♪ JULIE BAKER: We connected, and there was romance, and there was all these warm, fuzzy feelings, and this international love story began.

ANA HEBRA FLASTER: I take off down the street, round the corner, and in front of my house is a huge mob.

There's thousands of fish running by our feet, and we can't catch one of them!

This is amazing!

WES HAZARD: Our theme for this evening is "Hell or High Water."

We have all been in a hell-or-high water situation, a time where you looked at the situation, and the idea of pushing through seemed downright unreasonable.

But for whatever reason, whether it was sheer desire or just absolute necessity, you looked at that situation and said, "Today, I am not backing down."

FLASTER: I was born in Havana, Cuba, and I came to the United States at the age of six, or just shy of six, actually.

And I was raised in New England, but very Cuban, because I had a multigenerational family.

Gradually got into storytelling and writing essays for newspapers-- Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Tonight's theme is "Hell or High water."

What does that theme mean to you?

My story is about coming out of Cuba.

And it really was a hell-or-high water, last-ditch effort at freedom, at surviving, and at having a better life for us, for the next generation.

I have asked the adults in the family about how they decided all of this, and it was truly that desperate... "It's this or nothing."

Or, "It's now or never."

It was the end-- they were at the end and they knew that everything was going to change for them.

And it was a plunge into the unknown.

November 1967.

I'm six years old.

I live in Juanelo, Cuba, a working-class suburb of Havana.

Four generations of my family live all around me.

Windows and doors are always open.

Everybody knows everybody's business.

Most of the adults work at factories nearby, and while they're working, the abuelas, the grandmothers, watch over us.

And they're really good at what they do.

If you even think about doing something bad, one of them shows up and ruins everything.

But something really weird is happening in our neighborhood, and I can't figure it out.

Every now and then, a family disappears overnight.

The adults say, "Oh, they flew away to Florida," whatever that is.

I'm just not sure what's going on, but I know that those disappearances are connected somehow to the sound of a motorcycle coming into the neighborhood.

My parents aren't quite happy, and I realize that something's going on with them, as well.

They had applied to leave the country, and they had applied for their exit papers three years before, not knowing if or when they would ever get them.

They had supported the revolution in the '50s, like most working-class Cubans, but after the revolution, got...

Instead of getting the restored democracy that they had hoped for, they got ration books, propaganda, repression, and executions on live TV.

So somewhere in the mid-'60s, they decided, "Come hell or high water, we're getting out of Cuba."

So one night, I'm at my Abuela Cuca's house, who lives right down the street from us, and I'm playing, I'm chasing chickens.

She had these skinny little hens that I loved to chase around.

And I hear a motorcycle coming into the neighborhood.

So I want to figure this out.

I take off down the street, round the corner, and in front of my house is a huge mob.

And on the sidewalk is an enormous motorcycle.

Inside, my father is sitting at the kitchen table, and he's answering questions that this government guard is asking him.

Back here, my mother's running around packing a suitcase.

And over here is my grandmother Fina, Abuela Fina, who lives with us-- that's my other grandmother.

And she's holding my baby brother in a death grip, shaking and crying.

I go over, and now I'm shaking and crying.

And I'm asking questions, but nobody ever tells kids anything.

But the guard notices me at that point.

(speaking Spanish) "Girl, come over here.

"Is it true "that you want to leave your house and your friends and never come back?"

And my mother and my grandmother and my father answer for me, "Si, si."

(speaking Spanish) In no time, we're out on the street.

And I look, and the guard is locking the front door and sealing it shut with a banner that years later I find out reads, "Property of the revolution."

He tells us to be at the airstrip tomorrow night at 8:00, and the following morning, we will fly out to the United States.

So that night we spend at my uncle's apartment right above ours, and people start to show up to say goodbye-- my great-grandfather, all kinds of relatives, and then my first-grade teacher.

I love her, but I don't know what to do with her in that setting, and I don't want to look at her.

My mother comes over and says, "Anita, your teacher "was very brave to come here tonight.

She came to the house of a gusano family."

"Gusano" means worm, and that's what the government called people like us, who were leaving Cuba.

"So she was brave, I want you to be brave."

(speaking Spanish) "Make yourself brave, and go and say goodbye."

So I make myself brave, and I go out, and she's kneeling in front of me, and her tears are just falling down her face, and I lose it.

Every bit of confusion and fear just explodes.

And I'll never forget the feeling.

It was like I was going to float away.

It felt like I was going to just lift up and go away.

The next night, it's 8:00 at night, and we arrive at the airport as instructed with 200 other gusanos all around, and lots of little kids.

And at first, it's a blast, because we're playing, and we're running around, getting dirty, even.

We're in our best clothes.

But then there's nothing to eat when we get hungry, and there's no place to sleep when we get tired.

And there's some crying, and finally everybody just falls asleep on top of each other.

All night long, over the loudspeakers, names are called out.

And what's happening is that the government is harassing the people who are leaving, and they're scaring them, telling them all kinds of things that are going to keep them there.

But we get out.

And the next morning we get on the plane, and right before we take off, the attendant comes down the aisle and sprays us with... disinfectant, air freshener?

I don't even know.

I know that it must have felt like a slap in the face to everyone who was there.

Next couple of days we spend in a refugee processing center outside of Miami.

We get boots, coats, hats, get put on a plane, and somehow we end up in Nashua, New Hampshire.

And ...but I'm fascinated, because there's snow taller than my... than I am, and icicles hanging from roofs, and I have a brand-new teacher to love.

And at night, we get to watch "Gilligan's Island" and learn more English.

And our favorite show is "Los Orejones," "The Big-Eared Ones", which you guys call "Star Trek."

(laughter) And my parents have new jobs at a rubber boot factory.

But I'm very worried, because I keep finding my mother in a dark room in the house, crying.

"Mommy, what's the matter?"

"I have a headache."

But I know she doesn't have a headache.

And my grandmother doesn't stop crying, from the moment she wakes up to the moment she falls asleep.

And we sleep together, like we did in Cuba.

And at night, I can feel her shaking, and when I put my arm around her, sometimes we just... She stops, and we fall asleep like that.

And I have my own issues at night, too.

For the first and only time in my life, I'm hearing voices.

They come out of nowhere.

I can't sleep.

They come in waves.

They're angry and piercing, and I can't understand what they are saying, and I cover my ears, but I still hear them.

And I don't tell anybody, ever, that story.

And I guess I was trying to be brave.

The one thing that does make everybody happy in the house-- the adults-- is when we get a letter from Havana, from the old women, who never forgot us.

And I have those letters now.

They've been folded and unfolded so many times that they're like Kleenexes.

Sometimes the old women are saying nothing important, you know-- a little of this, a little of that.

But even if it's a bad something, a bad event, they are always...

They're always optimistic somehow.

And I imagine that in every line of every letter, they are sending us a message, an unwritten message.

(speaking Spanish) "Make yourself brave."

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) I did go back to Cuba.

I went back to Cuba in 1998, the first time with my mother, and then in 2012 with my husband and my son.

And it is not the kind of trip that an American on an excursion would have, because we stay with our family, and we eat what they eat, and we do what they do.

And it's a very emotional trip.

And I've never really-- you know, I'm very integrated and assimilated into American culture, but when I went back, I realized, "Wow, everybody here talks all the time, from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep."

That's me, that's what I do.

And they look like me, and they...

I just, I felt like I was related to everybody.

It was, it was a cool feeling.

BAKER: I am a single mom and a writer and a storyteller.

And when I quit my corporate job, I also became a barista.

That's quite a transition.

Yes, quite a... And so what was the motivation, that... you know, two different worlds...

I was miserable, and life is too short.

And I used to commute two to three hours round-trip, and now I commute three minutes.

How did you get into storytelling and why?

I've been a listener of stories for years, and went to many story slams, but never put my name in the hat.

After 50, I started feeling like, "Is this it?

Is this my life?"

And noticing that I was moving really fast, but not getting anywhere.

So when a friend said to me, "Why don't you put your name in the hat?

", I thought, "Why don't I put my name in the hat?

What am I waiting for?"

Every year, someone comes out with a list of the happiest places in the world, and Denmark usually tops that list.

When a whole bunch of Danes invaded my happy place in 2015, it was hell.

This particular happy place is Ponkapoag.

It's an Appalachian Mountain Club family campground in the middle of the Blue Hills.

It's off the grid-ish.

It has no running water, no electricity, except in the lodge for two hours to charge your phone at night, and there are outhouses.

I discovered it when my kids and I went there on the Fourth of July.

It was idyllic.

There was a pie-eating contest, and, you know, three-legged races, and people played "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" on the guitar on the dock while someone rode out to the middle and set off fireworks.

It was 1950s throwback, and we loved it.

And we became campers, and we've gone every year for the Fourth of July week.

In 2015, I found myself in a relationship with an expat American living in Denmark.

He had moved there 20 years previously to marry a woman with children, had a bunch more, got divorced.

We found each other on Facebook, and we connected, and there was romance, and there was all these warm, fuzzy feelings, and this international love story began.

We met up in Copenhagen for the weekend, in Amsterdam, and Iceland, and it was glorious.

And then we met each other's children.

And that was when the international "Brady Bunch" fantasy started to grow.

We would have a home in Copenhagen and a home in Boston, and children would come back and forth, and it would be lovely.

So why not invite them to my happy place?

Now, he was going to bring his two youngest daughters, who were 15 and 17 at the time.

Their idea of America was mostly based on the Kardashians, which is very, very different from Ponkapoag.

(laughter) I asked them, "Are you sure you want to come?"

The end of this trip to "America," as they called it, was going to be shopping in New York City.

And I think they saw Ponkapoag as the price of admission to get the shopping trip to New York City, so they said yes.

I did all this preparation.

I bought headlamps for everyone, and packed sheets and froze food and did everything.

They show up, and I'm thinking, "Oh, there'll be an assembly line of children loading the S.U.V."

That was not the way it happened.

The 17-year-old got her period.

And in my family, when someone menstruates, you take Motrin.

In their family, you take to your bed.

So she took to her bed.

The 15-year-old was called outside to help, and she had on bright, shiny, white, brand-new Keds and a pale pink jacket.

And a light rain was starting to come down, and she didn't want to get wet.

So my kids begrudgingly helped load the car.

And they're giving side-eye glances to the Danes, like, and looking at me, like, "What is going on?"

You know, "Why aren't they helping?"

And I said, "Well, they have jet lag."

And as we get closer to Ponkapoag, the rain is just coming down.

It is the the idyllic cabins in the woods with the dirt road-- it's like a muddy stream running through.

I show them the cabin, and I'm, like, "Isn't this quaint?

"Isn't this rustic?

Isn't it beautiful?"

And they look horrified.

There are two sets of bunk beds, one for my 12-year-old son and my 16-year-old daughter, one for his 15-year-old daughter and his 17-year-old daughter.

And then we drag a mattress out to the porch so we can have a little privacy, in theory.

I discovered that the 15-year-old, when she wasn't running around the cabin in her underpants, much to the joy of my 12-year-old son, she was afraid of spiders.

And how I learned this is, she would... Every time she came into the cabin, she would point at a corner and say in this cartoony little-girl voice, "Daddy?"

And he would climb on a chair and kill it for her.

Each time he did it, it killed a little bit more of my love.

(laughter) They wouldn't fetch water.

They wouldn't do anything.

The resentment is building.

The pond water... the rain's coming down.

The pond water's rising and the resentment is rising.

It's just rising.

After one particularly bad night sleeping back to back in our little twin bed on the porch, and trying not to touch each other, I decide that after my morning constitutional to the outhouse, I will go down to the dock, and I will meditate, and I will get in a better spiritual place so I can put back in the bricks of denial about this international "Brady Bunch" fantasy.

So I head down to the dock.

He didn't get the memo that I wanted to be alone.

So he shows up.

I'm trying to breathe in five, hold five, breathe out five.

And then he says, "How you doing?"

And that was it.

The floodgates opened.

I told him what I thought of his children's work ethic.

I told him what I thought of his parenting style.

I told him what I thought of the fact that he didn't get it-- when I said I wanted to go home to get ice, I wanted to have sex with him in my house with no children around.

And why the heck would he invite his 15-year-old daughter to come and take a shower in my house and make a mess of my bathroom?

He told me exactly what he thought of my parenting style, which was, apparently, rigid, and how my children were not kind to his children.

Our voices were getting louder and louder and louder.

And then the camp manager showed up.

I had known this woman for several years.

I was mortified.

She reminded us that it was 6:00 in the morning.

(laughter) And that when you talk on the docks, the conversation goes to the whole campground.

I went for a walk, and I bit my tongue.

The sun came out, but it was too late.

It was dark and stormy in my soul, and it was not going to get better again.

The Danes smiled a few times.

The 15-year-old got a crush.

The 17-year-old either stopped menstruating or figured out you could swim anyway.

They seemed to have fun.

They continued on to New York City.

Eventually, they went back to Denmark.

And, eventually, the boyfriend returned to his rightful place on my Facebook acquaintance list.

The following year, my kids and I returned to Ponkapoag, as we always did, and I was really afraid.

I thought the magic would be gone, that the Danes had soiled my happy place.

But they didn't.

And it never rained a drop.

(cheers and applause) JACKSON GILMAN: Well, I've been telling stories for a long time-- 30... pushing 40 years almost.

Do you make your living as a storyteller?

As a performer.

And storytelling is a big part of it.

Long ago, if you said you were a storyteller, they assumed you were telling to little kids, and it was all little kid stuff.

And so trying to convince an audience that storytelling might be enjoyable for adults, as well, was a pretty hard sell for a long time.

But now it's getting to be really popular, which is great.

How do you approach telling very personal stories, especially about your children?

The world is new for children, and when you're telling a story to someone, you want them to sort of experience it with you.

And what's great about kids is, they're experiencing things for the first time, so if you can sort of capture that innocence, it really...

It's magic.

And what kind of stories do you tend to tell?

How do you grab people's attention?

I'm all over the map when it comes to kinds of stories.

So I do some traditional kinds of things.

I do a lot of personal things.

I do a lot of musical things.

I really can't be pigeonholed that much, though something that sets me a little bit apart is, I usually move a lot.

I'm very much of a mime background, and clowning background, and I love to dance and I love to move.

So tonight, I'm in front of a microphone, which is a little bit... confining for me, but I will adapt.

HAZARD: I'm sure you will.

I'm a catch-and-release kind of guy.

I don't catch many fish, though, because I don't like to use a fishing rod or any kind of hook.

I prefer the challenge of catching them barehanded.

(laughter) You know, people look so fondly about fishing with their dads.

And my dad never took me fishing.

And I don't think he ever fished a day in his life.

But I didn't want to deprive myself or my children of that bonding experience.

So I was going to take them fishing for the first time.

We didn't live in Maine anymore.

We were now at Point Independence.

But I lived close enough so I can put the kids in my little boat that I made.

And I named my boat, pram, after my kids, Avery and Gillian.

So I called the boat Avian.

And we're out there, and we're going to...

Neither of them have caught a fish before.

They're six and nine years old.

Avery is six, Gillian's nine.

This is going to be a day they're not going to forget.

So we're rowing out.

It's a 15-minute row to a place called Onset Island.

And we don't have any fishing gear, but we don't need any.

Because where I'm taking them is just perfect netting, because we have a long-handled net.

And at high water, high tide, there's a room about this size, there's a tide pool.

It fills up, and not that...

It's only this deep, you know?

And the kids can wade out into it.

And when the tide turns, all the water seeps back into the ocean, and this little channel that you could actually jump over, and it's shallow, it's only a couple of inches deep.

So it's going to be really simple to net some of these fish.

There's thousands of them going through this channel.

And Avery wades out there in his trusty Crocs, and he's got his long-handled net, and it's going to be like fishing in a bathtub.

So he's going to catch his first fish.

(whooshes) And they scatter.

He's a little frustrated, so he takes another swipe!

They scatter.

And he swipes!

There's thousands of fish going by him, and every time he moves, they scatter.

And he's really frustrated.

(whooshing, grunting) The more he's frustrated, the more they scatter.

And I realize a teaching moment presents itself.

"Avery," you know, "I'm going to... Can I show you something?"

Dad's going to show off now, here, this stealth approach.

"See, as soon as you move the thing, "any quick movement makes them run.

"So if you just put the net right over them-- "see, it's, like, about an inch-- "they're just right underneath the net, "and then you just really quickly flick and... "And they're really fast, "so you've just got to just put it over there, "and just a flick.

"Oh, this takes a lot of patience, Avery.

Okay, so you just, like..." And my... (sighs) I am... Dad's finesse is failing miserably.

I can't catch any of these.

My daughter's watching these two guys fail miserably, and she says, "Can I try?"

And I say, "Sure," so we give her the net.

And she's got a hybridized technique where there's no quick movement.

It's just one beautiful, graceful swoop.

And it's, like, so beautiful to watch this girl.

She's like a little ballerina.

It's like... (whooshes) And her exquisite technique nets her a net zero.

(laughter) There's thousands of fish running by our feet, and we can't catch one of them!

This is amazing!

It's, like, we're all frustrated.

And finally, Gillian's still trying to, you know, fine-tune this technique.

And all of a sudden, Avery says, "I got one, I got one!"

And I'm thinking, "Wait a second, Gillian's got the net."

And he hops over to the other side.

Like this, like this, and he takes off his Croc.

(laughter) And he pulls out this fish that had got stuck in the hole of his Croc!

(laughter) He'd done his old man one better-- he caught his first fish barefooted.

(laughter) Thank you.

(cheers and applause) HAZARD: Jackson Gilman!

CC PAN: It was in Montreal.

I was in grade one.

I didn't speak a word of French.

We had moved from China recently, and I was in my classroom.

My teacher was Madame Micheline.

One day, there was this book on the counter, and it was "Clifford the Big Red Dog."

So I took it, and I signed it out, and I put it in my backpack.

And then at the end of the day, one of my classmates was crying.

And I noticed that Madame Micheline was saying, "Everybody, unzip your backpacks."

And I didn't know what actually people were saying, because I didn't understand the language.

But I knew at the pit of my stomach what was going on.

Because I knew I wouldn't be able to explain that I wasn't stealing, but actually, this book belonged to this girl, who had just set it there because she had brought it there for show-and-tell.

So sure enough, Madame Micheline comes around, I unzip my backpack, everyone gasps, and I had to hand over the book, and it was just probably the worst day of my young life.

Luckily, we moved the next year, and I decided that I would continue reading and learn the language really fast so I could always explain myself, and that's how I learned to speak English, and that's how I learned the term "hell or high water."

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