Ghost Light

Happy pre-production week! The only people who celebrate pre-production week work for the Observer… and it’s really less of a celebration than a nonstop thrill ride of planning, populating various spreadsheets, editing, assigning photographs, and lots and lots of emails. (And that’s just the editorial side!) It’s super-fun, in a nerdy way. But fear not, I still set aside a day to press pause on the Ann Arbor Observer so I could go and observe Ann Arbor. 

It started with a trip to Bamboo to meet Jennifer from Ann Arbor SPARK. She took me on a tour of the building, which she told me used to be the Kiwanis building. This thrilled me, because two days earlier, I learned that very same fact during Leadership A2Y Community Services Day. Learning something during a webinar or by reading it online can certainly be interesting, but nothing makes it stick quite like going and seeing it for yourself. En mi opinión, bodily experience > digital experience; guess that’s why I work for a print magazine. 

We chatted about Ann Arbor, its business ecosystem, and how a large part of her role at SPARK is to create connections, which I think sounds like a very fun job. Also, Jennifer showed me these signs that Bamboo kept up from the original building. I thought it was so cool — they could have taken them down, but they chose to preserve this bit of history. 

Speaking of preserving a bit of history, my next “meeting” was with Tara at the Michigan Theater. I say “meeting” because it felt a lot more like a couple of friends hanging out. We went into the main theater, lit only by a ghost light set up for the Jordan Klepper show that night. When I asked what a ghost light was, Tara gave me a technical explanation, but also told me there’s a superstition about warding off any ghosts. We agreed that the Michigan Theater doesn’t feel haunted, which naturally led to a conversation about places we’ve been that DID feel haunted. 

Other topics of conversation, as we took a tour of the Michigan Theater by the light of her cell phone (she couldn’t find the lightswitches and then we just decided to go with it): journalistic integrity, Florida farm workers, story as history, the Michigan’s upcoming 100th anniversary, the Michigan’s very old carpet (she told me it’s only been replaced once, and when a patch wears out, they cut out the exact patch from some extra carpet they have and fit it in so perfectly that you’d never guess it had been replaced), how incredibly cool the new CEO Molly Rowan-Deckart is (if you ever meet her, ask her to tell you her Rage Against the Machine story), being Michigan transplants, stuff we’ve made that we’re proud of, the importance of community, and honestly a lot more.

The meeting was a reminder that while it’s important for me to report on Ann Arbor, to stay informed about its current and historic narratives, it’s equally important for me to go out and be in Ann Arbor, and create my own narrative with it. Experience is an alchemy that transforms a place into a home.