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This, no longer around, was the site of what I realized today, coming home on the PATH, was a pivotal moment in my life. It's perhaps the single strongest memory I have of being a child. I don't really need to put it down here since I've always had it, but I guess I will anyway because Kirsten is taking forever to put her goddamn makeup on.

It was on maybe our second trip to Disney World, so we were four years old. We were in EPCOT, and Kirsten wanted to be one of the kids in Dreamfinder's School of Drama, an interactive exhibit at the Imagination pavilion, wherein children lined up in front of a blue screen on a black line painted in the carpet, and, in the video monitors in front of them, watched themselves be inserted into various pre-taped "adventures". At the beginning of each new group cycle, the children were asked to choose from three of such adventures: outer space, the old West and a fairy tale. Kirsten's group went to outer space. I stood on the sidelines watching on the monitors provided for the audience of parents, because I was too shy to participate. (I was the shy one; Kirsten was the fearless one.)

As I watched, through the magic of chromakey, my sister and her group of strangers traveled through outer space, battling evil anti-imagination space villains. Only through the powers of their imaginations could they escape! "Use your imaginations, now!" urged Dreamfinder from the video screen. "Go on, put your hands to your head, like this"-- he pressed his white-gloved fingers to his forehead-- "and imagine that they're disappearing! Go on!" And all the children pressed their hands to their foreheads, and I watched, transfixed, as my sister did this, and I could almost see the power of her imagination reaching out like an electric arm and zap those villains away. It was something real I was seeing, this power of imagination. I had never felt anything so magical. I had never been so jealous of my sister, who got to be there in outer space and fight the bad guys with Dreamfinder and the rest of the kids.

Now, I was four years old, but I was not a stupid four years old. I knew, rationally, that my sister was not really in outer space, because I could see her on the blue carpet in front of me. But at the same time, she was. She was there, and she was part of something fantastical and unreal and I wasn't, because I'd been too afraid. That moment when she pressed her hands into her forehead, and the music was playing, and the stars were all around her on the screen, it's burned somewhere very deeply into me. It was real, true, live magic. It was the first time I'd reached that duality of thought, where I could know one thing with my head, and at the same time I could believe another thing, with something other than my head.

Every year after that I always was first in line to be in Dreamfinder's Drama School. It was a ridiculous thing to be shy about; shyness was what kept me out of that marvelous adventure that first year, and I would never let it happen again. Even when I went to EPCOT later, as a teenager, with my friends (hi Ags!), before they took down the old Imageworks and put up that new crap in its place, we would go and stand towering above the small children, goofing off and pretending to be part of the adventure. Even after it was just a silly joke, some part of it wasn't. Because I think that that moment I described is what I've been chasing after since then. I think it's the reason I love EPCOT, and that my anxiety dreams are about EPCOT, and that I like to draw and that I read fantasy books and watch fantasy movies and am fascinated by the theatre and the magic created by a good group of performers. I'm chasing that one moment when I watched my sister's imagination destroy the bad guys, and I knew that I could do that, too.

Corny as shit, but it's utterly sincere, that. I've been trying to relive that moment since then, in various ways. It's in the back of every fantasy, every story, every movie, every adventure. I want to press my hands to my forehead and save the day.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 4:56 PM | shower me with attention