The Moth Lands At College Street

Singing in church — very badly. Crying in Target. Starting an international incident over a bad joke. Going viral. Recovering from trauma.

These were among the five stories told to a packed house at College Street Music Hall Thursday night as part of The Moth — a storytelling organization now 20 years old that puts together events around the country and for NPR.

The stories at College Street came from Alistair Bane, an artist and citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Nation; Andrea Collier, an author, journalist, and photographer; David Litt, author and former speechwriter for Barack Obama; Mark Oppenheimer, New Haven resident, former New York Times religion columnist and host of the Jewish-culture podcast Unorthodox; and Sarah Jane Johnson, chief of staff for the Moth. With Jon Goode serving as master of ceremonies and Aikiko Hosoi as interstitial musician, there were occasions for much laughter, a few tears, and a deeper understanding of the things that drive us apart and bring us together.

“Lips”

“Back when I was a speechwriter for Barack Obama,” David Litt began. The audience applauded. ​“Thank you, that’s my speech,” he said. Then continued.

When Litt was promoted to being a speechwriter for the president in 2013, he said, ​“I was 100 percent sure I deserved this promotion, except for a large part of me that didn’t.” He recalled his first meeting with Obama, who was scrutinizing some jokes Litt had written.

“So, are we funny?” Obama asked.

“Well, Litt’s pretty funny,” said his superior, Cody.

“Yeah, Lips is pretty funny,” Obama agreed.

Litt debated whether to correct Obama on the pronunciation of his last name, ​“You want to be the kind of person who can tell the president a hard truth. And my name is an easy truth. But I think to myself, ​‘OK, I guess I’m Lips now.’”

It came in handy — or so he thought — when it came time to write a speech for Obama to a group of journalists. ​“David Litt is scared. David Litt is timid,” Litt recalled thinking. ​“But Lips is bold. Lips is daring. Lips doesn’t give a fuck.”

The jokes flowed from his fingers, right to the end of the speech, where he wrote a line for Obama thanking the reporters for doing their work everywhere from ​“Syria to Kenya.”

The line backfired. A Kenyan newspaper ran the headline ​“Kenya Not Safe For Foreign Journalists, Says Obama.” The U.S. government apologized. Litt was not fired. But he wasn’t assigned to another major speech until the next press correspondents’ dinner.

“I am not letting Lips anywhere near this,” Litt recalled thinking. ​“Which means I am overthinking everything.”

He came up with a bit about Barack and Michelle Obama having bangs and doctored photographs of both of them, having graphic designers add bangs. ​“I work so hard and I sleep so little that I barely remember those three weeks,” he said. ​“It’s like a coma, only more productive.”

He finished and sent the images to his boss, Terry. Terry called him. ​“Is the joke that he looks like Hitler?” Terry asked.

Litt looked at one of the images. Obama, uncannily, did look like Hitler in one of them — and worse, it was a picture in which he was standing next to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

They removed that photo. But there was a last review to do, with Obama himself. Litt had a meeting with him and fellow speechwriters Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett.

Obama asked where the picture with Netanyahu was. He had liked it.

“We had to cut the picture,” Favreau said.

“Why?” Obama said.

There was silence. ​“Somebody is going to tell the president a hard truth,” Litt said. ​“Is there anyone that bold? Is there anyone that daring?”

“Sorry Mr. President,” Litt said. ​“We couldn’t use that picture because you kind of look like Hitler in it.”

Obama started laughing, hard. Then the meeting continued. ​“Something had changed,” Litt said. ​“I’m not scared anymore.” And Obama looked him in the eye on the way out of the room.

“Thanks, Litt,” he said.

“Shawnee Have Never Been Quitters”

Bane told a story about a drive he made with a Cherokee friend to visit Oklahoma, where he’s originally from. It was a 12-hour drive from Denver, where both of them lived. ​“By the time we got to Oklahoma, I was so happy to be home,” Bane said. That was when his friend gave him some complicated news. The friend’s grandmother, Miss Myrtle, ​“wasn’t particularly fond of Shawnee people,” due to a dispute between the Cherokee and the Shawnee in the 1800s. ​“This might seem like a long time ago to you, but she remembered,” Bane said.

The second piece of news was that Miss Myrtle was likely to try to get Bane to go to church with her on Sunday.

“I told my friend that I could be diplomatic and maybe win her over to Shawnee people,” Bane said. He took Miss Myrtle to Tulsa to run errands. He fixed her chicken coop. Toward the end of the week, Miss Myrtle explained that Sunday was Mother’s Day, and being of advanced age, she didn’t know if it would be her last Mother’s Day on earth. The one thing she wanted from Bane was for him to attend church with her. How could he refuse?

Bane and his friend drove Miss Myrtle to church. As they entered, she said that she had a ​“surprise” for him. During part of the service, she made a donation and asked Bane to sing a hymn for the congregation.

“It almost felt like an invisible force was propelling me to the front of the church,” Bane said. He was not a good singer. He knew no hymns. Then he remembered one: ​“Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.”

He began to sing. When he got to the second ​“hallelujah,” he said, was when he ​“realized that was all I could remember. But Shawnee have never been quitters.”

He resolved to sing the one verse he knew 16 times to make a song. Halfway through, he closed his eyes, ​“because sometimes it’s better not to see your audience.” He finished. The pianist accompanying him ended awkwardly. As he sat down again, his friend just said, ​“dude.”

Miss Myrtle at first ​“wouldn’t make eye contact,” Bane said. Then, he recalled, she said, ​“I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t know at least one hymn.”

“Happy Mother’s Day,” he said.

“All I Have For Them Is Love”

“I have been married for 30 years,” Andrea Collier began, to applause. ​“And 25 of them were dedicated to getting our two kids out of the house. We did this by becoming the Huxtables.”

It worked on her daughter, who became a TV reporter. Her son, however, ​“could be described as a yo-yo. Soon as you thought he was out of the basement, booyah, he was back again.”

When he was 24, he called to say he needed to tell Collier something. He came to the house. They went upstairs to a bedroom. Her son closed the door behind him.

“My girlfriend and I are going to have a baby,” she recalled him saying.

“Say that again?” she said.

“I said, we had a baby yesterday,” he said.

Collier composed herself and asked how baby and mother were. He said they were fine, and that the child’s name was Miles. Then left fast. ​“That was his cue for him to get out before I killed him,” she said.

That Sunday she went to Target. She called an old friend of hers and told her about her son. She broke down into an ​“ugly cry” doing it. ​“People are looking at me. People are stepping over me,” she said.

Her friend’s advice: ​“I want you to put your big girl panties on and do what your grandparents did for you,” Collier recalled.

“I know what I had to do,” Collier said, ​“starting with getting off the floor of Target.” She headed over to the baby section of the store and bought everything she thought the baby might need. Then she had a thought.

Returning home, she asked her family: ​“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Because you’re scary,” her daughter replied. She had a realization about herself. ​“I’m bad Oprah,” she said. ​“I’m Claire Huxtable. I’m Evillene from The Wiz.”

Collier decided to visit her son and his new family. As soon as she saw Miles, ​“everything melts away,” she said. ​“I’m like, ​‘give me my baby.’”

In Miles’s face, she said, ​“I saw everybody that I had ever loved.” She saw herself, her husband, and her children, along with ​“family members that I had loved and lost along the way.” Miles ​“took my heart and broke it right open.”

Collier recalled a quote from Toni Morrison that ​“a child looks into your face to see what’s in your heart.” She had been a little scary as a mother. But as a grandmother — now of two children — ​“I want them to know when they come into the room” that ​“all I have for them … is love.”

“There Was No Plan C”

On Oct. 6, 2017, Oppenheimer was waiting for the bus when his cell phone buzzed. It was the editor of Tablet. ​“I want a Jewy take on Harvey Weinstein by noon,” Oppenheimer recalled the editor saying. ​“Two hundred dollars. We’ll run it.”

“Why would you want that?” Oppenheimer said.

“You haven’t seen the news, have you?” his editor said.

The story of Weinstein’s sexual assaults had broken and was already spreading like wildfire. ​“I’m horrified, but I can’t think of what a Jewy take would be,” Oppenheimer said. ​“But then I said, ​‘Wait a minute. He said $200,” good money for a quick freelance piece, his bread and butter. A chance to take his family out for dinner and a movie, and popcorn besides.

“I began free-associating,” he said, and arrived at comparing Weinstein to a character in a Philip Roth novel. He wrote fast and turned it in by noon. His editor ran it with the headline ​“The Specifically Jewy Perviness of Harvey Weinstein.”

Oppenheimer went about his day. Two hours later he got a text from a friend: ​“Hey man, are you OK?”

“If you are OK when you get that text message,” Oppenheimer said, ​“you know you’re about to be not OK.”

The #metoo movement had been born and was circling the world dozens of times over. ​“The world was changing before our eyes,” Oppenheimer said. And his tossed-off story, written in a couple hours and another world ago, had gone viral. Three groups in particular were interested in it.

The first were #metoo activists, who were horrified. ​“I thought, ​‘Oh my God, that’s exactly right,’” Oppenheimer recalled on reading their critiques. He regretted writing the piece and began writing an apology, which Tablet ran a couple days later.

The second group interested in his piece were Jews. To them, Oppenheimer said, ​“this piece was the ultimate in anti-Semitic Jewish self-hatred.” Oppenheimer found it ironic because, he said, ​“I’m a big Jew” — having written about Jewish culture for years upon years (which he still does). But he understood the criticism.

The third group ​“really liked my piece,” Oppenheimer said. ​“This group of people was the white supremacists. … This was the piece they’d written many times and hadn’t had the courage to publish themselves.”

Richard Spencer gave it a big thumbs up. A teaching colleague shared Spencer’s endorsement. ​“Looks like my colleague Mark Oppenheimer is now white supremacist approved,” the colleague wrote.

The combination of all of them left Oppenheimer shaken. With a deluge of criticism on social media, he faced the possibility that he was ​“potentially unemployable. Everything that I had built” in a writing and teaching career ​“could just vanish. There was no Plan C if I couldn’t write or teach,” he said.

He got offline and hoped the storm would blow over. Now that he was offline, however, he found more time to play basketball with one of his daughters, walk the dog, bake bread. He bumped into a neighbor who asked him how he was and discovered that she knew nothing of what had happened to him online. He ran into the colleague who had associated him with white supremacists and they made plans to socialize. Oppenheimer reconnected with a sense of common decency in meeting people in person whom he hadn’t found online.

He decided to make the break permanent. First was his Twitter account. He logged in to discover a message in his inbox. It was from an editor in New York that Oppenheimer had perhaps hoped to work with someday. ​“Dear Mark,” the note read. ​“You are a disgusting piece of filth. Go fuck yourself.” He deleted the account, but also imagined if he’d seen the same person in real life, the conversation would have gone differently.

“The internet doesn’t make people mean,” Oppenheimer said. ​“It has just given us amnesia about how good we actually are.”

“A Little More Goodness”

“My partner and I are at a fertility clinic in a downtown Brooklyn high-rise,” said Johnson. ​“My wife doesn’t have any fertility issues except that she doesn’t make sperm.”

Johnson and her wife Carrie Ann wanted a child. But ​“when I am examined,” Johnson said, ​“I often feel like my body is not my own.”

In Paris, 14 years ago, Johnson was raped in the lobby of an apartment building. She chose to press charges. ​“One minute it was wildly empowering and the next minute I was drinking my sorrows away,” she said. ​“You never know where a reminder comes from.” It arrived once in the form of a travel poster for the Eiffel Tower on the ceiling of a women’s health clinic exam room.

“I learned to keep my fists up — and I learned that that is an utterly exhausting way to live,” she said. ​“Maybe I deserved a little more goodness and stability in my life,” she recalled thinking.

She met Carrie Ann among a group of friends when they all got kicked out of a bar together for being a little too rowdy. ​“Two years later we were married,” Johnson said. Her wife ​“was able to heal wounds I didn’t know how to heal.” But the old trauma resurfaced when they began talking about starting a family. ​“I don’t understand how I’m supposed to make a baby in the same place where I have suffered so much violence.”

They tried artificial insemination at home with a midwife — successfully. ​“I’m dreaming of this super-crunchy birth, like I’m rolling around in a wheat field,” Johnson said. She wanted no drugs, no epidural. She was afraid of losing control of her body. It made her think more about her trauma recovery. ​“Maybe you’re not as far along as you think you were,” she thought. But she ​“countered with the desire to be finally on the other side of this.” She knew some parents were worried about losing their own identity when they became parents, ​“but I couldn’t wait for the baby to be the center of my world.”

When her labor began, she had been warned that childbirth could trigger memories of assault. ​“I was trying not to let the pain of labor talk to the pain of my trauma,” she said. She labored for 65 hours, including 4 hours of pushing. It ended in a C‑section.

“The surgeon raised him in the air and said ​‘welcome to the world, Harvey!’ And the crowd went wild,” Johnson said. ​“His skin on my skin was the most delicious thing I have felt, and in that moment I have never been more proud of this body.”

Now, she said, the trauma is still there. It fits in her pocket, and sometimes she still feels it. ​“But my hands are free to do other things. Like hold my baby boy.”