The Moth: The Freak

This Moth StorySlam performance took place on November 28, 2011 at The Bitter End. The topic of the evening was Freaks. I wasn’t entirely pleased with this performance. A GPS failure had sent us to Queens instead of the East Village, so we arrived at The Bitter End about 30 seconds before the show was to begin and were forced to stand in a crowd of people for the entire show. As a result, I had no time to review my story beforehand, and it is evident in the way I am forced to circle around the ending of the story a bit before eventually finding it.

Most notable about this performance, however, was my failure to hear any of the warning bells that evening.  When I stepped off the stage, my friend said, “You went long, dude.”

“Yeah, but just a smidgen,” I said.

“You went way past the second warning,” he said.

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t even get the second warning.”

Apparently, I did. What should have been a five minute story went more than seven minutes, and this most assuredly impacted my scores. I finished in fifth place, and while I shouldn’t have won the competition, (there were at least three other storytellers far better than me that night), I expected much better scores.

But nobody likes a long-winded storyteller, myself included.