(Pretend This Is An) Artist Statement

Somewhere in between really, really being a kid and being a kid who’s already in school using my brain concretely, I made a last-ditch effort at escape into fantasy. I actually used the one real skill that I had, drawing, to help me. Remember in the Disney movie Mary Poppins where Bert and Mary and the kids went into that happy penguin-filled, merry-go-round horse-riding cartoon world? Well, I wanted in, and I went about it scientifically.

I tried to enter that world using my drawing ability and I what I felt were the essential elements: my record player with the official Disney Mary Poppins soundtrack, extra jump leverage courtesy of my bed, and a trance-like reciting of the “password” which was something like “You wink, do a double-blink, and jump!” Each time I jumped from the bed and onto my “magic” drawing of my desired location I would, of course, crumple the drawing so I’d have to smooth it out or redraw it when I got too enthusiastic in my jumping.

In case you’re wondering, it didn’t work. I blamed myself:  I wasn’t doing it right; was missing some important element, etc., but I guess I also felt maybe it couldn’t happen. I mean at all. So that’s then. But thinking about it now, here’s the kicker: I didn’t think about how I would get back if I had escaped into that happy world for an afternoon of fun. Kids have limited timelines of thinking.

In the movie, it rained and the pictures washed away and Mary, Bert and the kids returned safely to the “real” world again. In my room, however, there would have been nothing to bring me back. I guess eventually, I tell my worried “adult” self, that my mom would have come into my room looking for me and heard the click-return-click-return sound that the Mary Poppins soundtrack had ended (in the old days the needle would just click, click on the grooves at the end of the record*) and seen crumpled drawings on the floor. Would she have been interested enough to pick up the stomped-on drawing? If so, that would have probably broken the spell. Or maybe the spell would have been broken if she turned off the record player. Yes, that might have worked as well.

So now you are probably waiting for me to bring this all to the present, make some pat summation for you about life as an artist, child-like wonder—you know, make an artist’s statement (because this IS an artist’s statement)—but I’m not going to do that. You’re on your own. Ponder on it a little. Think about the FBI coming into a little girl’s room hours after she’s been missing looking for clues. If Fox Mulder was there with my beloved Scully from The X Files, perhaps I would have had a chance….

Don’t stare at the sun—too long. I don’t know how long is too long, but I think I got just on the wrong side of it. Maybe a scientist can let me know. In the meantime, I guess I can be grateful I didn’t try the same thing with heroin.

* I actually really liked that end-of-the-record sound, especially because it went on and on. Like a train whistle in the night, so mournful.