The Mother of All Moths
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 10:29AM 
As writers, the two men could not be more different. One, a midwesterner whose charming Prairie Home Companion tales have earned him millions of fans. The other, a Bombay-born novelist whose most famous work sent him under cover for nearly ten years, ducking assassination. And yet, there they were at Capitale last night, Garrison Keillor and Salman Rushdie, spilling their guts about post-adolescent road trips gone awry. The strange coming together could only have been pulled off by George Dawes Green and his team at The Moth, an organization whose mission is to promote the art of storytelling. The room was filled with raconteurs--both seated and on stage, not least of whom were the finalists in a Left Coast vs. Right Coast story slam that pitted Angeleno Josh Matthew Cereghino against New Yorker Jim O'Grady. Celebrity judges Jonathan Adler, Mike Birbiglia, Simon Doonan, Nathan Englander, Adam Gopnik, George Dawes Green, Lucy Hawking and A.J. Jacobs handed the prize to Cereghino, a writer whose other career hats have included Zamboni driver and cook. Also in the house was host John Turturro. With the theme of La Dolce Vita, the event was indeed a sweet affair, one about which many memorable stories can—and will—continue to be told.
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Reader Comments (2)
6-degree's of separation comes true again, as Josh Cereghino meets a distant relative ... Garrison Keillor. The link is thin, but there - and it started with Elder John Crandall, founder of the first Baptist church in rhe new world in 1604.
Josh is related to Marilyn Haese, through a second marriage of Josh's father Warren to Marilyn. Marilyn is a 6th-cousin, twice-removed of Garrison Keillor.
The family journey starts in 17th century Rhode Island, goes to Wisconsin, to Idaho, and finally to ZAP NORTH DAKOTA, where else.
In Zap around 1919, a waitress and John Crandall descendent, Maude Pettis, disarmed the defenses of a young and promising banker - Art Hoese, who are Marilyn's grandparents. Garrison's line of Keillor's had branched off from Maude Pettis' family a couple generations earlier, and the Pettis line connects with the Crandall's somewhere back in Wisconsin.