Christian puppetry, red pickles & Alaska ghost towns: ‘The Moth’ wows Bellingham audience

Emmy-nominated writer and poet Jon Goode noticed something about Bellingham during his few days in town this past week.

“When you see a pedestrian in the crosswalk, you let them live,” Goode told the crowd at the Mount Baker Theater on Wednesday night.

Goode, who lives in Atlanta, was in town to host “The Moth Mainstage”, a true-story showcase organized by New York City-based non-profit The Moth.

The show had been in the making for nearly five years, when the Mount Baker Theatre reached out to The Moth about stopping in Bellingham, and you could tell. The 1,500-seat venue sold out far in advance. More ushers had volunteered to work that night than any other since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a representative from the theater. When the lights dimmed, the crowd went silent.

The first person to take the stage was local musician Terhi Miikki-Broersma, the night’s musical guest, who pulled off the rare feat of holding the crowd’s attention through an accordion solo.

“If I could play like that, I wouldn’t even talk,” Goode said when he took the stage to introduce the night’s first storyteller, Katharine Strange.

Stories galore

The night’s theme was “The Heart of the Matter,” a topic vague enough that the presenters could make any story fit if you squinted.

Strange, a Seattle-based writer, told a perfectly-paced story about the time she thought being in Missoula, Montana’s premier Christian puppet troupe was cool, and her eventual realization that it, in fact, wasn’t. 1P3, as those in the know called it, spread the gospel across the country through puppet shows – a sort of VeggieTales meets Sesame Street, but live– and happened to be led by none other than Strange’s mother.

With Miikki-Broersma lurking a few feet away, ready to play the “accordion of doom” if the speaker went beyond the time limit, Strange’s routine could’ve been confused for a stand-up set, until her story morphed into a tale about dealing with parental expectations.

Local teacher Jackie Brown followed with a story about her time as a naturalist on a voyage to Alaska. Brown spoke slowly at first but grew into her story as it went along, building up to her tense description the first time she heard a humpback whale’s song.

With the mood in the theater suddenly more solemn, New York City’s Devan Sandiford had the perfect story to close the first act. He told of time that, in early 2020, his five-year-old son walked in on him watching the recording of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder. Sandiford, whose uncle had been shot by police and who grew up as one of the only Black students at a mostly-white school, had talked to his kids about race before. But he’d never had to confront the pain that he felt on the spot like that before.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were a few dozen people in the crowd fighting back tears as intermission hit, though the woman sitting in front of me seemed to disagree. She was “far from impressed,” I overheard her saying. “They need some coaching.”

Even she couldn’t find any gripes with the second act, though.

When he was little, Bryan Kett’s class put together a book of each student’s favorite red item. Kett drew a pickle. Kett was color blind, he would find out. On Wednesday, he told the story of the time he drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the middle of the night for a chance to see color for the first time.

Bellingham local closes the show

Then Martha Benedict took the stage.

“I was born and raised here,” she announced.

Benedict hasn’t lived in Bellingham for all of her 80-plus years though. In her 20s, she and her husband moved to the ghost town of Hyder, Alaska where they became the 19th and 20th residents by her count. They stayed in an abandoned brothel while they waited for their house to be ready, withstood a bear-attack and built a motel-and-bar from scratch.

But the bulk of Benedict’s story revolved around one night, when a boat from Ireland docked in town. The crew descended on her bar and after hours of a good time, an argument broke out. The argument turned into a fight, which turned into a brawl, before Benedict sat down at the piano in the corner of the room and played the opening notes of “Danny Boy.” Next thing she knew, the crew had their arms around each other and were singing along.

It was the kind of scene you would never believe if you saw in a movie. But that’s the fun of The Moth. When you don’t have to put any thought into how believable a story is, you can become so absorbed in the story itself.

“At the end of the day, it’s going to be our stories that save us,” Goode said right before intermission.

The Moth will bring its “Grand Slam” and multiple other events to Seattle this spring.