Dear Reader,
I am one of those people who claim to remember things from very early childhood. I don’t remember being born, of course, but I do remember laying flat on my back in a crib and discovering my belly button. This was not a sweet and precious baby moment. Internally, this was a moment of profound, visceral fear that is best related to the realm of body horror. (More details on that in a later post.)
Another early memory, one with more charm, that provides a good thesis for this Substack coming into existence, is a trip with my Grandmother to the Cumberland Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1984. We were going to the museum that day to see a robotic dinosaur that had been newly installed in the museum atrium. I was four years old.
We walked into the museum, and I was immediately terrified. This dinosaur had a long neck that swayed from side to side. There was an audio track of chewing sounds, and other imagined echoes of the Late Jurassic Period, and I simply panicked. Desperately wanting to leave, my grandmother stubbornly insisted that we climb the atrium stairs and look at the dinosaur from above. She had something to show me.
As we looked down, she helped me understand that the dinosaur was only a display. We listened to the audio track, and she pointed out when it would loop. We watched the dinosaur's movements and found that they were predictable and simple. She emphasized that we could see the robot was bolted to the platform and noticed that the designers had positioned fake plants to cover these bolts. And then, my favorite part—we noticed a long industrial extension cord coming from below the dinosaur’s platform, snaking across the rear of the display and plugging right into the wall. I think my grandmother could see my awe at these discoveries, and I remember her clapping her hands in a matter-of-fact gesture and saying, “See, look, it’s even plugged in.”
While I was calmed by this big reveal, the exposure of the truth behind the scary dinosaur provoked complexity—even then, in the tiniest version of myself. Just a few months before this visit to the museum, I had learned about death and was beginning my lifelong existential journey. With the dinosaur, my grandmother and I stepped through a portal—from the front of the house to the back—into a different way of navigating reality. I can trace how that moment and others marked a shift in my perception, shaping the way I like to experience the world even now.
Also in 1984, I watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time. As I remember the dinosaur, I’m reminded of the iconic scene where Toto pulls back the curtain, revealing that the Wizard is merely a man using artifice and machinery to create an illusion of power. In the series of essays to follow this year, I aim to tell stories that lift the veil between worlds like life and death, reality and representation, past and present—using a blend of autobiography, archival research, ghost stories, history, and images.
So, here’s a sneak peek at what I’m working on. I plan to post about once a month and slowly finish a short stack of currently half-finished writing projects, one will focus on other elements of Nashville, Tennessee’s cultural landscape—1980s tourist attractions and other real and simulated narratives found there, like the now-defunct Country Music Wax Museum and the Nashville Parthenon (built in 1897 that claims to be the only full-scale replica of the original Parthenon in Athens, Greece). I’m also working on an essay that highlights the wonderfully weird “high-rise” mausoleum where my grandparents are entombed, plus other deep dives and some fun gay stories.
P.S. A few years after my dinosaur revelation, after I could sit through The Wizard of OZ without crying during the Wicked Witch scenes, I would watch the movie on VHS (recorded from TV, with commercials) and, secretly, with great pleasure, rewind the tornado scene on repeat to watch the short clip of Dorothy, in her dress, kicking the storm cellar door after her family had taken shelter without her—my gay root! I also loved to watch her “double skip” out of Munchkinland.🔥
Join me on Substack!
Thank you for listening.
More soon,
~Erin Z.
