Hedi Lamarr Rudd
Standup comedian Dina Nina Martinez is one of the 10 winning storytellers.
At 94, Tom Sitter has had plenty of life experiences. He’s lived through the Great Depression, served as a combat medic in Europe during World War II and raised six children.
But he never expected to become an internet sensation.
Back in May, Sitter’s daughter Kathy posted a video on YouTube of her dad telling a story at the Moth Madison StorySLAM — a charming, hilarious and vividly detailed account of Valentine’s Day 1933. (It’s technically against Moth rules to take video during a slam, but Kathy didn’t realize it wasn’t allowed.) “I remember when it got up to 640 views, I couldn’t believe it. I was thrilled,” Sitter says. “Then my grandson Jim introduced it to some online thing called Reddit. Then it really started to go viral.” The video now has more than 43 million views.
Long known as a great storyteller among family and friends, Sitter, who lives in Milwaukee, had never even been to a formal storytelling event, let alone participate in one. He knew the theme of the evening — “love hurts” — and had an inkling of what story he wanted to tell, but he “didn’t really prepare at all” for the performance. He ended up winning the slam, scoring the first perfect 10 in Madison Moth history.
Sitter is among 10 Moth Madison StorySLAM winners who will compete in the inaugural GrandSLAM championship Oct. 27 at the Barrymore Theater. It’s the grand finale of the wildly popular monthly series that kicked off at the High Noon Saloon in February, and these stars of local storytelling will explore the theme “fish out of water.”
Dina Nina Martinez, another competitor, first discovered storytelling as an art form when she was living in Los Angeles. A stand-up comedian and organizer of Madison’s Lady Laughs festival, Martinez draws from her comedic background for her storytelling but says it requires a different approach. “Stand-up is pretty formulaic in the sense that you set up the joke and you deliver a punchline,” she says. “Storytelling, though also formulaic, has a lot fewer rules … the expression is broader.”
Martinez is excited about the “fish-out-of-water” theme, and she has plenty of material to draw from, thanks to her experiences growing up queer in a small town in Texas. “I’ve been a fish out of water pretty much my entire life,” she says.
A seasoned performer, Martinez relishes the spotlight and says she “no longer gets nervous” when she performs. Not so for Debi Kennedy, who told her first story this summer after receiving encouragement from a friend. “I felt like I was going to throw up,” Kennedy recalls. But she overcame her fears and came back to tell two more tales, eventually winning a slam. Her stories are funny and poignant, often focusing on her daughter Ellie, who died of a brain tumor five years ago. Sharing the stories can be painful, but it’s also been cathartic and confidence-building, Kennedy says.
“It’s so cool that her legacy lives on and I can honor her by telling her story,” she says. “That’s the beauty of the Moth — if I can touch somebody else with my story, that’s always the goal.”
