Hey, my family join us for our next Moth mainstage live from St. Anne's Church in Brooklyn, New York, on Thursday, November 5th, step into the beautiful and historic St. Anne's. As for storytellers, share true stories told live. Don't miss the show. Get your tickets at The Moth, Dawg. This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was originally produced in 2014 and has been modified from the original version. From PUREX, this is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show. And in this hour, we present a live moth event held at the Players Club on Gramercy Park in New York City. The theme of the evening was Don't Look Down Tales of high anxiety. The host of the evening was writer, actress and former Saturday Night Live cast member Rachel Dratch. OK, our first show.

So we asked everyone who's telling a story, a question that's based on the theme of the evening. OK, so the theme is don't look down tales of high anxiety. And the question of the evening is, what is your most irrational fear and what do you do to stave it off? And so I was thinking, what would I say was my irrational fear? And I found a difficult time with that question because my fear seemed rational, like none of them seem like something that couldn't happen.

Everything I'm scared of could happen to me. Like when I think of an irrational fear, I think of those Maury Povich shows where someone's scared of like a bird or something, and then they bring the bird on the back. That's an irrational fear. But so some of my true fears. Well, one is flying like I fly, but I never enjoy it. And I was scared that if I tell the story, I'll be jinxed. And I'm not going to say I'm not going to put it out there.

But but I was thinking about my fear of flying and like, I'll do it. I never really let it stop me. But then I thought maybe I do. But it's maybe a little bit because I do have one irrational branch of fear flying, which is I'll get on the plane. But I feel much better if it's like let's say I have a job in L.A., then I'm like, yeah, I'm going on this job. I don't go I don't spin out.

But if I'm going on a voluntary trip like a vacation, then I'm like, I'm in for it, you know?

Does anyone else do that? Like like it's somewhere you have to be, then you don't get scared. But if it's somewhere you're opting for, then you're going down.

But but and I was like I got offered this little teeny like a couple of lines in a film in London. Also, here's another rational Paanch. I would be more scared to fly to London than L.A. I don't know why it's over an ocean. It's Europe or something. It feels like a much bigger deal. No one seems to be relating to this. I thought I was going to get like. Yeah, me too. Oh, my gosh.

OK, someone up here, I don't even I don't even need, like, the storytelling cuteness. I just wanted to know that other people out there are feeling the same weirdness.

Take him smatterings. Smatterings. Yeah. Like I'd feel better when I live in London. So I got I got offered like three lines and a movie line. And this is one thing like I actually think I was on the fence about it because of my fear of flying, I think. But I did do it. So look for those three lines coming out theater near you. Humble brag.

I'm in a movie. OK, OK. I really do have like three lines up. OK, enough about me.

Last time I hosted this, they said you did a good job, but we want more of you out there and now you may question that now. That's kind of all of me you're going to get, because next, our first storyteller, Ben Lily, gave the answer that his most it's very meta. He warned me his most irrational fear is fear. And what he does to stave it off is always be afraid.

Please welcome Emily. So I'm sitting in the Orange Room at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, listening to a seminar on the applications of nonpoor Turbit of Quantum Croma Dynamics, as you do.

And the thing is, as fascinating as that topic is, I'm not paying attention to the speaker. Instead, what I'm doing is looking at all of the other physicists in the room, and I am looking at them one by one because I am absolutely terrified of them. Now, they're not particularly terrifying people. These are perfectly ordinary kind of dorky physicists, people. They gather around the coffee machine and talk about their lives and they talk about their kids or more often their lack of kids.

And and then they go out to dinner and they drink wine and they talk about esoteric physics topics. And this is the problem because I am also supposed to be going out to dinner and drinking wine and thinking about esoteric physics topics. But I am sitting there in that room with absolutely no idea what the phrase applications of non-operative quantum chromo dynamics even means. I wasn't really supposed to be there. I was in my second year of grad school, but I was supposed to be a playwright.

I went to college to study theater and it turns out the theater department where I went was terrible. And there was an amazing physics teacher and he took an interest in me.

And so I liked physics. So I'm like, all right, I will do this. This is a good thing. And then he said, you should apply to grad school.

And I said, great. And he said, you should apply to Stanford.

And I said, OK. And then I got in and you don't say no when Stanford says you can come. So there I was at Stanford and I went into that room twice a week every week and listen to these seminars and had absolutely no idea what was going on. This wave of words would come at me and like every once in a while I would recognize a word I understood.

Like, every once in a while somebody would say that I got that after the bell is an object. I can figure that out. Or maybe they'd say we did. And then I'd know that they took an action.

But but that was it. It was just this barrage of incomprehensibility. And I'm looking at all the other people in this room because I know that at any moment one of them is going to turn around and look at me and then all of a sudden just say, wait a minute, everybody, we made a mistake.

Ben has no idea what's going on. We made an enormous mistake accepting him into this program. And then everyone will just slap their heads and go, of course, how could we have missed that before? And then they will laugh at me and it will be humiliating. And I'll have wasted two years of my life. And I'm thinking about this and I'm realizing that my breathing is short and that my heart rate is elevated. And that's to be expected.

But less expected is the fact that my entire left arm has suddenly gone and I realize I'm having a heart attack.

Now I'm twenty three. They don't tell you what to do when you're having a heart attack until you get to like forty five or something. So I don't know what to do and I can't tell anyone in that room clearly. So I just slip out and, and there's there's a doctor's office in the laboratory and there's a big lab. And so I take myself over to the doctor's office and I walk in and the doctor there is this amazing woman is like it must be in her early 60s.

I think she's been there since the lab was founded in the 70s. And I walk in and and I I'm trembling and I say, look, I I'm having a heart attack. And she she just stops and she gives me this long look that very clearly says. Oh, no, not this again, which is not what you expect a doctor to say when you tell them that you've had a heart attack at 23. But she sits me down and she says, look, you're not having a heart attack.

You're having a panic attack. And I said, OK, really? And so she did some tests, so she showed them to me. I said, OK, and then she says, look, I see this all the time. You physicists, you drive yourself crazy. You then you come in here. You're all worked up all the time. I'm like, by this time I'd calm down and I believe her.

And so she's showing me out. And as she's showing me out the door, she says, look, here's what you do.

Get some exercise, best treatment for anxiety, get some exercise. So I go to a psychiatrist to see if I can get some medication. And the psychiatrist agrees. She says, you know, I see this a lot, too, with all all the academics, people come to grad school, they go crazy. And she says, you know, the fact that you had a panic attack, I think there probably is something chemical. And so she says, well, we'll start you on something.

And she settles on Lexapro, which is actually an antidepressant. It works like Prozac, but it's used off label to treat anxiety a lot. And so she starts me on this drug. If it works, it works really well. The anxiety just vanishes and all those bad feelings of worry, they vanished and the not understanding physics vanished.

And actually, I got good at it, we were we were doing this thing, we're trying to find the Higgs boson, which is the source of a mass in the universe. And to do that, you need to take two protons and smash them together and look in the debris for the Higgs. But the problem is protons or these incredibly complicated things. You need to look at the debris and tease it out.

And all of that debris is governed by something called Non-operative Quantum Croma Dynamics, which is why you want to apply that.

And I got very good at this.

In my last two years of grad school, I published nine papers, two of those I was the sole author, and then I graduated and I started getting job offers. Now, in academia. When you get a job, you have absolutely no control over where you are going to live. So at the time, I was living in the Bay Area with my girlfriend, who had a lovely career there, but I got a job in Chicago and so that's where I was going to go.

And I remember one night this had been happening for four years. And I sat and I I came in and we were sitting in bed and I told her, you know, I got this offer. That's clear. This is the one I have to take. I'm going to go to Chicago. And she started to cry. And I couldn't understand why, because, you know, yes, it would be long distance, we'd have to fly back and forth and talk on the phone, but it would be all right.

We we'd figure it out. Everything was just going to be OK. And she kept crying and I didn't understand. And I moved to Chicago, and two weeks later we broke up and in Chicago, things kind of stalled. My career kind of stalled, my social life kind of stalled. And I went to another psychiatrist there and I was talking to her about this. And she says, well, based on what you're saying, it sounds like you have depression.

And I said, OK, where would that have come from? And she said, well, actually depression is one of the potential side effects of Lexapro, an antidepressant. But it turns out when it's used off label, this this happens sometimes.

And so she said, OK, here's what we're going to do. We're going to treat the depression. So she put me on Wellbutrin, which is a different kind of antidepressant to cure the depression caused by the first antidepressant to cure the anxiety.

And things went on.

It got a little better and a little worse and a little better. And on the strength of all my work, I got invited to give a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. And this is a big honor. The institute is where all the brightest physicists go. It's where Einstein spent the second half of his life. So of course, I was going to go. You go, you get a talk for an hour, people ask questions.

It's a wonderful time. So I went and I got there and I went to the hotel room the night before and I realized I hadn't started writing my talk and I had meant to, but I hadn't. So I sat down and I sort of wrote some of my some slides and and I figured it's going to be OK. It's going to be fine. So I went to bed. Woke up the next morning, went in to give the seminar, and I got in there and I start talking and giving this hour long seminar and twenty five minutes later I run out of things to say and I stop.

And those are perfunctory question. And then it's over and I'm walking out and I'm talking to the guy who invited me there. And I said, well, well, how did that go? And he said, went well, I wish they would talk to for a little bit longer. I said, OK. And then it went back to the hotel that night and I started thinking about what had happened and I really started piecing it together and thinking, you know, if we were in Chicago and we'd invited someone to give one of these seminars and they talked for twenty five minutes, what would we have thought?

Well, we would have thought that that that was weird and that they had somehow failed and that they weren't very good. And then I thought, well, well, what would we have said to their face? Well, we would have said that it was fine, but maybe we wished it had been a little bit longer. And I sort of worked out that, you know, this statement I had just failed. I had just failed really badly in the most prestigious place I could have.

I started to think about why and I'm sitting there and I had the bottles of the drugs out and I was staring at it. And I started thinking about what had happened and, yeah, the the bad feelings were gone, the anxiety, the fear of people that was all gone, but also the happiness was gone and the caring about things and the having a drive that had all gone away as well. It was like I was level and there was no good things, no drive.

But also without the bad things, I couldn't feel the sorrow. And I realized that's why I couldn't understand when my girlfriend was crying. That's why I thought it would be OK when it clearly wasn't. So I took both bottles of pills and I put them in the trash and I went off it cold turkey. This is quite possibly the single stupidest thing I've ever done in my life. Don't do that.

Potential side effects of Lexapro withdrawal include dizziness, nausea, painful electric shocks. I got pretty lucky. What happened to me is that for two weeks I couldn't talk and I couldn't, like, form coherent sentences. It was an effort to communicate with people. And if I turned my head, it felt like the whole room was spinning. So I had to just sort of sit there and not form a coherent thought and not move my head. So for two weeks, I sat on my couch and I played World of Warcraft and after two weeks, the fog sort of lifted.

And I started thinking again about what had happened. And I started thinking, you know, for a lot of people, there is a chemical problem in the brain and that's what causes anxiety and depression. But for me, maybe it was trying to tell me something, maybe I was anxious because I had just done the wrong thing, maybe I should have been the playwright and the writer and I shouldn't have just done what was easy. So I quit my job and I moved to New York.

So. A couple of weeks later, I was I was sitting in my tiny little Lower East Side apartment sitting on the bed because there was no couch and I was reading and I was reading Volume six of Neil Gaiman Sandman.

And in this book, in The Prelude, there is a short story about a theatre director who's about to lose his theater and he keeps dreaming. And in this dream, he has pushed off a cliff and he knows that if in the dream he hits the ground, he'll die in real life. But if he wakes up, he'll have to get a boring office job so he doesn't know what to do. And as he's falling, he he calls out and he says, well, why?

Why was I pushed off this cliff? And this voice comes to him and the voice says, because sometimes when you fall, you wake up. And sometimes you die and sometimes you learn you can fly. And I was looking at that sentence and it struck me and I started trying to piece together, what about that sentence was important? What was it that made me notice it? And as I was trying to do that, I realized that my breathing was getting more shallow and my heart rate was was elevated and then my vision got completely clouded.

And then I noticed that the paper was wet and I realized that my vision was clouded because I had started to cry. And I sat there in that bed and I just cried for hours. And I was crying because I was terrified about what I had done with my life. I was crying because I was happy with what I had done with my life. I was crying because I was crying. And most of all, I was crying because for the first time in five years, I had felt something.

Thank you.

Well. Emily. Ben Lily is the co-founder of the Story Collider, where people are invited to tell stories of their personal experience of science.

He's also a moth story slam champion and a contributing editor for Ted Dotcom to share any of the stories you hear on the Moth Radio Hour.

You can go to the moth dog where you can stream the stories for free and send the link to any story to your friends and family. We'll be back in a moment with more stories from this live event at the Players Club in New York City. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange Project's big.

This is the Moth Radio Hour from PUREX. I'm Jay Allison. You're listening to a live storytelling event held in New York City with the theme Don't Look Down Tales of High Anxiety. And here's your host, Rachel Dratch.

OK, for our next storyteller. His name is Josh Broder. And I loved his answers for his irrational fear. He said it goes back to when he was five and his irrational fear is flying monkeys.

And when I said, what do you do to stave it off? He said, well, it's too late for me. But if you, you know, know a child, do not let them watch Wizard of Oz.

And now please welcome on stage Josh Broder.

It's the late 1980s and I'm in my early 30s and I'm a lead actor in a hot downtown New York theatre company in those ice cold rehearsal halls and those dank basement theaters, I am all powerful. I trust my instincts. I make big choices. I surprised the hell out of my audience. Coming to our shows is like coming to a wild party. And to some extent I am the party, you know.

But downtown theater is a very small world. A corporate friend of mine once told me that he liked to impress first dates by bringing them to our shows. Because you guys are so funny, you're so smart and no one's ever heard of you.

Now, when your claim to fame is no one's ever heard of you, there are financial implications.

In a good week, my company can pay me one hundred and twenty five dollars.

And even a quarter century ago in New York City, that's abject poverty and abject poverty is wearing thin. Two o'clock in the morning and of a 15 hour tech rehearsal day, the thought that I could get into a cab, a taxi for the short ride over the Brooklyn Bridge to my house. That's ten dollars. It's not in the equation. It's down into the subway and hope for the best, which sucks.

Now, I don't want to give up the fun. I don't want to give up the party, but I need some money. And that means film or television, I'm not looking to be a star. I just want to be able to take a taxi every once in a while. And, you know, it's not just money in terms of a paycheck. Experimental theater, it exists outside the laws of supply and demand, there's only supply, there are.

There's no demand. And for whatever reason, I want to test myself out in the marketplace, I want to see if my work has value. I want to see if I can even do what I know how to do when money is on the line. But it's a long way from an illegal firetrap theater to Hollywood. But then the film director, Jonathan Demme, he becomes a fan of my company now, I love demis movies. I've been into the all the way back to Melvin and Howard.

I would love to be in a Jonathan Demi movie. And this could also be a gateway opportunity. He put a downtown friend of mine into married to the mob. The guy got a great agent. Three months later, he's on Miami Vice and eaten by crocodiles.

And sure enough, when Demi starts casting his next movie, he puts a couple of guys from my company into it. Benami. Well, it's crunch time, so I gin up the nerve and I asked Jonathan Demme for a part in his next movie. And true to his generous nature, Jonathan comes through. But the seeds of doubt have been planted. I mean, downtown, I am the party here, I wasn't even invited to the party. I'm pretty much crashing the party.

But, you know, screw it. I got a part. I'm thrilled. Start reading the script. What does this Jonathan Demis doing a horror movie about a serial killer? What is this thing? Look at the cover, The Silence of the Lambs. What do I know?

It could be good, but what's my part? I keep reading, OK? I play an EMT and whoa, I get killed in the back of my ambulance by Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

If I can pull this off, it's going to be great if.

Fly out to the location, Pittsburgh, take a taxi to a very nice hotel.

Intimate dinner that night at the house they've rented for Jonathan Demi, his wife, the artist John Howard is producing partner cinematographer me and Anthony Hopkins, who I end up seated next to.

From his questions, you can tell the guy knows nothing about Jonathan Demme.

This was supposed to be just a couple of weeks work in a busy year.

But he tells me that, you know, only a fool would try to judge a film by the dailies, but I must say they're looking awfully good and I've never had so much fun on a set.

Well, you know, I haven't even seen the set, but so far I'm having a great time.

And I keep telling myself that, you know, pulling off a conversation with Anthony Hopkins isn't the same thing as pulling off a scene with Anthony Hopkins.

But so far, I'm doing great. Well, they're filming at night. And the first couple of those nights, I'm really an overpaid extra. I'm riding shotgun in my ambulance and hurring the gurney inside. And then comes the night of my first real scene, not my scene with Hopkins, but the first scene where I speak.

My crew of extra huddles around this apparently injured cop, while, well, I shout orders and the camera whirls around us, I feel loose focus committed to the imaginary circumstances. I mean, it turns out to be easy to pretend when they make it so real. The guy looks like hell.

His face is shredded to bits. Take one eye rock take to even better take three trust. My instincts make the big choice. I throw in an R rated improvisation both. I need the fucking oxygen cut print wrap for the night.

Demi gives me a big bear hug.

Shredded face sky high fives me. The crew wrapping up has adopted my profane improvisation. Jill, I need a fucking gaffer's tape.

This is like downtown L.A. with a fat paycheck and all the food you can eat.

I am the party.

Flash forward a couple of nights. My last night on the set, my big scene with Hopkins'. Spoiler alert, are you ready? It's not a cop in the back of the ambulance, it's Hannibal Lecter wearing the uniform and face of the cop that he's killed.

Now, I say it's my big scene, but to the crew, my scene is the thing to get out of the way. The real business of the night is the stunt driving with the ambulance. That's going to take some time. Now, there's only one interstate that tunnels through the mountains and into downtown Pittsburgh. And they have closed that interstate at the mouth of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, we have from the end of rush hour in the evening to the beginning of the rush hour in the morning to get my scene out of the way, do the stunt driving, get packed up and get the hell out of the way so Pittsburgh can get to work in the morning.

And I feel ready, ready to end on a high note. But setting up takes hours longer than it should. It's almost midnight before they even start to think about my scene, and that's when someone realizes that my my speech, my it's a few sentences of medical lingo shouted into a radio microphone while Hannibal Lecter rises behind me.

It's short, but the shot, the movement of the camera.

Anthony Hopkins business is long. They need more words for me to say. And all eyes turn to a guy on the periphery of the set, he's a local guy with a medical background, he's rented them the ambulance for the night and I see his face light up. This is his chance to write a line for a Hollywood movie. Now he's the party, and I know I'm not going to have any fun at all. Guy scribbles out three pages of tongue twisting, medical gibberish.

Post Dick Doyle with lactated ringers running on a double IVI Vásquez evisceration on and on and on, and I'm handed these three pages and I'm told to memorize them fast and I do.

But practicing in my trailer, I can speak them with all the Yalon of a bar mitzvah boy who's blown off his Hebrew studies till the morning of the big day, we haven't shot a single frame and I am screwed.

Dead man walking from my trailer to the ambulance, my new friends on the crew shout, encouragement, one take Josh, one fucking take clock is ticking.

There's a midwinter thaw and the temperature has spiked to near 70, the evaporating snow has condensed into a thick fog.

I climb into the back of the ambulance and drop down on the bench with the film lights, it's at least 90 degrees in here, equally humid. Hopkins is escorted in and laid out on the gurney, silicone mask in place, they start ladling chopped up spaghetti or viscera onto his face.

This hellhole instantly takes on the ripe stench of an elementary school cafeteria.

Take one action. It's a disaster. I mean, I get the words out barely, but worse. You can see my eyes scanning the scribbled pages that I'm visualizing in front of me. Cut, reset.

It takes 20 of the night's precious minutes to redo Hopkins' makeup. I'm starting to panic. I got to get out of this and let's I need to breathe. I got to go back to Manhattan where I belong. But every escape route is blocked. Hopkins and the makeup guys, the camera, the lights, ACHOUR in there like a cornered animal. Everyone but me ready for take two demi calls in, just just drive the speech, Josh, just spit out the words and I and I try to spit out the words, but mostly I just bit cut, reset.

My heart is pounding and my brain starts to take up its rhythm. You blew it. You'll blow it. You blew it. You'll blow it. And I do. In place for take for Hopkins' ask, might I speak to Jonathan a moment, Demi squeezes his head painfully between the camera and the doorframe. Are we going to be much longer at this? I am feeling a bit claustrophobic. And this guy who is making me nauseous. Anthony Hopkins is unhappy.

One take, four still shows room for improvement. Demi goes into crisis intervention mode, chopping out big chunks of my speech while the cinematographer unhappily dumbs down this pivotal shot that pays off the entire escape sequence. But the problem with taking out chunks of a speech I barely know is it only muddles me more. Take five is my worst yet. Take six.

Take seven cod. Take a cut. Waiting for take nine, I start thinking about the Pittsburgh commuter. I have no idea what time it is. Is he awake, is he headed for his car or is he headed for my tunnel? Take nine action and something in me snaps midway through the speech.

I'm shocked to suddenly hear myself. Well, Jonathan. Now, of all the highly successful people I know, Jonathan Demme is far and away the kindest. But now I forced him to try out tough love.

Keep rolling. Just do it, Josh Bam. And he slams the high side of the van hard.

And it works. Take nine continued goes a little bit better. Take 10 even better. Four, take 11, they reinstitute my full speech in the full complex shot and my brain resets to accommodate the new information, take 11 action and I am in roll medical language. I've used for years fires from my lips.

As I stare through a windshield, I can't actually see my instinct tells me that something is amiss with my patient and I whip around to find him sitting up.

With a new face. No lacerations, but drenched in blood. He holds a knife to my throat. We stare at each other. No one says cut. I can hear the camera motor still whirring. No words, but I look him a question. What's happening? Hannibal Lecter looks at me and answer. I'm going to eat you. Do you have to? Oh, yes. A great wave of sorrow washes over me and Hannibal Lecter laps it up.

At Jean. With Anthony Hopkins. Outside the band on a small monitor, Jonathan Demme watches with pleasure for these few moments, we three are the party.

Thank you. Josh Protic, Josh Broder worked as an actor and director for over 20 years.

Now he makes his living as a writer and executive coach. He made his New York acting debut at the Public Theater and toured Cyberia two months before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

All the stories you're hearing in this hour are available at the morgue where you can find photos and Web extras on all our storytellers. That's it for the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth.

Your host for this hour was Rachel Dratch. Rachel was a cast member on Saturday Night Live for seven seasons before that, she was on the main stage at Second City in Chicago for four years.

Her book, Girl Walks into a Bar, was published by Gotham. The stories in this hour were directed by Catherine Burns, Jennifer Hickson and Kate Tellies.

The rest of the MOS directorial staff includes Sara Habermann, Sara Austin Ginés and make Bolls production support from Katherine McCarthy, Genoways Berman and Brandon Hektor. Most stories are true, is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.

Both events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul West. Our theme music is by the Drift John CBRNE. He was the life musician of the show.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison with Viki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation committed to building a more just verdant and peaceful world. Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange Project's big. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our Web site them off big.