Lights, stage and no notes

Missoula Moth has been revived after an eight-month hiatus to bring back live story telling without notes.

The night started as a story free-for-all at the Badlander, but because of the overwhelming popularity, Missoula Moth needed a bigger venue and more structure — the night is limited to six 10-minute stories around the theme "Dear Diary."

"This is a different event," said Missoula Moth coordinator Marc Moss. "It's at a different venue, different people are involved, so we can have different rules."

The next story night will be hosted at the Missoula Art Museum as a part of Artini Thursday "A Story to Tell" on Dec. 15 starting at 5:30 p.m. The featured storytellers will be nestled between live music, a poetry reading and discussion on MAM's newest exhibit "The Journals of Sacajawea" by Debra Magpie Earling and Peter Rutledge Koch.

The tale behind Missoula Moth all started with Patrick Duganz, the Missoula creator, when he heard The Moth story featured on Public Radio International's "This American Life."

"It struck me that I had stories that were funny and sad, but no venue in town to really share them," he said. "A town full of writers and artists and no live storytelling? I had to solve that just so I could tell some tales."

Stories need a beginning, middle and end, with a nice moral to tie everything together. But Missoula Moth needs a little something more — sponsors, a venue, hype and excellent stories. Duganz said it was a lot of hard work, but he was always able to sit back and relax when it all came together.

"I let anyone talk, which was good and bad," he said. "I just put my trust in the folks willing to take the stage to not let me down. Ninety percent of the time it went well."

In the four months that Missoula Moth was around, the good, the bad and the ugly took center stage. One of Duganz's favorite accounts came from Moss himself when he was under some particularly unusual circumstances.

"Having a guy to tell a story about finding a dildo is one thing, but to include that you also picked up this discarded latex organ? I'm still shocked that he told it, and still laughing about it," Duganz said. "It's the honesty here that I like."

Moss committed to making Missoula Moth a quarterly event, the next one isn't occurring until March, but people are encouraged to get their tales into missoulamoth@gmail.com.

Similar to The Moth's rules, "The story has to be true, has to be told without notes, has to be told live, not memorized, although rehearsing is encouraged," Moss instructed, and if it's a good story, anything goes as long as it's 10 minutes or less.

Future events will take place at The Top Hat, themes pending.

elizabeth.duffy@umontana.edu