Drunk on Barbara Eden

You grew up in VA housing—repurposed army barracks known as Flavet Villages—in Gainesville, Florida. The buildings sagged with humidity and history, not far from an alligator swamp and a patch of forest that always smelled like something prehistoric had recently bathed. Perched on a branch at the edge of that forest was a Mynah bird, the same one, every evening. It became a ritual—your father and you, walking out at dusk to visit the bird and carry on what felt like real conversations with it. The swamp behind you would breathe out its musk, that potent stench of low tide and alligator dung. Most would gag. But for you, the smell was oddly soothing—earthy, primal, even sublime. It made you feel tethered to something vast and mysterious.

One evening, while chatting with the Mynah bird under a bruised pink sky, you heard a distant radio drifting through the humid air. Juanita Hall was singing “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific. Her voice wrapped itself around you like vapor. The song, with its haunting promise of a paradise just out of reach, was meant to stir longing—but you didn’t feel any. Your paradise was right there, next to your father, speaking to a magical bird on the lip of an enchanted forest. No ache. No yearning. Just presence.

You didn’t understand longing—at least not yet.

Longing came for you in 1965, when you discovered I Dream of Jeannie. Barbara Eden appeared on your screen in chiffon and sequins, smiling from inside her genie bottle—a velvet dream chamber lined with pink and purple satin brocade, the walls glowing with embedded glass jewels like shards of a pearl sky. You didn’t just want to meet Jeannie. You wanted to live with her. Inside that bottle. Forever. The ache you’d been spared during “Bali Ha’i” finally found you. You didn’t just want the bottle—you needed it. Later you learned it was actually a painted Jim Beam decanter. Appropriate. You were drunk on Barbara Eden, intoxicated by the fantasy of never having to grow up.