin and wild hand motions, he tells half the story as himself and the other half in her character.

Michael talks lovingly about his prankster of a grandmother, who he describes as “fresh off the boat,” recounting the time when he was a kid and she pretended in a panic that a moving truck that showed up at their house was there because she was being deported.

“They’re after me! They’re after me! I have to move to Canada!” he says in his best high-pitched, Italian accent.

Switching to his own wailing child’s voice, he responds, “No, Grandma, no! I love you so much! You can’t go!” until he eventually realizes the truck was just there to pick up a piano.
The audience is practically rolling on the floor laughing at this point.

Then, just before the end of his five minutes, he takes on a serious tone and gets choked up, remembering one day when his grandmother went to the hospital in the middle of one of their jokes and never came back. Pointing to the ceiling, he finishes by saying that somewhere, he knows that there’s a little, old Italian lady looking down and laughing at him.

Moved by humor and sympathy, the audience erupts in cheers as Michael jumps down from the stage and the judges hand him a unanimous victory. He will go on to face off against other winning storytellers in The Moth’s next GrandSLAM competition.

Before dismissing the group, the host asks all the storytellers who put their name in the hat and didn’t get selected to come up and say the first line of their story as a sort of teaser. The woman in black who had been practicing outside approaches the stage, this time without her notes, and delivers in a slow, Calamity Jane type voice: “Hey Sally, move your big head.”

She seems like she has done this kind of thing before. And she should have plenty of chances to finish her story at future events. Because with consistently sold-out crowds for over a decade now, these storytelling events keep attracting people and, like moths to a flame, they keep coming back for more.