TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Every piece of art is a time capsule — every poem, every essay, every memoir. It’s a capturing of a very specific time in your life. It’s also a capturing of that time inside a specific version of YOU, a specific consciousness that is processing and writing about it. The facts of the past don’t change over time, but our relationship to the facts does. When we revisit the past, we find it a changed place. We are the ones who change it, with our new perspective and knowledge.

For example, if I were writing my memoir now, it would be a different book. I’d bring my current understanding, and my current emotional state, to every personal story, every conversation, every memory. If I wrote the book twenty years from now, it would be yet another book. If I wrote about my childhood now, I would describe it differently than I would have described it when I was in it.

When the consciousness behind the narrative changes, so does the narrative. When the storyteller is transformed, so is the story.

However — and this is a big however — when the poem or essay or book is finished, the life continues. The work is frozen in time, and its narrator stays frozen in time, too. The Maggie Smith who narrates my memoir lives between those two covers. I’ve had to leave her there, to thank her for her service, and move on. I’m not exactly that person anymore. I don’t feel now the way she felt back then.

Sometimes when I think of that version of me, she seems very far away, and I remember how afraid and shellshocked she was, how unsure of the future, and I want to tell her I’m amazed at what she made when everything was falling apart.

Today’s poem reminds me to feel tenderness toward the earlier versions of me. It reminds me that we should acknowledge our past selves more. Just think of what earlier versions of you were able to endure. Bless them for that.

How to Dress a Star
by Nicholas Goodly

When I was four more than anything else
I wanted to wear the same costume     every day

a gift of printed-on polyester
worn like a second skin 

I was the most flamboyant color     at all times
a solid-karat morpher

ranger in the grocery aisle picking a cereal
ranger sliding backward down an orange slide

ranger with metallic wrist cuffs
too far up on the forearms

ranger fighting the fabric sliding up his crotch
I wore the costume down to ribbons

I was naive as a soap bubble
my god did I believe things hard     back then

I confess I make art
to save some part of the whole

I want to cover every note
croon my flaws into salvation

I grab a microphone in front of a crowd
thirsting for melody

and sing the scales
I evoke the past to repair it

play with the pieces of my origins
until the head pops off

I can mend the suit be patient
I can make a path for all of us

"How to Dress a Star" by Nicholas Goodly from STAR POWER © 2026 Nicholas Goodly. Used by permission of the poet and Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.