THIS IS AN ADAPTATION OF THE SLIDESHOW I HAVE PRESENTED FOR MORTIFIED IN NEW YORK, BOSTON, AND D.C.

“…

My mom saved everything of mine, all my childhood art and papers. She never thought, neither did I, that it would end up onstage in New York City. But that’s what happens sometimes. In the school essay you see on the screen behind me are the three words that led me to excavate my “gnomes stuff” and get to the bottom of this long-hidden, shameful (mortifying!) mystery: Did I believe in gnomes as an 11-year-old boy?

The essay was titled “My Favorite Place,” and describes a lighthouse in my home state of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “Gnomes dwell freely,” I write in this nonfiction essay. Magical thinking, sure. That’s a given. I still do that. I still believe in ghosts and psychic abilities and heaven and telekinesis. But let’s examine some evidence and see if we can get closer to the WHY.

Gnomes were my obsession for about a year, according to the dozens of items in my archive. I used pen, pencil, colored pencil, magic thinking marker, paint, oil pastels, crayons, and other media to create my gnome art.

Time for a book report? Gnomes.

The book I was reporting on was, of course, this:

It’s inscribed: “TO SCOTT, LOVE GRANDMA & GRANDMA SHRAKE, 12-25-1981.” It’s in pristine condition, which puzzled my nowadays self until I remembered that I had checked the library’s copy out so many times that they cut me off. So I had to get my own copy, but by then the obsession had passed. But while still under the gnomes’ spell, I studied it like a guidebook for living. I wanted to be a gnome. Being a book by a couple of Dutch perverts, it had plenty of gnudity, too:

Then spring came, and it was time for a science-class diarama project on the subject of ENDANGERED SPECIES. For me, what else? Gnomes again. I wanted to share my encyclopedic gnowledge with my classmates and enlist them in the struggle to prevent gnomic extinction. Here is half of the piece:

Here is one of the notecards I prepared for my presentation:

And here is the story I tried to tell on the diarama. Ever the perfectionist even as a child, I wrote two versions.

On the second page of the first version my mom tries to help me with a little editing.

Give me Rewrite!:

By page two, I have once again lost my tenuous hold on reality.

An illustration:

But I was not content to just tell, I wanted to SHOW my classmates that gnomes were real. On the left panel of the diarama, which I cropped out above, is this caption and series of photos:

I can’t remember how my classmates reacted to my science diarama. Probably not well.

So, why? I think I saw gnomes as like little pocket-sized ersatz grandparents to shepherd me safely from the gnown terrain of elementary school into the scary new terrain of middle school. They’re helpmates.

I identified with them. Like me, gnomes are short. Like childhood me, they live a traditional lifestyle. Like me, they are real. Fictional and real, at the same time. Which is what we call… Magical.