Michael Arden

So, you know, having to kind of learn how to not save pieces of tinfoil in the same way.

Yeah.

Metaphorically.

Yeah, no, I can relate.

Absolutely.

I know your grandparents took you to see Sesame Street Live when you were very young.

I think you were about four years old and you said it was a revelatory.

How so?

I couldn't believe that a different world, one that is seemingly imaginary, could be presented in front of me in the real world.

I think something about that, that like through the proscenium that was created in the Chaparral Center, which was like our, you know, the sporting arena in Midland, Texas, they set up shop there.

this portal of the proscenium created a magical world that was three-dimensional, that if I wanted to, I could have run up there and touched.

Something about that, more so than like going to the movies or anything I had witnessed prior, like really blew my mind.

I couldn't believe it.

Something about the depth of that, the dimensionality of it, that something that is imaginary existed in the same dimension as something real.

It's magic.

Oh, my God.

I'm still obsessed with it.

I just came today here from watching a put-in understudy rehearsal of Maybe Happy Ending, and I'm still mesmerized by it.

Oh, I can't wait to talk to you about that play.

That play.