The Moth Presents Occasional Magic

by The Moth Presents Occasional Magic (retail) (epub)

  Then came a moment that will possibly define my life. Victoria Beckham, Posh Spice, the laziest Spice Girl, my favorite Spice Girl, was doing a signing the morning of their show in Chicago. She was promoting her designer women’s clothing fashion line, and you were only guaranteed to meet her if you had a receipt for like five hundred dollars’ worth of merch from this line. This was obviously not in my tour budget. I was mostly living off coffee and airline peanuts at this point.

  But I pressed my luck. I went to the event anyway, and I was very discouraged to find that hundreds, even thousands, of people would eventually get to cut in front of me if they had the receipt for these clothes. Before I know it, the event’s nearly over, and despite being the first one there that morning, I am pretty much dead last in line.

  This guy comes up to me out of nowhere and says, “Excuse me, did you already go through the line once, and you’re trying to meet her again?”

  I said, “No, I’ve been here since four o’ clock this morning, but I don’t have money for these clothes, so I’m not going to get to meet her.”

  And he goes, “You’re kidding me. Follow me.”

  I followed him down some service hallways and pop-up corridors. And as we walk and talk, he tells me he’s their tour photographer, and he has recognized me from seeing me every single night. He wants the photo op of Posh Spice with her number-one fan.

  Before I know it, I am thrust into brightness, now three feet away from my lazy idol, and she squeals, “Oh, my God, it’s you!”

  Like, not only was she not afraid of me, she seemed genuinely excited to see me.

  Now, at these events she sits at a little table, and she does not stand up for anyone or anything. If you want to get a picture, you have to lean across the table, and they take a Polaroid from the side, real personal-like.

  She asked how many shows I was actually seeing and did not believe me until I pulled out the evidence of the twenty-two ticket stubs. She got up out of her seat, grabbed me by the hands, pulled me to the red carpet, and said “You are fabulous. We’ve got to get some pictures.”

  Mind: blown.

  My presence has just moved the laziest Spice Girl to get up out of her seat and do something? What power do these hands hold in Spice World?

  We return to her little seating area, and I ask her to sign a CD very specifically.

  She agrees, so I dictate the following to her: “Dear David, you’re really thin. You should eat something. Love, Victoria Beckham.”

  And this smug pop star, who has made a career out of not laughing or smiling, cackled and then covered her mouth so the press wouldn’t get a picture of her looking happy.

  And at that moment, it started to click.

  You know what, David? You’re not better off dead.

  You might even be special outside of Spice World, too.

  But all good things must come to an end. And in February 2008 the Spice Girls called it quits yet again, cutting their tour just a tiny bit short and thus ending my walkabout.

  Now what?

  The tour was over, but the reviews kept rolling in.

  I was doing all right. I waited a really long time, thinking that that feeling of me being someone special was going to go away, and I’m so happy to report that it never did. Because during my little walkabout I learned so much about the world. I gained so much perspective. I realized that when I was a kid, my mother was a young single mother with seven kids. Of course she was angry and stressed out.

  She’s since realized that I’m a human being with feelings and worth, no matter who I fall in love with.

  I learned that the world wasn’t necessarily hating me while I couldn’t connect. The world was waiting for me to find my voice. (And good luck getting me to shut up now!)

  And there’s one more thing that I learned about the world that I think I probably knew all along.

  It’s a Spice World.

  We’re just living in it.

  * * *

  DAVID MONTGOMERY is a writer, comedian, storyteller, and teacher based in Los Angeles. After being trained in comedy by both a terrible childhood and the Upright Citizens Brigade, David has gone on to win multiple Moth StorySLAMs and be featured on The Moth Radio Hour, Risk! with Kevin Allison, True Story, and even to tour extensively with The Moth Mainstage. He is the author behind the storytelling blog RideshareStorytime.com, where he tells the unbelievable tales of his terrible passengers from his days as a rideshare driver. His solo storytelling show How the Queen Found His Crown has had sold-out runs in Los Angeles and in Pittsburgh, where it picked up the award for Audience Choice at the Fringe Festival. His new solo show, It’s a Spice World, We’re Just Living in It, debuted in May 2018 in Los Angeles at the Upright Citizens Brigade, to great acclaim. His storytelling interview podcast, Two-Story Building, is available on iTunes and Stitcher. David is a storytelling coach in person and online, details about which can be found on his website, buymeahotdog.com. His memoir, Here’s the Story from A to Z, is available for purchase at his website.

  This story was told on February 8, 2017, at Atwood Concert Hall in Anchorage, Alaska. The theme of the evening was Between Worlds. Directors: Jenifer Hixson and Kate Tellers.

  The night before I flew to my divorce, I was standing alone in my bra and underwear and basic black pumps, trying on dress after dress.

  It wasn’t sexy, and I wasn’t sassy. I didn’t have any girlfriends with me (though it would have been a perfect chick-flick rom-com scenario for me to give a gay-divorcée fashion show).

  I didn’t have any kids to watch me, though at thirty-eight I wanted them. And I didn’t even have my own mirror to look in, because I’d been subletting a furnished apartment ever since moving to Manhattan from LA during the separation from the man we will now call my wasband.

  What I did have was this hot desire to show up in court wearing something that would say to my wasband, See what you’ve been missing? When he had not been missing me at all, and had in fact been dating a bartender–cum–fitness model who was a decade younger than I was.

  If you’re wondering whether I Googled her, oh, yes I did. And—you can say it with me—she was blond, she was tall, she was thin, and she was tan. According to her modeling photos online, she enjoyed riding a bicycle in a bikini, with no helmet.

  I realize that focusing on what to wear to the funeral of your marriage may sound silly, or jejune, if I may use that word (and I’d really like to).

  But I knew that being in my soon-to-be ex-husband’s presence for the first time in ten months would yank my heart and quicken my pulse. And that sounds like the stuff of romance novels, but it’s really the stuff of corrosive karma.

  I’d met this funny, handsome, tall man when we were in our twenties. He was quite bald then, because he had just survived cancer. And I was quite sad then, because my mother had just died of cancer. I think we thought we would heal each other. But the sweetness of our early days had diminishing returns.

  I loved him madly. Slavishly. And he loved me, too. We just loved each other wrong, and I always loved him more.

  My lawyer had promised that there would be no drama in the courtroom, because we didn’t have a single shared asset. I mean, we had these Crate & Barrel gift cards, which were the only things we registered for, because we couldn’t agree on anything else. But besides that, nothing. All we had to do to release ourselves from our marriage was sign a piece of paper.

  But my wasband wanted to see me in court, and I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what I would say or feel, and I didn’t know what he wouldn’t say or wouldn’t feel. So my literal appearance was the only thing I could control about my legal appearance.

  And honestly, it was such a relief to focus on something as superficial as a dress after years of addressing deeper concerns, you know? I got to dig into my closet rather than my soul.

  Here’s what it came down to: I wante
d to look beautiful for my divorce. I wanted the man to whom I was saying “I don’t” to look at me and think I was pretty and feel sad he was losing me, because that would mean I had mattered.

  Also, focusing on what to wear to my divorce was an easy way to be glib about something painful. Honestly, there is something very chic about flying in from New York to Los Angeles to get divorced, you know? It’s kind of Auntie Mame. My friend Jo begged me to wear a black pillbox hat with lace that would cover my eyes. My straight brother told me to look very Law & Order, and my gay brother wanted me to look Sex and the City fabulous. I seriously considered wearing one of my reliable, beloved, Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses, but I didn’t want to taint it with bad juju.

  Now, the funny thing is, my wedding dress was a cinch to pick out. I shopped for it alone, because I didn’t have a mother or a sister, and it was the very first one I tried on. I was getting married in a fifteenth-century chapel in Scotland, and this dress, it had ethereal gauntlet sleeves (and this was way before I ever saw a Game of Thrones episode).

  I went back to look at the dress with my best male girlfriend, whose name is Manfred. And when he saw me in my wedding dress, he whispered just one word: “Inevitable.”

  Sadly, Manfred was not with me when I was picking out my divorce trousseau, and so I had this pile of dresses on my bed.

  I didn’t buy anything new. It seemed wasteful. I was going through my dresses in my closet one by one, and there was this dress I kept dismissing because it was very grown-up and elegant. And the neediest part of me thought I had to look a little bit sexy in court.

  But this dress told me to step in it, and I awkwardly zipped myself up, and it was the one. It was a silk Nanette Lepore with this black-and-tan-and-purple pattern that somehow simultaneously evoked peacock feathers and leopard print, which I thought was an appropriate yin-yang combination. And the clincher was it had pockets, which lent it an air of casual insouciance that I did not possess.

  But I didn’t realize until after I packed the dress why it was so extraordinary. I remembered I’d bought it at a sample sale a year earlier in Manhattan, on a cold fall evening. As I was leaving the sale, my wasband called with some legal threat. And as I was walking through Times Square with a phone to my ear and my arms laden with bags of beautiful, deeply discounted clothes, it occurred to me that I could hang up on him.

  This had never occurred to me before, because I had spent years clinging to his every word.

  But I did it. I just hung up. And it was like giving myself keys to my own cage. Every time he called back and I didn’t answer, I got a little less sick to my stomach, and I just kept walking through the cold night air. The world kept spinning, and the lights in Times Square didn’t even flicker.

  That’s the origin story of my divorce dress.

  The accessories were cake. My mother’s gold Celtic cross, as it offered some kind of armor. Beige patent heels, which we know elongate the legs. My toenails were painted a color called “Modern Girl,” and my fingernail polish was “Starter Wife.”

  I cared about the jewelry and the shoes and the nail polish because I cared about those things on my wedding day. On an important day, whatever you wear can have meaning, because it becomes what I wore that day, whether that day is a beginning or an end.

  When I get out of the taxi at the Municipal Courthouse of Los Angeles, my lawyer escorts me up to the eighth floor, and we exit the elevator. We’re walking down this long hallway, and it’s like my attorney is some weird legal dad who’s giving me away on my divorce day.

  But what really gives me away are my heels, which are clicking loudly on the tile floor. I’d wanted to see my wasband before he heard me, but it’s instantaneous. I’m about fifty feet away from the courtroom, and I see him pacing outside.

  At the same moment, he hears me, and he looks up, and my heart lunges. It is crazy how fast your heart can beat when you’re approaching the person you’re divorcing.

  He looks strong and somehow taller. And I catch my breath seeing him, this man that I had married just a few years earlier in a Gothic nave instead of the fluorescent lighting of a courthouse. The sun had streamed through the stained glass on our wedding day. I remember trying to slow my walk down the aisle, because my soon-to-be-husband was staring at me like he never had before.

  I thought, This aisle is too short to hold this moment.

  When he saw me for the first time in my inevitable wedding dress, he blinked his eyes so hard and fast, as if his own tears surprised him. My veil was a blusher, it covered my face. And for once in our whole relationship, he was the naked and emotional one, and I was the less transparent one.

  I remember thinking, Someday I will tell our children how their father looked at me on this day.

  But on this day, on the eighth floor of the superior court, the father of the children we never ended up having looked at me for half a second. He glanced at me by accident, really, and then turned on his heel and went into the courtroom, where he studied his iPad with intense concentration.

  When the judge arrives, we sit in a row. It’s him and his lawyer and me and my lawyer. And for a half an hour, I try to get him to look at me. I crane my neck. I scoot my chair back. I’m twisting my torso and pushing my chair onto the back two legs. I just want to give him a small, sad smile, the kind where the corners of your mouth turn down. Just some kind of respectful closure for the decade we spent failing to love each other properly.

  Now my heart’s not beating fast. It just sinks into my gut, and I’m thinking, Dude, you married me. You invented hilarious nicknames for me. And you won’t even look at me this one last time? I mean, this is it.

  But he never looked my way.

  I thought he wanted to see me in court. And after all that energy I put into deciding how I should look, I never wondered whether he would look, which is ironic, and maybe…inevitable.

  Just two years later, I wear another wedding dress, this one more exquisite than the first because, when I walk down the aisle in it, my first child is inside me. And soon after marrying the man I call my husband, I’m in bed. It’s early evening, I’m exhausted, and I’m nauseated, and I’m flipping through a magazine to try to get to sleep.

  I see this ad for Naked Juice, with this fit young lady out for a run.

  I’m kind of sleepy, and I think, Oh, I can’t run, and Oh, that juice looks so good.

  Then I do this slow-mo double take, and I realize that the runner in this ad is my ex-husband’s girlfriend.

  And I’m so happy I can’t run, and that I’m forty years old, and I won’t fit into any of my dresses for quite a while.

  I wish I could go back and tell that motherless, partnerless, childless woman, standing in front of a rented mirror, trying on dress after dress for her divorce, that what seems to fit you now may not suit you at all a season hence, and you’ll outgrow old favorites and slip effortlessly into something new.

  * * *

  FAITH SALIE is an Emmy-winning contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and a regular on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! She also hosts Science Goes to the Movies on PBS. Her book of essays, Approval Junkie: My Heartfelt (and Occasionally Inappropriate) Quest to Please Just About Everyone, and Ultimately Myself, has been called “a magic mix of vulnerability and jest.” She attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, after which her fellow scholars went on to become things like governors and Pulitzer Prize–winners, while she landed on a Star Trek collectible trading card worth hundreds of cents. Faith lives in Manhattan with her husband, two kids, and her husband’s dog.

  This story was told on June 14, 2017, at the Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles. The theme of the evening was Domestic Tethers. Director: Sarah Austin Jenness.

  I was in a van on my way to school, driving through the center of Baghdad. It was one of those vans that had a row of seats behind the driver where you ride backwards. I remember I was sitting behind
the driver, and in front of me was my friend. She studied English literature, so we were speaking in English to practice.

  As we passed the children’s hospital, all of a sudden I felt a wave of heat, followed by an incredible explosion. The force of the explosion sent people flying from their seats. My friend jumped on me and hugged me. I put my arms around her as she cried, but my eyes were fixed on the fire and the smoke behind us.

  We were just five minutes away from school, and I was in shock. I couldn’t believe that someone drove a car bomb into the children’s hospital. How evil can you be to do something like that?

  I grew up in Baghdad, Iraq, where car bombs were an everyday occurrence after 2003, but this was the first time I had been mere seconds from being blown up myself.

  At that time Baghdad was considered the most dangerous city in the world. My twenty-five-minute ride to school took two hours because of the many checkpoints in the city.

  We got used to it, but we weren’t happy. My mom would hug and kiss us every day before we left for school, because she knew it might be her last hug or kiss.

  I always told myself, I should focus on school, get my degree, and tomorrow will be better than today. I always hoped for an end to the Sunni and Shia civil war and to see a strong Iraqi military defeat al-Qaeda.

  Once I graduated, I got a job, but to get there I had to cross town. One morning, after news of sectarian killings and kidnappings, my mom said the salary the job paid wasn’t worth the risk that making the journey posed. So my only choice was to leave Baghdad.

  On Thursday, November 23, 2006, I kissed my mom and siblings good-bye. I didn’t cry, because I almost never cry. My mom told me to look after myself and be careful.

  She hugged me tight, and her eyes started to tear.

  I wiped her tears and told her, “I’ll be okay, and I’ll come visit.”