Waterton

Posted on by alisonmcghee

At twilight the herd of elk came walking down from the mountain pass. Single file they walked, and from a distance they looked like a string of camel picking their way through a green desert.

Closer and closer they came, a dozen or more, until they congregated in a tight knot by the snow fence, a snow fence that is permanently in place, here in this land where the peaks of the mountains are always white. Where two weeks ago, in June, snow was still falling. Where waterfalls tumble into rivers that run so fast their water churns up green and brown.

The elk stood by the now-closed gate in the fence. They were used to passing through the gate at this time of day, walking across the dirt road, and grazing in the green pasture on the other side. Now there was a horse in that pasture, and so the gate was closed.

The elk stood uneasily on the other side of the fence.

If they wanted to, they could just leap it, said someone who has watched the elk for many days now. You can’t believe how high they can jump.

The elk did not jump. They stood in their tight cluster, conferring. It looked as though they were having a planning meeting.

The gate is closed. What should we do?

Eventually, one of the elk turned and faced the direction from which they had come. He lifted his head toward the mountains and began walking. The other elk turned and followed. Something startled them and they began to run, back across the green meadow, up and over the rise, disappearing in the distance.

The horse in the pasture began to run then too. He had once been a wild horse, a Nokota, and someone had worked with him for years until he allowed that someone to ride him. He had acres of grassland to run on, ridges to hide behind, dips to take shelter in, and in winter his coat grew long and shaggy so that he was happy to stay outside in all weather.

Farther down the road there was a gravel pit, and a den within it that contained a fox and his family. The fox had been courted by a man who lived nearby, and over time lost his wariness enough so that he would appear at dusk and carry food given to him by the man back to his fox family.

In the nearby town, bighorn sheep lolled in the sun in front of a small church. Their coats were falling off in clumps of fur, smooth undercoat visible beneath.

The nest of a river eagle rose high beside the dirt road, long ribbons trailing from it.

You are in grizzly country, every sign at every entrance to the park read. Be aware.

The sky is everywhere, especially here

Posted on by alisonmcghee

This is what will happen to you on the day you drive the length of Route 2 from eastern to western Montana.

Before you get behind the wheel you will stand beside the car and turn in all directions, marveling at the boundless sky.

You will see the 75 mph road signs on this two-lane road and you will smile and set the cruise at 83 and the few cars on the road with you will all be going as fast as you.

It will feel as if you’re flying. As if you could literally take off from the earth and rise in the air and be part of that big sky. When you have to slow to 60 it will feel as if you’re crawling.

On your right will be a prairie dog city, mounds rising over an endless field, one prairie dog after another standing with tiny upraised arms, watching you pass.

You will play the music you brought with you, turning the volume way up and then way down, depending. There will be no stretch of time on Route 2 without music, new and old, to keep you company.

Dinosaurs will appear on a ridge overlooking the road, one after another. Silent, still sentries from hundreds of millions of years ago, watching over their land and you in your small car. It will take you a moment to realize that they’re not real.

You will cross the Milk River early on, shallow water the color of cafe au lait, and you’ll squint as you take in the magnitude of the flooding around it. Tall trees standing in water. The tires of farm machinery half-submerged. Drowned wheat.

A hand-lettered sign –brown letters on a white board– will read Women Are Sacred.

The sky will surround you, the biggest sky you have ever seen, and you will be able to see the weather in all directions, dozens of miles away. To the north: rain sheeting down from the heavens. To the east: sunshine. To the south: gathering thunderclouds. To the west, the direction in which you are headed: a clear dividing line between storm and clear skies.

Zeus is angry, your youthful companion will remark, as the sky ahead darkens.

We’re heading into the jaws of the beast, you will say.

You will grip the steering wheel tighter as the sky turns black. You are driving at 81 miles per hour directly into the storm. You will look at the temperature outside: 72 degrees. Now it will read 71. Now 68.

63. 58. 56.

54. 53.

In five minutes. First you won’t believe it, and you will open the window and the car will fill with cold air. You still won’t believe it and so, knowing your own powers of exaggeration, you’ll turn to your youthful companion and say, Did that temp just drop 20 degrees in ten minutes?

Five, she, a non-exaggerator, will say. 20 degrees in five minutes.

Into the storm you fly. Rain so hard you can’t see a thing will lash the small car and wind will rock it from side to side. You will slow to 30, then 25. You will turn your hazards on, hoping that anyone behind or ahead will see them blinking. You will debate: more dangerous to pull to the side and wait, or keep going?

You will keep going.

Within minutes you will drive out of the storm and the temperature will begin to climb again.

The Milk River, a tributary of the flooding Missouri, will appear again and again. Its own tributaries will also appear –Beaver Creek, Willow Creek– and the flooding is everywhere. Whole fields submerged. Milky brown water lapping at the sides of Route 2.

You will wonder about the Milk River and its shapeshifting qualities.

You and your youthful companion will take turns choosing cd’s from the stack you brought with you. As it was the day before, each song will make your heart ache, in a good way, and make you want to write a beautiful book.

Ahead, as you head west, you will see the tail end of a black cloud dipping down from the sky toward the road directly ahead of you. Having just driven through the storm, this unusual sight will not surprise you.

Into the black cloud you’ll plow, to find that it is not a cloud, but a swarm of tiny black bugs that coat your windshield with bug glue. It will be hard to see. At the next tiny town, dozens of miles down Route 2, you’ll pull into a gas station to scrub your windshield.

At the next pump over, a bigbellied man in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat will jump nimbly out of his truck to do the same thing.

“You get caught in that cloud of bugs too?” he will yell. “Sticky little things, ain’t they?”

You will smile and laugh and scrub away. A little girl will come running out of the shack of a store by the pumps. The bigbellied man will scoop her up and hold her up against the sky.

“I didn’t hardly get to see you today!” he will say, and then he will kiss her on both cheeks and she will throw her arms around his neck and laugh.

When you get hungry you will pull up to a light blue windowless supper club where the parking lot is full of trucks. Before you go in you’ll trade your flipflops for your cowboy boots. Once inside you’ll see that the menu, as you expected, features 18 versions of steak and two of pasta.

There will be eight large aquariums dividing the dining room. In one of them will live two albino frogs, one slender, one so fat that it must try and try again to come up for air.

Back in the car, you will not want to stop driving. The western sky will coax you onward and you will drive and drive and drive until you have driven 670 miles on this one day.

When you finally pull up to the last available motel room in a town on the western edge of Montana you will want to write a poem made up only of lines from songs you listened to as you drove, lines such as Oh life, you are a shining path, or I asked God to please slow down the seconds.

But you will be too tired to write that poem, at least today, and you will go to sleep under a sky filled with stars.

Road trip, day one

Posted on by alisonmcghee

If she were a better photographer, or in fact, any kind of photographer at all, which she obviously isn’t, to judge from the photo to the right there, she would know how to crop the thing. Then the “Ahrndt U Hungry” words and the accompanying chicken would appear much bigger. They would be the center of the photo, sailing up there in the blue-blue sky, just the way she imagines them looking.

Surely her computer comes with some kind of software that can do that, but in her ineffectual and haphazard way, clicking around from photoviewer to photoviewer –why are there so many photoviewing programs on this thing, none of which she installed, when all she wants is one, just one adequate, easy-to-figure-out one?– she couldn’t find it.

Alas, she forgot her actual camera at home, not that that would have made any difference in the quality of the above Ahrndt U Hungry photo because a) she doesn’t really know how to use her actual camera, which she won in a silent auction benefit fundraiser, and b) she lost –or one of her youthful companions lost– the cable that connects it to the computer, so that all the photos contained within are currently imprisoned without possibility of parole until such date as she manages to type the camera make and model into google, figure out what kind of cable she needs, order one, and then hook the thing up again to the computer.

Whereupon several thousand, or maybe four or five, photo-viewing programs will open simultaneously, none of which, again, she really knows how to use, and she will stare dully at the newly-released photos, still not knowing how to edit them, and continue to post photos here on this blog, all with an unwritten “crappy photo” caption.

But that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that two travelers, a woman and the most youthful of her youthful companions, set forth from their home in a large city yesterday morning. They pointed their car west and crept through incoming rush hour traffic –but they were headed out! salmon swimming against the tide!– bound for open land.

The youthful companion plugged in her iPod and chose a selection of tunes for the the first couple hours of the drive, and each song seemed like the perfect song.

Wow, thought the woman, maybe she could be a dj.

She imagined introducing people in later years to her youthful companion, the dj. How fun that would be. Also, she could probably get all the music she wanted for free, because her youthful companion would be overrun with it.

Within an hour the land had opened up.

Within three hours they had driven out of the world of endless trees and lakes into a world of giant, undulating plains.

Within five hours the trees had disappeared, giving way to unbroken stretches of fenced grassland. Dark cattle grazing solo or in small herds. Buttes rising in the distance. Piles of large rocks gathered in the middle of hayed or grassy fields.

The road straightened into a gray ribbon stretching to the far horizon. 75 mph speed limits, and out there, where no cars go, the woman set the cruise to 80. A red, freestanding barn door –no barn behind it– rose from the middle of a cowless pasture.

A steer leaned against a boulder and pushed his head and neck and shoulders against it, scratching an itch. A UPS truck, so covered in dust it was tan instead instead of brown, turned down a ranch driveway.

Mailboxes were set by the road at the end of dirt driveways so long it was impossible to see a house. A sign appeared: School Bus Stop. The woman and her youthful companion agreed that no matter where you got on the school bus out here, you were in for a long ride.

The tunes kept coming. Now the woman and the girl traded off picks from the many cd’s they had brought with them. They made a rule: Listen to the first twenty minutes of the other’s choice, and then, if such choice proved unbearable, accede gracefully to a cease-and-desist request.

No such requests were made. The youthful companion even allowed the woman to sing along with the songs with no comment.

Water began brimming from the surface of the green earth. It spilled up out of the ditches, held back from the sides of the narrow two-lane roads by rocks and yellow oil-spill booms and earth berms. Flood-lakes drowned fields and engulfed small trees.

Tan shirtless boys in yellow vests stood leaning on “Slow” and “Stop” signs, drowsy in the heat, lazily advising drivers that it would be eight to ten minutes before the pilot car returned, leading a caravan of trucks and dusty cars down the narrowed-to-one-lane-by-flooding road.

The youthful companion played a few rounds of solitaire on her itouch. The woman tried but failed to best her own personal skeeball record on her phone.

Back on the road.

Because they were starving and because of the name, they stopped to eat at the Ahrndt U Hungry. The girl ate a plate of cheese nachos so covered with cheese that finding a chip within was an excavatory process. The woman decided to add “excavatory” to her personal lexicon of words which don’t exist but should.

She ate a bowl of soup with Krispy Original crackers. Then they got back in the car and kept heading west.

Turn around, turn around

Posted on by alisonmcghee

In the beginning there was the pink backpack, miniaturized for a kindergartner’s small frame.

51ZARDXBHJL._SY453_BO1,204,203,200_In the backpack was a brown paper bag lunch: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple, a granola bar. And a note on a scrap of white paper. No words –this was a kindergartner who didn’t yet know how to read– just a smiley face and X’s and O’s.

In the beginning there was a photo of a little curly-haired girl getting off the school bus on that first day –huge smile– running up to her tall mother and throwing her arms around her legs.

In the beginning there were days and days when the kindergartner demanded elaborate hairdos of her non-hairdo-doing mother: multiple pigtails, barrettes, braids and butterfly clips.

In the beginning there was the year or three of striped shirts and flowered pants and polka dot socks.

Always, there was the brown paper lunch bag.

There were brief forays into School Lunch, forays which usually happened after careful study of the week’s forthcoming School Lunch menu. Italian Dunkers, that was a good one. Pizza Day, another good one.

But the forays were brief, and then it was back to the brown paper lunch bag.

Years passed, and each fall brought with it a regular-sized backpack in a different color, shopping bags full of requested school supplies for an underfunded classroom, an agenda book covered over with hearts and flowers and swirly patterns and the names of all her friends.

Years passed, and so did the demands for a different hairdo each day. Soccer and tennis entered into the picture, along with the two-wheeler, the rollerblades, the ice skates, the skis.

The brown paper bag still held the usuals. A granola bar. A piece of fruit. Cut-up carrots or bell pepper. A cookie or two. A sandwich: peanut butter and jelly, turkey and cheese, a cream cheese + pickle roll-up.

The mother made the brown paper bag lunches in the early morning, while the girl was still asleep. Sometimes she turned on NPR, those soothing early morning voices muttering on about the weather, the wars, the stock market. Sometimes she worked in silence, the paper bag open on the counter behind the heavy wooden cutting board.

Wash the apple. Bag the sandwich. Which kind of granola bar today, chewy or regular?

The tiny notes continued for years —good luck on the history test! have a happy day! I’ll see you at Poetry & Punch!– until one day the mother sensed that maybe it was time to stop sending notes in the lunch. That maybe the girl was a little too old now to want her friends to see her with a lunch note from her mother.

But the brown paper bag lunches continued. And the mother still made them. Occasionally this fact became known.

Wait, your mother still makes your lunch?

Yup!

The girl liked her mother to make her lunch, and the mother, although she would not always admit it, liked to make her daughter’s lunch.

The years went by, and then came a day in spring, just two days ago, in fact, when the girl came zipping down the stairs. I’m late! I’m late! she sang, I need my lunch! and she plucked up the brown paper bag from the kitchen table and raced to the front door.

Then she turned –tall girl with those hazel eyes and those dark curls tumbling down her back– and looked back at the mother standing in the kitchen doorway.

This is my last school lunch, she said. Confusion and wonder spread over her face. This is the last school lunch you’ll ever make for me, isn’t it?

The mother nodded.

Later, when she opened the brown paper bag, the girl would find one last note inside, buried at the bottom beneath the bag of peeled and sliced carrots.

Musical note, part one

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Across the street from  your house is a small apartment building. Every so often, at the end of the month, someone will move out and someone else will move in. You sit in your upstairs office, the one with the green walls and the fuchsia and orange curtains –be not afraid of color– and glance out as you work.

Cars and vans, sometimes a U-Haul, the sweating friends and family: in and out they go, tromping up and down the steps, lugging the bureau and couch and chairs and television. It’s all so familiar. You yourself have moved quite a few times in just such a manner.

About a month ago, someone new moved in. You have no idea if this someone new is a man or a woman, but you do know that the someone new is a musician.

You know this because it’s spring –finally, it’s spring– and you took out the storms and put in the screens, and the spring breeze blows the curtains and your hair while you work. And while you work, classical violin music wafts from an upstairs window from the apartment building across the street.

At first you thought it was a fluke. You had managed to catch a child at practice. Maybe she goes to MacPhail School for Music, as does one of your own children, you thought, and she’s been avoiding her practicing all week, but today is lesson day. Quick, better get in a few minutes of practice so you won’t have to lie to the teacher.

But a few minutes later you knew you were wrong. This was no child desperately trying to dodge a stern teacher bullet. For one thing, it was the middle of the day on a school day, long after all the backpack-dragging children on the block had trudged to their bus stops. For another, this was serious music played by someone who had put in thousands and thousands of hours of practice.

That first day he (she? Some days you picture a woman, other days a man in a black suit) played for more than and hour and then stopped.

Oh. You were surprised at how sad this made you. That music was so beautiful. You, who are forever embarrassed at your un-knowledge about classical music, yet who love it anyway, in your naive way, didn’t want that music to end.

Your phone rang and you plucked it up.

“Did you hear that?” said your next-door neighbor. “That gorgeous music?”

She too works at home, in an upstairs room that faces the street exactly as yours does. She too likes to look out on the street life as she works.

“It’s amazing,” you said. “Who is it?”

“No idea,” she said. “But maybe we should go throw flowers up at their window. Do you think that would encourage them to keep going?”

But no flowers were necessary. Within an hour, the music had begun again, and on it went, for another hour. And on and off throughout the day, and the days, and the weeks, and now more than a month. Music is the center of the violinist’s life.

Is there anything like that in your life? Any kind of gift you yourself can give the world, or your block, right here and right now, merely by trying to be better at something?

You can’t delight the neighbors with the sound of your fingers clicking away on the keyboard, trying to be better at writing. You can’t delight them with your singing, or your own preschooler piano playing. Maybe you can delight a few with the smell of baking cookies. Come the end of June through September, you might delight some with the hundreds of flowers which by then will be open and waving in the boulevard and front yard gardens.

But that violinist, all he has to do is stand before an open window and try to get better at what he already excels at, and the air around him fills with beauty.

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Famous

– Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

—
For more information on Naomi Nye, please click here.

Something you would think but never say

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Every other day or so, you drive up Irving Avenue and back again, a drive so familiar that most of the houses barely register. A few exceptions, notably the green one with the clerestory windows you’ve always admired.

Once, when this green house was for sale and you were walking by, you pulled one of the realtor sheets from the realtor mailbox and studied it carefully. It is a house designed by an architect with special attention paid to natural cooling. This intrigued you. You never could have afforded the house, then or now, but you still love it and gaze at it fondly every time you drive by.

If your older daughter is in the car with you, she will glance out the window toward a certain white house on a certain block of Irving Avenue. If you’re alert, and you cut your eyes over her way, you will see her hand lift in the tiniest of waves and her lips move soundlessly.

If she catches you looking at her during this little ritual, she will smile. You will smile back. One of her friends lives in that house, and for years now, ever since she found out that he lived there, she has waved at his house and said “Hi, T.”

At first her waves were open and big and she freely spoke the words aloud. These days, as the years pass on, no one who hadn’t been there in the beginning would know about the ritual.

Maybe next year, when this daughter returns from college for the holidays, and you and she are once again driving up Irving Avenue, the “Hi, T.” will be something she only thinks but no longer says.

A few weeks ago this daughter turned to you in the car and said, “I bet that fifty years from now, if I’m still living in Minneapolis, I will still be saying hello to T.’s house.”

That thought made you happy.

Fifty years from now, if you are still living –which isn’t likely– maybe you will still be saying “Rabbit rabbit” on the first day of every new month, the same way you do now. You wake in the middle of the night, usually in the 3 o’clock hour, and if it’s the dawn of a new month, you speak those words aloud, for luck.

Some people say Rabbits Rabbits, but you have always preferred the singular.

You taught your friend Peter B. to say Rabbit Rabbit way back when, when you were both still in college. Years later you received a letter from him cursing the day he learned to say it, because, as he put it, “I’ll be saying Rabbit f——- Rabbit till the day I die, and all because of you, McGhee.”

That thought made you happy.

Many years ago you had a friend who taught you to say “11:11. God will appear,” every time the digital clock showed 11:11. Every day since, twice a day if you’re still awake for it, you say those words. Neither you nor your friend were, or are, religious in a God-like way, but still, you say the words.

Years ago your younger daughter heard you muttering the ritualistic words and inquired what you were saying. So you told her the story and taught her the words, and now she, too, is an 11:11 aficionado.

This thought makes you happy.

Your long-ago next door neighbor’s mother, leaving the house after a visit, came upon you pale and exhausted in your front yard, trying to calm your firstborn, He Who Did Not Stop Crying.

“This too shall pass,” she said, reaching through the picket fence to touch his head.

And it did.

Now you’re thinking of your mother, who in times of stress tells you that All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

You have passed that one on to others, speaking it aloud or writing it down or merely sending it through time and space via thought waves. Some things are equally powerful whether spoken aloud or silently.

Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The Boy
– Marie Howe

My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer:
night
white T-shirt, blue jeans — to the field at the end of the street.

Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown
with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,

and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.
He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.

And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him — you know
where he is — and talk to him: No reprisals.  He promised.  A small parade
of kids

in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in
spring.
And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father

will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next
month, not a word, not *pass the milk*, nothing.

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.

I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
—
For more information about Marie Howe, please click here.

And paced upon the mountains overhead

Posted on by alisonmcghee

You get a reminder of it sometimes, when you walk by a house being built. Or when you’re tearing out a wall damaged by one of last winter’s ferocious ice dams. Or when your electrician friend comes to put in a new outlet in the room that has only one.

Touring a factory can do it too. A brewery, for example. The cavernous rooms, the grind and hum of machinery, the rattle of conveyor belts, the machines that fill the bottles, the giant vats of beer, the sour smell of fermentation.

Followed by the sight of perfectly packaged six-packs: brown bottles in their bright boxes, silently stacked on shelves. You see them in the store and, unless you consciously remind yourself, you forget where they came from. You don’t think about the mess, the grind, the chaos of their beginning.

When the wall of the house is torn open, it’s impossible to forget. Rough lathe and crumbled old plaster, newspapers from 1945 stuffed inside for insulation. Electrical cords writhing their way in twisted bundles up and down between floors.

If you hover in the room when the electrician is working on the outlet, watching and waiting, you will see sparks fly, the tiniest of fires.

This too will remind you of what is beneath the surface. All these reminders, all the time, should you choose to notice them: there is another life alongside this life.

Now you’re thinking of when writing is the easiest, which is when you’re not thinking. Your fingers are just tap-tapping away, and words appear on the screen and you look at them with interest, as if they were written by someone else.

Were they?

An image appears in your mind: a little bracelet made of red plastic beads next to a blue child’s ring. These were the treasures that you and some of your friends in fifth grade played King of the Mountain with one brief winter week. The snow piles at the elementary school were so high that year that you dug snow caves into them, made snow roads on top of them.

You buried the jewelry and searched for it. Why this game was so entrancing you don’t know, but all of you were entranced. Then came the day when the jewelry couldn’t be found, and the game ended.

The thing is, though, it’s still there. That red plastic bracelet, that little blue ring: they are still out there. Probably feet under the ground in the grass by the side of the red brick elementary school, but there.

All these years –almost your whole life, at this point– you have thought about them. The red bracelet. The blue ring.

Nothing goes entirely away. Some part of it stays.

Look at that small, square brown pillow with a pattern of leaves needlepointed on top. It was the first thing that caught your eye just now when you looked up. It’s carefully placed by the armrest of the couch in this room. Your grandmother made that pillow.

You look at it and she immediately fills your mind. You can hear her voice. You can see her hand, arthritic fingers and ropy veins. Now she’s laughing. Now she’s urging more raspberry popover and ice cream on you.

Doesn’t this mean that she’s still here? That some part of her is still with you, like the silent, unseen electricity running its way up and down every wall of this house?

Yesterday, a lovely day when the outdoors was made indolent by the sun, you passed two girls and a boy, late teens all, sitting on a stone bench by the lake. Laughing. Tugging down the shoulders of their tanks, flexing their biceps, each insisting their muscles were the biggest.

You wanted to stop and watch them, they were so beautiful. Smooth, smooth brown skin, white teeth, dark hair tied back. You walked away from them, listening to their easy talk. You tried to picture them fifty years hence, what they would be like then, if they would still know each other, still be together.

Then you imagined the bones and blood and ligaments and arteries just under the surface of that silken skin, how it is there right now. Hidden. Invisible. Doing its silent work.That shadow world, indivisible from the outer one in which we move.

Sometimes you sense another world, a shadow world happening alongside this one. An unseen world of spirits and memories, things you once held. The world where the stories begin.

Sometimes you get a glimpse of it. The torn-open wall, a presence on the stairs, a long-lost voice come whispering into a dream. Your grandmother, and that one line in that one letter: “What a beautiful life we had.”

Sometimes, falling asleep or waking up, there is the sensation of something just out of reach. A familiar stranger with you, hiding his face amidst a crowd of stars.