00;00;10;01 – 00;00;35;00
Marc Moss
Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. Tell Us Something is a nonprofit that helps people share their true personal stories around a theme. Live in person and without notes. I’m Mark Moss, your host and executive director of Tell Us Something. Have you ever felt that tug towards a place, a memory, or maybe even a person? That feeling of going home, that feeling of going home isn’t just about a physical location.

It’s about belonging and connection. It’s about finding that piece of yourself that’s been missing. On this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. We explore all the different ways we come home to ourselves and the world around us. We’ll hear stories of journeys, of second chances, of rediscovering what truly matters. So buckle up and get comfy. Join us as we embark on these heartfelt adventures.

This episode of the podcast was recorded in front of a live audience at the Glacier Ice Rink and Pavilion on June 11th, 2024, as part of the Missoula Pride celebration. Eight storytellers shared their true personal stories on the theme Going Home.

00;01;19;02 – 00;01;30;05
Michelle Reilly
It was like looking through the most beautiful kaleidoscope I had ever looked through all these vibrant colors and shapes and patterns of fractals and wonder.

00;01;30;05 – 00;01;48;03
Adel Ben Bacha
As she answers the phone, she softly says hello. And then silence. That silence felt like forever. But she breaks that silence with a delicate sob.

00;01;48;03 – 00;01;59;15
Zeke Cork
I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought maybe it was about my family, so I try to write about it, but there was always something missing. It stayed with me for years.

00;01;59;15 – 00;02;06;01
Ashley Brittner Wells
The coolest thing you could do in town was go to the games. And I desperately wanted to be cool, so I went.

00;02;06;01 – 00;02;37;00
Marc Moss
That’s coming up. We are currently looking for storytellers for the next tell us something storytelling event. The theme is Never Again. If you’d like to pitch your story for consideration, please call (406) 203-4683. You have three minutes to leave your pitch. The pitch deadline is August 9th. I look forward to hearing from you. We’re also looking for volunteers to help with the event.

If you love Tell Us Something and you love helping out, visit. Tell us something. Morgan. Volunteer to learn more and to sign up.

We were gathered at the Missoula County Fairgrounds in the heart of Montana amidst the vibrant energy of early June. As we remembered that we took a moment to acknowledge the traditional stewards of this land. We stand on the ancestral homelands of the Salish and Kalispell, people who for countless generations have nurtured and cared for this place. The place of the small bull trout.

Their deep connection to this land is woven into the very fabric of this valley. We honor their resilience, their knowledge of the natural world, and their enduring presence here. Acknowledgment alone is not enough. Let’s also commit to taking action ways that you can do this if you live in Missoula, or to learn more about the native tribes who still inhabit this land.

You can visit the Salish Kootenay College or the Missoula Children’s Museum to deepen your understanding of the Salish and Kalispell cultures. You can visit the Missoula Art Museum, where the exhibit We Stand with you. Contemporary artists. Honor the families of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous relative crisis runs through September 7th, 2024. You can support cultural events hosted by local tribes and explore opportunities to volunteer with their initiatives.

We can always be looking for opportunities to incorporate indigenous knowledge and practices into our everyday lives, whether it’s sustainable land management or traditional food systems. We can commit to moving beyond mere words and work towards building a more respectful and inclusive future. Honoring the legacy of the Salish and the Kalispell people on whose land we stand.

Remember this. Tell us something. Stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language.

We ate. Tell us something. Recognize the privilege inherent in our platform and while we love sharing a variety of voices, it’s important to amplify marginalized voices. That’s why during the event on June 11th, I stepped back and passed the mic to our friends from Missoula Pride. Devin Carpenter, who shared his story at last year’s event, and Kiara Rivera from the center, performed the honors of seeing the evening’s event.

On the podcast, you’ll hear them giving the bios for the storytellers.

Michelle Riley finds herself homeless in 10th grade in a challenge that begins a lifetime of challenges after earning a PhD. Despite her alcohol use disorder, she struggles to overcome addiction and finds unexpected hope. In an online ad, sensitive listeners, please note that Michelle’s story contains mentions of suicidal thoughts, which may be distressing for some listeners. Please take care of yourselves.

Michelle calls her story heroic measures. Thanks for listening.

00;05;41;05 – 00;06;29;18
Michelle Reilly

I found myself homeless for the first time when I was in 10th grade. My sisters and I came home from school and our father’s truck was parked there. But our father was never home this time of day. So we walked inside. Hello. Hello. No answer. We walked up the stairs and the door to my parent’s bedroom was cracked, so we pushed it open and my father was there, kneeling at the foot of his bed with all of his guns, a row of guns laid out neatly on his bed.

My mom was gone. She left. See, I grew up in a small town in rural Appalachia, and my parents were young parents. My mother had three daughters by the time she was 21. So I guess by 35, she didn’t want to be a mother anymore. And home became not so homey anymore. I started sleeping at friends houses or sleeping in my car.

Sometimes I didn’t sleep at all because by 11th grade I was working 3 or 4 jobs. I’d rotate between two afterschool jobs, and then I’d go to work third shift at a diner. And diners in Appalachia weren’t the most wholesome place for a 16 year old girl to be. So I dealt with far too many sexual propositions from older men.

There. I’d get off at 6 or 7. I’d go to school, shower in the locker room, and then I’d sleep either in homeroom or in my car. And I don’t remember thinking about these things. It was like I was just on autopilot doing them. After high school, I started undergrad with the same unwavering autopilot and schedule. I was working 5 or 6 jobs and taking 18 to 21 credits a semester.

And I was introduced to the underground rave scene in Pittsburgh and started experimenting with party drugs. I was also drinking a lot during this time and sleeping even less. I’d started drinking at a young age after my mom left, and I was given a fake ID, but I lived in a small town, so I’d frequently run into friends of my father’s at dive bars, but they knew his mental state after my mom left, so either they never told him or if they did, he was too depressed to say anything to me.

After undergrad, I moved to Reno and started living out of my car again. And then at 27, I applied to grad school and earned a master’s of science from Johns Hopkins University. And then I was offered a research position. So I moved to Flagstaff and earned my PhD and four years.

Underneath the accomplishments and overcome struggles. I was completely empty and numb, still completely out of touch with any emotions and just doing doing all the things that I know needed to get done. Doing all the things I needed to do without feeling anything. And during this time, I was still drinking a lot like a fifth whiskey a night was not uncommon.

I was still over performing at work, exceeding expectations and producing high quality products. But my behavior was erratic and my emotions were frequently uncontrolled outbursts of sobbing or rage. And I felt that uncontrollable spiraling. It’s like I was in a dark box and there wasn’t a top or bottom, and there wasn’t a way out of this box because the box was everything.

It’s like those car compactors at scrap yards. The force and pressure needed to smash a car into this tiny package of metal. That force and pressure is what it felt like all around me, all of the time in this torque box. And I couldn’t climb out of this box because the darkness was everything.

It was so isolating and I felt so alone. I became completely dysregulated and at times suicidal and really lost hope.

One day I was scrolling through Instagram and I felt an emotion, a glimmer of hope, a tiny seed deep down that I barely felt safe acknowledging. I filled out an online form for a clinical trial titled Psilocybin Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder with Co-occurring Alcohol Use Disorder.

Fast forward several long months of getting physicals, providing psychological examinations, getting bloodwork and providing a detailed drinking history. And I was told I was accepted into this trial. I started meeting twice a week with my guides, a licensed social worker and a psychologist. And there wasn’t a single meeting that I didn’t cry at, just endless tears streaming down my face.

But hopelessness was still. I felt.

On September 18th, I walked into the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Behavioral Research for my last Credos interview, and I was asked a series of questions on a scale of 0 to 10, how important is it for you to change your drinking right now? Ten? On a scale of 0 to 10, how confident are you that you can change your drinking right now?

At this point in my life, I felt like I had drank more days. I’d been alive than not drank, so my confidence was pretty low. I think I gave the question a 3 or 4. More evaluations and discussions and meditating. And then I was handed a wooden chalice and I put on a blood pressure monitor. I shades and headphones and I waited.

And if you’re familiar with psychedelics, the dose I was given was a high dose. It’s what they call a heroic dose.

The music began to entice and overwhelm me, and I was being pulled by curiosity into a world completely unfamiliar to me. Although I had a fair share of experience with party drugs, I had no experience with psychedelics.

I began to see so many fantastical things and found myself invited deeper and deeper into my internal psyche. So many interesting patterns and curiosities and a feeling of weightlessness.

It was like looking through the most beautiful kaleidoscope I had ever looked through, all these vibrant colors and shapes and patterns of fractals and wonder.

The texture of the music became the vibrant colors, and I could feel all these colors and patterns in a very intense way. The kaleidoscope became five dimensional and the universe became five dimensional. And I was a part of that.

I could feel so much depth and breadth and heights, but also time both forward and backwards and resonance. And every cell in my body was suddenly alive and vibrating with the resonance of these mutating colors and the kaleidoscope. My body became warm and endless without boundary, and I felt so much openness, like an untethered ring. Like the layers just being pulled off of me.

All that crushing heaviness. That only thing that I had felt for so long was being pulled out of me and lifted off of me and replaced with this beautiful radiance. And this warm, golden light was being poured into me and filling me and spilling out around me into this beautiful reflective pool. At some point, I don’t know the timeline, but I felt as though I was being embraced by the universe, and I felt a presence.

And I felt this presence tell me or show me that I was not alone, that I was being held, always held, and that I was loved. And I saw darkness from my past in a new light. But I felt safe there, and I felt as though I was not alone. But I was being guided through this darkness and fear was replaced with curiosity.

I explored unending time and a continuum of life, and I felt more at home than I had ever felt in my entire life. The details of the experience are inexplicable, as often is said about life changing psychedelic experiences. It was ineffable. I had one other treatment three months after my first, and I have not had the urge to numb reality through drinking since my first session.

I still carry with me that peace and comfort I felt during my first session, and I’m learning a new sense of self filled with generosity and acceptance. And I’m so grateful that I found my way home to my self-worth.

00;16;36;03 – 00;16;52;04
Devin Carpenter
Michelle Reilly is a wilderness specialist and wildlife ecologist who has lived in Missoula for 8 years. She is a wildcrafter, avid backpacker, and devoted mother. If she isn’t deep in the mountains or paddling the rivers, you can find her in her yard tending her gourmet mushroom gardens. She also runs a Missoula Ladies’ Dinner Club and enjoys entertaining in her backyard. Sensitive listeners, please note that Michelle’s story contains mentions of suicidal thoughts and the her father contemplating suicide, which may be distressing for some listeners. Please take care of yourselves. Alright, please welcome Michelle Reilly.

00;16;52;10 – 00;17;06;17
Marc Moss
Up next Adele Ben Boccia shares a vivid tale of family nostalgia and a life changing phone call that redefines the meaning of home. Adele calls her story plus 206. Thanks for listening.

00;17;06;17 – 00;17;35;07
Adel Ben Bacha
Hello, everyone. Before I tell you my story, I would like for all of you to close your eyes, at least for one part, because I want this to be a shared experience. So my story takes us back. Eight years ago in France, in the little city of my family and I are all gathered for a Thursday dinner, as my mom loves to make them.

Everyone understands what she has prepared for dinner. It’s everyone’s favorite meal, a delicious couscous that looks like perfection. So she’s in the kitchen. We are all in the living room. We are a big family of eight people, and I’m the youngest in the living room. You can hear the loud voices, some jokes being thrown at people, and very loud and heavy arguments.

So she’s in the kitchen. The dish is getting ready, and as she brings the plate in the living room, everyone just stops. They’re astonished by this red vivid color. This color comes from the spices she puts in it. The tomato sauce, the harissa. Very spicy that day. By the way. And everyone dies in. Everyone stops. And the room is filled with the sound of clinking spoons.

And so I try a very timid. Bon appétit that can be heard. Have you ever felt that ignored. If not, that hurts a lot. So everyone dives in and eats peacefully. The noise is getting louder as it was before, but suddenly the phone rings. My mum rushes through the phone to the phone and I see her eyes widening, and as they get bigger, we all see this number.

This number was longer than usual on the phone and we could all see the country code. And I remember vividly the numbers two, one, six. Answering that phone took her instantaneously back to her childhood until she was 17. As she answers the phone, she softly says hello. And then silence. That silence felt like forever. But she breaks that silence where they delicate sob.

Me and my siblings look at each other and we understand what happened. And something very bad happened. After a sleepless night, my mom boards us on the first plane. She finds to Tunisia the place where she was born. As the plane lands, her head is still up in the clouds. She walks through the airport and all she sees is just lifeless figures walking around the airport.

She goes out of the airport. And then she hops into the first taxi, and she is starting to get prepared to her two hour drive to take her to her hometown, a small village now become a city called Dubai. As she is on her way, she looks through the window and she notices that a lot of things have changed.

The palm trees are higher, the buildings too, and the traffic is heavier, making the journey even longer. She finally gets there, knocks at the door and suddenly the memories in her head start rushing as well as if it was a race. Each memory wanted to be the one, the one to be remembered. The first thing she would tell her sister.

But eventually none of them won. The door opens and my mom sees her sister. Red eyes still filled with water, without a word. She is welcomed with a heartfelt hug and welcoming eyes filled with filled with sympathy. Without saying anything, she follows her sister in a very dark room, and you can tell that the room was very dark, because the only light you could see was the swaying of the curtains through the rare breeze.

And then she enters and she sees the lifeless body on a mattress. As she sees it. She can’t help it but rush to the body. She holds her and hugs her tightly and kisses her repeatedly. On me. On me. Meaning mom in Arabic. I’m here now. You’re safe. After saying that, the only thing we could see is a tear that has been shed on my grandmother’s cheek.

One of her siblings goes to the body and closes the eyes, and you may now open yours. The reason why I chose this story is because, like my mom and the youngest of the family of eight, and I’ve always felt that it was hard to find my voice and to step up for my ideas. Because when you’re young and you have a lot of big brothers that would tell you what to think because you’re too young, you don’t know anything.

You’re naive. But now, thinking back, I think that this story shaped me in a way because I didn’t want to feel the regret and guilt that my mother felt of not being there enough for her own mom. So when I was about 18, I already knew that I wanted to be a teacher, and I’ve always made a promise to myself.

I said that whenever I get my first job as a teacher, I will buy a house and make sure that my mom is safe with my dad and that they left the small apartment we have been living all our life. So that’s what I did and I thought that would help them. But as I was growing older, I was getting, harder and harder on my siblings.

As I was repeating the process, I had been I had been living before, and now I’m thinking back, and I was hard on them because my mom wishes they called her more and visit more because she was expressing her own grief as if life could stop at any moment. So I get into a lot of arguments with my siblings, telling them that they should call mom more often because you never know what can happen.

But now I understand why I felt that. And most of all, why I shouldn’t feel like that. Because today we’re here to talk about home. And my vision of home changed. My siblings didn’t call my parents that often because they now have a family husband, wife, children. So this is now their home. But it doesn’t mean that they love my mom any less.

So what I do today to avoid that happening again is calling my mom anytime I can. And being here now. Far away from home. Only for a month. Still, I make sure that I call my mom every day because I have understood something very important. We tend to think of home as a building, something that has been built, something that protects you from the outside.

A geographical space. But I have now understood that a home is actually not a geographical place. It could be a spiritual place. So now when I call her, I always make sure that even if we don’t have much to say every day, that I get to hear every detail of her day. This way, when it’s my time to go home, I don’t feel like she felt the buildings getting higher and the trees higher to thank you.

00;25;44;02 – 00;25;54;09
Kera Rivera
Adel Ben Bacha is a 29 year-old French English teacher in Dijon, France. You must have heard of the mustard! He teaches in highschool, university and for masters’ programs, among other activities . He loves meeting new people, traveling and discovering new cultures, going out with friends and family.

00;25;54;09 – 00;26;01;02
Marc Moss
We’ll be right back after this short break. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast.

00;26;01;02 – 00;26;12;14
Zeke Cork
I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought maybe it was about my family, so I try to write about it, but there was always something missing. It stayed with me for years.

00;26;12;14 – 00;26;18;28
Ashley Brittner Wells
The coolest thing you could do in town was go to the games. And I desperately wanted to be cool, so I went.

00;26;18;28 – 00;26;22;10
Marc Moss
That’s after the break. Stay tuned.

Thank you to our story sponsor, the Good Food Store, helping us to pay our storytellers. Learn more at Good Food store.com. Thanks to Golden Yolk Griddle, who also showed up as a story sponsor. Learn more about them at Golden Yolk griddle.com. Thank you to our accessibility sponsor, Parkside Credit Union, allowing us to hire American Sign Language interpreters at this event.

In order to be a more inclusive experience, learn about them at Parkside fcu.com. Thanks to our artist sponsor Bernice’s Bakery, who paid our poster artist. I learned about them and their delicious baked goods at Bernice’s Bakery mty.com. Thanks to our media sponsors, Missoula Events, Dot net, the Art attic, The Trail Less Traveled, and Missoula Broadcasting Company including the family of ESPN radio.

The trail 133, Jack FM and Missoula. Source for modern hits you 104.5. Thanks to our in-kind sponsors. Float. Missoula. Learn more at float msl.com and choice of tile. Learn about Joyce at Joyce of tile.com. Please remember that our next event is September 18th at the George and Jane Denison Theater. The theme is Never Again. You can pitch your story by calling (406) 203-4683.

Tickets are available right now at Tell Us something.org. Please follow us on all the standard social media channels and subscribe to our newsletter. In order to be informed about all of our events. Welcome back. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m your host, Mark Moss.

In our next story, Zeke Cork returns to Missoula after many failed escapes to face his demons, find love and embrace his true self. Sensitive listeners, please note that Zeke’s story contains a mention of a suicide attempt, which may be distressing for some listeners. Please take care of yourselves. Zeke calls his story. Ezekiel cried. Thanks for listening.

00;28;25;09 – 00;28;39;09
Zeke Cork
Speaking. Got a short king? Yeah, sure. King on the premises? Yeah.

Thank you, Devon. And thank you, everybody, for coming.

After trying to be someone else anywhere else, I came back to Missoula. This town owns me. No matter how many times I try to run from here, it would find me and call me back and was never kicking or screaming that I’d return. It was more like tail tucked between my legs, begging for forgiveness with a promise to be better.

See, I grew up here. My handprints are in concrete. My footprints cast in the local trails. My tire tracks on the gravel roads. I went to Paxson and Roosevelt, then Hellgate High School. All my first year here. My first communion. My first kiss. My first awkward mechanics was sex. My first love, and my first heartbreak. I left my first boyfriend, who I wanted to be more than I desired, for a girl who had dumped me in the pig barn right here at the county fair.

So surrounded by the smells of shit and cotton candy. I stumbled through the sounds of the midway games and the blinking lights, where I ran into friends who tell me it was going to be okay. And then I made a girl underneath the Ferris wheel who I watched devour of candied apple with a passion I could only envy.

And I swear, she rolled her eyes at me, seeing the pathetic loser I was instead of the swaggering, give a shit start, I tried to present. Now my parents, they were educators, active members of the Democratic Party in Saint Anthony’s parish, and they pushed me to become anything that I could imagine, at least until their marriage failed. When I was a teenager.

And trust me, it needed to end. But I lost my way. I didn’t know who to be without them showing me. I think maybe later, when we’re adults ourselves, we figure out that our parents were just people trying to find their own way. But I followed my father to Portland. I blamed my aimlessness on him, and I wanted him to fix it.

I was a disaster. My once perfect father was consumed with finding his own last year, and he was really nothing more than Peter Pan chasing after his shadow. So I came back to Missoula, trying to find the promise that others had seen in me. I enrolled at the university. I was pretty focused for a while until I fell in love with that girl I’d met underneath the Ferris wheel, so I’d follow her to Chicago and then Seattle.

But she’d become this plank for me to cling onto, and an ocean of confusion and grief. That was a lot to expect of someone who was just trying to make it to shore themselves. So I packed up my books and my records, and I drove back to Missoula again. But there’s something that happens for me every time I enter this valley from any direction.

When it opens up and the neighborhoods pop into view, and whatever season it’s in presents itself in all its glory, like the royal robes of fall lilacs in the spring, the ice choked rivers in the winter, and the brown hills of late summer. And I just let out this long breath I’ve been holding. And I know, I know that I’m home.

But I can never sustain that comfort. I could only see my reflections in shards, slivers of broken glass. I couldn’t name the ways I was fractured. I only knew that I was. So I took up drinking as a hobby. And there was lots of what Beyoncé calls those red cup kisses when I’d meet a girl, and then another, and then another, hoping they’d be the one that would fix me.

But they were just crooked. Rusty nails tried to hold it together themselves, and we all kind of wanted the same thing, but the weight of it was too much for anyone to hold. And one night I had a dream about the prophet Ezekiel, the one in the desert who commands the bones to rise up out of the sand.

The one in that old song. That old gospel song. Ezekiel cried. Them bones, them bones, the ankle bone connected to the knee bone. Yeah. That guy. I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought maybe it was about my family. So I try to write about it, but there was always something missing. It stayed with me for years, and I’d say, what is it?

Why does this haunt me? And then one late night in August, after one month of sobriety, I wandered out to the shed that belonged to the woman I was seeing at the time. And I took her shotgun with me, and I tore that place apart looking for shells. All I found was an empty box. But still I put the barrel of that thing in my mouth and I squeeze the trigger, hoping there was one in the chamber.

Well, I’m here today because there wasn’t. But the next morning I checked myself into rehab. Next month I’ll be 34 years sober.

But back then, I had to just try to make it through each day. So I stayed to myself, went to work, read, listen to music, played video games, and watched a lot of movies. But then I’d made a girl and she was cautious but intrigued. And I wasn’t a good catch. But she was beautiful, smart and strong. So we took it slow, and eventually I’d convince her to run away with me, and we moved to Seattle.

We came back to Missoula, and then we’d move to Texas, California and Alaska. Every time things got rough, we’d move. All we needed was a change of scenery. We even got married, and that meant something. Maybe that would be the thing that would save us. Where we strong enough to move back home, settle down in our family and friends again.

We’ve had so. But it was actually the opposite. It was the safest place to just let it end. See, the skeletons live here, and we’d return to the place where they’d dwell. And I still despise that broken person in the mirror. And I’d been asking someone else to love them without hesitation. Without question. Unconditionally. What a huge ask.

So, for the first time in a very long time, I was on my own and I stood on the top of Mount Sentinel, staring down at my hometown, listening to Josh Reynolds homecoming, humming along in the crisp column air. And I let the pastoral rolling. It was there that I understood what the dream she had left her countless times as a lost girl, someone’s daughter, sister, a wife, only to return to become something akin to the prodigal son.

And it probably would have been a lot easier for me to become myself in a place where no one knew my story. But instead, I asked people who had known me most of their lives to call me by a new name and address me as the man I’d always been, but repeatedly denied. And what I got in return was my family and friends wrapping their arms around me and saying, yes, this makes sense.

My ex-wife gave me my first testosterone shot and she’s my closest friend. Then I’d meet someone new. Yeah, I know, here we go again. But we’d both sworn off relationships. But that crackle and hum like power lines was pretty hard to resist. So she chose to move across the world and give me and my town a try. She liked us.

We got married in a ghost town not too far from here, and we’re trying something different. We’re helping each other unpack the baggage instead of helping and making each other lugging around. So far, so good. And I’m no longer a stranger in a strange land. I finally live in a body that I’m not at war with. And the mirror.

The mirror is now a full reflection of someone I recognize. Someone I know. I look at my perfect haircut from Compass Barbershop, who has been with me through the whole thing.

And I’ll run a razor down my neckline. And I’ll watch my shoulders broaden and my hips narrow. And I see my parents, both of them looking back at me. My mother, who’s 84, is still alive and well, and my father has passed, but both of them staring back at their son, proud of the man he’s becoming. And I have a tattoo on my chest, a line I borrowed from Florence Welch that says, I’ll show you what it means to be spared.

I landed in a safe space. Nestled between these foothills and held by this community. The place where Ezekiel Zeke rose out of a desert of despair and became home. And for me, this is what it means to be home.

00;38;37;04 – 00;38;43;13
Devin Carpenter
He lives in Missoula with his wife and two rescue mutts. He loves tacos and trucker hats.

00;38;43;13 – 00;39;05;10
Marc Moss
Wrapping up this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. Ashley Britton or Wells is a self-described tomboy in the 1980s who finds courage in the Montana Lady Griz games. It took years to find her own place in the sands and be the inspiration for girls who are like she was then. Ashley calls her story made in Montana. Thanks for listening.

00;39;05;10 – 00;39;52;13
Ashley Brittner Wells
I’m sitting on the burnt orange carpet of my bedroom for new kids on the block, blasting from a tape deck in the background. Staring back at me from my bookshelves. Kristy’s great idea. Every Garth Brooks cassette tape known to humankind. And the eyes of 1 million porcelain dolls. I’m staring at my 1993 1994 Montana Lady Griz basketball team poster.

The shit is iconic. 15 players pose in their high school leather jackets on the University of Montana campus in front of their lockers. T’s blond perms, proofs of curly bangs scrunched at the front one with a feather in her hair. The team is historic. The tag line is made in Montana because that year all the players were from our states, and I would stare at it because it was a signal to me and my friends what Montana girls like us could grow up to be.

One day. I’m all Montana, too. I was born in the mid 80s and raised in East Missoula. And did I mention that I loved the Lady Grizz? I went to all their games. I went to their summer camps in the summer, and I tried to figure out which player I wanted to be. Their home turf, Delbert Arenas, nestled up against the base of Mount Sentinel on the University of Montana campus.

Our games I would run one hand along the brown, snaking metal railing that surrounds the court, balancing a piping hot personal pan pizza, on the other hand, slide my butt along the tanned plastic bleacher seating and get ready to be pumped at the opening chords of Pop Up the Jam. I would scream, and the players ran out to raucous applause from a full house decked out in copper and gold.

The games were the coolest thing you could do in town, and it was like my posters had come to life. The players were like my celebrities Shannon Cates, Skylar Cisco, Malia Kapp. The coolest thing you could do in town was go to the games. And I desperately wanted to be cool. So I went. I have always been trying to figure out who I am in a world that doesn’t totally feel like I belong in it.

I was bigger and louder than the other kids. I tried to do all the things the boys did. I struggled to fit in pretty much anywhere you put me. I was what we referred to in the 90s as a tomboy. I didn’t know which new kid on the block I had a crush on, but I knew that I had a crush on their rat tail haircuts.

So I got one of those with my mom in tow. The hair stylist twisted my thick blond ponytail into a giant hair tie at the base of my neck and cut the whole thing off. Save the rat tail, my mom cried. She still has that ponytail tucked away in a Ziploc bag in her floral hope chest. I sometimes think it’s the last remnant of the daughter that she thought she was getting, but who?

I quickly put a stop to it. My friends and I loved my rat tail, and at the games we would strut around the arena checking people out, looking to be checked out. the crowds back then and to this day are made up of everyday Missoula fans just like us. Families retire trees. Then there was the student section.

I thought the student section were so cool. They were in college, for example. They had they were sunglasses inside. They knew all the chants and cheers. T fans, lady Griz T fans. But there was this one couple that always stood out to me. One had hair short like mine and wore hoodies and baseball caps. The other had a tease perm, poofs of curly bangs and jeans, just like the players on my beloved poster.

But they weren’t just any other couple. They were queer. I would see them, and I would watch them as much as I would watch the games. I had never seen a couple like them in Missoula or anywhere else. I would climb to the highest corner of the arena and my second hand Nike’s, and I would watch them, and I would see them put their arms around each other’s shoulders, whisper in each other’s ears, cheer for the same players.

I cheered for. And I didn’t really know what I was seeing, but it felt really safe. It felt warm. It felt like coming home. It must have taken so much bravery for them to show up to those games 30 years ago to and be totally themselves. I don’t know what it was like to be queer in the early 90s in Missoula, except that I do, because I was I just didn’t know it yet.

Back then, it felt like people kept out of each other’s business in ways they just don’t anymore. And seeing this couple was really meaningful to me, because it made me feel like maybe someday who I was going to be wasn’t one of the players on the court. It was one of the people in the stands. When I was 24, I moved to Portland, Oregon and quickly realized why a couple like that would make me feel like I’d found myself.

You probably figured it out before I did. It wasn’t difficult to be a lesbian in Portland, Oregon. It didn’t feel like taking a chance, holding hands in public with Mal, who would become my wife. Once we went hiking up the Columbia River Gorge, and on the way home, we pulled over to stop and look at the river and as we got out of the car, I planted one on Mal’s face.

And in that moment, I noticed a man in iridescent sunglasses staring at us. Standing outside of his pickup truck. It was just the three of us out there and my breath caught in my throat. But then he gave me a smile and a wave and a thumbs up. And I thought maybe it was going to be okay, and maybe I could be queer anywhere, even in Missoula, Montana.

Shortly thereafter, we moved home. You can imagine how excited I was to take Mel to a Lady Grizz game. My mom was just as excited and bought us matching University of Montana hoodies just for the occasion. We loaded our arms up with personal pan pizzas, big bags of popcorn, fountain Diet Cokes as big as we could find, and took the back arena hallways to our seats.

Nowadays, those hallways are lined with posters from all of my beloved teams from the early 90s, and I showed them all the 9394 poster and told her about the team and the dirty ball contest at summer camp, where whoever had the dirtiest ball would win a prize. At the end of Lady Griz camp. So I would dribble the ball for hours in my driveway and practice layups and try to do whatever I could to prove how committed I was to the players.

I also told her about the couple, who, you know, I’ve always wondered who they were, where they ended up. All of these images came rushing back to me as I watched the current team on Robin solving court. A few months ago we attended the senior night game and the house was packed. There were families and the student section and packs of ten year old girls walking around the arena and matching sweatshirts shox a bright pink lipstick across their faces.

Seeing and being seen, listening to whatever it is I listen to now, it is. And this time I hesitated for my arm around my shoulders.

The Montana that I grew up in, and frankly, moved back to just a few short years ago has been replaced by a moral panic. Folks aren’t exactly keeping themselves out of our communities business anymore, but we must remain being seen. When you are true to yourself, you give others permission to be true to themselves, to.

It was our turn to demonstrate a little bit of bravery. Owing so much to that couple that I will never get to thank.

So I did, everybody. I put my arms around my shoulders.

Because she is my love. And those arena seats are my home where we get to be exactly who we are and who I always have been.

00;49;56;11 – 00;50;04;18
Kera Rivera
She is best known as Mel’s wife. she is a lifelong women’s sports fan.

00;50;06;26 – 00;50;20;03
Marc Moss
Thanks for listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. This episode was recorded live in person as part of the opening events at Missoula Pride on June 11th, 2024 at the Glacier Ice Rink Pavilion.

Please remember that our next event is September 18th at the George and Jane Dennison Theater. The theme is Never Again. You can pitch your story by calling (406) 203-4683. Tickets are available currently at Tell Us something.org. Please follow us on all the standard social media channels and subscribe to our newsletter.

In order to be informed about events and all things storytelling. Stream past episodes, learn more about upcoming events, and get tickets at Tell Us something.org.

Marc Moss: Welcome to the Tell Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss. We are currently looking for storytellers for the next tell us something storytelling event. The theme is, it’s the Little Things. If you’d like to pitch your story for consideration, please call 4 0 6 2 0 3 4 6 8 3. You have three minutes to leave your pitch.

The pitch deadline is November 7th. I look forward to hearing from you this week on the podcast.

Kate Wilburn: You would be also able to see, I think, how much I like the quality of things. It’s small and simple, this house, but everything is well done. She goes,

Marc Moss: Can we do it again? I was like, Yeah.

Amy McAllister: We meet Matthew, our mortician and Matthew.

Looks like or reminds me of Lurch from the Adams family.

Rachel Gooen: Bow ties and tuxedos and crushed velvet dresses, and we are in jeans and

Amy McAllister: t-shirts.

Marc Moss: Four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme letting go. Their stories were recorded. Live in person in front of over 900 listeners on September 27th, 2020.

At the Denison in Missoula, Montana, we wouldn’t have been able to produce this event without the help of our title sponsor The Good Food Store. We are so grateful to the team at the Good Food Store for their support. Learn more about the Good Food [email protected]. Tell us something acknowledges that we are on the Aboriginal territories of the Salish and Kalispell people.

You hear this at events all the time. What does it mean? Who cares? Right? . I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Why do we say it? Most of the time it’s white folks that are saying it. Are we trying to make ourselves feel better? What are we doing here? When I came to Montana, to the west from Ohio, which Ohio is the land of the Cas and Erie tribes, at least the part where I lived, I wore a Cleveland Indians hat.

Some of you know this former name of this baseball team and, uh, the mascot allegedly was to celebrate the native peoples. It’s pretty racist mascot if you haven’t seen it. And I was traveling out with a, a traveling companion who was admonishing me about my hat, and I dismissed her out of hand. I was wrong to do that, and I started thinking more about that as I started thinking about land acknowledgements.

And why I do them is not just to honor the people whose land we stole. Not us particularly, but everyone in here who’s white. Our ancestors stole the land. We can’t do anything about that, but we can admit it. Honor the people who live with us and work with us and recreate with us who are native to this land.

So again,

again, I say we are on Salish and Cooney. Let me take this moment to honor them and the stories that they share with us.

Our first story comes to us from Kate Wilburn. Kate loves wood and woodworking. She learned the craft of timber framing 40 years ago. Collected materials for a timber frame house, hauled them around for 30 years and is now ready to let them. Kate calls her story Dovetail a love story. Thanks for listening.

Kate Wilburn: Okay, so step into my kitchen with me on the cherry countertops. There are two jars of beans. Every morning I take a bean from the jar labeled 10 years. , 10 good years, days left, and I move it to the other jar labeled 10 good years. Days past. I’ve been doing this for three years with my friend Joseph. It’s an amazing thing to watch the days of one’s life.

Pass a bean at a time. Am.

Here we are in my small old house in Missoula. It was pretty sad until I remodeled it and now it’s cozy and beautiful looking around, you’ll see right away how much I love would the hemlock. fur trim, the raised panel fur doors, those cherry countertops, the maple kitchen cabinets, the old growth Douglas fur floor underneath that’s original and that I didn’t know was there until I unearthed it from layers and layers of goop.

So, You would be also able to see, I think, how much I like the quality of things. It’s small and simple, this house, but everything is well done. And if you looked out to the back side of my lot and saw the old ugly shed, you would wonder and be mystified. Why the heck has she let that thing stand? It’s a love story, not with the shed , but with the small timber frame that’s sheltering inside.

I learned the art of timber framing as a young woman, and I love it as much as I love wood, because it’s like creating a beautiful. , large piece of furniture that is going to become a home or another building. Timber frames use big, massive pieces of wood polished and carefully cut with strong joints that hold them together like dovetails.

you might have seen a dovetail if you’ve ever pulled the drawer out of an old well made dresser. The front is attached to the side with these amazing triangular joints. Those are the dovetails, and they’re not only beautiful, but they’re strong. So let’s go back to the shed and the tiny timber frame.

It’s the sixth one I’ve cut and designed in my life, and that was 30 years ago. Back then, I was married to an auctioneer and our home was pretty chaotic, so I imagined a quiet refuge back behind the house. Unfortunately, the marriage ended before I got the timber frame finished and standing. By then, not only had I invested, uh, cash and an incredible amount of careful painstaking work, but also a fair amount of fondness, and I chose to move it with me.

The next place that found us was a small home in North Carolina, and I thought it would be a perfect screen porch, unfortunately, the tiny timber frame. And I ran a mock of the HOA rules. . Oh, well the. When I became a nomad, I thought that was the perfect ending at last because it’s only eight feet by 12 feet, this tiny timber frame, and it fits really super well on a trailer to pull down the road.

The deal though is that the rafters are 14 feet. Uh, and that’s to make good overhangs on either side to shade the walls, but it’s way too wide for highway safety. It means that all this pile of lovely wood with intricate joints has been so far is a little building waiting to be a. , every time I moved, I, I checked in with myself.

Do I still have hopes for this little critter in me? Yeah, I do. So I’ve moved it from Idaho to Virginia to North Carolina, to California, to Idaho again, and finally to Montana. Is the year finally. Um, I’ve got the plans. I’ve got the permits. There’s some 220 volt electrical work involved, and it’s a little bit dangerous, but it’s simple.

And my friend Mike and I are going to do. Then he calls his master electrician Brother has a sudden emergency and he’s not going to be available in case something goes wrong. It’s a catalyst. It’s actually one of several, but I don’t have time to tell you the rest of them. So I ask myself, Is it time to throw in the towel on this?

I don’t want to. I can so clearly see it nestled in my backyard. These hand carved knee braces arching around windows where beautiful patchwork curtains hang. That mom and I stitched together

so many years ago, and I’ve saved them all this time for this building.

But other possibilities, whisper. There are other big dreams that I’ve held forever. I feel the preciousness of time and I know that when I get real, this project is at least a nine month project to bring to completion.

So, Here tonight with you. I’m gonna take a deep breath.

I might cry a little bit. . I think it’s time for me to stop building things. It’s time to leap into the unknown of these other dreams. It’s time to look for a new owner for this small building and for a different ending to the love story.

I don’t have any clue how. This will unfold, and I don’t have any idea how many beans of strong, healthy life remain to me. My friend Ruth just died,

so I’m ready to leap into the unknown. of other dreams and I’m letting this one go.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Kate. Kate Wilburn, church’s, wildland, and is keenly aware of legacy across Generat. Her life’s terrain is diverse from engineering and carpentry to single parenting, permacultural design and teaching. She’s found in Missoula, a place to show the beauty and practicality of living simply of creating an urban yard that is a vibrant ecosystem of perennial food for people, birds, bees, and other wild things all at the same time.

She seeks green wildness in a neighborhood like a village, even in the. You can see a photo of the jars of beans on Kate’s kitchen counter and learn more about [email protected]. Our next storyteller is Marc Moss. Hi there. Working third shift at a late night coffee shop. I met all sorts of people.

I generally made a connection with most of them until a regular customer. Very grumpy, presented a challenge for me. I call my story third shift. Thanks for listening.

I learned how to drink coffee when I was 17, working midnight shift at a grocery store in Ohio, much like the Orange Street Food farm. Working third shift became something that I really enjoyed. The crew, I can’t, I don’t have the time to tell you how awesome they were and how weird they are still. But in those days, there were no 24 hour grocery stores.

And so at nine o’clock we’d all shuffle in, lock the doors, and they would put coffee on, and I would drink Coca-Cola or water because I hate the taste of coffee at 17. And eventually I got injured on the job and I, I had to start drinking coffee. That’s another story that I’m not telling you tonight.

tonight I’m telling you about my love affair. We’re third shift, and when I moved to Bozeman, Montana, I got another third shift job at a little coffee shop called Kinko’s. Kinko’s doesn’t exist anymore, right? I got bought out by some other company, so I can use the name. It’s not product placement. And third shift at the Bozeman.

Kinkos was great because like every Kinkos, it was located on or near a university campus. And when I was working there, I would meet all sorts of folks and the architecture students were like frantic, like outside chain smoking, waiting for their copies to be done, coming in, building these intricate models at a foam.

And, and I was like, You know, that’s gonna be really expensive. I’m thinking in my mind they come up and they, and they come to pay and the bill’s like 250 bucks. And I know that there’s students and I ask ’em like, Are you a student? And they’re like, Yeah, I’m great. And so like, ring ’em up for $75. And they’re like, What?

And I’m like, Student discount. And they’re like, Okay. Thank you.

When I worked third shift at the Kinkos in Akron, I met a lot of interesting folks also in the university campus. But the, the urban environment of the University of Akron was much different than the university or the, the Bozeman campus, whatever they’re called,

Go Grass, I guess. So, uh, I’d, I’d meet all kinds of folks, homeless folks coming in to stay out of the cold. There was a strip club about four blocks away, and so the, the strippers would come in and one of them would like sit up on the machine and copy her ass. And I’m like, Hey, that’s great. You know, clean the glass and if you break it, you bought it.

And she’s like, Don’t worry, honey. Big Wayne would show up and Big Wayne ran the strip club and he’d like make these little coupons to get in for free. So, you know, really interesting folks. But at the Bozeman Kinkos, the architecture students weren’t the only interesting folks coming in. There was a woman that came in all the time and she sort of shuffled in older woman in her fifties, Right.

Mousey looking woman, really grumpy. She’s like five foot two, sort of disheveled looking, super grumpy. And she’d come in. And in those days when you came into the, the copy shop, there was a like a little key counter. Remember those blue key counters and plug it in the machine and it counts off ICU nodding counts off how many cops?

And she’d make like four. She’d make like four copies and coming in to pay. And I did everything I could think of to try to reach her and like, and talk to her. And she was ignore. She would never say a word to me. And I’m, I’m trying to think of whatever I can think of to, to try to make a connection with her.

And I say, Hey, sweetheart, and I start flirting with her. She doesn’t want that. She doesn’t, nobody does

so then I’m mean to her, right? She like walks up to pay and I walk. Ignore her. She doesn’t care. She like slams that thing on the counter like

then I’m like overly nice to her. Is everything to your liking this evening? You know, nothing. When I was a kid, you know Michael was telling that story about penny learning to ride a bike. I remember learning to ride a bike at a blazing. A huffy with a little banana seat and you know, the lightning bolt down the side and his sissy bar in the back.

And I didn’t have the cool backpack that Penny has. And, uh, my dad would like hang onto the back and, and, you know, just like Michael let go without me knowing. And, and I wrecked a lot. And because like, who needs training wheels? Like I’m a boy and. But I also like to cry and scream and yell when I got hurt.

And you know, my dad was like, Boys don’t cry. Suck it up. You know? And I would cry louder. And my aunt, the cool aunt, was like, That really must hurt. And I’m like, Yeah, it does. But I would stop crying. And I was thinking of that moment when this woman came in. Again, super grum. And I said, You seem kind of grumpy.

She goes, What? I said, Are you grumpy? She starts looking around, She’s just hurting me. You know, the machines are buzzing and you know, like, so I’m like, I gotta let go of that work. And now I’m, I’m in it like I’m committed to this. And I start to think about the bike, you know, and my aunt validating me and like acknowledging like, that must suck.

And so I said, You know what I do when I’m grumpy? I copy my face. And she’s like, What? And I’ve never done that before. And so like, take a right of hand, uh, put your head on the glass, close your eyes. Don’t go blind.

And she’s like, Hey. And she like pulls the thing up, grabs it, and I’m like, and she starts laughing. I’m like, This is great. She goes, Can we do it again? I was like, Yeah. She goes, We should make a bigger one. So I changed the size 11 by 17. She’s like, You should have one too. So we make. She’s like, I’m gonna do this some more.

I’m like, Great. I gotta go back to work. The machines back there aren’t running anymore, and if the machines aren’t running, I’m gonna get in trouble. So knock yourself out. Um, I’ll see you in a few minutes. So she’s like there for five minutes. I’m making copies of her face, enlarging, making ’em really small, different sizes of paper.

She comes back, she comes to pay, and she’s laughing. And I’m like, What’s your name? And she goes, My name’s Ruby. I said, Ruby, I’m Marc. Why are you so grumpy? And, and the copies are on me. Like, Put your purse away. She worked at the airport, third shift, second shift I guess, cuz she would always come in around two or three.

This was before nine 11, so no tsa. So I don’t know what she did at the airport, but apparently whatever it was at the end of. Was pretty slow. And so she was writing letters to her son every night and he wasn’t returning her letters and he wasn’t returning her phone calls and there was no texting in 2000 and she’s grumpy.

And I said, That sounds really lonely. And she goes, It sucks.

And she stopped coming in. I don’t know why. And what I’m hoping is, oh, because she said I’m gonna use these face copies as stationary to send to my son

And I didn’t say this, but I thought, Are you Catholic? Cause that’s a classic guilt trip, . But I didn’t say that something my mom would pull. She didn’t come back in. And what I’m, what I’m hoping is the reason she didn’t come back in is because she was writing those letters to her son and he was seeing her and he was remembering her, and he called her and he wrote her back.

And that’s all we all, all of us want is to be seen and heard and validated.

Thanks me, I’m the executive director of the non-profit organization. Tell us something. I recently hosted a tell us something event at Burning Man, where I’ve literally walked through fire with my life partner Joyce. And the cool thing is you can search the Tellis something website for Burning Man and listen to that.

Without walking through the fire yourself. We live together on Missoula’s historic North Side with a perpetual kitten. Ziggy to see one of the face copies that I made with Ruby visit tell us something.org. In our next story, Amy McAllister’s Dad dies two weeks after her mother dies. Amy visits his body in the funeral home.

And the funeral director assures her that the body he has prepared for her is indeed her father’s in a story that we call, that’s not my dad. Thanks for listening.

Amy McAllister: Both my parents passed away about, um, a few years ago, and they were both 93 when they passed away and actually doing really well until they hit about 91. Um, my mom was still going to jazzer size classes and my dad was playing golf and meeting up with his friends. Um, but at 91 it seemed like everything kind of started to fall apart and my brother and sister and I all lived in Missoula and my parents lived in Billings and it seemed like every other week, um, one of us was going down there for something.

There was broken shoulder, broken ribs, sepsis. Uh, some minor surgeries, furnace going out. So we tried everything we could to get my parents to move to Missoula and they absolutely would not do it. They insisted on living in their own home and they wanted to stay there, so they converted their basement into a, um, apartment and hired a full-time caretaker.

And then they had, um, hospice and some other organizations. And so they were able to stay in their own home and pass away. So it was about mid-November of, um, 2018, and we got a call from the hospice nurse that my mom wasn’t doing very well, and they said, If you wanna see her before she passes away, you need to come down to Billings.

So it actually took about four days for all of us to get to Billings, but we did, and we were able to spend Wednesday with my mom and then that night she passed. So my dad at that time was doing pretty well. Um, we spent Thanksgiving with him and he actually came up to Missoula for Christmas. But um, I think when he, he got back to, um, Billings in January, he just was done.

And I think what happens a lot of time. People have been together, spouses have been together for so long. My parents were married for over 70 years. Um, when one passes away, the other one passes away soon after. So this was, um, the middle of January now, and we get the same call. It’s a Friday afternoon and we get the call from the hospice people that say, Your dad is not doing very well.

And if you wanna see him, you should. To Billings when you can. And they said, but his vitals are pretty good. So he should be okay for a few days. Well, this time my sister Jane and I decide we’re gonna go the next day. It’s Friday afternoon, we’re gonna leave on Saturday. My brother’s outta the country. Um, but that night about eight 30, we got a call and my dad had died.

So the next day we leave for billings and I am super upset why my mom had the whole family around when she passed away. My dad had nobody there. So we’re talking on the way down to Billings and I say, I just feel like I need to say goodbye to dad. And Jane. My sister says, I wanna remember him how he was at Christmas and I don’t wanna see him, but I said, I think I, at the funeral home, maybe I should go in and say, So we get to billings and go over to the funeral home, and the first we meet Matthew, our mortician, and Matthew looks like, or reminds me of Lurch from the Adams family.

He’s tall, thin, kind of gaunt looking, but as most distinctive attribute is that the way he talks like lurch real low and slow. So he leads us into the office and we go over all the cremation, um, arrangements. And I asked Matthew, I said, Matthew, where’s my dad now? And he goes, He’s in the back room. Do you want us.

See him and I said, Well, Matthew, I don’t know. I said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a body in a funeral home before. Is it gonna look like my dad? And he said, Oh yeah, he’ll be a little pale, and his cheeks will be a little sunken, but it’ll look like your dad. So I said, Okay, if you’re sure. He goes, Oh, it’ll, it’ll be fine.

It’ll look like your dad. So my sister leaves and Matthew says, Can you give me about 30 minutes to get him ready? So I go out into the lobby, the waiting room, and there’s, I’m upset, but there’s two things to distract you. There are two things to read. These big giant brochures that have funeral packages and caskets.

Or the Penny Saver . So I grab the penny saver cuz I want nothing to do with the funeral stuff. And I start reading the jokes and doing the trivia. You know who played Laura Petre on Dick Van Dyke show. Oh, I know that one. You know, and Matthew comes to get me and he takes me back to this big, long, dark, creepy hallway with these three giant doors about the size.

Like let’s make a deal. And he leads me into the, into the room and quietly backs out and closes the door and I go up. To the bed, and I freak out because this guy looks nothing like my dad, . And I run out and I say, Matthew, that’s not my dad. And he looks at me real sadly, and goes, That’s your dad. And I said, Well, it doesn’t look anything.

Look like my dad. And again, he goes, That’s your dad. So, Okay. My friends keep telling me how un observant I am, and so I go back into the room and I go up to the bed and nothing. Now I really start studying my dad. Now, this man is shorter than my dad. He’s thinner than my dad. He has different coloring, and now I’m doing 360 s around the bed trying to find something familiar, age spots I’ve never seen before, a bump in his nose.

And I go to the top of his head and my dad had a pretty full head of hair. And this guy has a couple strands of hair. I’m thinking, can you lose, uh, body, lose all its hair in 18 hours? So now I’m convinced and I go back out and I find Matthew and I say, Matthew, that is not my dad. And again, he looks at me real sad, That’s your dad.

And I said, You’re telling me that man in there is Bill McAllister? And I see him go, uh, just a second and he goes into the back room and he comes back out and he. Uh, That’s not your dad. I said, I know. That is what I’ve been trying to tell you. So I said, Can you give me about 20 more minutes? So I go back out in the lobby, finish I dream a genie and Dick Van Dyke trivia.

And he comes to get me and he says, I’m really sorry about this. This has never happened before. This is really your dad. I can prove it. There’s a tag on his toe. So I say, No, just let me in and go see my dad. So I went into the door number two for the third time, and I go up to the bed and there’s my dad.

He’s looking a little pale, and his cheeks are a little sunken, but it’s definitely my dad. So I say my goodbyes to him, how much I love him and appreciated everything he did for us. And I walk home from the funeral home and about halfway home, I just start burst out laughing, thinking this could only happen to me.

So I get home and my sister and some other relatives are there, and some friends of my dad’s and my sister Jane comes up to me and says, all concerned, Oh, how did it go? And I just start laughing and she goes, What happened? So I tell them all the story of what happened in the funeral home, and especially my dad’s friends were just livid.

And I said, Really? It’s okay. It brought a little levity to this really, really hard situation for me, and it’s okay. So the next morning I have the Billings Gazette, the morning paper, and I’m going through the paper and I open up to the obituaries and who’s in there? My other dad. So I yell for Jane. I go, Jane, come here.

This is the guy they were trying to pass off his dad. So she comes in and looks at his picture. We read all about him. His name I think was Mr. Santori. It sounded like he had a really nice life, really nice family, which we were happy to read about. So I’ve told this story multiple times to a lot of different people, and some people think it’s funny, some.

Or appalled, but I really do believe that the person that would’ve gotten the biggest kick out of this story and would’ve laughed the hardest would’ve been my dad.

Marc Moss: Thanks Amy. Amy McAllister comes from a strong and loving family and has lived in Missoula for 45. She loves the variety of events offered in Missoula and was a school teacher for 32 years. To see a photo of Amy’s dad visit, tell us something. Dot org bringing us home in this episode of the Tell Us Something Podcast.

Rachel Goen on a trip to New York City with her family. And some of their international friends visits a fancy ballet at the Met after eating pizza. Rachel calls her story when letting go. Stops the show. Thanks for listening.

Great.

Rachel Gooen: All right, so it’s in 1983. I’m 13 years old and my family has a lot of international friends, and I’m not gonna get into how we have these international friends, but we do. So we have three Israeli boys staying with us and another family. Persian friends who just came from Iran. It was 1983. There was a lot of escaping from the ia.

Tolo. Coman. So my mom decides we are gonna hit New York City. And so the ages of the three Israeli boys are 10 to 16, and of this lovely Iranian family, it’s nine to 16 with their lovely mother Mary, and I’m going, and my sister Jane, who is 16, and my mom. So we hit New York City. And New York City for my mom is all about shopping.

Yeah. And so we go and we like, we’re down on the Lower East side going to all the really funky, cool places, and then we hit Midtown. We of course go to like Bloomingdale’s and FAO Schwartz, and that was kind of around when the movie Big came out and they had like the piano on the floor. So we’re all playing on the piano was super, super.

and um, we go to this amazing store called Fuchs, which back then was like the bomb in New York City. And we are like shopping bag and shopping bag and shopping bag. And my mom decides for some reason what would really top this day is if we go to a ballet at Lincoln Center. So we go in, it’s Saturday night.

She goes in and she gets tickets, and the only seats that are left are in the ninth row in Lincoln Center in the orchestra. So I don’t know if any of you have been to Lincoln Center and where the ballet is. It’s actually kind of like this. Except instead of 900 people, it has 2,500 people and it has six layers of balconies all around red velvet seated super fancy, super plush.

And so the woman looks at us, you know, and she says, Well, okay, well there are these ninth row seats if you want them. Yeah, sure. Cuz you know cash is cash. So my mom says they’re our. We decide to go across the street to a restaurant is the coolest restaurant ever. It was really known in New York City because all the waiters and waitresses roller skate.

So for us kids, it was awesome to like have them rollers skating by and have their pizza coming, and it was very, very cool. Now, this is about the time when I think I started realizing that I couldn’t eat certain foods. And I think pizza was one of them. And so we, you know, finished with our meal and we go back into Lincoln Center and, um, the lobby is just filled with.

Lovely, lovely people dripping with pearls and diamonds and Chanel is over there and Eve St. Loran is over there and Gucci is there. I mean there is bow ties and tuxedos and crushed velvet dresses and we are in jeans and t-shirts with big brown bag and FAO shorts bag and there’s 10 of us and we are just like this ragtag bunch kind of coming.

and uh, we go to the, you know, top of the theater and the usher looks at us as if like, we must be going to the wrong seats. And he says, uh, yes you are in the ninth row orchestra. So he walks us in and we like really fumble to get into all our seats cuz we have bags and people around us are just like, hmm.

Hmm. You know, looking and, you know, we’re kids and whatever. So we start to, we kind of fumble all and get in there and I start to feel this grumbling in my stomach and I’m like, , I really gotta go to the bathroom. And, uh, so you gotta remember it, 1983 in New York City. It was not a safe town, uh, at all. My mother had the fear of God.

Put into us whenever we went into New York City, you did not wear jewelry, you looked straight ahead. She marched really, really fast. And we traced after that Mama duck, as if we were all little baby ducks, afraid to get lost. And so, you know, I start whispering down the seats, you know, Um, Hey, anyone have to go to the bathroom?

um, anyone wanna go to the bathroom and no one wants to go to the bathroom with me. The line is really, really long. And, but remember, my mother, we weren’t allowed to go in elevators alone. You weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom alone, You weren’t allowed to do anything alone in New York City. And why we would go in to this glorious place to be scared shitless was always a mystery.

So, you know, I’m sitting there and I’m like, Okay, we’re not gonna be able to go to the bathroom. And you know, the Israeli boys are sitting next to me, saw Meet Elda Tie, and then on this side is Rachel, Roy, Rebecca, and Mary are Persian friends. And then my mother and my sister Jane. So, um, you know, we got Hebrew over here, we got Farsi over here, and all of a sudden, Mary and Roy and Rachel are like talking about the person in front of them and they’re like speaking in Farsi, and all of a sudden the man turns around and says in Farsi, you know, if you’re gonna talk about someone in front of them, you really should make sure they don’t know your language.

And what they were saying was, Ooh, look at the egghead in front of you. His head is so perfectly round and you know, here we come in this ragtag bunch and so we’re insulting the other patrons and everything. So the um, you know, the place that play the ballet starts and. . I, of course, more and more have to go to the bathroom.

Like I am grumbling. There’s grumbling and I’m like, Oh God, okay. I’m just gonna sit here. Just gonna sit here. It’s gonna be okay. The ballet starts. This ballet, by the way, it was not just any Saturday night, it was, um, George Bellen Sheen, who was the father of American Ballet. He had passed in April of 1983, and this was his big production, um, Bug Goku, which was a Japanese ballet, not just any Japanese ballet.

It was so perfect for a bunch of pre pubescent children to be seeing because it was an erotic sexual fantasy

So as if we weren’t really at a place already, um, the curtain rises and on either side of the stage are these big sumu wrestler men in diapers playing these flutes, which were kind of like didy dues, but they weren’t. They were just these big flutes. And the ballet is a very atonal ballet. Very uncomfortable sounding.

But what was even more uncomfortable is they started blowing the, the flutes and their cheeks would shake in their boobs, would shake in their bellies, shook in their legs, shook. And boy, we just ripped out with laughter. I mean, this was just too much for like pre pubescent or pu, you know, puberty full children, right?

The next thing that happens, Okay. It’s an erotic fantasy. I just want you to remember that with which, you know, the, um, costumes were minimal. And the next thing that happens is, is like, you know, the ballerina comes out and the first scene is about like the man and the woman meeting each other. And you know, yeah, we’ve seen female figures.

We’re used to that in America culture, no big deal. Um, but then the man comes out. And he has no shirt on and he has these really tight white tights and you can see his perfectly firm buttocks and his male package. And we just start like absolutely laughing hysterically, like ridiculously hysterical and people.

Poking my mother saying, Can you please control your children? Can you please control your children? This is not appropriate. And so we’re laughing so hard that a meet sitting next to me. Lets out a little toot. And I started laughing hysterical, and I slipped down in my seat and I let out the biggest fart ever.

This was like a base tube of fart. It was so loud. If you can imagine that when I let this fart out, every seat in Lincoln Center, all six rows, the balcony. Leaned forward like this sound lit went who? And everybody is looking and they’re like looking at me. And not only that, the conductor went like this

and I shrink into my seat and I am like, You did it in your sleep. You did it in your sleep, you did it in your sleep. And people are like, I think it was the little girl that bared . I think it was the little girl that bared. And I am just melting. I’m 13 years old, you just don’t even wanna be seen when you’re 13 and here.

2,500 people in Lincoln Center heard me. The conductor goes on. He continues with the ballet. Um, I’m not quite sure any ballet in Lincoln Center has ever been stopped by a fart before. So it’s intermission and. You know, kind of are walking out with all our bags, and I’m telling you, everyone is like, Yeah, it was definitely the little girl.

That little girl, that little girl fared. And we, we roll out the pathway of the auditorium and we are dying. And I’m dying. And we just collapse in the lobby. All of us with our bags laughing hysterically. And my sister Jane, who’s very mature, 16 years old, comes up to me and she says, If you’re gonna make it in high school,

she really said this, If you’re gonna make it in high school, you are gonna have to learn how to squeeze your buttocks tighter.

That’s what happens when you let it go at Lincoln Center

Marc Moss: Thanks, Rachel. Rachel, go Inhales from a gorgeous, lush state of New Jersey in a county where there were more cows than people. This is perhaps why it took her so long to learn the art of being cultured. She’s lived in Missoula for 25 years and loves playing in the mountains and rivers of Montana with her partner Jeremy and their pups, along with all of her dear friends in Missoula, she socializes for a living because she is a social worker.

Next week, tune in for Tell Us Something. Live from BlackRock City in 2022.

Jack Butler: The artist, the writers, the creatives, those were other people. That’s what other people did.

Sasquatch: My wife and I had spent 42 grand in cash on in vitro. That didn’t work.

Katie Condon: And

I wasn’t

just surprised.

I was

shocked.

Like there wasn’t enough room in

Kate Wilburn: my body for the blood.

It was amazing.

Tune in for those stories. On the next tell us something. Podcast.

Taylor Burbey: Hi

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