The Moth, Houston, Storytelling - Theme: Awards
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
Japanese North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
alright, our next storyteller will be max wanger wanger, sorry max come on in, okay, you want to keep the microphone in the stand and stand close enough so they can hear you, what's up gang, I didn't know I was doing this until about an hour and a half ago, so this is going to be exciting, right, there's a lot of synchronicity tonight, so I'm also a speech in the bake it and I feel so ashamed, I'm not wearing my suit, I'm so sorry, I, I grew up in Japan, believe it or not, I had a real nerdy dad, I was born down in um in Clear Lake and Seabrook technically yeah, there you go, one of us, what's up? My dad was a nasa guy, so I grew up right next door to nasa and I grew up, I mean for about two years there and then I grew up in Tokyo Japan speaking of synchronicity, you know, I, I grew up there from about kindergarten until just before middle school, right, so about five until just about 10 and all my kind of formative years were spent in Tokyo Japan. My my earliest memories are of festivals and that sort of thing. I do speak a little japanese just enough to say like which means uh may I go to the bathroom and I gotta go, I didn't go back Until I was about 20, so I grew up in Japan with me and my dad, my grandmother, my my badass nana or banana for sure, right, so when my dad got the offer from Motorola, you guys remember hello moto, Remember they used to do cell phones and stuff. Right? So my dad got the offer and my grandmother nana was already in Japan teaching english as you do. So when he got the offer just kind of worked out that the two of us kind of joined forces with her, we grew up in Chicago gonna die and um one of my best friends growing up was was J formerly Julia. Now Julianne. But J J was always jay. Right, Jay was a boy. Jay is a boy. Jay has always been a boy and I remember telling my dad at the age of 56 when he said you can't go in the bathroom with jay. And I said why? I said well well jay is a girl and I said well you're a foolish adult and you don't know, you don't know what you're talking about. Clearly jay is a boy sure enough. Fast forward about 10 years Julia has become Julianne and nana banana and I are going back to Japan to visit for about a month and it turns out she teaches english to like the cream of the crop, like wives of C. E. O. S. So we're traveling around, she's got places to stay. It's a, it's a good experience, right? And jay and max hello are reconvening for the first time in about a decade. It's gonna be a good time. We decided to go to shinjuku to a location in shinjuku called **** alley and that's where all the samurai used to go to, you know, read their bibles and stuff. No, they go and they get real drunk, they **** in the alley, you know, that's where all the Uchiha are in Ezekiel or these little hole in the wall spots, they're, they're getting drunk in the, is Uchiha there like 4 to 12 seats, you can get like two kinds of beer, three kinds of sake and like very, very suspect grilled meat, you know, so we're in Pittsburgh and we were getting drunk, we're having a good time, we're catching up, we're telling all the stories we haven't told in a decade. And then after that we decided to go and play pachinko. Do you guys know what pachinko pachinko is? Is slot machines as reimagined by the Japanese? It's wild. I don't, I don't understand it. To this day, if you watch a Youtube video about pachenko and you watch like the pachenko experts, they don't know what's going on either. Nobody, nobody knows what's going on, you know what I mean? So we go into this pachinko parlor and it's, it's like about to close, its what, 9 30 they close at 10 or 10 30 or something. The attendant there is just looking exhausted all the people in the facility or smoking cigarettes and just hitting buttons and whatever and we're like, we're about to learn or lose about 15 Bucks, Who Cares, You Know? So we get in there, the, the attendant guides us to our seats, he's looking tired. He's like, yeah, here's the instruction manual and I read it, I read it very carefully and I handed it to jay and J reads it very carefully and we both nod and neither of us has any idea what to do with the machine before us. It looks like a slot machine, but there's, there's little metal balls that fire and they go in all kinds of directions and it looks a little bit like you're supposed to guide them. But the buttons don't do anything except for like change the fish on the screen that are swimming by with numbers on them. We don't know what's going on, right, We're like, you know, screw it, we're gonna lose 10 bucks, we'll have a good night, whatever baba baba baba baba baba baba. And then suddenly the world splits in half. My machine goes so crazy. I have just won the world. There are three fish that have swum in into alignment. I don't know what the metal balls due to this day, I don't know what they do, but the fish have swum into alignment and it's 999 right in a row and I hit the button and my machine loses its mind super rocky and there's anime, women with gravity defying **** jumping up and down and they're, they're losing their minds to everyone in the the place is looking over at us smoking their cigarettes going you stupid baka gaijin which is like stupid foreigner. And I'm like, I know, I agree. I don't know what's going on. You know, we're losing our minds. I am sobbing, sobbing with laughter. And so is J There are so many marbles pouring out into this little container. I filled four containers full of metal metal marbles, right? But gambling in Japan is illegal. So we took these marbles and we poured them into a machine and we're getting these tickets that have numbers on them that I don't fully understand. And we got the stack of golden microchips of some kind and then we took them down this alley to a sketcher alley and we are awarded with a coke and some cigarettes and about 25,000 yen, which is like $150 us. But after that drinks were on me that night. Thanks so much. Mhm