Connecting the Dots

I would stick them down at the head of a boardroom table. And in the grocery store. I would put them in Value Village and at Costco and in some very expensive store, the name of which I can't pronounce. I would create yellow-stickered artist areas in television studios and radio announce booths. I would put them in church. And in every school. I would place them in court and in Parliament, in hospitals and in jails.

I would lay them down in my living room, creating a refuge in case of argument. I would install them in my children's bedrooms (for them to use) and on my and my husband's sides of the bed. I would put them on every porch on my street. Yellow stickers would grow like dandelions in every front yard.

Even though I wouldn't need to, I would take them outside, to open fields, to hushed forests, to shoulders-of-the-road. I would take them to the top of the highest hill I could climb. And to the edge of the sea.

For the length of a song, anyone could enter that space and feel the magic of changing the world without being seen, of being powerful and yet invisible, of watching masks parade by and seeing masks fall away. By stepping inside that unusual, open-ended box (bounded by a dotted line, allowing you to step in or out, or to pass), anyone could take permission to be someone they didn't know they were. Someone both braver and smaller.

Inside each of these spaces, there would be room for a small open object, turned upward in an invitation: a hat, a cup, a guitar case or a cardboard box. In order to open up this receiving-place, the singer would have to not sing, but instead kneel down in a way so similar to praying, to allow others to take part in the rhythm of give-and-take, even if they weren't intending to, even if their eyes were fixed on something up ahead, and they were barely aware that they were giving anything as they walked by.

There would be millions of these little stages, defined by yellow dots, everywhere in the world. If you looked at them from a distance, they might appear as a map, a map of towns or subway stations, or like like a field of stars in the sky.