As a child, I was a Brownie. All of my friends were Brownies. It was part of being a kid. My memories of Brownie meetings and Brownie activities are rather dim. I have other memories from those long-ago days, very vivid ones, stuff that has to do with sitting on the hot bulkhead eating a popsicle, and running through the sprinkler in the backyard – wearing a swimming cap – why? – and the smell of the mud in the woods where Jen and Katy and I would make up games, and the sound of the screen door slamming on summer nights, and the time I crashed my bike into a mailbox and got a huge cut, and skating with Andrew in the pond in the woods and how he would steal my hat and I would chase him.

I have a lot of vivid memories from childhood, but very little remains about “being a Brownie”.

What does remain is how it ended.

At the end of my sojourn as a Brownie there came a moment which I think of now as my loss of innocence. I can laugh at it now, I can turn it into a cute story, but it crushed me when I was 8 years old. “The first cut is the deepest.”

So here, briefly, are my memories of being a Brownie before “the Fall”:

— I remember having Brownie meetings in the big cafeteria (“caf”)/gymnasium at South Road School which was called “the Multi-Purpose Room”. I love that name. It really tells it like it is. “Okay, so we’re all going to go watch a play now in the Multi-Purpose Room!” “Let’s go eat in the Multi-Purpose Room.” “It’s rainy today – so we have gym in the Multi-Purpose Room!” And of course: “After school Brownie meeting in the Multi-Purpose room.” All of us little Brownies sat in a circle as the troupe leaders (who were mothers of my friends) led the meeting. I have friends now who have kids of their own, and are now Brownie troupe leaders. Those women who were my troupe leaders seemed so OLD to me and they were younger than I am now. I remember too that the mothers who led Brownies (and this is neither here nor there, I’m not making a judgment, it just happened to be that way in my little troupe) were the kinds of women who had bleached hair or frosted tips, Lee Press-on nails, and were tanned, year-round. They were also the kinds of women who didn’t go to the big public beach like my family did, but were members of private “beach clubs”, where they rented “cabanas”. It was a foreign world, I tell ya. They smoked long thin cigarettes and when I played with their daughters at their houses, sometimes they would put out bowls of candy for us. CANDY. A far cry from the Saltines and popsicles available at my house. To use my mother’s terminology, these women were “jazzy”.

— I remember marching in the Parade with the troupe, and feeling so proud of my little brown uniform, my little beanie hat. I particularly loved holding the flag as we marched. Oh, my heart swelled with my own importance. I tripped on my shoelaces, however, and fell while holding the flag as we reached the rotary in Peace Dale. I loved telling that story when I met up with my parents at the end of the parade route. I turned it into a rollicking good tale. I was good at that: turning moments of adversity into jokes where the joke was on me. I loved (and still love) jokes where the joke is on me.

— I remember being entranced with the “Brownie book”, which I don’t think they use anymore. Probably because it had too much of a pagan slant and religious parents would object. The book tells the story of the Brownies, with illustrations. I can still see those illustrations in my mind. They were so evocative. The Brownies were small fairies who would creep out into the moonlight around a magical pool in the middle of the woods and dance and sing their Brownie songs. Well, that for me was the ENTIRE appeal of being a Brownie. I wanted to be part of that pixie fellowship. I could see the silver moonlight, I could hear the rustling of the leaves, I loved the darkness, the cool dew, the feeling of a secret special ritual … I was totally in the Brownies for THAT.

Little did I know that, in actuality, being a Brownie had nothing to do with shimmering moonlit nights and pagan rituals around a mirrored pool. It was more about gluing interminable amounts of spray-painted macaroni onto random pieces of cardboard in the Multi-Purpose Room.

I was never into prose, especially in terms of life-style, even back then. I always preferred poetry. The romance of the moonlit woods. I wanted life itself to be poetic. I suppose I still do. There’s a beautiful moment in Postcards from the Edge when Meryl Streep says, in a moment of revelation, “I want life to be art.” I wanted the poetry, the possibility of something magical happening.

I accepted the “prose” nature of being a Brownie, mainly because that was what you did. I didn’t really question it. I didn’t really enjoy Brownies, truth be told, but everyone was in Brownies. So I had to be there. But our meetings in the Multi-Purpose Room were a pale ghost of the extravaganzas that went on in my imagination, secret meetings in the middle of the night, out in the woods.

But all lukewarm things must end, and it was time to move on and become a Girl Scout.

The moment when we would become Girl Scouts was referred to as “Flying Up”. The troupe leaders also talked about how we would “Get Wings”. There would be a “Flying Up Ceremony”.

None of this was explained to us in literal terms. Or if there ever was a literal explanation of what “Flying Up” actually meant, I was out that day. I took it all completely literally since no one explained to me that the whole thing was basically just an elaborate metaphor for a “graduation” ceremony. This “Flying Up” thing, to me, resonated and shimmered with magic. “The Flying Up Ceremony”. It sounded so … fantastical. So exciting! What did it mean? What would happen at the ceremony? What were the “wings” we were going to get? It all was so mysterious.

I truly believed that somehow, during the ceremony, I would “Fly Up”. To where was still unknown, but I would “Fly Up”. There were “Wings” that I would get that would help me to do this.

Some sort of transformation was going to take place.

I pictured the wings in my mind and I imagined that they would be elaborate huge constructions, wings that would make Icarus envious. They would HAVE to be big if they were going to carry us up off the ground, right? I imagined them. I worked it all out. What I imagined was real to me, not something I HOPED would happen, but something that WOULD happen.

Some of the wings (we each would get two, one to fit over each arm) were made of actual feathers, soft as down. But there were other wings made of sparkles, and glitter, like one of Elvis’ capes. It would only be revealed on the day of the “Flying Up Ceremony” what kind of wings each of us would get. I wondered if mine would be the feathered kind. I thought that I would prefer feathery wings to the glittery ones, but I told myself sternly that I wouldn’t mind either way. I made a promise to myself that I would be happy with whatever pair of wings I got, even though I preferred feathers. I talked myself down from that hypothetical disappointment beforehand: “It’ll be okay if the wings I get are glittery. It won’t matter.” It is amazing to me, in looking back, how realistic I was with myself, in the days leading up to the “Flying Up Ceremony”, preparing myself for the disappointment of getting glittery wings.

It’s like somewhere I knew. I knew that disappointment was going to be inevitable. No way could the “substance of things hoped for” ever live up to what was in my mind.

The fantasies about the wings went even further. (And this element, to me, is the most interesting thing about the entire memory). Not only did I imagine what the wings would look like, the wings which would help us “Fly Up” to be Girl Scouts during the “Flying Up Ceremony”, but I also imagined what the wings would be like a couple months after the ceremony, crushed in the bottom of my closet, once the novelty wore off. That, to me, was THE most pleasing fantasy of all: to be “over” the wings, to be lackadaisacal about what was going to prove to be a transcendent experience. “What are those feathery things in my closet? Ah, those are nothing … no big deal … just my wings from my Flying Up Ceremony … No big deal …” I LOVED that fantasy. I turned it over in my mind again and again. Even more than dreaming about the upcoming “Flying Up Ceremony”, I LOVED fantasizing about being “over” the magical wings, and seeing them crushed in a heap in the bottom of my closet.

So the big day came. The day when all the Brownies would “Fly Up”.

The ceremony was held in the Multi-Purpose Room, of course. I had wondered to myself: How will we get up high enough, so we will actually be able to fly? I had thought, Well, maybe they will stack some of the lunch tables on top of each other, and then put them on the stage … Maybe that will be high up enough for when we put on our wings …

This all may sound incredibly silly. But nobody had ever actually told me what the ceremony was going to be, none of those jazzy tanned mothers had ever explained to me that “Flying Up” was a metaphor. I was in the world of poetry, you understand. Nobody told me the whole thing would be prose.

I suppose I was eager, even then, even as a little girl, for transformation. For transcendence. I look back on that little girl … and see myself now. No change. No difference at all.

I wasn’t sure how the Powers-that-Be were going to handle the challenge of getting all us Brownies up to a good enough height so that we wouldn’t fall like stones when we leapt (I intuitively understood aerodynamics, I remember worrying about all of this obsessively) but I was sure that SOMEONE would have figured it out.

When I walked into the Multi-Purpose Room, I was stunned to see how few people were in attendance. My mother was there and a couple of other mothers but it seemed to be a VERY thin crowd for such an extraordinary ceremony of transformation.

I’ll just say this, for those of you who were never Brownies, I’ll tell you what the real thing is: The “Flying Up Ceremony” is when each Brownie gets a small badge, a badge of two outstretched wings, pinned onto their sash. This wing-badge means: You are now a Girl Scout.

That’s all it was.

It had never been said to me, point-blank: “You will get a wing-badge, and then you will make the Girl Scout vow, and then you will be a Girl Scout, and that is what the Flying Up Ceremony is all about.”

The jazzy frosted-tip ladies spoke in shorthand. “So, girls, when you Fly Up …” “During the Flying Up Ceremony …” “After you get your Wings…” They assumed we knew the terms. I didn’t have an older sister who would have clued me in a bit earlier and crushed my dreams in a gentler more realistic way by saying, “Here is what is going to happen…”

So there I was, making up elaborate fantasies of Icarus wings, tables stacked on top of each other, little girls flying through the air of the Multi-Purpose Room, convincing myself that it would be okay if my wings were glittery and not feathery, and then looking forward to the day when said wings were crushed in a heap in my closet.

The ceremony began.

In a flash, when the first girl “Flew Up” and became a Girl Scout, the veil was yanked from my eyes in a painful swoosh. I saw the teeny wing-badge, I heard her say the Girl Scout vow, and then I saw her step aside to let the next person go, and I realized that that was it. That was it. That was all the “Flying Up Ceremony” was going to be.

Furtively, I glanced around the Multi-Purpose Room, hoping to see a big cardboard box (for the wings, you understand). I remember so specifically looking for that box … the box that contained the REAL wings … that they had ordered from some magical Brownie warehouse from deep in the forest by that silvery pool…

but already I knew it wasn’t there.

I went through my “Flying Up Ceremony” with a huge smile on my face, plastered across my freckles. I acted like I was really happy about my little wing-badge. I didn’t want to show how much my heart had just cracked, how grey the entire world suddenly became.

It’s unusual to have a photo of yourself at the moment a dream dies.

I hid my heart from everyone. Why did I do that? Why did I pretend things were okay? I had loving understanding parents. But maybe I sensed something. I sensed my own “too much”-ness. I wish I had felt free enough to cry on the way home in the car, and let my parents take care of me. Nobody shamed me, everything that happened was all in my mind and no one ever knew, but I was very ashamed of my fantasies. I was ashamed of my fantasies AS I said the Girl Scout vow. I felt stupid. Of course, everybody else knew what the “Flying Up Ceremony” was going to be. I was the only one who didn’t know. I was the only one who was devastated. Everybody else was giggling, and excited to be a Girl Scout. Inside – inside – I was crying with disappointment. I thought about the crushed wings in my closet, and felt a piercing mixture of longing, despair, and shame.

Where are my wings? Where are my REAL wings?

There weren’t going to be any wings, feathery or glittery. There would never be wings crumpled up in my closet.

There would be no transformation.

And somewhere I knew, in my 8-year-old soul, that this was no metaphor.
 
Here is a Coda:
I only made it as a Girl Scout for a couple of months. There is actually a picture of me wearing the uniform doing some stupid craft, hating my life.

One afternoon, we spent the entire meeting making duffel bags. I walked out and never went back.

My parents didn’t give me a hard time.

I was better off, I suppose, in the make-believe world of acting and drama club and community theatre. There, at least, you knew the wings were pretend, but your belief in them remained intact.

Nobody was trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
 

2026 thoughts
I remember telling this story (in person) to my friend Maria. I framed it as “I wish someone had clued me in to what flying up was all about, Jeez Louise”” and she burst out with, “I love little Sheila being willing to believe. I don’t wish someone told you beforehand. I know it hurt but it’s so beautiful how much you believed and believed in the magic.” I never looked at this story the same way again. I am lucky I have such friends.

I didn’t even realize I had the photo of me “flying up”, my heart broken inside, my dreams shattered. I found the photo in a shoebox one day and just had to sit down, staring at my face. Wanting to give myself a hug. The thing I am struck by here in re-reading this piece is how I kept this a secret. I am not sure why. I do think I was embarrassed at being SO wrong, but being 8 years old … I remember thinking, “Nobody can know how much I wanted real wings.” I remember this clearly. I know all 8-year-olds are different but I wonder what it would have been like to be a kid who burst into tears at the event, letting my disappointment be seen – at least by my parents. Some of my nieces and nephews are like that. They just let it all hang out, and then their parents can help them and reassure them and say “It’s okay, I know you’re disappointed, it’s okay.” They allow themselves to be comforted. I didn’t. I’m still not sure why.

From the archives archive
My Situational Crush (2006)
Chicago: The Cold Extreme (2004)
A Sea-Level Kind of Girl (2006)
There Was Already Something a Little Off… (2003)
“Go Ask Sheila.” (2010)
How We Talked (2011)

I had what I call a “situational crush” on Kyle. I do that sometimes, if I’m bored and need to liven up my daily routine a bit. I’ll create a random crush on, oh, the guy who gives me my coffee every morning. I look forward to seeing him, have some banter, go on with my day. I will also create a situational crush if I’m having a great time doing something out of the ordinary. Being out of town in a show, for example. Sometimes the situational crush will blossom into something significant – but more often than not, it’s something to pass the time in a more pleasant way. I bet a lot of actor marriage breakups begin as “situational crushes”. Okay, I am making a movie in Mozambique, I am out of my routine for 4 months, home is far away, I am SO busy, so I’ll have a situational crush on my co-star. If you’re famous and married, the situational crush can swerve into a tabloid debacle.

My friend David, when I tell him some weird thing happened to me, he often says, “Sheila, your life is a literary conceit.” This one second of time with Kyle is an example. You have a stupid crush and life is ordinary, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the two of you are, for just a second, the leads in a torrid pre-Code movie.

I don’t want to make this build-up too much. However:

The moment I am moving towards lasted about a second. But if you’re going to have a situational crush, if you’re going to decide to focus your ten minutes of free time a day on some random person, then it might as well culminate in a moment of total – and almost unbelievable – perfection. A moment of, dare I say it, art.

I have always made my love affairs into art. This is a bad habit. Like Meryl Streep says in Postcards from the Edge, “I want life to be art.” So do I. This has led me down some pretty gnarly treacherous paths, because some random guy becomes a piece of art, even if he’s trash. What was weird about Kyle is it wasn’t a love affair. It was a situational crush, activated for just ten minutes a day.

What Kyle did to me, in that one second of time, was art. “Art”, in its purest form, is perfect. You look at it and, even if it overwhelms you, you know nothing needs to be added.

This is what I’m leading up to. We didn’t share a passionate kiss or even a relationship: all of these things may be fun and exciting, but they usually contain flaws. What I am leading up to has no flaws.

I guess that’s why I remember Kyle. I’ve had a million situational crushes – I had a situational crush on my New York bus driver, whom I saw every day, more than I saw my own family, and I’d sit in the seat behind him, and we’d chat, and it gave a shimmer to my day, which was probably a boring day filled with obligations. 99% of my situational crushes I don’t remember, but I will ALWAYS remember Kyle because of the culminating moment. I couldn’t have planned it or, hell, even imagined it, not even in a fantasy. I thought afterwards, “…Did that really happen? Who else do such things happen to? It FEELS like it’s just me.” Maybe because I want life to BE art. Maybe it’s a mindset. I don’t know.

Aspects of the situational crush

Situational crushes don’t need to go anywhere. Situational crushes don’t need to be spoken about or even acknowledged. In fact, it’s better if they aren’t. Just enjoy the flirting as the friendly guy at the food truck hands you a taco. Situational crushes are helpful if you are bruised from heartache, and you don’t feel ready to risk a REAL crush again. There is very little risk in the situational crush, if you do it right. A situational crush can remind you, that you are capable of having those feelings again, but for now it’s without the risk. Without the risk is my favorite part.

Sometimes people THINK their crush is situational, they THINK it can be contained to five minutes a day, but then they ride a roller coaster of emotion, and end up sobbing drunkenly at a party because the situational crush is now making out with a Goth girl, and what do you do with your crushy feelings?? (Not that I’ve done that or anything.)

You can mistake a situational crush for the real thing, especially if you’re in a vulnerable spot. You can mistake the flirty-flirts for “soulmate material”. This is the danger with the situational crush. You can get CRUSHED by the situational crush, which, of course, defeats the purpose.

Situational crushes, in other words, are not for amateurs.

I have it down to a science. I don’t know how to do many things but I know how to do THIS. I have slipped up a couple of times, but I treated those failures as learning experiences. Like: Oh. Okay. I thought he was my soulmate, when really I’m just bored right now and I mistook the friendly Irish bartender for true love. (Not that I’ve done that or anything.)

Enter Kyle

By the time I met Kyle, I was an expert in this fine art. I knew what I was doing as I was doing it. The crush was deliberate: I decided to have it. I was working on my grad school thesis project, consumed by it, and I wasn’t in love with anyone or dating anyone. I felt the tell-tale yearning for a situational crush, just to provide a brief escape in my busy days.

And along came Kyle, the backstage stagehand. After our first conversation, I knew I had found my crush for the run of the show. I had been in the cloister of grad school for three years. I knew all the guys and they were either gay or I was not interested in them, or vaguely disgusted by them, or full of hatred for them, or they were involved with someone. I had my sometimes FWB, but I know how to do those too. I didn’t have a crush on HIM. He was one of my best friends in school, and school was stressful, so sometimes we would hook up, and honestly he saved my sanity in a lot of ways. We are still friends.

My interest in Kyle had no GOAL. It was the equivalent of seeing my high school crush in the hallways on my way to class, and having a brief amusing conversation, with no expectation that we would someday be Homecoming King and Queen. Or Jack and Diane. Or Brenda and Eddie. Seeing him in the hallways was something to look forward to, innocent, with nothing else put on it.

When we reach adulthood, we forget how to do this. We forget how to just accept whimsy for the transitory thing it usually is.

Kyle wore baggy battered jeans, Buddy Holly glasses, and Doc Martens. He wore a beat-up leather tool belt, and he jingled and clanked when he walked. He looked a little bit like my idol, Harriet the Spy.

Kyle was the go-to man for any problems backstage.

“Kyle, I need to cross by back here in the dark. Can I get some glow tape?” Kyle whips the glowtape off his belt, bites off a strip, and sticks it along the floor in the darkness.

“Kyle, I need to throw open this door when I enter but I always have to jerk at it!” Kyle whips out a small oil can.

“Kyle, I need brain surgery.” Kyle whips out a scalpel and cuts open the actress’ head.

He could do ANYthing. Every tool he needed was on that belt.

Put a pin in this because it will be important later.

Kyle was blurpy, the epitome of “my type”. I do not believe he ever darkened the doors of a gym. He was sturdy and strong as hell. He could lift entire flats by himself, he could carry an entire bed on his back (I saw him do it), but he would never be seen pumping iron somewhere. He was pale and pasty, and he had a shock of messy curly blonde hair. He looked like a cross between Harriet the Spy and …

In other words, my ideal type.

Kyle was from Alabama and had a beautiful drawling accent. He was WILD after-hours. He would show up at cast parties, having exchanged his battered jeans for tight black leather pants. He would dance so hard the sweat would literally fly off his golden locks. He would do shots of tequila in the kitchen with the Russian actress who weighed 100 pounds and had a Brazilian wax (we shared a dressing room, that’s how I knew). I was fine with all this because my situational crush only existed for ten minutes a day, backstage at the theater.

Let it just be said here, so we’re clear: I was so all-consumed with my project that I didn’t want to get all involved in a love affair, and he might not have wanted to anyway. I wasn’t trying to make anything happen. I didn’t give him a second thought outside of our interactions. I knew I was going through a once-in-a-lifetime thing: my thesis project!! And it was, to put it mildly, a struggle to make it all happen. But I threw myself into fully enjoying Kyle’s flirting as he staggered by underneath an armoire.

Backstage ritual with Kyle, my situational crush

I arrived at the theatre early. I set my hair in a leisurely manner. I put on my makeup, eyelashes, dress, alone in the dressing room, before actors’ call time. I would then go into the shadowy blue-lit backstage area, to avoid the rest of the actors who were by now arriving. This was my quiet meditative time.

This was Kyle’s quiet time as well. He had nothing to do until the show started. All glow tape was in place. All door hinges oiled. All beds carried to their proper spot. All brain surgery performed. He was a dark hovering presence backstage. I liked having him there. Once the curtain went up, this man would be busier than ANY of the actors, moving furniture into place, striking props, sliding flats from here to there, trouble-shooting anything that came up.

This will be important later.

He was used to theatre people. On the first night, he whispered to me through the blue light, “Break a leg. Is it okay if I talk to you?”

Stomach fluttery crushy-crush. “Sure. It’s okay. We’ll have to stop talking in ten minutes though.”

He nodded. He understood.

It became our “thing”: I would come backstage before anybody else. I sat in the blue light, wearing my costume, and he would stand in front of me, fidgety in his blurpy body, cracking jokes to make me laugh. He flirted with me, too. He would silently show me his new “dance moves” and I would whisper at him, “Please stop …” because I was afraid I would laugh-cry my fake eyelashes off. He was so unselfconscious. I loved that about him.

Then, I needed to just do my actress thing so I would whisper, “We have to stop talking.” And just like that, he would disappear, an experienced stagehand. Actors have their process and he has his. It takes both sides to make the show happen. Stagehands double-check props, murmuring to the stage manager on the headset, stepping around the actors doing their silent thing.

This was our ritual: A whispered ridiculous conversation, bathed in the dark-blue and midnight-black of backstage. Our skin glowed blue, the lenses of his glasses reflected bluely at me, his pale glowworm skin taking on a bluish tone, the rest of his body swathed in blackness. He would make me laugh. This kept me loose. I enjoyed the ten minutes of innocent banter.

It’s funny the things you remember.

Two Costumes

I was playing Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, based on his marriage with Marilyn Monroe. I did a shit-ton of work on it. By the time we opened, all I needed to do was be present in the moment. There was a headspace I needed to be in. I couldn’t just roll into the theatre half an hour before curtain. Or maybe I could have. It would have been interesting to try it, but where I was at at that stage in my development, I needed prep time and quiet time.

I had two costumes for the role.

This will be important later.

My first costume was a skintight champagne-colored dress, made of a thick almost upholster-y fabric, and zippered up the back. I wore white kid gloves and a head scarf. Jewelry was involved. I wore cat-eyed sunglasses. The costume was perfect, and based on a couple of Sam Shaw’s beautiful photos of Marilyn Monroe. I showed those photos to the costume designer, and they executed my version of it brilliantly. The dress did most of the work. I put it on and I felt like Maggie.

My second costume was simpler: big striped men’s pajamas. This scene was Maggie unglued at 3 a.m., wearing her sugar daddy’s pajamas. Drunk in a hotel room. She has no one to call. She doesn’t even have her own pajamas. The original costume sketches by the costume designer showed a revealing negligee, but I thought: No. She is a lonely little girl, swimming in pajamas that are too big for her. Men’s pajamas, which give her a kind of pathetic air, suggesting that she may be famous but the casting couch is still nearby. I thought men’s pajamas would point to that subtext.

I had a 12-second costume change between these two scenes. The change happened in the front lobby of Circle in the Square Downtown and I was assisted by two members of the costume crew. We did a couple of costume-change rehearsals, using a stop-watch. We had it down to a science. I would exit from my first scene and then stand totally still as they took the dress off and put the pajamas on. Everyone had a job. Eileen would unzip my dress, and she would pull it down, whipping it off me in one movement. Meanwhile, Anne would squat beside me, holding open the pajama legs, scrunched up, so I could just step my foot into the hole and she would pull them up. At the same time, Eileen tossed the dress aside and held open the pajama top. My arms were already up and out, so she could put my arms through the sleeves. I buttoned it myself, and while I did this, Anne took off my earrings. Then I would hurry onstage for the next scene. 12 seconds!

I needed to provide this set-up, because Kyle is about to make his entrance, transformed from Clark Kent into Superman, looming in a literary conceit above Bleecker Street.

A split-second of pure perfection

Since it was a situational crush and I recognized it as such, I didn’t behave like a lovesick girl around him. I didn’t hover near him at a party, hoping to talk to him. I didn’t angst about the Russian girl. I didn’t think: “Maybe this can go somewhere!” (Good thing I didn’t, because it turns out the entire time we had our blue-lit flirty-flirt, the entire run of the show, he was having a hot sweaty love affair with someone which actually turned into a long-lasting relationship.) I just enjoyed the distraction.

However: the whole thing culminated in a moment of almost cinematic perfection that I still think about it sometimes. Because … does this sort of thing happen to other people? How many people EVER get to experience such a moment with a crush? Or, hell, with anyone? This could ONLY happen in the theatre, where fantasy and reality don’t just blend, they are the same.

The show was up and running.

And one night, after the first scene, I came rushing off into the empty lobby, where Eileen and Anne stood, as always, frozen like statues with my next costume in hand. I stood in position. Eileen went to unzip my dress, and immediately: The zipper stuck. Instant terror. We only had 12 seconds. I felt the zipper stuck, we all felt it. I heard Eileen murmur, “Shit” and this was enough to send flood-waves of panic reverberating through the lobby. The dress was so tight I could not pull it up over my head. I was trapped in my champagne-colored dress.

What follows feels like it took 15 or 20 seconds, but it was probably just 2 or 3. So much happened and I remember it all. When Eileen murmured “Shit” everything escalated. We were in big trouble. The next scene started with me, alone onstage in the pajamas. I couldn’t be late. How could I get out of this dress? Eileen kept yanking at the zipper. I am ashamed to admit it but I was whimpering: “ohmigod ohmigod … get it off me … ” I was wriggling around, the music out front was nearing my entrance cue. I was in panic mode: Someone save me!! I MUST GET ONSTAGE.

There were other actors in the lobby waiting to make their entrances and they sensed the intensity of the crisis, and they all moved back, watching nervously.

The zipper-struggle felt interminable. Anne gave up her squat-position and joined Eileen behind me, looking at the zipper, trying to yank it out of its stuck position. I have never felt so trapped.

At that moment, Kyle entered the lobby in the middle of his scene change. He was loaded down with furniture. Eileen hissed, “Kyle! Her dress …”

In a flash, Kyle put down all the objects, and was there behind me, inspecting the problem. Eileen whispered, “The zipper’s stuck.”

With no thought, no hesitation, Kyle held onto my arm and whispered, “Hold still, baby.” (Baby? What?) He whipped his retractable razor off his belt. I heard the click of the razor and Kyle whispered again, “Don’t move.” Jesus, suddenly the situational crush was the most erotic moment in the history of my life, and I am not even exaggerating. I stopped wriggling and held perfectly still. He held his hand on me, basically to anchor me in place, and with his other hand, in one quick movement of his wrist, he sliced the dress off of me.

Let me reiterate: Kyle, the guy I’d been crushing on, sliced my dress off with a razor blade. And didn’t cut me. There was risk involved. He could have nicked me with a razor-sharp … razor. Steady hand, a sure cut.

I think lots of people enjoy simple crushes, with a bartender they see once a week, or a co-worker who comes in from out of town once a month, the guy at the corner deli who sells the newspaper. How many people, though, have been cut out of their dress with a razor BY their crush? Freakin’ Rhett Butler didn’t cut Scarlett O’Hara out of her dress!

When he was done slicing off my clothes, he stepped back, giving space to the costume crew, my dress came off, I stood there – in front of my crush – in my bra and shapewear in the middle of the lobby – and on went the pajamas and I raced onstage, a second after my entrance cue. After the show, I went and found Eileen and Anne and we collapsed in each others’ arms, re-living the trauma, but congratulating ourselves for having made it through.

Kyle and I laughed about it at the cast party later, and we re-enacted it five times, regaling everyone with the story, telling it in tandem (“Okay – now you tell YOUR part!!”).

Let’s backtrack: Kyle cut along the seam of the dress. A perfectly straight-line. All the costume designer would have to do to fix it was put the dress under the needle and sew the seam back up. No messy tear. No ripped-apart zipper. He didn’t slice down the zipper line which would have also required a massive reconstruction. Kyle, in a fevered moment of urgency, with a wriggling actress under his hands, (“Hold still, baby” my God, yes SIR), had the presence of mind to not cut into the fabric. He had five million things going on in his head at one time. He was in the middle of a set change and he had three other things to do before his own job was complete. But he was born ready for any emergency. He understood the urgency but he also had in his head the costume designer’s priorities. In a moment of high stress, his brilliant brain considered everything.

Like I said in the beginning, this is not a story with a big finish. This is a story about a breathless moment of erotic perfection, and not meant to last … but the reverb remains.

I was not ever hurt by Kyle. My crush was contained, as it needed to be in order for me to enjoy it. No big deal. Run-of-the-mill.

But suddenly, in one shimmering alive moment – in the most matter-of-fact, gentle and yet FIRM way possible – he whispered in his soft commanding Alabama accent, “Hold still, baby”, and then sliced off my dress with a razor blade.

If you’re going to indulge in a situational crush, you might as well choose one who can do that!

I want life to be art. And in that moment it was.

2026 thoughts
Honestly, I had forgotten all about this. So it was so fun to re-claim this memory, of a random Alabaman holding me still and cutting my dress off. Now I get to be happy all over again that when I had a crush on someone, this is what ended up happening. A once-in-a-lifetime event.

From the archives archive
Chicago: The Cold Extreme (2004)
A Sea-Level Kind of Girl (2006)
There Was Already Something a Little Off… (2003)
“Go Ask Sheila.” (2010)
How We Talked (2011)

The Cold Extreme
I lived at a drafty apartment on Ashland with my dear friend Mitchell. A 3rd floor walk up, with hard-wood floors, big old windows, on the corner of a big brick building. Our windows looked out on the endless expanse of Ashland, which appeared, during winter, to be a snowy wasteland with stoplights changing for no cars. It was from this apartment that we witnessed, as though it were a movie, the destruction following the Bulls’ “3-Peat”. Riots of joy broke out, idiots went around smashing windows and tipping over cars. Everyone was told by the Police Chief to stay home, and then Michael Jordan came onto the television and said, “We’re all really glad you’re happy we won, but please stop destroying the city.” Mitchell and I watched wild groups of boys prowling around on Ashland, restless with blood-lust, ignorant, tipping over Port-a-Potties and smashing windows.

The temperature began to drop in January. And drop and drop. Add to that the wind chill factor. I come from the Ocean State. I had never experienced such cold in my life. It was a whole other beast. First: you have your basic cold days. Everyone knows what those are like. Then you have days where it suddenly becomes clear, like an ice pick on your spine: “I am in danger. This cold will kill me.”

The cold of that Chicago winter was of the second variety.

Radio announcers filled the air with warnings: “Do not go outside unless you absolutely have to. If you have to go outside, make sure that no skin is exposed.”

People wrapped up like cocoons staggered against the wind up and down Ashland. Everyone was sexless and indistinct. The entire city was in crisis mode. Having never experienced the “I am in danger” kind of cold, I only half paid attention to the warnings.

I was working as a temp at a security agency down in the Loop. It was one of my favorite assignments ever, not because my job was great – I just answered phones. It was the vibe. The employees were a bunch of cops who worked as bodyguards and did security details. Donny Osmond was one of our clients: he was in town with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I talked to Donny Osmond on the phone every day. (He was very nice.) It was the best job ever because of those cops, all of whom I befriended. They got concerned about me because I would regale them with stories of what I did after hours, hanging out at pool halls and getting on the train at 11 at night to go to a party in some weird area of the city … They did not like any of this. They did not tell me to stay at home and be a good girl. They were not patriarchal bores. But they were concerned. So they decided as a group to teach me self-defense techniques on their lunch breaks. (I have used their tips from time to time. Their tips “stuck”.) There was one time when I was literally being pinned down on the office floor by a cop and I was trying to follow his instructions to get away. The other cops stood around us in a little semi-circle watching this battle royale, giving me tips. The boss came out of his office, took one look at what was going on, and said, in an over-it voice, “Robert, could you please get off the temp?”

The office was in a rickety shithole next to a garage. I was clearly a bright spot in the cops’ day, they’d come in in between assignments and loll around at my desk talking to me. They were all observant. They noticed everything. For example, there were times when I showed up wearing the same outfit I had on the day before. They always clocked it. One of them took one look at my outfit, raised his eyebrows and said, “…. Hm.” (subtext: “Your clothes look familiar and I know what that means.”) I’d be like, “Okay, okay, leave me alone.”

One cop in particular became a good friend. He was a small Irish leprechaun of a man, and tough as nails. He would talk to me over the receptionist’s desk. Once, we were in the middle of a conversation and he stopped suddenly, looking at me with wonder. “What?” I asked. He hesitated, and then said, “I’ve heard people talk about ‘pheromones’ before. But I didn’t believe they existed. Until now.” This became one of our jokes. I paged him once to let him know I spoke to “Mr. Osmond”, and had a message to pass on. Leprechaun-cop called me back, I gave him the message, and before we hung up he said joyfully, “I had no idea pheromones could come through a phone!” (I could have had him. Easily. But I liked the job too much to mess it up.)

On the coldest day, the wind-chill was something like 40 degrees below. The radio chanted dire warnings. I ignored them. I bundled myself up, as though it were a normal winter day, not an “I AM GONNA DIE” day, and trudged to the L station. Our apartment was in an awkward location and the walk to the train station was about 15 minutes.

I cannot describe the agony. The cold was so cold it burned. Only my eyeballs peeped out from the scarf wrapped around my head. The bottom of my right earlobe was exposed for fifteen minutes. My head scarf slipped, and my hat did not cover the lobe.

But everything was so freezing (there really should be another word for cold like that) that the agony of my exposed earlobe did not register. Or, it registered, but it was just another item on the list of agonies.

I was frightened by the weather. I was the only idiot outside. The streets were empty. I sat on the train. Feeling like I would never thaw. The cold was in my bones.

I did not unwrap myself. I sat there, a sexless layered blob.

Suddenly a woman across the aisle spoke to me very sternly: “The bottom of your ear is exposed. You have GOT to cover it up.”

“Oh … thanks.”

I covered up the lobe. I wasn’t really paying attention to the fact that my ear was now throbbing.

I sat at my desk at the security office. I felt as though the winter was pushing against the thin walls of the rickety building. The Loop was deserted, a maze of concrete canyons, with freezing wind that would rip your face off. Lake Michigan heaved with ice at the city’s edge.

I had no business going to work that day.

I answered phones. My earlobe felt very uncomfortable but I ignored it for a while. I put the phone to my left ear. The burning intensified. It ached and the ache started to spread into my head. My earring hurt. I took it out. I thought maybe my lobe was infected because of the earring. I just wasn’t putting it together. Finally, I was reduced to sitting at the desk in a mute state of pain, holding my palm firmly over the burning earlobe, trying to cool it down.

When I finally got my act together and decided to check it out, I went into the bathroom to see what was going on with my ear. I took one look in the mirror and burst into hysterical sobs.

My earlobe was swelled to the size of a big broccoli blossom, and was a violent burned red. The skin was puffed out painfully. The lobe was so enormous it looked ready to explode.

FINALLY, I felt fear.

Am I going to lose my ear?

I never had frostbite before. I only heard horror stories. My ear looked like a horror story.

I cried hysterically in the bathroom, in a total panic, pressing my hand onto my ear, trying to warm it up or push it down. I suddenly LOVED my ears with a passion beyond belief. I CHERISHED my ears. I was crying out loud, “Oh my God … please go down … please go down…”

I came back out into the bleak little security office, still sobbing.

The “pheromone” cop, bundled up so much he could barely move, came into the reception area. He took one look at me and rushed over. “What’s going on??” he cried. I turned my head to show him: “Oh my God – Look at my ear. Am I gonna lose my ear?? How bad is it?”

He took one look at my ear and said, “Call the health clinic right now.”

I obeyed. He waited as I called, staring at me with the dead-on eyes so many cops have. He was stalwart, calm, a rock.

The harassed nurse who answered the phone could not have cared less about what ended up being a mild case of frostbite during an enormous city-wide disaster.

She said to me, “People are dying.” Many people did, in fact, die in this storm. She briefly told me what to do for frostbite and hung up.

“My” cop made me go home. He gave me his fur hat with side-flaps to put over my other hat. He gave me another scarf and wrapped it around my head multiple times. He basically dressed me like I was a kid heading out to the school bus. I could barely walk. I set my teeth, marched to the L. The platform was crowded with faceless shivering gblobs.

I got off at Ashland, and endured – the only word for it – the walk back to my apartment. The wind hit my face. The cold hurt. I was almost walking horizontally. Sheer force of will got me there. I had to take my gloves off to get my keys out. The second the cold hit my exposed skin, the fear of God was in me. Instead of an earlobe I had a broccoli. I frantically grasped in my purse for my keys and in that brief moment my fingers froze. I could barely control them.

Interesting twist: the lock was frozen. The key did nothing. I had to jiggle the keys wildly to get the lock to move. I thought: Holy SHIT. I am going to die on my own doorstep. I am going to lose my ear and my fingers, because of ten minutes of exposure. Finally I got inside.

I then sat in my apartment for three days, ministering to my ear, following the harassed ER nurse’s instructions.

The swelling did go down, and the ear eventually looked normal, but the damage to my skin tissue was irrevocable. To this day, I have to be extra careful of that ear.

I still think fondly of my “pheromone cop” and how he took care of me on that cold cold day.

2026 thoughts:

That really was one of my favorite jobs, to this day. The office looked like it had been erected in 10 minutes, nothing on the walls, no real reception area, since nobody was going to come visit the office. The office was just a place where the cops (former, current, picking up extra cash) would come to get assignments, or check in, do paperwork, or whatever. I ran the phones and kept the schedules, paging them to let them know if plans had changed and they needed to go pick up so and so at such and such. I was in my glory because it was 10 guys and one me. They clearly were not living the life I was living then – wild and nocturnal – and so they loved living vicariously. “Soooo what’d you get up to last night?” I’d be up all night with M., and then we’d get in the car at 7:30 am and he’d drive me down to the Loop to drop me off at the shitty office. These were the mornings I wore the same clothes since I basically never went home.

I swear to God, I do not know what I would have done without temp agencies. I was lucky in that I knew how to type and I typed wicked fast. You had to take typing tests at these agencies. But it was so EASY to get assignments. I don’t know if temp agencies like this exist anymore. Everyone knows how to type now. A lot of mundane office work – filing, for example – just isn’t a “thing” anymore, since everything’s digital. But my God, these agencies were a lifesaver. I’d get a call on Monday to show up at some office in the Loop, they needed someone to answer phones, or I needed to fill in for an executive assistant, etc. And off I’d go. Temping could be nervewracking because you couldn’t really settle into a routine. Every other day it was a whole new office. But it was steady. And if you proved yourself by being reliable, these offices would ask for you back.

I was able to fully support myself by temping. I should do a post about all the different jobs I had, because there were some pretty funny ones. I hated getting assigned to advertising agencies, especially to answer phones, because the phones never stopped ringing and pretty much NO ONE was nice. Everyone was stressed and mean. Law offices were good gigs, but you had to be really careful to do everything right, especially if you were filing or typing something out. Business corporations were weird and stuffy but you could get long-term assignments since they always needed people. I got one long-term assignment in a real estate office where I became so embedded in the office culture I was invited to a co-workers’ wedding in southern Illinois, and we all went in a hilarious caravan, staying in one hotel room.

I look back so fondly on my time being Donny Osmond’s personal travel-planner, coordinating with the security guards on what Mr. Osmond needed, contacting Donny is anything changed … chatting on the phone with this famous guy I used to watch on television. It was wild. And those cops, who all had little crushes on me, really looked out for me. Their self-defense techniques were so good, albeit obvious, but I never forgot their main tips:

One cop said to me, “If some guy tries to move you to a different spot, fight like your life depends on it because it does. Girls don’t die at point A. They die at point B. Fight for your life at Point A.”

One said to me, “Girls always think they need to aim for the nuts. Don’t do it. You might miss or you might not hit them hard enough. What you need to do is try to poke them in the eye. A 110 pound girl like yourself could fell Mike Tyson if you poke him in the eye. Closing your eyes is involuntary. So promise me you won’t be dumb and try to kick him in the nuts?” “I promise. I’ll go for the eyes.” Decades later, I had an opportunity to fulfill that promise. I went for the eyes and dammit I missed but only because he was flailing me around. However, my fingers jabbed his Adams Apple and this worked. He winced and I heard a gurgle and it gave me a chance to get free.

The final tip I also used in that unfortunate event: One cop said to me, “Make a fucking scene. Do not go quietly. Scream bloody murder.” Even if no one is around, someone who fights that ferociously may not be worth the trouble and effort for a potential assaulter, who – obviously – would prefer someone more submissive. So I made a fucking scene – on 8th Avenue – people around – and nobody helped me! I had to poke the guy’s Adams’ Apple all on my own. It worked. So fuck you, bystanders. Thanks for nothing. I’ve got this on my own. I was prepared years ago by those lingering cops in that rickety Loop office!

I smile when I think of wrestling with one of them as the others stood around watching, and my boss – the guy who signed my time cards, the guy in charge, for God’s sake – coming out of his office, taking one look at me – wearing some mid-90s kinderwhore outfit (totally not appropriate for an office), red plastic barrettes, Doc Martens or Chuck Taylors – struggling to get out from under some huge guy pinning me down – and the boss saying, exhausted and fed up, “Jesus, get off of the temp, please, the phones are ringing.”

For the first couple of days I couldn’t catch my breath. We were driving through the mountains, and I had never been at such high altitude before. As a matter of fact, the Rocky Mountains were the first real mountains I ever saw. When they came into view, glimmering on the horizon like a huge jagged set of teeth, my mind went blank. There they were. I had imagined them, I had seen pictures, I know that they exist, but I had never seen them. And there they were, pretty much just as they had existed all along in my mind. I’m a Rhode Island girl. I grew up at sea-level. We do not have mountains in Rhode Island. All we have is 812-foot Jerimoth Hill. When I first saw the mountains, I almost heard grandiose symphonic scary-sounding music in my head. Beethoven at his angstiest. The mountains left me wordless and stunned.

In Colorado, we traveled to see his friends in the mountains, and that’s when I first noticed the weird feeling high altitude gave me. Because it was an unfamiliar sensation, I didn’t know how to name it. My breath was caught in my chest. I couldn’t inhale. Things looked different up there. There was a clarity to the vistas I found almost upsetting. Why was that stone wall two miles away so clear I could see the rough texture, a golden field gleaming through the cracks where the stones did not meet? Why could I see a dark brown horse on the field in the distance flicking his tail? I wanted to shut off the stark and vivid vision, let things blur out again. My eyes watered for no reason. I thought I might be sad, or maybe having some sort of prolonged anxiety attack. I was not doing well then, so this was possible. Eventually, I got acclimated to the altitude but those first couple of days were disorienting. I would lie in my sleeping bag in the van, breath heaving in my chest, watered-up eyes staring into the darkness, wondering if I was finally going crazy.

We rattled across highways, the horizon blasting off on either side of the road, the Rockies shining in front of us … They looked like death. They were beautiful but they would kill you if you did not respect them. We were really into the B 52s at the time, and we kept playing “Roam”:

I hear a wind
Whistling air
Whispering in my ear

Take it hip to hip
Rocket through the wilderness

There’s a blasted-open echoing energy in the song, meant to be joyful and transcendent. “Roam” was that for us, but there was a dark underbelly, as though we were at the bottom of a well, and we could hear it playing way way up out in the world, at some happy party we could not get to. Our response wasn’t about the lyrics (although looking at them now, in retrospect, they express perfectly our external experience). We lost ourselves in the song and in the wide vistas. That way, we didn’t have to talk to each other. I hear “Roam”‘s opening chords now, and am immediately in the front seat of our van, my eyes watering up, squinting at the fields and mountains, trying to catch my breath, trying to ignore the fact that my boyfriend and I were breaking up.

Heading up, up, up, to his friends’ ranch, I did not feel up for company. This was a bad time for me, the dissolution of personality, the cessation of language … I shied away from meeting new people. I would look away when I shook people’s hands, ashamed to have this new person see me. I was not well. I lost my voice. Anyone who has ever lost the ability to speak will know the paralysis. “Fake it til you make it” does not apply. At this point, my boyfriend and I had been living in our van for months. We cooked outside, did our laundry in a bucket, slept in sleeping bags, splashed down in various camp sites across the country. We splurged for a motel once in Moab, but other than that, we were outside, truly off the grid, post cards and gas station pay phones our only connection with people we knew back in New England. But here we were on the ranch, in “civilization” again. I’ll put it bluntly, and I say this with retrospect: I was doing so poorly I should have been in a hospital. Instead, we were going to spend a couple of days with people I had never met. My soul cringed back from the exposure.

We rattled up the driveway in our bug-spattered van, the windswept family – Ruth the matriarch, and two grown 20-something kids – Jessica and Chris – on the front steps, waving at us, whooping and hollering a welcome. Jessica’s small son cavorted around like a tumbleweed.

Their energy was so open I relaxed. I didn’t have to put on an act, or be sociable in a polite way. If socially acceptable behavior was required, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. These people were expressive and nuts, in the best most eccentric way. The kitchen overflowed with food and alcohol. The house was freezing. Ruth gave us the grand tour, barking out comments in cynical asides. She referred to her ex-husband as “Asshole” (you could hear the capital letter). “Asshole left me diddlysquat. This ranch is MINE.” She ushered us into her huge bedroom, saying, “It’s a great room even though you could hang meat in it.” Her humor was so irreverent I found myself crying with laughter within ten minutes. The tears in my eyes, a constant for a couple of days, were tears of laughter.

Chris, a fire fighter, was one of the sweetest men I had ever met. A big guy, wearing a tight T-shirt, jeans, and boots … Quiet, not forthcoming … but obviously sweet and sensitive. He was very kind to me. I don’t know if he realized his friend’s girlfriend was not in a good way, but he was very nice, specifically, to me, making sure my drink was filled, cracking jokes, talking to me about actors he loved since he knew I was an actress. Thank you, Chris, wherever you are. His kindness was random, he would have been kind to any guest who traveled up the mountain to his mother’s ranch. But oh, how I needed it.

Jessica was glamorous, with thick black hair, gleaming in waves, glowing skin, and huge brown eyes. Meticulous makeup, thick mascara, but tromping around in jeans, a big sweater, cowboy boots. A high-altitude mountain girl.

The house was so chilly inside I could not get warm, and outside was the frigid mountain air. The atmosphere inside, though, was warm and rambunctious. These weren’t “nice” or “polite” people. They swore. They shouted at each other. They bitched about Asshole. As a repressed girl in the middle of a crack-up, living out of a van and losing language, easy anger expressed was revelatory. Anything too positive grated on my raw nerves then, reminding me of Tennessee Williams’ famous response, when asked his definition of happiness: “Insensitivity, I guess.”

The ranch, its staircase with wooden railings, thick plush rugs, massive stone fireplace, drafty rooms, gargantuan kitchen, did much to protect and soothe. My boyfriend and I sat on the couch, being entertained by this lively family, still not able to speak to each other, or acknowledge that … we were done.

I whispered to him at one point, “I can’t catch my breath.”

“It’s just the altitude. The first couple of days are hard, but it’ll get better.”

He and I had been living out of our van for months. We both took steaming-hot half-hour-long showers. When we emerged from the steaming bqthroom, we were back in the house’s teeth-chattering air, but at least we were clean to the bone. We came downstairs, and the food was out, beers, a fire going. Somewhere along in here, I forgot my neurotic shyness. I could look these people in the eye.

Ruth took us on a tour around the ranch. We went to look at the horses. Jessica, an equestrian probably since birth, leapt onto her horse, galloping off across a field, shouting and whooping. The barn was shadowy, the scent of horses pungent and overwhelming. Out of the small square barn windows you could see the jagged peaks of the nearby mountains. I had never been in such a place. I kept thinking, Those are real mountains. Just like I’ve dreamt of. The mountains looked like a backdrop. I couldn’t realize they were actually there. This devastated me. Later, when I got really nuts, and had completely dissociated from reality, I would make us leave Teton National Park abruptly because I “couldn’t see the mountains”. My boyfriend kept saying, “They’re right there. They’re right there.” “But I can’t see them.” We left. I said, “I’m going to have to come back some other time. I can’t see them.”

I stood on the ranch’s front stoop as the sun went down, hearing guffaws of laughter inside, Jessica shouting at her terror of a son. I stared at the peaks, determined to see them. My eyes tearing up, my hand over my chest. I was pissed. I could see the mountains, obviously I could see them, but I couldn’t see them. My brain had split off from the physical world. Nothing got in. It was really upsetting to me. I wanted to feel the mountains.

The only thing I could really feel was that I could not breathe, and my eyes were always full of tears.

Ruth took us to see the big barracks-like building on the other side of the barn where the ranch hands used to stay, or maybe they still stayed there, seasonally. You could smell the musty mildewy mattresses. Bunk beds lined the walls. There was a small wood stove at one end. Everything was cold and still.

Ruth said, lighting up a cigarette, “This place is haunted.”

I thought maybe she meant haunted by the ranch-hands. I could feel their ghostly presences. Turns out, Ruth meant actual specific ghosts.

“The people who built this ranch back in the 30s had two little kids, a boy and a girl,” said Ruth. “And the kids apparently used to sneak out here in the middle of the night to have pillow fights. This place is haunted by those two kids. You can even hear the slapping of the pillows, and their screams as they beat the crap out of each other.”

My breath was high in my throat. “Have you heard them?”

“I camped out here one night just to see if they would visit me.” (This is why I loved Ruth. She was in her 60s, with short grey hair, blood-red lipstick, she smoked like a chimney, wore jeans and cowboy boots, called her ex-husband Asshole, and slept out in an old abandoned building hoping to be visited by child ghosts.)

“And did they visit?”

“You bet. I woke up, and I heard these tiptoeing feet. I could hear them burst into giggles. There was nobody there, sweetheart, but they were there. And then came – wap wap wap! The sound of the pillow fight. Wap wap wap!”

“You were right there?”

“Yup! Sittin’ right over there. Hearing their giggles, and the Wap Wap Wap!”

“Wow!”

“They’re friendly little ghosts, nothing to be scared about. Just two kids fuckin’ around.”

I squinted through the altitude-tears into the shadows, trying to see them, with a sudden yearning, yearning so deep it pushed out of my chest. I yearned. But for what? To see the mountains? To see the ghosts? Sure, I wanted to see them. But why did this make me so sad? I squashed down inappropriate yearning with a mallet. I was always doing things like this in those days. I never felt fit for company because out of nowhere I would be ambushed by intergalactic yearning and have to leave the room. Ruth was so casual about the ghosts. As we walked out of the building, she laughed to herself, and said, “Wap wap wap!”

Chris and Jessica took us to see a swing on the property, put up by Asshole in happier days. Behind the house, the land fell away abruptly into a deep ravine, a virtual cliff of dirt. A tree stood on the edge of the abyss, and from one of the branches hung a wooden plank swing. You could kick yourself off and swing back and forth over the abyss. Jessica leapt on the swing and pushed herself off, flying out into the empty air, laughing out loud. I felt uneasy. I didn’t want to go on the swing. I didn’t want them watching me. Jessica lay back so she was a flying horizontal girl, floating over our heads, and back out over the abyss.

I didn’t trust my hands to hang on. All I kept seeing, over and over and over, like a flickering newsreel, was me letting go, and falling, falling, cracking my head open on a boulder. I kept seeing it. My boyfriend jumped onto the swing, and took a running leap off into mid-air. I watched him fly up and back, up and back, I watched him stand up on the wooden plank, gyrating his body so he kept momentum going. I was in awe of him. A daredevil who deserved to be with someone who wasn’t such a head case. I watched and saw: my body falling … hands grasping thin air … scream snatched out of my throat … my head smashed open … brains on the rock … I thought of my parents. How sad they would be. I chopped my hand in the air, trying to physically brush the images away. My boyfriend was laughing out loud. He deserved a girlfriend who would have fun on the swing. It was unfair, saddling him with such a fraidy-cat. I needed to set him free of me.

At some point, Chris came over to me, putting his arm around me, squeezing. He grinned down at me with such intimacy and kind knowingness. He knew nothing about me. I have no idea what Chris saw in me, if he saw anything, but I believe he saw something. He was like a dog, sensing something unheard by the normal human ear. He just grinned down at me, never looking away. My boyfriend careened over our heads. Chris’ attention was not invasive or inappropriate. I felt seen. He said, “You go next, okay? Don’t be scared. You won’t fall.” Somehow it didn’t embarrass me he guessed.

My boyfriend got off the swing, and handed it to me, saying, “It’s so great – it’s like you’re flying!”

It wasn’t my boyfriend’s words that made me brave. It was Chris’ grin. I could do it because Chris said it would be okay. I got on the swing, Chris grabbed hold of my waist and pulled me back … I held on for dear life. Chris said, “You ready?” “I’m ready!” Chris let go, and off I went over the cliff. I didn’t look down. I held onto the rope so hard that my hands were chafed later on. There’s a picture of me on that swing.

The photo is hard to look at, because all I can see is the whole circumstance around it. But I look okay. I don’t look like I’m having a bad time. I don’t look like a weird neurotic person who couldn’t speak or couldn’t see the Tetons. I remember hearing Chris shouting: “YEAH! YEAH, SHEILA!” It says a lot about my state of mind how much this moved me.

The newsreel of catastrophe stopped the second I was airborne.

Chris and my boyfriend made a feast for us on the grill: burgers, chicken, steak. Jessica made frozen margaritas. Ruth and I played with Jessica’s son, who was adorable but demonic. He wreaked havoc. Jessica kept moaning, as she put ice into the blender: “I just don’t know how to control him … God. STOP WHINING. Mom … what the fuck … ” Ruth, cigarette dangling from her lips, would bark at the kid, “Time out. You’re being a pain in the ass. Go sit in the corner. Read your book.” The child would open his mouth to start to SHRIEK, but the look on Ruth’s face stopped him cold. “Kid, I love ya. But your voice is ugly when you whine. I can’t take it any more.” Strangely enough, this kind of chaotic disciplining seemed to work. They weren’t unloving, they were open honest statements of frustration. The child sat quietly in the corner, reading a book, playing with his toy train … until he was ready to join civilized society again. He’d walk back over to us, tentatively. Ruth would glance down at him. “Are you done with that whining?” He nodded solemnly. Ruth did not hold a grudge, except against Asshole. She’d say, “Okay. Let’s play with that train then.”

We sat around the huge table, eating and drinking. These were casual big-hearted people. My boyfriend and I had been shivering in a soul-chill – and an actual living-outside chill – for two months. Here were people with a lot of problems, yes, but they didn’t stop them from laughing. Ruth told us bluntly, at the table, with the child right there, “It sucks being 60 and single. I’m dying for sex.” She then bellowed: “DYING! But I’m 60. Nobody picks up 60 year old women. I’m losing my mind.” Jessica was abandoned by her husband (fondly referred to as Asshole Two) and she had a difficult wild child, but she kept making the margaritas, riding her horse for hours every weekend. Chris was a lonely-heart single guy (unbelievable to me. As far as I was concerned, he was the Catch of the Century). He lived out in the middle of nowhere, he didn’t like pick-up bars, he had a hard time meeting people. These people had problems, but they were loud and funny, they loved each other, and they welcomed us. We could sit there with them, and we didn’t have to pretend our problems didn’t exist.

Night fell. I got the sense of the enormous spaces stretching out around us. I’m from New England. You don’t get big vistas in New England, unless you go to the ocean (never farther away than a 25-minute drive). The horizon in New England is always around a hill, behind some trees. You can’t see that far in New England. Even in the ranch house, with all the lights on, a fire crackling in the fireplace, music playing, all of us dancing around barefoot on the rug, sipping beer as we danced … even with all that lively light, you could feel everything drop off immediately outside the door. You could feel the darkness pressing in, you knew the mountains were there overshadowing everything.

The night slowly wound down. The child was put to bed, after a shrieking fight which left Jessica in a shambles. “He’s so wild … dammit … the kid is out of control …” Ruth said, “Jessie, you gotta be firm. That kid is DYING for limits. He may not want ’em but he needs ’em, and you’re weak. Tell him to shut the fuck up and go to bed, because he’s five years old, and that’s what five-year-olds do.” We could then hear Jessica in her son’s bedroom, giving it a good shot, albeit weakly, “You have to go to bed. Okay? I love you …”

My boyfriend and I had been sleeping in sleeping bags for months. It was strange to be inside. I almost didn’t like it. In a strange way, even though we were on top of each other in the van, we also could get away from each other. We weren’t domesticated. There weren’t four walls closing in. Nature was right outside the door. We fell asleep to the sound of coyotes howling. Mating elk made anguished hooting sounds 50 feet away. Being inside a house, and having to be a “couple” was not right for us. Our relationship was over, we just hadn’t admitted it yet. It was easy to deny this reality when we were out in the wild, wearing long johns and hiking boots, collecting fire wood, sipping scotch while we watched the aurora borealis … Things were going to get worse before they got better. Being inside a house only made the wrongness between us more evident. I didn’t feel this until it was time to go to bed. I wanted to be back out in the van. Would it be weird if I slept out there, even though there were plenty of bedrooms inside?

The family went off to their respective rooms. My boyfriend went off to the guest room. I lingered in the bathroom for a long time … brushing my teeth … washing my face …

Something was going on. The sad yearning expanding in my chest. My own emotions were unbearable. I wished I could fucking catch my breath. I wished the light-headed clarity would fade. I wished I would feel like myself again. I could never be her again. She was like the Tetons. I could see her, but I couldn’t see her. She was a backdrop. She had nothing to do with me.

I was still in my sweater and jeans. The house was settling down, the human noise ceased. The child slept, filled with visions of evil plans to thwart the orderliness of the universe. My boyfriend lay in the pristine guest room, under a huge down comforter, reading, wondering where I was, but not wondering too hard. He probably needed a break from his wild-eyed dissociated girlfriend. Maybe Chris lay on his back in his bed, staring up at the ceiling, wishing he had a girl in his arms. Maybe Jessica curled up on her side, trying to get through another night by herself, trying to hang on until tomorrow, tomorrow would be another day. Maybe Ruth lay in her king-size freezing bed, treating herself to a panoply of luscious sexual fantasies in which she was the X-rated star.

And what about me?

I tiptoed down the stairs into the dark house, feeling like a criminal. I tiptoed to the front door, and put my hand on the cold doorknob, certain that at any second I would hear my boyfriend’s voice from the top of the stairs, “Babe? What you doin’?” His voice didn’t come. Biting my lip, I turned the doorknob, willing it to be silent … my thoughts streaming into the doorknob like a command: “Quiet. Quiet.” The night air hit me like a frozen wall, a freezing blast when I stepped outside. I wasn’t wearing a coat.

I was alone, high up in the Rocky Mountains. It was a cold moonless night. I have never seen such bright stars. The stars are bright in remote places in Rhode Island, but they were nothing like these stars. The air was thin, my lungs struggled for oxygen, my eyes full of tears … but the stars FILLED the sky. I stepped out onto the lawn, the dry grass crunching under my feet. I stood there for I don’t know how long. Wheels of constellations circled overhead, a dizzying array, an ethereal ceiling. The tall dark mountain sentinels, with the softly glowing white peaks, would kill you if you did not respect them. We were up so high the stars seemed to go behind the mountain peaks, the mountains blocked out the Big Dipper. I didn’t recognize the constellations. The stars were different.

Vincent Van Gogh didn’t think his Starry Night was “impressionistic”. He saw it as realistic.

That was how a starry night actually looked to him. I never really understood this concept until that night out under the stars in Colorado. Astronomers of old saw the heavens as a ceiling circling above. The earth did not move. The stars moved. I understood this perspective that night up in the mountains. I watched the stars move, a massive cyclorama spiraling by overhead. I watched the stars go behind the mountains and emerge again.

I didn’t know any of those stars.

Then came a sensation so distinct it can only be described one way and I never had this sensation before or since. I felt like I was going to fall up off the earth. I felt as though the stars, wheeling by overhead, would sweep me up in their motion. Gravity would no longer hold me down. I would go up, “without wings, without wheels“, into the abyss of unfamiliar Rocky Mountain constellations. I felt this imp of the perverse, as Edgar Allan Poe called it, as another newsreel, with an opposite trajectory: instead of falling into the abyss below the swing, I saw myself falling up into the air. The stars were a moving entity of one-ness with their own insistent pull. The sensation that I would fly up off the earth into the ether became so strong I sat down on the ground, grabbing chunks of dried wintry grass to hold me down.

Only if one was up that high, near the ceiling of the world, would it be possible to just fly up off the earth and join the stars in their heavenly circling.

The sensation did not last. I have no idea how long I sat huddled on the grass, trying to press myself into the earth so that the heavens couldn’t pull me up … but it must have been half an hour. This was not psychological, it was physical, an overwhelming bodily rush of vertigo, a sense of flying up, looking down, so far down, a sense that those mountains all around me would never stop my ascent. There would be nothing to grasp onto when I left the earth. In New England, I could grab onto a tree as I flew up into the air … but here? There was nothing between me and the stars, my hands grasping thin air. Thinner and thinner and thinner air. I guess I didn’t belong here. I was too much of a sea-level kind of girl.

I finally knew why I had come outside. Of course.

The vertigo settled down. I trusted myself to be able to stand up without flying up into the starry heavens. Up I got, slowly, shakily, and nothing bad happened. I was still subject to gravity. I still took up space. Like the Tetons. Maybe I wasn’t real yet, but matter is real. I was real in that sense. I could walk on the earth. I tiptoed across the lawn, glancing back at the house occasionally, wondering when my boyfriend would notice my absence. It would be soon. I didn’t have much time.

I hear a wind
Whistling air
Whispering in my ear

Shivering, I started to run. Suddenly I really felt the freezing air, it cut me to the bone. I ran over behind the barn. The horses were all asleep but I could still smell them.

I got to the barracks building where the ranch hands slept once upon a time. I said to myself, “Don’t be silly. They’re just two little kids. They will not hurt you.” But the night was pitch-black, there were shadowy darkened buildings all around me, and I was terrified. The yearning from earlier was back.

Blood throbbing in my veins, I opened the barracks door, my eyes straining, trying to see, terrified that the ghosts would turn out to be not so benign, due to the fact that it was me calling them up. I was afraid they would reject me. They would appear for Ruth, but avoid me like the plague. They would shrink away from me. I felt, then, everyone shrinking from me. Why did these high-altitude children need to be called up by a hyperventilating sea-level girl? Just let them be.

Convinced I was about to be murdered, I slipped inside the barracks. I didn’t move past the inner door, I didn’t have the guts. It was too dark. I stood right by the door, and waited. I could hear my breath in the silence. The blackness pressed against my eyeballs. If I held up my hand in front of my face, I wouldn’t have been able to see it.

Eventually, anything can become normal. Huddling in a dark empty barrack in the Rocky Mountains was normal.

Silence rushed in and everything washed away, including my conscious awareness, the thinking part of me. I was my muscles, my throat, my eyes, inner impulses cut off, a survival thing because consciousness was unbearable. In the barracks, acute aliveness poured back in. I was my heart pounding and my heaving breath. And then that anguished yearning, like a hot molten sword in my side. What the hell was I even yearning for?

I waited. And waited. I waited for those ghost kids to show up. I invited them. I tried to cleanse myself of the yearning. Maybe they would shy away from that yearning. I waited to hear the “Wap wap wap” of the pillows, I waited to hear their mischievous giggles, tiptoeing feet, hissing whispers.

Of course they did not come.

I waited until it was obvious nothing would happen. I walked back to the house, deflated. I remember how everything was flat again. I was suddenly blind to the stars, the mountains. I felt the gravity. I was on the earth, in no danger. I crawled into the dark bed in the cold room, and quietly cried, holding it all in as best I could, the tears scalding my cold cheeks. I so wanted to meet those ghostly little kids. I thought they might have a message, and maybe it was something in me that held them back. I was the wrong thing here.

Or maybe my sleeping soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was right. All of this was just the altitude.

2026 thoughts:
I barely remember writing this but my memory of the night in the mountains is vivid, as is the horror of what it was like inside me back then. I am a little shocked I put this out there, but (I guess?) I’m glad I did. Hard as this is to believe, just two months later I flew to Chicago to start a whole new life. I break down that whole journey in another personal piece, written during a difficult month during the pandemic, when the past was on my mind. Starting over in Chicago is all wrapped up in what came before, the months of living off grid, the restlessness, the inability to talk to each other anymore. The wordlessness and the yearning vanished once I chose my destiny, coming down off the mountain directly the shores of Lake Michigan. A mere three months later I attended a fund raiser for the theatre where I had just been cast in a production of Golden Boy, my first show in Chicago.

The cringing girl on the swing in the mountains was just three months prior? That CAN’T be right! (But it is.) The Sheila in the second photo wouldn’t be scared of a little ol’ swing.

Just three months before, I was lying on the grass, hoping I wouldn’t be sucked up into the air. The source of the yearning I felt up in those mountains wasn’t mysterious, after all. I yearned to be three months ahead on my own timeline, nails painted red, 15 pounds lighter, wearing a dress I bought for $8 dollars at a thrift store, drinking cheap white wine. Probably had a date later that night with some random guy from my acting class. Or the following night at 11 p.m. I was with another date on the train to the South Side to go to some secret rave in a warehouse. It was a busy winter, and I was as anti-relationship, anti-conventional-dating as it was possible to be, no real surprise there considering what I came from. I wanted to be free. Guys were into me and I hurt their feelings by accident because I had no idea what I was doing, and, frankly, I wasn’t believed by them when I said, “I don’t want a boyfriend. Like, at all.” They kept wanting to be my boyfriend and I’d be like, “For God’s SAKE, I TOLD YOU.” (in other words, I was not nice. I was, in fact, feral. Things did calm down, but at first …) At the time this photo was taken, I’d seen M. in an improv show, but hadn’t yet met him. I continued to be anti-relationship, but we connected (in our own way). I’m standing there in my cheap dress and bright red nails/hair, having no idea M. is in the wings, about to make his entrance.

All this happened in three months.

How does someone even LIVE at that speed?