Ted Hoagland has a stutter. The speech impediment was so incapacitating that for much of his life, he was practically mute.
“That helped me develop an intense, intuitive rapport with animals, because of course if you can’t talk to people, you get close to your dogs,” he said. Mr. Hoagland, 84, later became an acclaimed nature writer, sharing stories the only way he could, on the page.
But he will take the stage of the Tabernacle on Saturday, August 5, as a storyteller for the Moth. The theme of the evening is twist of fate: “The things that happen to us that kind of send our life in different directions,” said Meg Bowles, senior producer and co-host of the Moth.
The Moth first came to the Vineyard in 2012. Each speaker uses no notes or help of any kind. Many of the stories are then broadcast on NPR.
As Mr. Hoagland describes it, while he was in college he wrote to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and asked for a summer job. They offered him a spot in the animal department and he made his way to the circus by hitchhiking. He spent the summer taking care of their tigers, which will be the focus of his talk on Saturday.
He said he found a sense of belonging in the circus: “I couldn’t talk anyway, but that didn’t bother people in the circus, because they all had some kind of handicap.”
As he aged, Mr. Hoagland’s stutter lessened dramatically. Nearly blind now from glaucoma, he explained, “If you can’t see, then you have to be able to talk.”
But, he added: “I think it’s mainly that if you can’t see, you can’t see other peoples’ reactions.”
He acknowledged that the opportunity to tell his story live in front of so many people is something of a rarity for him. “Until very recently, I wouldn’t have been able to tell my story on a stage.”
The other Vineyarder who will speak on Saturday, Cynthia Riggs, is a seasoned Moth storyteller. She performed at the first Vineyard Moth event, sharing her story of a flirtation she had in college while sorting plankton at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She passed notes with Howard Attebery, an older colleague, for months in a secret code. But when the job was over, their relationship also ended. And then, one day in 2012, 52 years after they had met, it picked back up.
The way Ms. Riggs, 86, describes it, the connection sounds telepathic. “I had just been thinking the way you do, I wonder whatever happened to this guy.”
She Google searched his name but couldn’t find anything (as it turns out, she had misspelled it). She dropped the thread. Then two weeks later, out of nowhere, she received a package stuffed with their old notes. There was also a coded message that said: “I have never stopped loving you.”
The package had no sender listed and no return address. Ms. Riggs went into detective mode and tracked down Mr. Attebery’s information and they struck up their correspondence again. When Ms. Riggs last spoke at the Moth, she was preparing to travel to San Diego to meet him in person for the first time in over half a century.
“My first performance, I kind of left it dangling. I had been corresponding with a guy and I had a plane ticket to go out to San Diego to meet him. And I said, well what was going to happen?”
On Saturday, she will resolve this cliffhanger ending, detailing what became of their meeting, their subsequent marriage, and Mr. Attebery’s move to the Vineyard.
Joining Mr. Hoagland and Ms. Riggs are three Moth storytellers from off-Island: Suzi Afridi, Phyllis Bowdwin and David Montgomery.
“They are a mixture of heart and hilarity,” Ms. Bowles said.
Ms. Riggs said the power of the program is that no matter how insignificant the premise, the stories shared can profoundly affect people. “It’s just people telling their stories and it’s fascinating,” she said.
Ms. Bowles agreed: “It’s not necessarily life or death stakes, it can be something small.”
The Moth takes place at the Tabernacle on August 5, hosted by Tara Clancy. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; stories begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $40.
Comments
Comment policy »