You made it! I saved a seat for you. Welcome to a montage of magic. Not so much razzle dazzle or abracadabra. I mean Bug in Amber moments when intuition crystalizes with community to create something new. So, we’ll flash through this essay like that old show, This is Your Life. Or more like the Sesame Street version, Here is Your Life. I love the one where the oak tree strolls down memory lane. So, dim the house. Stage lights up. I’m the ghost of Christmas Past (or maybe you are). I guess there’s a little razzle dazzle after all. Magic!
THE OLD THEATER
This is the part where we sit in the old theater, waiting for the movie to begin. Look up. Ornate details, worn out and run down, trim the ceiling. They are too much and just right. And they make this outing an event.
“We left the house and did something!”
Now we’re in the dark, just where we need to be. Out of the blue, before the screen scrolls down, I think of magic. I mean, look around. For one, the dark. Two, the waiting. Three, the curtains, thick with memory and skin cells of moviegoers over time. Stale air is ripe with popcorn and potential. I think of magic. And Jaclyn’s mom. And muppets.
Pause. Let’s put a pin in Jaclyn’s mom and rewind. Let’s talk magic. Certain places belong to muppets. Places like this have always existed and will always exist. They, too, have dusty, old curtains. They, too, are outside of time. Whenever you open the door, there they are—muppets masquerading as humans. Connected to kinetic crazy. Dialed into magic.
“Hello! We’re old school muppets! Felted and faded! Out of our gourds in a good way!”
THE BAR
The first time I meet real-life muppets is in Concord. It’s full of ghosts. Walden and all. I am here to dance and you might say the magic in this place is the beginning of Shop Talk. Put a pin in Shop Talk, too. And hold your muppet-y horses.
We make our way to the dusty little back room of a bar. I order a cider. What’ll you have? An old jug band plays, Emmett Otter style. The music swings eternal. This cramped room feels immense with psychic powers. In the audience, we’re so jammed together that we’re in each other’s brains. Instruments are made out of anything and everything. The band has been playing for as long as time remembers, long before we stepped in and long after. I even hear them now, strumming away, smiles on their ageless faces. They’re so old they’re young. Like the muppets of my childhood dreams, endlessly rehearsing.
“Thanks everybody! And goodnight!”
THE STORE
Scene change. Interior. A miniature store in a beach town, packed with beads and stones. Driving by, you would never see it. A hole-in-the-wall is at least a hole you can see. Inside, it’s wall-to-wall dust and old things from everywhere. The muppet feeling prickles the back of my neck. It’s like I’ve always been here.
I call the store before I go because it’s almost never open. The clerk thinks my New York number is someone soliciting. No, I laugh. I just want to poke around.
“We are poke-able” he says. “We open at 11.”
Muppet energy is palpable. I feel the weight of objects before I pick them up. I take my time because it’s timeless here. An older woman (muppet-y, eternal) wears layers and prods the beads. An older man (muppet-y, eternal) enters and pops the calm.
“Would you look at this store? What a collection! These are real. I know, I lived there.”
Like a magnet, the woman joins in, “See the amber! I have some with a bug caught in it.”
He misses no beats. “That’s the way to live forever. Be a bug in amber.”
And they’re off! They play with a huge, toothy necklace. It breaks. They put it down, unfazed. He turns to see the treasures in my hands—tiny stone vases and bracelets—and says, “You’ve got quite a collection going!” I tell him I want to surround my writing space with flowers. I had just started writing for real. Although I’d never really told a soul I’m a writer, he ordains me anyway.
“You’re a writer, not a wronger!”
Let it be so. Look! The woman is a writer, too. And she teaches cooking for kids. She loves theater, plays the piano and practices “harp therapy” (tell me more). She and I are alternate universe twins, separated by a few decades. And the harp. She and I wait for the world to say “yes.” When we’re open, it does.
The three of us spill out of the shop. Before my new real-life muppet-friends are gone for good, the man ordains the woman, looking directly at me.
“She knows if you stop moving, you stop living.”
THE AFTERNOON TEA
But we’re here to talk about Jaclyn’s mom. She asked me a question once and I still think about it, turning it over like a riddle to solve. Flashback to a tea party. We sit around a long, wood table eating cookies baked with love and intention by Jaclyn herself. Pan across the benches to see Carrie, Carly, Jaclyn, her mom and me. Mom holds court, shifting to see each of us in turn. Jaclyn’s mom is many things, among them a dancer and a truth teller. She has wisdom for all of us. She reads us, in every sense of the word.
When it’s my turn, she asks me what I think magic means to me. I flub through an answer that doesn’t ring right. Why is she asking me about magic? Does the answer unlock everything? What does magic mean to me?
Flash forward and the magic is the gathering of a quartet of friends. Carrie, Carly, Jaclyn, Jenny. A committee, if you will, committed to holding space for each other. Teaching each other what support feels like. This quartet pulls me from the burning building of my fear and teaches me to share with joy. I forget. I will forget again. But I write it all down. And I remember magic.
THE FLOOR
Now we’re down at dust level. On floors across several state lines over several years. Dancers. Kim. Cara. Jenny. We begin in Concord (remember the muppet bar?). I’m helping Kim with choreography and we meet Cara. Sometimes you just know when you’re in the presence of a like-minded soul. Walden and all. The pond is magic at night.
Cut back to the floor. Here we are, season after season. Rolling, stretching. Sliding in socks. Addressing the body in relation to gravity. For dancers, nothing beats a hardwood floor.
We are muppets, rehearsing, driving at making a dance. The piece we are making, the choreography, is going to be big. But, you see, we don’t need the piece at all. We ourselves are big. As we move, we talk through life. We are talking shop. Mechanics of movement, mechanics of life. Turns out, same thing. Hence, Shop Talk. We like to say we meant to make a dance, but instead we make ourselves. We perform life, one breath at a time. We clear the space and prepare the body. For what?
We don’t know. Yet. And yet…
We slide around in the unknown, playing music, haunting studios and peppering floors with paper notes. The moving is the thinking. This is the intelligence that only comes through movement. I write it all down. One spiral notebook becomes boxes and boxes of notebooks. From my view on the floor with Cara and Kim, I learn to talk shop. Magic. And here we are. It all comes back around.
THE OLD THEATER (AGAIN)
Jaclyn’s mom’s question appears in notebooks, over and over. What does magic mean to me? In the dark theater, before the movie begins, it crystalizes. Maybe you see it, too. I jot down a note about magic. Oh, yeah. Writing notes is magic.
Wait! I didn’t tell you what movie we’re here to see. Inside Out 2. Kid movies help us move through big feelings. I say us because these movies are for all of us, no matter our age. Parents need an emotional road map as much as kids. We’re parenting in a whole new way, laying out language and frameworks for working through feelings (and trying to take our own advice). This scaffolding is new, and we don’t know what we’re doing. My parent friends and I always remind each other that we’re doing a great job. “Soft skills” are superpowers. Vulnerabilities are strengths.
So in this old theater, in this film, we follow the adventures of emotions personified as characters. They valiantly manage the “control board” of a young girl’s brain. In the first film Inside Out, Joy learns that Sadness is essential for empathy. In the sequel, Anxiety moves in and (spoiler alert!) causes a ruckus. Anxiety, with her wide eyes and muppet-y hair, traps herself in a tornado of her own making. She out-paces control and enters a panicky numbness.
I know the numb. Wide-eyed in the middle of my own storm. My old-school, fists-clenched lizard brain believes anxiety is doing an important job—VIGILANCE! It’s not a problem, and no, we don’t need to talk about it, thank you very much.
It doesn’t take a magician to know that our tornados are not magic. But they’re magic-adjacent. To set the stage for magic, Anxiety can’t be in control. But, she can drink tea in the corner. She can be peacefully alert. Maybe she’s sliding on the floor next to me. Maybe she’s playing the spoons in the jug band. Maybe she broke the beads and practices “harp therapy.”
Funny thing. We can’t feel magic without first flipping in the tornado. When the spinning stops and our eyes adjust, there’s a magic to the stillness. Now feelings move through us like a whispery wind.
HERE ON THE PAGE
So, what is magic? Bringing people together. Choreographing community. Tuning into the radio station of our intuition. I think that’s what I’m trying to do here with Vera Monstera and these essays, if you’ll join me.
Hi. Welcome to this magic space. And thanks for lighting the way for magic.
Gather in. The writer Ross Gay reminds us that the word essay means “to try.” Let’s try together. I want to be a writer, not a wronger, and I want to do it with you. Join my impromptu muppet jug band. Come to my magic tea party. Slip and slide on my everlasting hardwood floor.
As the lights dim and the movie starts, we know magic is a moment caught like a bug in amber. Crystalized for all of time. Guess what? You’re a bug in amber, too, because we spent this time together.