Welcome to the Moth Podcast.
I'm Dan Kennedy.
Many times stories are about taking the long way.
They 're about what happens when we make the difficult decision that we knew would be good for us
and we made it even though it was tough.
But what about the times when we don't exactly rise to the challenge?
This week.
Two stories about taking shortcuts.
First up, we have Lawrence Wood live at the Moth Story Slam in Chicago,
where the theme of the night was gangs, cliques, and crowds.
Here's Lawrence.
When I was a teenager, I read only what I had to for school.
And there were rare exceptions.
In ninth grade, my English teacher took me aside after class one day,
and she gave me a book called The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks,
who 's best remembered now as the director of the 1971 movie Shaft.
And it's a good movie.
It was a good book.
And The Learning Tree.
Is his autobiographical account of growing up black in the deep south in the 1930s and it was banned in my school