playground phantoms

on musical theater and early lessons about mortality

The first time I put on a play, my best friend was dying. Let me call her Meg, for that is who she wished to be—the ballet chorus girl watching from the wings. We were five years old. 

My first memory of friendship is of Meg pressing a crayon into my palm. I don’t remember her being well, but it took time for me to understand that she was sick. First, she was weak, struggling to complete our school art projects—primary-colored self-portraits, or iridescent sun-catchers. Then she was simply gone for days and days, the seat beside me in our classroom lacking the warmth of my friend. 

When Meg returned after time away, her face rounder and taking on strange colors, she begged me to tell her stories. The stories I had were Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. I knew the plot lines from the cassette tapes my grandmother sent, which I listened to on a Walkman in my bedroom. I loved The Phantom of the Opera best. 

“I don’t want to give you bad dreams,” I’d say. “It’s scary.” 

She’d take my hands into hers. I can still feel them, small and warm. “Tell me,” she’d say. “Don’t leave out the scary parts.” 

Because the character reminded me of my friend, I started with Meg, a minor figure in the musical, quiet and watchful. “Meg is a ballet dancer, and the story is about her friend, Christine.”  

Originating from Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’opéra, first published serially in 1909 by the French newspaper Le Gaulois, Phantom tells the story of a musical genius who haunts the Opéra Populaire in Paris, and becomes obsessed with his protege, ballet chorus girl turned soprano ingénue, Christine Daae. 

I loved Phantom’s music and was terrified by it, a sweeping score that made me sit up straight every time I heard it. I felt I understood Paris and the opera house, the melodrama and the ornate backdrops. Childhood is operatic, as is Central Florida, where mine took place. The elementary school Meg and I attended was adjacent to an office park, but also abutted a wetland wildlife reserve, a hardwood swamp forest in the floodplain of the Hillsborough River. I don’t know if the school had any official connection to the nearby children’s hospital, but I do know some of my classmates were not well.

On some mornings, children in good health would hunt lizards and frogs and deliver them to the hands of those too sick to venture far from the classroom. We played Explorers and Funerals between lessons. We listened to records in the afternoons. Our teacher played “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies and sometimes cried at her desk. I felt a sense of urgency about experience, directing scenes of life on the large wooden structures of the play yard. It was overlooked when we played at things we should not: giving birth, senior prom, divorce. 

We could hear creatures in the swamp beyond the fence. We knew what lurked just on the other side of the division—enormous snakes and gators, fish with teeth. But our encroaching understanding of impermanence produced a fear far greater than that of strange wildlife. And so we acted out futures not all of us would have. 

Because she could not play out these scenes with us, I told Meg again and again about the masked composer living beneath the opera house, though what I really wished to do was share Phantom’s music with her, the synth and electric guitar of the title song. And so, one morning, I carefully placed my Walkman in my backpack, tucking it beneath my naptime blanket, and took the cassette with me to school. 

On days that Meg wasn’t well enough to go out during recess, our teacher let me stay inside with her, and she said nothing on the morning I pulled the Walkman from my backpack. I carried it to her desk and asked her to help me find the title track. She looked at Meg, then back at me, and, smiling, put down her pen as if to say, Don’t tell anyone I let you do this, and cued up the song. 

I carried the tape player to the rainbow rug by the windows, where Meg was waiting for me. I would be sitting on that same rug when I would learn that Meg had died. But that would come later. I handed her the headphones, and helped her place the foam pads over her ears. I hit play and pressed my cheek to hers. Then, music so loud we vibrated. She yelped, and we both laughed. 

Her eyes became wide, a little frightened, but she held the headphones in place, palms pressing down tight on them as if someone might try to take something from her. I wanted this for Meg, specific chords to make the heart swell. I felt like it would give us both more—more life, more intensity, more understanding, more time. On the playground beyond the windows, orchestral bugs crescendoed in their calls.

In the spring, Meg was gone again for weeks. When she returned to school, she’d sometimes only stay for a few hours, her mother staying close, sitting in a chair in the corner. I wrapped my hands around Meg’s when she felt too tired to hold a crayon. On our rainbow rug, I sang to her.

What did I understand of death? I don’t recall, only that theater was comforting in this way, too, how characters who met untimely ends would spring back to life at the end. But I understood somehow that Meg and I were running out of time. And it was this understanding that made me want to put on a play, to give her Phantom.

“Is there dancing?” she asked. 

I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. I was five. Though I had sat enraptured through Cats, I had not seen Phantom. But I felt it had something to tell us, something true. So, I decided Meg would experience it. 

Playgrounds are our first theaters—early attempts at collaboration, at art as offering. They are testing grounds for the creative experience, for imagination, the pyrotechnics of big feelings that can accompany life.

On the playground, I wanted to give Meg everything I’d heard on the cast recording and seen in advertisements—extravagance, backstage melodrama, rehearsals and scenic drops, chorus girls and dressing rooms. 

I wanted to give her stage magic and grandeur, beautifully costumed characters on a boat navigating the burnished lake beneath the opera house. I wanted to scare off whatever was haunting her, to conjure candelabras up from the sand and clay and layers of Floridian limestone beneath our feet.  

But despite my gathering of props and costuming (white mask fashioned from construction paper and yarn, black cape borrowed from the classroom dress-up bin) and my insistence to my classmates that I needed them, no one cared to put on a play with me. 

Meg was unable to leave the classroom for recess, so I stationed myself in front of the windows where she could see me. I checked the laces on my shoes which I hadn’t yet learned to tie by myself, then raised my arms. Inside, our teacher hit play on the cassette player. She stood beside Meg at the window, Meg who watched with her hands pressed to the glass. 

In a pale pink shirt and short jean overalls, I danced alone to the aria in Hannibal, one of the three fictional operas in Phantom, whose lyrics are a plea: Think of me, Remember me, Promise me you’ll try. I sang to myself, hoping my movements would match the music in Meg’s ears. 

The Phantom of the Opera is a strange piece of art for a child to be drawn to. Why was I so compelled? Why not, say, Annie? I put my hands into the air and tried to move like a ballerina, thinking of the Phantom, the story’s central figure, the outcast hidden away, the person in pain because he cannot join in. It was clear Meg was becoming more and more sick. Fluid built up in her face. The little hair she had turned brittle and white. 

Phantom was a way to engage with something I was tapping into, but didn’t yet understand—theater as a way to relay our darkness, our hardest feelings, big and terrible questions given over to art rather than left to smolder within us quietly, art as a way of reaching. I just wanted more time with my friend. 

Dancing for Meg was my first sensation of being immersed in a performance. I was learning then what can happen to an actor if she’s lucky, the prismatic terror and exuberance that comes from being absorbed in a loving act. It felt like flying, like reaching toward the place my friend was going, a way of meeting her there ahead of time. I rose onto the balls of my feet, extending a wobbly leg behind me and holding it in the air. I folded one hand and then another carefully over my heart. 

Meg met me at the door when I finished dancing. She said nothing, but pressed her cheek against mine, and threw her arms around my neck. I felt it in her skin, the curtain rising at the beginning. Little girls, our embrace was fervent, a warmth I would long for with every opening night bouquet for the rest of my life. 

Our time together in which to learn about the world was grotesquely limited. This is true for us all. In the schoolyard, I was preparing myself for her absence, trying to ward off death, to get closer to everything I could not know. Meg died before we turned six. I wore a navy blue dress to her funeral and carried a white rose. 

In September 2022, it was announced that The Phantom of the Opera would end its New York City run after 35 years, holding the title of longest-running musical in Broadway history. I was also 35, as Meg would have been had she lived. Shows close, of course. Every one comes to an end. But I’d been living in New York City for nearly 15 years and had never seen the production. 

On a Wednesday evening earlier this year, I took the train to West 44th Street with my nine-year-old son—so young, so much older than Meg ever was. His excitement beside me as we sat at the back of the Majestic Theater was almost enough. I almost thought I didn’t need anything more. 

“What happens?” he asked. He wanted to know about the mysterious composer, the white mask. “What’s it about?” Love, jealousy, atonement, revenge, art. Missing people. “Is any of it true,” he asked. I hesitated, thinking of Meg, of the ways I’d been trying to offer her something real, something of life. 

There was truth in it. I learned about events that inspired Gaston Leroux’s novel, how the falling chandelier was inspired by a counterweight coming through the opera roof, how there were rumors of a ghost after the skeleton of a former ballet pupil was discovered, that there is, in fact, a lake beneath the Paris Opera House, home to catfish and used to train Parisian firefighters to swim in the dark. 

A ghost light sat in the corner of the stage set for the opening scene. It begins with a prologue, the rundown opera house years after the main events of the play. There is an auction, opera ephemera being sold to the highest bidder—a poster, a music box, and Lot 666, a chandelier in pieces. 

The overture arrived, and Meg’s face with it, her tiny hands pressed down over the headphones of my Walkman. When the actors finally appeared, they were, for me, Floridian children caught in the haze of the opening scene, returning to what was. Squeezing my son’s hand, I saw Meg everywhere—in the velvet, the raucous applause, the heavy, tasseled curtains. She was there, blooming with it all. I had to look away from the play, and focused instead on the gold proscenium arch. There were clusters of gold angels there, winged creatures before the blackness of backstage, the boundaries of what we can know.  

I knew this was how the show began, with the chandelier rising. There were wild cheers from the audience for a show so very near its final night, dust being blown off the story, a return to when everyone was alive and together. But I’d forgotten how it ends: with Meg—the show’s ballet chorus girl, the friend waiting in the wings—Meg alone and holding the mask, and the Phantom vanished in a puff of smoke, not killed, not caught, disappeared through a trapdoor, gone somewhere now, somewhere beyond imagination.