♪ MARK MODRALL: Life has this way of still teaching you things as you go along, like that goo in the pie that comes out when you cook it.

That's flammable.

(laughter) KWASI MENSAH: That's the smell of fourth-grade Kwasi getting all As on his report card, and his mom knowing exactly what to make to reward him for it.

(laughter) AMANDA LORING: And for the first time in my life, I saw what the other kids were eating.

♪ THERESA OKOKON: Tonight's theme is "Mealtime."

ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you-- thank you.

OKOKON: Whether you are a child, the grandparent, the family dog, or even a herd of cows.

When you hear someone scream, "Mealtime!"

you know what to do.

And that meal that's about to fill your belly will do so much more.

Because food means connection, it means community.

It means love, and sometimes it even means wonder.

♪ AMANDA LORING: My name is Amanda Loring.

I am from North Weymouth, Massachusetts, where I live with my daughter and my husband.

I am a stay-at-home mom, but in a past life, I was also a chef, and right now I just cook for causes that I care about instead of for money, which I have to say is a lot more fun.

I'm new to storytelling, but, uh, I really love it, and I'm excited to be here tonight.

And what role has storytelling played in your life now?

Storytelling has done two things for me.

One of them is it's a really fun hobby that has led to, you know, improv and a little bit of stand-up.

But the other of reason that storytelling is really important to me is I'm also in long-term recovery from addiction, and storytelling is a really big part of that.

So, you know, you go, you start, you tell your very sad story, and then it becomes a story that you can learn from.

And then you have a new story.

What kind of stories do you like to tell?

My favorite stories to tell are about, you know, like sort of revealing or exploring some type of memory that I have that is painful when it, when it recalls, like, when I recall it.

OKOKON: Mm-hmm.

LORING: But telling the story kind of, like, helps lessen that and then also makes me feel, like, connected to others through something that I might have felt really unique with.

OKOKON: What is it about the story that you're telling tonight that feels special or important for you?

LORING: It's just one of those burning memories of a time that I got in trouble.

It was, like, the first memory I have of doing something that I knew was bad and choosing to do it anyway.

So it sort of seared in my gut for that reason.

So, when you're a little kid, you don't know that your family is weird.

You just know that they're your family.

And when I was five years old, I knew that my mom only shopped at the food co-op, bought everything in bulk, made everything from scratch and cooked out of cookbooks that looked like they were handwritten and hand-illustrated, and we had dishes with names, like Buddha's Jewels.

Those were balls of tofu in a brown sauce.

Or we had the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, which was, like, this elaborate dish of refried beans that had broccoli all standing up to look like trees-- very labor-intensive.

We did not eat sweets.

Maybe once a year on our birthday there was a cake made of whole-wheat pastry flour and raw honey.

But for the most part, if we were having something sweet, it was a piece of fruit.

And there I was, at five years old, my mom said, "I'm sending you to kindergarten.

Here's your snack."

And she put two plums in a brown paper bag and kissed me goodbye.

And I went to see school, and it was so exciting.

And then we sat down in a circle to share our snacks.

And for the first time in my life, I saw what the other kids were eating.

(gasps, audience laughs) It did not even look like food.

It was a Fruit Roll-Up.

(laughter) That's a toy, I'm pretty sure.

It was cookies that were so uniform they looked like they probably were also toys.

It was pretzels that were, maybe, like, encrusted with jewels.

I guess it was salt.

Their bread was so white that the purple jelly inside bled through when they clutched it in their hands.

And I had a brown paper bag with two plums in it.

It was kind of a bummer, but I didn't get so bummed out at that point.

It wasn't until the very first birthday of kindergarten.

This was before allergies, and when a kid had a birthday in my kindergarten, one of the teachers went to the kitchen in the back, and they spent the morning producing an amazing smell.

And when I smelled it for the first time, I was like, "What is this?"

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

And then when we sat down, and we sang "Happy Birthday," and they came out with this object of my desire, and I saw it for the first time, it was a cake.

It was like a thick, black cake.

It was probably a chocolate cake, but I wouldn't know, 'cause I've only had carob.

(laughter) Yeah.

It had a frosting that was, like, even more vividly bright than the Fruit Roll-Up or any of the clothes that I owned.

And we sing "Happy Birthday," and they cut it up and put big, fat slices on plates and handed it out to all the kids.

Except for the kid whose mom said, "You know, "I'm going to pack my daughter her snack.

I really don't want her to have anything else."

So I didn't have it.

And that was when I started to get pretty upset.

I sustained this for a few more birthdays.

But then one day I arrived at school with my usual, a plum in a bag, and I dropped it off at my cubby, and I smelled that familiar smell of my desire.

And we sat down in the circle, and we had snack, but I didn't go to my cubby that day.

I walked past it, and I showed up empty-handed, and I sat there, and even though I had a feeling in my stomach that I can only describe as loose, I did it, I did the thing, And when the teacher looked at me and said, "Where's your snack?"

I looked up at her and I lied to an adult.

And I said, "My mom didn't pack me a snack."

(laughter) And it worked.

(laughter) And the next thing I knew, she's giving it to me.

And it's coming, and I see it, and the frosting is so red.

And I take a bite.

And it is even better than I could have imagined.

It's the most delicious thing I've ever eaten.

It becomes the most important thing in my whole world.

I eat the whole thing, and I start to physically float.

(laughter) I float over to the line to line up for recess, but before I can get outside, the head teacher, Elkie, catches my eye, and she gives me one of these.

And I fall to the ground.

And I walk over to her, and there's that feeling again.

And she says, "Amanda, what happened to your snack?"

And I try to lie again, but... (stammering): nothing is coming out.

And she says, "I was by your cubby, and I found a plum in a bag."

And I'm like, "I put my hand in that bag and I didn't feel anything."

(laughter) But for some reason, she doesn't believe me.

And I'm just completely busted.

And I don't get in trouble at home.

But I have been obsessed with cake ever since.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) My story is important for me to tell because it's a memory that I've carried with me for such a long time, and I've learned from being in recovery that if you carry a memory with you, and you still react to it emotionally, then it's a good idea to tell that to other people and share it.

And what I've found about sharing these types of things is that so many other people can relate.

♪ MENSAH: My name is Kwasi Mensah.

I am programmer by day and a stand-up comic at night.

And I'm originally from New York, been in Boston for over ten years now.

My family is originally from Ghana in West Africa, and it plays a big part of the story I'm telling tonight.

So how did you get into storytelling?

I got into it kind of through stand-up.

A lot of stand-up, especially when I first started, was a lot of telling stories and finding a way to make them funny.

Then you kind of learn later to kind of condense them down, but I think there is such, like, a, a interesting overlap between the two skills.

Whereas, like, with stand-up.

you're kind of just trying to make people laugh.

Whereas with storytelling, you kind of have all these other emotional levers you can play around with.

OKOKON: Yeah.

Do you find that your voice onstage is the same in both of those venues?

I think I can be a little bit more earnest in storytelling.

I think when I'm not trying to hit that laugh every 30 seconds I can kind of be a little bit more vulnerable than, I guess, as a stand-up.

Because as a stand-up, you're very much like, "I am controlling the stage, I am in charge," especially with all the crappy bar situations you do shows in and whatnot and all the hecklers you have to deal with.

Whereas with storytelling, you're kind of dealing with kind of a more genteel crowd.

And what kind of stories do you find yourself most enjoying to tell?

I think one of the things that's interesting about my background is kind of this immigrant experience, but you're also black in America.

But it's like you don't have this generational knowledge of what being black in America means.

OKOKON: Mm-hmm.

MENSAH: So you're kind of finagling your own path through that.

And so I think there's a lot of this kind of... this educates in how we talk about race, especially, you know, African American, black race in America.

So I think there's a lot of interesting things that fall out of that.

♪ My name is Kwasi Aramaku Mensah.

If you can't tell from that, I'm the child of immigrants.

The adults in my family are from Ghana, and I still say that even though I'm turning 32 tomorrow.

And part of being part of that immigrant experience, especially being first generation, is understanding that the food that you eat at home is going to be different than the food all your friends eat at home.

And growing up in the Bronx, New York, that was never a problem.

There's literally a block where I grew up where there's a pizza place next door to a fried chicken place next door to a biryani place, and the last two are owned by the same family.

(laughter) So we're used to using food as a way to express our cultures to each other.

In fact, if you were over at a friend's place, you just had whatever their mom was cooking that night.

I had plenty of friends over at my mom's place that would have some of my mom's jollof rice.

And I would go to my Puerto Rican friend's house, and that's where I got introduced to the beauty that is adobo spice seasoning.

Oh, my God, if you ever have a chance to try it, you can put it on pasta, you can put on scrambled eggs.

It's so good.

In fact, we were so used to using food as a way to express culture, it became even more important than the language.

My mom actually stopped speaking Twi, my family's local language in Ghana, because in kindergarten it was taking too long for me to pick up English.

And this is before everyone knew that being bilingual was going to be the new hotness.

(laughter) But even without the language, my home was still filled with the smells of my mom's food.

Of my mom shito, my mom's pepper sauce, my moms kenkey.

I still grew up around those smells.

And so fast forward a couple years, I'm 23.

I've been in Boston for about a year or two straight out of college, and I have a new group of friends I'm forming in this new city of mine.

And they decide to throw a potluck.

And a lot of people in this group are Indians.

So I'm like, "Yes, "they can handle the food of my mom's spice.

They'll love it, it's great, they can do it."

And, again, I knew I need to step up my game.

Being a 23-year-old guy right out of college, a lot of times my contribution to stuff like this was doing the last-minute beer run.

(laughter) So I knew I wanted to make them something traditional, something that was close to my heart.

And I had decided to make them my favorite, peanut butter soup.

And so a lot of people hear "peanut butter," and, like, "What?"

But traditionally it's really peanut soup, where you... you take the peanuts and you roast them, and then you ground them, and then you put them in the soup.

But it's the 21 century, and ain't nobody got time for that.

(laughter) So a lot of people use peanut butter as a way of shortcutting that.

And so peanut butter soup is actually, it's like a tomato-based soup that has all these great interesting spices in it, and the peanut butter is there to add a creaminess to it.

And if you do it right, it actually doesn't overtake anything else that's going on in the soup.

But it still makes your entire apartment smell like Jiffy.

(laughter) And I love that smell.

That's the smell of fourth grade Kwasi getting all As on his report card, and his mom knowing exactly what to make to reward him for it.

(laughter, applause) I knew I wanted to make an authentic version of the recipe, and I knew I couldn't just grab a recipe off the internet.

Turns out there's a lot of people who put really bad versions of African food recipes on the internet.

(laughter) If you want to see an example of that, there's a really famous chef that tried to make his own version of jollof rice, and of you don't know what jollof is, jollof the staple rice dish all over West Africa.

And there's this friendly rivalry between Ghana and Nigeria to see who makes the best version of it.

Ghana, of course, wins.

(laughter) But we were able to put that aside the moment we saw what he published in the internet, and we were all like, "That is the blandest thing we've ever seen in our lives."

So I knew I had to call in an expert.

And, of course, that expert was my mom.

And if anybody has ever tried to learn a traditional recipe, though, from their mom, from their uncle, from the grandma, or anything like that, you know they're anything but exact.

To give you example, at one point my mom told me to slice up a fistful of onions.

And I go, "Mom, I'm a foot taller than you.

My hands are twice as big."

And she goes, "Well, your friends better like onions."

(laughter) And it's not just inexact in what proportions to use, but even how to make the meal.

Instead of telling me how long to let the pot sit before I can touch anything inside, she tells a story about how my cousin Kofi has a permanent burn spot on his tongue, because he tried to sneak some beef out of the pot before it was done cooling down.

A lot of people talk about how the secret ingredient to their family's recipe is love.

Well, I honestly believe that in my family, that secret ingredient is laughter.

And so I finally finished making the peanut butter soup, and it smells amazing.

It brings back all these memories, to the... my love of "The Power Rangers," to all the girls I was afraid to ask out.

And I'm so excited about my peanut butter soup, I text the person who's running the potluck.

And I go, "Oh my God, this is so great.

You guys are going to love it.

The beef even came out so well-spiced.

It's going great."

And then I go to sleep.

And then I wake up to five, six messages from her, and I'm thinking, "Oh, man, I must have described this so well, she's so excited to have it."

And that's when I actually read the messages, and I'm like, "Oh, no."

Because you see this potluck was going to have a lot of Indian people at it, and there are going to be a lot of people who don't eat beef.

There are going a lot of people who are vegetarians.

And she was trying to be nice and console me.

And she said, "Well, hopefully you left the beef on the side, "so that we can have... "so people can make their own decision about whether to have it with the soup and whatnot."

And she's telling me this as I'm looking at the Tupperware full of soup that's had the beef soaking in it overnight.

(laughter) And so I know I can't just take the beef out of it.

That would be disrespectful.

So at 8:00 a.m. the day of the potluck, I actually have to run back out to the store, get everything I need to make the soup again.

And this time I used potatoes instead of beef to have something, you know, chunky in the soup.

I bring it over to the potluck and, again, it's a lot of people who aren't used to peanut butter soup.

And part of me is just, like, waiting for the first person to try it, mostly because I'm an attention seeker, and I needed that validation.

(laughter) Next thing I know, one person walks up to... walks up to my pot and goes, "Is that peanut soup?"

I'm like, "Oh, how would you know what that is?"

And she's like, "I'm Indian, but I actually grew up in Nigeria."

And she takes a ladle of it, takes a spoonful of it and goes... (sighing with satisfaction) And that was the sign to the rest of the party that this was safe to eat.

(laughter) And we actually spent a lot of the night talking about West Africa and growing... how her experience growing up there and my experience of having a bunch of family from there.

And it was great; I achieved my goal of being able to share a little bit of myself and a little bit of my culture with these new friends I've been making.

And so that's... that episode started me getting more confident with my cooking skills.

It even helped me get my current girlfriend, who's actually Armenian and introduced me to the beauty that is losh kebab.

Oh, so good.

But quite the opposite of vegetarian.

One of things I loved about learning how to make peanut butter soup is that it helped me become more active in participating in my culture.

That day I wasn't just Ghanaian because of my name.

I wasn't just Ghanaian because I had some kente cloth in the back of my closet.

I was Ghanaian because I took part of a tradition of making a meal that's frankly older than the country we're standing in right now.

I took part of a tradition of helping use food to spread joy to the people I love and care about.

I took part of a tradition of using that special ingredient of laughter.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ MODRALL: My name is Mark Modrall.

I'm a computer programmer from Littleton, Massachusetts.

I started going to public storytelling events about six years ago.

OKOKON: Mm-hmm.

When I ran out of family members who hadn't heard that one before, and I've been enjoying doing it ever since.

Are there elements of storytelling in computer programming?

Um, there are certainly elements of storytelling.

You can tell stories about the work.

OKOKON: Mm-hmm.

MODRALL: Um, I worked through the dot-com era, and whenever you go through a crazy inversion of all reality, there are bound to be stories that come out of it.

OKOKON: For sure.

But the actual storytelling in the work is not as much as I would have liked, which is why I do it outside.

OKOKON: Yeah.

And what is it that you learn from telling stories?

Well, there's all sorts of things you learn about telling stories.

One is, you know, you bring up your own life stories.

And in putting them into a position or a mold that you can actually go out and tell, you remember things about them.

You remember various events and certain, you know, colorful or poignant moments.

OKOKON: Mm-hmm.

MODRALL: You remember some of the detail about things, and it sort of puts a lot of your life in context.

OKOKON: Yeah, so you're sort of learning about yourself in the process of telling a story.

Very much so, yeah.

OKOKON: Yeah.

So, Mark, what would you say is your recipe for the best story?

I guess I would say I really don't have one.

I mean, one of things I like about the storytelling venues is you're, you're given a theme.

You're seated, and the themes are all so different.

You can't really say there's one formula that covers all themes.

OKOKON: Right.

MODRALL: And some stories are going to be more adventurous, some are going to be more intimate, some are going to be quiet, some are going to be loud.

OKOKON: Mm-hmm.

MODRALL: And I don't say I could have a formula that I would say, "Oh, that's just how I do it."

I was a willful child.

I got that from my mother.

Once, she and a bunch of her friends went to this Russian hypnotist to quit smoking, and it worked.

None of them wanted to smoke afterwards.

But a couple of weeks later, my mom had this thought.

She's like, "Who's this Russian guy to tell me what to do?

(laughter) And poof, that was it, it was all gone.

(laughter) So it shouldn't have surprised her that day when I marched up and I said, I want apple pie Now."

And my mom said, "I don't feel like making apple pie for you now."

So I went and I got her recipe box, pulled out... pulled out the apple pie card, "How hard can this be?"

I was ten.

My mom said, "I'd like to see you try, smart guy."

I think she probably regretted that.

My mom used to keep store-bought crust in the house for her safety as well as ours, I think.

Because making crust is an ungodly mess, and all you get out of it is crust.

(laughter) Up the road, there were a couple of apple trees, and when you're ten, it is not a chore to climb trees to pick apples.

I don't remember what kind of apples they were, but they were the right kind for me, free.

(laughter) because I like my apple pie like a Jenga tower.

Because there's nothing sadder than a flat deflated little pie after it bakes down.

So I was good to go.

My mom's recipe, she didn't put crust on the top, because that's like building a house with a concrete foundation and putting cement on the top.

She had this kind of crumbly, cobblery kind of thing she did.

And that's, that's what made it my mom's pie.

So I learned a lot that first day, some important life lessons.

Like when you're the cook, recipes are suggestions.

(laughter) 'Cause, I mean, it says, "One cup sugar."

but if I put in two, who's going to stop me?

(laughter) And if any adult won't eat it, that's more pie for me.

And it worked.

(laughter) So after my parents split, I spent summers with my aunt.

And it was the same apple trees and the same neighborhood.

The recipe was committed to memory by now, but life has this way of still teaching you things as you go along, like that goo in the pie that comes out when you cook it.

That's flammable.

(laughter) And you can put a cookie sheet under the pie to catch the goo, but if you don't move the pie before it cools, that's superglue.

(laughter) And if the butter is too soft when you make that crumble top, it makes this shell that's harder than Kevlar.

It still tastes good, but you have to eat it with a hammer.

(laughter) And as I went on here, I kept learning.

Like I learned that what type of apple is important, because, like Golden Delicious, they're the bastard children of pears.

Who eats those things?

I also learned to cut the pie... the apples into different-size pieces.

You know, little, tiny sliver slices to make the goo, bigger pieces to make the texture.

And the apples; you know, over the years-- I've been doing this a long time.

Over the years, the apples have changed.

When I was a kid, you peel, and they started turning brown immediately.

You had to put lemon juice on them to slow that down.

But as the years went on, the apples just got harder and harder, and they stopped turning brown.

And then there was that, like, dark night of the soul Alar sandal in the '80s.

The pesticide they use on apples, it turned into jet fuel when you baked it.

So I kept learning as I went along.

I've been refining my recipe as I've gone along.

I've decided, for example, that Granny Smiths are the perfect apples.

I've decided to take the sugar from two cups down to a half a cup, because maturity.

(laughter) And at one point my wife suggested about 20 years ago, "You know, oats might be good in that topping."

Damn it, she was right.

(laughter) I've tried other things, like putting raisins and dried cherries, and it's, you know, it's okay, I guess.

But it's not apple pie.

That's apple-and-something pie.

When I got my first copy of "Joy of Cooking," I got this really nasty shock.

I was flipping through, looking for something else entirely, and right there was my mom's recipe for apple pie, right down to the French crumble top on page 869.

It wasn't my mom's, it was Irma Rombauer's.

(laughter) But by then she'd been leaving the pie to me for over a decade.

My next-door neighbor of 15 years was a Vietnam vet.

And for the last five or six years, he's been having a lot of trouble with his health.

Last three with cancer.

He's a really proud guy, he didn't want to take help for anything.

When snow shoveling got beyond him, he insisted on snow-blowing our driveway in exchange for me shoveling his walks, because nothing is for free.

But he would take an apple pie now and then.

He had cancer, he was losing weight left and right.

I made him a lot of pies, because I am nothing if not willful about my pie.

He died last summer, and I haven't made an apple pie since.

At his service, they made a point of saying how much he loved his apple pie.

Thank you.

(applause) ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you-- thank you.

♪