I have been wanting to go to a Moth performance since I moved to New York. My parents turned me onto the Moth, an organization that hosts live storytelling sessions (stories are true and are told live, without notes), after hearing it on NPR. I download their free podcast, which I can't recommend highly enough, quite a bit, and it's fantastic. Some stories are funny, some are poignant, and none, so far, have disappointed. Anyone is allowed to participate in the story slams, each with a theme, and they pick winners from each one to take on other winners from other slams or other cities. It's awesome.
Alas, Moth performances tend to be on weeknights, when I have to tutor. While perusing the Moth schedule longingly one night, I just about fell out of my chair when I saw that Salman Rushdie would be hosting an upcoming Moth event. In conjunction with the annual PEN World Voices international literature festival, an event that celebrates and promotes freedom of literary expression around the globe, the Moth was going to do a performance hosted by PEN's former president, Sir Rushdie himself. Salman Rushdie has long been one of my absolute favorite authors. His books are incredibly demanding, but I am addicted to his wit, wordplay, allusions, outrageous plot lines, and sharp observations about culture and human nature. He is absolutely brilliant, and the chance to be in the same room with him was too good to miss. I bought two tickets immediately. Saturday night, I showed up excitedly with my friend Matt in tow. The place was absolutely packed and the show started a few minutes late. While we were waiting in our seats for people to settle down, Matt nudged me and pointed to the wall to the right of the stage. Salman Rushdie himself was standing by a pillar, waiting to take the stage. He's one of the few authors I recognize immediately, and it was completely surreal to stare at the man who thought up Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Shalimar the Clown, and The Satanic Verses, among many others.
The crowd went crazy when he took the stage, and in a smooth British accent he welcomed us, told a few jokes (one of which started with a comment about wigs made from human hair and ended with a speculation about Donald Trump's hair, which clearly was not American and therefore should not be allowed to run for president until its birth certificate had been examined), and encouraged us to be very concerned about the censorious Chinese government and the threat faced by Chinese authors, some of whom were arrested months ago and have yet to be seen or heard from. Then he introduced the first storyteller and returned to the stage between each performance to introduce the next one.
The theme of the night was "What Went Wrong?" We listened to five stories, and the speakers included Jonathan Franzen (again) and an author named Warren Macdonald, an Australian who lost his legs in a climbing accident but still climbs with prosthetic legs. All of the stories were superb, as I've come to expect from the Moth. Macdonald's was the most gripping, Franzen's the most thought-provoking, and Edgar Oliver's the funniest. Oliver's story, told in his unmistakably and completely inimitably grand voice (here is a video clip of another story he told at another Moth event, because you really have to hear him - he's phenomenal, although this story isn't as funny as the one he told on Saturday), was about going to Morocco to look for Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky. I kept glancing at Rushdie throughout the performance, and he was roaring with laughter. After it was over, he took the stage again and told a hilarious anecdote about going to a screening of the movie version of the book after it had just been made and not being sure how to tell the director, who was a personal friend of his, that he thought it was terrible. The only author I saw signing books after the show was Franzen, and since I already had a signed copy of one of his novels - I love being able to type that - Matt and I headed out into a cool spring night where we wandered into a Nepalese restaurant and dissected the evening's events. All in all, thoroughly fantastic, and just another unneeded reminder of why I love this city.
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