DAVE FROMM: It's 1993.

I'm fresh out of college, and I decide to move to the Czech Republic and make a living as a basketball player.

(laughter) NATASHA LANCE ROGOFF: I found myself at the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church, in order to bring the Muppets to Moscow.

JOHANNE PELLETIER: When you lose someone, the ick and the sad, it passes.

Then, for something really small and incidental, (snaps finger) it's back, the feeling of the person.

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "Never the Same."

♪ ♪ We are defined by our turning points.

Whenever they come along, we hold our breath, take a look in the rearview mirror, and forge a path ahead toward a new future.

Tonight, our amazing storytellers are going to share their own tales of reaching their own personal crossroads and everything that happened after.

♪ ♪ My name is Johanne Pelletier.

I'm from Montreal, Canada, and I'm a writer and a storyteller, and I work in communications.

I'm also the producer of something called "Good Gyn, Bad Gyn" a storytelling show about women's gynecology and health issues.

And when I'm not thinking about the next story, I train scientists and startups on how to do storytelling.

And I'm a boxing judge.

Where did the interest in boxing come from?

It started late for me in life, in my 40s, being stuck in traffic on my way to work, stuck in my life a little bit, and stuck, in a way, on the street, that the best view I had was, to the, to the right into this boxing gym and I kind of got curious.

One day, tired of just feeling stuck, I walked in.

Wow.

Can you talk about finding a story in small moments and how, how that works out for you?

I find inspiration in relatable humanity in these really tiny moments, these very commonplace sorts of things.

I've told stories about trips to Ikea and standing in line.

I've told stories about waiting for surgery.

What I find is people in the audience can relate to the feeling of those moments.

We've all waited in line.

We've all waited for stuff.

I think they're really relatable.

♪ ♪ I have a landline, still, and I have a lifetime subscription to something called "Roofing Canada."

Both because of my dad.

I transferred the landline and the mail from his business over after he died.

He was a roofer.

He died about 15 years ago.

More than just a roofer, Dad was the guy, the roofing guy, an expert known even in parts of the U.S. And he loved roofing.

So much so that any car ride with Dad would include a detailed commentary on architecture, but focused exclusively on the roof.

(laughter) He would say, "Look up, look up-- the roofers, "those are the real artists and every roof has a story."

So the landline resulted in people calling, looking for his services over the years.

One call stayed with me-- a man's voice, older and unsteady, asking for Dad, but could I call back?

I don't recognize the name, but I'm curious, so I call back, and he says he doesn't remember calling but says, "Please, tell me again."

I say, "My dad, the roofing guy.

"I'm his daughter, I'm pretty sure you called me."

He remembers, he apologizes.

He's ill, he's forgetting a lot.

They worked together.

He says, "There was nobody like your father.

He knew everything."

He tells me, my father's reports were so good, he still had them.

And he doesn't remember my father dying, but he says maybe he was at a funeral.

Did I do the eulogy?

I say, "Yes, that was me.

Maybe we did meet all those years ago."

We don't know each other but it, it feels like we're catching up.

He says, "What did he die of?

It was cancer, right?"

And I say, "Yeah, "a glioblastoma multiforme, "a fast-moving brain tumor.

He was gone in three months."

I recite that like it was yesterday.

I look at my watch, and it's 30 minutes and we're still talking.

And he wants to tell me about my dad.

It's stuff I already know, but it, it's nice to hear.

He says, "Your father was kind and honest and hardworking.

"He was really smart.

He was a swell guy."

"Yeah, he was all those things, thank you.

"He was a great dad.

I loved him."

He says, "You know, you sound a lot like him."

And before I can even think of what to say to that... (laughter) He says, "But wait, "what did he teach you about roofing?

How much do you know?"

(laughter) And I say, "Well, actually, thank you.

"No one has ever asked me that question.

My roofing education began when I was very young, and I'm happy to talk about it.

I mean, I never went up on the roof with Dad because I'm terrified of heights.

But... (exhales) I remember going to the roofing company with my dad on the weekends, and those afternoons with Dad he showed me how to use roofing shingles, and how to cut copper, and tin and metal.

And I tell him, "I know a lot about how to use rivets, and I know a lot about asphalt," that tar that always stuck to my shoes.

And wow, I remember.

Dad bought me a Coke every weekend.

He bought me my first protractor.

I had a few.

(laughter) This is so nice.

I say, "Thank you.

It's nice to remember Dad this way."

And he says, "You know, it sounds just like your father."

He says, "By the way, every roof has a story."

Huh, yeah.

So, Dad used to say that and I want to ask him more about this, but all I can think is, damn grieving.

You see, the thing is when you lose someone, the ick and the sad, it passes.

It passes so much, you think you're going to forget them.

And then, for something really small and incidental, (snaps fingers) it's back.

Not the ick and the sad, but the feeling of the person.

For me, a Coke and a protractor brought him back, my wonderful dad.

But really, anytime I look at a roof-- metal, tin, copper-- my father is everywhere.

And now, there's this call.

I haven't asked him why he's calling.

It's an hour now.

And I tell him, look, there are no coincidences.

I transferred stuff to me.

My father was vibrant and working, and the tumor came, and it was over quickly.

And in the haste of managing the end of his life and his business, I just transferred stuff to me.

I thought I was being efficient.

You know, one less thing to do later.

It was really one more thing to hang on to.

He says, "Your father must have been so proud of you.

I think of your father a lot."

Okay.

(laughs softly) I don't know what to say now, but I try.

I say, "Hey, were you and my dad close?"

And he just says, his voice crackling a little, "Your father was a great, great man.

He was a great friend to me."

It's not just any call.

It's 90 minutes now.

(laughs softly) And, and now we're talking like, you know when you have to end the call, but you don't really want to?

And, and I say, "Hey, I want to tell you how I feel.

"I'm, I'm so moved by this call."

"And I don't normally say stuff like this, "but, I got to tell you what I feel.

"My heart is full.

"Can I call you again?

"Would you like to call me?

We could talk about roofing."

(laughter) He says, "Maybe," but, he won't remember the conversation.

He remembers his wife dying some years ago, and he says that was very tough.

Now what he remembers is from really long ago-- work; friends; right now, my dad.

"You sound so like him," he says.

"I have to go, "but I want you to know, "of all the things I have forgotten and I will forget, "I will never forget your father.

"Keep looking up.

Every roof has a story."

I called back.

(laughs softly) A few weeks later, I left a message.

Why?

Damn grieving.

The recording on his line, it was his wife's voice.

He had told me he never changed the message.

He never changed the landline.

He never called back.

But, it's okay, 'cause my heart...

Still full.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ FROMM: My name is Dave Fromm.

I live out in western Massachusetts in a small town called Longmeadow.

I grew up in the Berkshires, and I'm a novelist.

Have you had a whole lot of experience telling stories on a stage like you're going to be doing this evening?

(chuckles) I've had very little experience, which is why I'm so terrified of it tonight.

But, out where I live, I found... somebody is putting a monthly uh, storytelling series in a small town, near where I live, the town is called East Hampton.

And I started to go to that, and I realized quickly that it's a very different animal than writing.

The things you do when you're trying to tell a story live.

The way you breathe, the way you carry yourself, the way you pace things, even the words you use are completely different.

I understand that you write both fiction and nonfiction, and I'm wondering, can you give us some perspective on what you see as the differences in that process?

In fiction, you can be creative, outrageous.

You can take kind of both structural and stylistic risks that might not work as well in nonfiction.

And nonfiction, I think, requires the writer, in a different way, to be really aware of all the perspectives that could come into a piece to broaden your perspective on other people in your life and in the world.

♪ ♪ So, it's 1993.

I'm fresh out of college, and I decide to move to the Czech Republic and make a living as a basketball player.

(laughter) Believe it or not, there are some impediments.

(laughter) First, I do not speak any Czech, and I do not know anybody living in the Czech Republic.

The Iron Curtain has just come down.

There's no Google, there's no Amazon.

the internet is dial-up.

There are surprisingly few books on Czech basketball in the local library.

(laughter) So I don't even know if they have leagues there, but I assume they must.

The Dream Team has just won gold in Barcelona.

The whole world loves basketball.

But that brings me to my second problem.

I'm not that good at basketball.

(laughter) I know, I look like I would be.

(laughter) I mean, I'm good enough to make my high school team, but I can't make the team in college, and I try out, twice.

So, what's this about?

Well, it feels important.

I feel like I've lost myself in college, lost a sense of who I am and who I want to be.

And when I graduate, I feel anxious and unmoored.

Maybe these aren't uncommon feelings, but rather than deal with them honestly, I bury them beneath layers of grandiose delusion.

I'll be a novelist.

I'll be a spy.

I'll be an international basketball star who's also a spy.

(laughter) And then I'll write a novel about it.

(laughter) I'm an English major.

I've read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and told people that I understand it.

(laughter) I wrote, an entire honors thesis on Central Europe, from a dorm room in Boston.

My advisor called it "breathtakingly naive."

(laughter) But it's 1993.

Everybody's going to Prague.

I don't know them personally, but I hear that.

They say it's beautiful and that it's free, and that it's safe and that it's cheap and that you can be what you want to be there.

It's really more of an idea than a place.

And how am I going to get there?

Basketball.

I love basketball.

Played it my whole life.

I played with my father.

He played in college.

The basketball court is one of the few places where I feel like I know what I'm doing.

Still, I have some reservations about this plan.

So do my parents, my friends... pretty much everybody I talk to has reservations.

(laugher) So, I seek a fifth opinion.

(laugher) I go to a man I kind of know, who lives in my town.

This man's name is Jan and he's Czech and he grew up in Prague.

At this point in his life, Jan was in his early 70s, a small, dignified man with white hair and a white mustache and piercing blue eyes.

He worked as a cross-country ski instructor.

He was kind of a local legend.

He was an actual World War II hero.

When he was my age, Jan lost his entire family when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia during World War II.

He managed to flee at the last minute, first east and then south, into the Balkans before he was caught near the Italian border hanging from the undercarriage of train.

They put him in a prison camp in Italy and he escaped, twice.

The second time, he made it all the way to England, where he joined the Czech division of the Royal Air Force and flew bombing missions back over Prague, in order to drive the Germans out.

This is the guy, I thought to myself.

If anybody can identify with the postgraduate angst of a middle-class American 22-year-old in peacetime... (laughter) It's this guy.

Jan invited me over, it was wintertime.

I drove down a long and winding dirt path through the woods to his house, which is up on a snow-covered hill.

There was a giant white husky in the drive, and the dog glared at me until Jan came out and said something to it in Czech.

At least I assumed it was Czech, I didn't know.

We went in, we sat in his living room and I unfurled my master plan, which was to move to Prague to find a place to live, to find a basketball team, to convince that team to let me try out, to make the team, and then to become the Czech version of Magic Johnson.

(laughter) Jan knew nothing about basketball, at all, but he knew about Prague.

And he told me things like, here's where the U.S. Embassy is, and here's the hospital where they speak English.

I told him about my high school all-star days.

I told him about how much I loved the game.

I told him about all the Czech novels I had read.

And then, because I wasn't getting a whole lot back I started telling him about my self-doubt.

The feeling that I'd lost the thread of my life and I needed to do something daring and kind of ridiculous to try to find it again.

I was hoping for some sort of reassurance from Jan, some sort of endorsement that things would be okay, that this wasn't a crazy plan, but I wasn't really getting one.

Because it was a crazy plan.

Jan knew it.

I knew it, actually, we all knew it.

And after an hour, nothing had changed.

I started to wonder if there was still time to apply to law school.

(laughter) I got up to leave and I went to the door and Jan stopped me.

He put his hand on my shoulder and he looked me in the eyes and he said, "David, whatever you do, don't back out."

Don't back out.

That was it, that was the endorsement I needed.

I felt my head clear, I felt taller.

I felt stronger, I had a mission.

I walked back to my car.

The dog looked at me differently.

(laughter) Flash forward six months, I'm on a bus on the outskirts of Prague with my teammates heading to a game.

We play in the third tier of the Czech Basketball Federation.

I'm the only American in our division.

We don't win much and we don't get paid and I'm not the best player.

But the season we have is magical.

My teammates take me in, they become my friends.

They show me their lives, their families, their country-- the real country.

I learn important Czech phrases like, "Look out behind you."

(laughter) And "I was open."

(laughter) We, we drink in the pubs where the poets wrote.

We walk down the alleys where the dissidents hid from the secret police.

At the end of that season, we go to a small village in France, in the French Alps, and we play in a tournament against teams from all over Europe.

And we come in third and we bring a trophy back to Prague.

"Whatever you do," Jan said that day at his house, he said, "Don't back out."

And on that bus I realized that he was saying, don't back out of my driveway.

(laughter) That would make more sense, because I did back out of his driveway and I wound up in a snowbank.

But it doesn't matter, because I also wound up in Prague.

Because it's not, it's not the finding that's important, it's the looking.

Thank you.

(applause) ♪ ♪ ROGOFF: My name is Natasha Lance Rogoff and I'm from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I'm an author and I recently published a book called Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia.

And I have also worked for the past 20 or 30 years in television, making children's television, documentary films, and news.

You spent a great deal of time producing and reporting within Russia, and I'm wondering, what fascinates you about that country?

I was seduced by Russia early on, as a teenager, and I think it really came from reading the literature and connecting to that world which was soulful, passionate, and often cruel.

And then I studied Russian in college and went to what was then the Soviet Union when I was in my early 20s.

And I stayed there for the next 12 years.

(chuckles) After listening to your story tonight, what would you hope that our audience most takes away with them?

That it takes time for societies to change.

♪ ♪ On a very unusually hot day in Moscow in June of 1995, I found myself with a group of child education experts, who had gathered to create a new children's television show.

We were meeting at the Danilov Monastery, which is the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church for a three-day seminar with the production team and the research experts, both from the United States and from all over the former Soviet Union.

Sesame Street had approached me a while earlier in order to bring the Muppets to Moscow.

This was a historic period of time when the Soviet empire had just collapsed a few years earlier And the idea was that the Muppets would be ideal ambassadors to bring idealistic values of tolerance and freedom of expression to the post-Communist society.

I speak Russian and I had already been living in in the Soviet Union for ten years covering news first, and then made documentaries about the fall of the Soviet Union.

But I thought this incredibly ambitious project would...

I, I really didn't know how the Russian community would take it and how the Muppets would play in dark, pessimistic, angst-ridden Russia.

(laughter) So we're all sitting around this conference table and most of the educators who are there really weren't familiar with the show, at all.

So we thought the best way to familiarize them was to show them clips.

And when we finished the video, we turned it off, there was silence.

The first thing one of the participants said, "You do realize that our show is going to have to be a great deal more sophisticated than that."

(laughter) And then he went on to say, "Our children are much smarter than the Americans."

(laughter) So, I found that really insulting.

But this was the beginning of our conversation, so I really didn't want to, you know, start off that way, and I wanted to steer the conversation away from kind of the us versus them.

And so I said, "Well, why don't we all propose some scenarios "that could be in the show "that reflect your culture and your values.

"And we will see how these scenarios "will be put into place, "so that children will have the skills and values they need to thrive in an open society."

And then as an example, I say, "We could show children running a lemonade stand."

That was met with horror.

(laughter) One of the educators says, "That is shameful.

You can't have children selling things on the street."

And then someone else said, "The only people who do that are criminals and mafia."

And, of course, that's true.

Under communism, it was illegal.

All independent commerce was illegal.

So, people selling things on the street you know, could go to jail.

And then we showed another clip, which was a little boy in a wheelchair.

It's a very familiar Sesame Street clip where the boy is flying a kite with a friend in the park and there's a song that goes ♪ Me in my chair, we go everywhere ♪ You may know this song.

The clip plays and then it finishes.

And a math teacher stands up and says, "It would be exploitative to show children in wheelchairs on a television show."

So now I'm thinking, we're not, we're not doing very well here, and this is just the first day.

(laughs) So then this other woman says, quite innocently, "I don't understand why normal'nyye deti "-- normal children-- "would want to watch a TV show with ne normal'nyye deti in it."

This conversation continues, people add to it.

And at this point, I'm kind of uncomfortable with the use of the word ne normal'nyye deti, which keeps getting repeated, over and over again for children who have disabilities.

And I, I wonder, you know, if these enlightened educators seem to show so little empathy, maybe Russia's not ready for Sesame Street.

So as I'm sitting there, you know, thinking, I'm feeling pretty despondent about the whole thing.

Then this woman says, "You Americans don't understand."

She said, "You know, in our country, "all is being torn apart, "and most children, "they can't afford to have a wheelchair.

"Our government has fallen apart.

"The health care doesn't supply wheelchairs to children.

"These children are trapped in their beds, "and if they see children with wheelchairs on a TV show, they'll just feel sad."

So the discussion continues among the group, and there are all different opinions.

Then there's a quiet voice from the back of the room, and she says, "Hello, my name is Ludmila.

And she says, "I am from the region of Chuvash," which stretches from the Volga to Siberia.

She says, "Our region was used during Communist times "as a dumping ground for hazardous chemicals.

"So we, our region, has the highest rate "of deformities for children.

"And I work with these children every day.

"I laugh with them, we play together.

And these children yearn to play with 'normal children.'"

She says that, "I don't understand why you people "don't understand that a child who has a problem with his legs is still talented in other areas."

She urges the group to create scenarios where these children are presented and portrayed as human and a valuable part of the society.

When she finishes speaking, I look around and I see that the people who had spoken earlier are kind of shifting uncomfortably in their seats, and some of the people have started crying.

But what I realized from that day with Ludmila is that she had actually given us all a gift.

She gave my colleagues an understanding of the role that they could play in transforming their country to a tolerant, open society.

And what she gave me was exactly what I needed, which was the ability to feel again and empathy.

(applause) THERESA OKOKON: The Stories from the Stage podcast with extraordinary true stories wherever you listen to podcasts.

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