Four storytellers took the Tabernacle stage on Saturday evening as part of The Moth, sharing stories about events that shaped their lives. The space was full as was the surrounding lawn in the Camp Ground. This was the sixth summer in a row that The Moth has come to the Vineyard.
Three of the storytellers were from off-Island, with Cynthia Riggs representing the Island storytellers this year. Ted Hoagland had been scheduled to talk but had to bow out at the last moment.
The evening began with a short performance by Mary Wolverton on the violin. Ms. Wolverton would also serve as time-keeper, warning a speaker who talked for too long with a series of violin notes. No one had to be warned on Saturday.
Writer Tara Clancy acted as host and storyteller, interspersing humorous anecdotes of her own between the featured participants.
David Montgomery, a writer and comedian from Los Angeles, was up first. Growing up gay in West Virginia, he felt alone and rejected by his family. But at age 14 he discovered an important outlet — an obsession with British pop super group The Spice Girls.
“I realized this is what I want to do, metaphorically,” he said. “I wanted to have a voice... I wanted to be spicy.”
Years later, while working a dead-end job after college in 2007, he learned of the Spice Girls reunion tour. In a fit of passion, Mr. Montgomery decided to leave his job and follow the tour, attending every U.S. show. He created a YouTube channel to document his escapades and gained some celebrity of his own in the process. The culmination of it all was meeting Victoria Beckham, a.k.a. Posh Spice.
“At that moment it started to click,” he said. “You know what, you’re not better off dead. You’re okay, maybe special, even.”
The tour, he said, gave him perspective on the world and allowed him to find his voice, fulfilling his childhood hope.
Suzie Afridi, a producer of a comedy show in New York, went next. Raised Christian in the West Bank, her family impressed upon her the importance of marrying a fellow Christian Palestinian. Fate had other things in store, and after moving to the United States, Mrs. Afridi fell in love with a Muslim man from Pakistan. This was, in her words, “absolutely forbidden.” Half joking, half serious, she said that a probable outcome of such a match was her mother having a heart attack.
She grew apart from many of her family members when the couple decided to marry. But, Mrs. Afridi said, this decision was her first feminist stance, something that she wouldn’t have been able to do in the West Bank. And ultimately, after not speaking to her brother for 14 years, they made amends.
“I married a Muslim and no one died,” she closed.
Phyllis Marie Bowdwin, a New York-based artist, followed, describing an encounter she had with a mime back in 1979.
Ms. Bowdwin was going to meet a friend for lunch the same day she was interviewing for a promotion at work. When she arrived at her destination, she was sexually harassed by a street performer, while the crowd of New Yorkers cheered. She was humiliated and enraged, until she realized she had some recourse in her purse. She returned to face the mime and the unruly crowd, pepper spraying the mime and silencing the bystanders. When another, much larger, mime showed up as backup, Ms. Bowdwin recalled: “That day I was prepared to die, and I wasn’t leaving the planet alone. No, I was going to take them with me.”
She ultimately triumphed over the duo, went back to work, stapled together her skirt (the seam had ripped in the earlier tumult of the day), and aced the interview. “That’s when I got in touch with my other side,” Ms. Bowdwin said. “She doesn’t make many appearances, but she’s available on an as needed basis.”
Last up was Cynthia Riggs, an Island writer who participated in the Moth the first time it came to the Vineyard, telling a story about her late-in-life love affair with a man she had met as an eighteen year old. The two rekindled their relationship when Ms. Riggs was 82 and her long-lost love Howard Attebery was 91.
At her first Moth peformance, Ms. Riggs and Mr. Attebery had been having a long distance reunion, through letters and emails. That story ended in suspense, with her about to travel cross-country to meet him at his home in San Diego.
Picking up where she left off on the last story, Ms. Riggs described the couple’s first meeting, and how just hours into it, Mr. Attebery asked her to marry him by offering her a cigar band for a ring. She accepted and the two were married on the Vineyard, and Mr. Attebery settled into Island life.
Ms. Riggs described their marriage as magical, full of love notes and spontaneous kisses around the Island. They knew their time together would be short, but they made the most of what they had. Mr. Attebery’s health declined and he died at the age of 94, five years after they initially resumed contact.
“Howie is still with me,” Ms. Riggs said. “I think of him all the time when I think of all the things he gave to me. The best five years of my life. And he gave me something I would wish on every one of you, and that is just a steady, passionate, constant love, and that’s it.”
After finishing her story, Ms. Riggs was joined onstage by her writer’s group, which helped facilitate the couple’s reconnection. The crowd in the Tabernacle rose and gave Ms. Riggs a standing ovation.
Though over a thousand gathered to listen, the event felt intimate.
“I love it when we come here, because it’s like, this is all front porches, they’re just front porches radiating around,” said Jay Allison, founder of WCAI and producer of the Moth Radio Hour. “So it’s like rebirthing the Moth with stories and the lights and the moths themselves.”
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