In the beginning were the animals.

The chicken that got its head pulled through the wire mesh by a raccoon and eaten off like some single morsel on a shish kabob. 

The chicken that died hyperventilating in dad’s arms in the kitchen from the trauma of seeing the shish kabob chicken.

The gerbils that we kept in a bird cage and one day the bottom fell out and they fell all the way to the floor and one bled to death from its ear and that was a revelation.

The rabbits, one for each of us. One morning we went out and found the two brown ones dead and covered in ants and the white one just gone. We said he was the easter bunny and had to leave to do his job and every spring we would look for him when we drove by the river and one year Ezra saw him.

The guinea pigs, one for each of us. I was the smallest so I got the smallest one and Mom explained to us all what a runt was. A few days later Runty got trampled by her brother and sister and mother like in some primitive game of carousel and did Mom know this would happen and how could she withhold such crucial information. Obviously it meant only one thing and I would lay awake at night wondering when my own family would in turn murder me like this.

My parakeets. It was only supposed to be one parakeet. But it died because it was left in a room with open paint cans. I had this obsession with trying to see it asleep but I could never wake up early enough or quiet enough to manage this until the one fateful morning when I found it laying with its eyes closed on the bottom of the cage. I carried the whole cage into my parents bedroom triumphantly.  I was victorious at last. Look, I caught him sleeping. And their faces did that sad quiet parent thing while they gently began to say honey I don’t think he’s sleeping. 

Then there was a string of replacement parakeets but it wasn’t really the same. It took us a while to figure out they were dying in rapid succession because one of our cats would sit with its face right up against the cage bars for hours looking at the birds. We thought it was cute. The birds were having heart attacks and dying.

Daisy the dog who was so mean. When she died it was raining so hard my dad didn’t want to bury her so she lay on a moving blanket in my parents room for days and her stomach kept swelling higher and higher into the air and one day my brother poked her and a big gas cloud bellowed out of her mouth and he will never forget the smell.

I wish I could go back and feel the beginning. It’s the best feeling. It must be. I wish I could close my eyes and be in that child body again. Looking out from the small rib cage. Touching again with the miniature fingers. The miniature legs. The miniature ears. I remember the dark beauty of backstage. The nearly total darkness that magic requires. The darkness of the slender backstage, that precious sliver of a footpath: this is safe darkness. This is necessary darkness. The backstage is so dark, so narrow and so quiet so that in front of the wings the universe of the puppet show can gleam and echo uninterrupted. Waiting and watching backstage is conspiratorial and peaceful. We were born into the conspiratorial creativity of the backstage. The floor was good to us. Hiding was happy. Waiting was exciting. Watching was done with anticipation. We were born into neglected things as possibilities for a beautiful show. Strangely shaped glitter was better than the uniform kind. Tulle was all around. Paper mache was an uncontested presence. Stories were made with your two hands. I watched everything with my two child eyes: deep pools of receptivity. I absorbed. My brain grew. The foundation was cast. I smelled spray paint and face paint and spirit gum and latex paint and hot glue and fog machine and heat from the stage lights and the adhesive of duct tape which is different from the adhesive on masking tape and these smells became home. These smells became the way I knew I was living well. These smells became a promise of the special variety of happiness that we feel when we put on a wonderful show. I felt the soft spring of the marley dance floor beneath me and the scratch of the tutu and the hug of the spandex and the ache of the headdress and the crust of the foam baby’s face which had been painted and the unpredictable weight of the stick puppet and the spongy hollows of cardboard and the treacherous tautness of the balloon and made these sensations into a compass for possibility. Now I know these textures to mean: something good might happen here.

Opening night is the most magical. The pinnacle of magic. The moment everyone is working towards and everyone remembers. The goal is to make it to opening night and then feel it. Part of the feeling is imagining everything is way fancier than it actually is. If you’ve ever been to a symphony or an opera or a ballet the fanciness becomes a part of your vision for the rest of your life. The red velvet curtain is still present energetically in the black box theater that smells like the office space it once was. The vision of expensive instruments: gleaming and glinting under the stage lights. The vision of the dancers’ feet warming up onstage. The feeling the feeling the feeling of the house lights dimming and the curtain opening. These feelings are internalized even if we only ever got them in drips, in whiffs. These feelings we bring to every opening night for the rest of our lives.

I don’t remember what any one opening night was like.

I don’t remember opening night for Shipwrecked: in which we were all covered head to toe in wet clay and rolled around on the floor in watery choreography.

I don’t remember opening night for Living Threads in which I wrote an imaginary monologue for the deceased mother of one of the other actresses and tried a southern accent for the first time.

I don’t remember opening night for Mary Poppins in which there were 13 different Mary Poppins: one for each scene.

I don’t remember opening night for Oliver Twist in which I began to fall in love with the adult actresses who always made the dressing rooms smell so good and cared about make-up and looking pretty.

I don’t remember opening night for Perpetua: the dance concert about an ancient Roman martyr that was danced only by me and my father. 

I don’t remember opening night for Rikki Tikki Tavi in which I played the cobra king’s wife Nagaina.

I don’t remember opening night for Charlotte’s Web in which I decided that, as Wilbur I would probably have been depressed about my impending slaughter.

I don’t remember opening night for any of the many productions I was a part of.

But I remember the feeling.