To Feel Starstuff

Or, maybe life is just one big dog pile

This essay is the second in a series about the best podcast ever—Mystery Show.

The podcast, which ran for just six episodes between May and July of 2015, is ostensibly about solving mysteries,¹ and Mystery Show’s host and lead detective, Starlee Kine, is an adept storyteller and sleuth. 

But above the mysteries, what makes Mystery Show the best podcast in history is its ability to unearth the hidden connections that link us together. To commemorate the release of Mystery Show, I’m writing a series of six essays that reflect on each of the podcast’s six episodes. My first essay, Unlocking the Mystery (Show), explored memory and how our brains turn us all into liars. 

Britney, Mystery Show’s second episode, was released on May 30, 2015, and so I’m releasing my second essay in the series today. This essay, accompanying Mystery Show’s second case about Britney Spears and a little-known book, dives into the hidden connections that weave us all together. But before we get to Britney we have to talk briefly about karaoke. 

Go and brush your shoulders off (and remember you’re brushing off stardust)

On the most fundamental level, we are all connected. 

Carl Sagan’s PBS show Cosmos first introduced me to the mind-bending idea that we are bound together in a cosmic web. After watching Cosmos as a kid, I knew on an intellectual level that “the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.” 

But there’s a difference between knowing something and feeling it. I’d known since watching Cosmos that we all connected, but I really felt the weight of these connections on a visceral level while singing karaoke in a hidden club, nestled next to a dentist’s office in a Manhattan mid-rise in December 2018. 

On the surface, karaoke is an individual performance, where you belt your heart out for friends and strangers. This kind of individual karaoke experience is lovely and I had felt it a few times at karaoke bars with my partner in Boston. But that night in December, where time warped as I pulled a karaoke all-nighter, was when I felt karaoke as a cosmic experience. 

Towards the end of the night, as I expelled every ounce of my being into the air shout-singing the bridge to System of a Down’s Chop Suey, I felt the cosmic intensity of our shared connections vibrating the room and everyone in it. These are the moments in life that reveal our hidden connections, that highlight with full-bodied intensity that we are all made of stars—and that those stars aren’t lonely orbs in an empty universe, but entire worlds linked together in splendor. 

These hidden links are also the fuel for Mystery Show’s second episode about a book that almost no one has read. Well, no one except, perhaps, Britney Spears. 

Mystery Show Case #2: Britney

Britney Spears has been in the public eye since her childhood days in the Mickey Mouse Club on the A-list since her first single, …Baby One More Time, topped the charts in late 1998. Billions of people have heard her music or seen photos of her; hundreds of millions have consumed reality shows and gossip about her life; millions have seen her perform live. And with the legal drama of Britney’s conservatorship, intimate details of her life have been exposed to the world. Even someone like me, who has never felt a strong connection to Britney’s music, knows more about her life than I know about the lives of many longtime friends.² 

So, if you think of mystery as simply hidden details about a particular person or subject, then Britney is one of the least mysterious people around. Yet mystery is about more than just a particular gap in knowledge. In fact, I’d say that mystery is more about the why of a particular event or person than anything else. And when it comes to Britney the sea of why is vast. 

The second episode of Mystery Show revolves around one particularly mysterious why embedded in a photo of Britney that was taken on March 18, 2008 outside of a restaurant called Paradise Cove.³

At first glance there is nothing mysterious about this photo—at least to me. Britney finds herself inside a storm of paparazzi, being led to a car by her dad. The photo does make me feel sad and empathetic for Britney’s complete lack of privacy, for the way that celebrity insists on flattening the entirety of a person down into a bland object of fascination; but it doesn’t spark any mysterious thoughts in my mind. 

But, wait. Zoom in on Britney’s hands. 

Britney is holding a book. And this book is where the mystery begins. 

Britney is one of the most photographed celebrities, and, I was surprised to learn, she is often photographed holding books. Almost all of the books she is photographed with are best sellers.⁴ So, a celebrity who likes to read books is photographed with a book. Where’s the mystery? 

Well, see if you can make out the title and author of the zoomed in book. I actually couldn’t, but, thanks to the collective knowledge of the internet, I know that the book in question is called To Feel Stuff by an author named Andrea Seigel. Andrea is the one who brings this mystery to Starlee’s attention.

I hadn’t heard of To Feel Stuff, but then again I also hadn’t heard of another book that Britney was photographed with called The Horse Whisperer, which has apparently sold 16 million copies. But, To Feel Stuff is not a best seller. Amazon currently ranks it #3,030,325 in its overall best seller rank. Even in Amazon’s subgenre for Ghost Fiction, To Feel Stuff is the 10,073rd most popular book. 

Mystery Show also investigates To Feel Stuff’s popularity—but instead of doing an Amazon search, Starlee, the show’s host, calls around to a bunch of bookstores. None of the booksellers she talks to have heard of To Feel Stuff and none of them have any copies of it in stock. But, in a prime example of why Mystery Show is awesome, Starlee does meet a bookseller whose parents have won the lottery, leading her to conclude that:

The odds of finding a bookseller whose parents had won the lottery were better than finding a bookseller who’d heard of To Feel Stuff.

This is the central mystery of the second episode of Mystery Show—how the three-millionth most popular book in the world ended up in the hands of the world’s most popular celebrity.⁵

Solving this case is, in one sense, pretty straightforward—find Britney Spears, ask her if she read a book called To Feel Stuff and whether or not she liked it. But, of course, getting in touch with one of the most famous people in the world is not an easy task. 

Or is it?

Starlee starts her search with a discovery: 

You would be surprised how many people you pass every day on the street who have a hidden connection to Britney Spears. One it turns out they are very skittish about revealing.

A couple of phone calls and a post on a message board give Starlee promising leads to Britney’s stylist, former bodyguard, and perhaps even a direct line to her supposed fiancé.⁶ But these promising leads soon go cold, which leads Starlee to another insight:

Herein lies the paradox of Britney Spears: she’s impossible to talk to and yet her every movement is tracked.

Unable to connect with Britney through other people, Starlee tries to connect with Britney in the world. Of all the places that Britney has been photographed over the years, one location pops up more than any other: the mall, specifically the Oaks Mall in Thousand Oaks, California. Starlee’s quest to solve the mystery takes her to this mall in the hope that she will run into Britney. But, while Starlee talks to people who have helped Britney try on clothes or served her lattes, she doesn’t get any closer to actually solving the mystery. 

Starlee’s detective work then takes her to Paradise Cove, the scene of the mysterious photo that started her quest. Britney and her family went to Paradise Cove on March 18, 2008 to celebrate her mom’s birthday. March 18, 2008 was a Tuesday. This seems like extraneous information that has no bearing on the case, except that, apparently, everyone at the restaurant that Starlee talks to takes Tuesday as their personal sabbath. No one there has ever seen Britney; no one there ever worked on a Tuesday.

These failed attempts to meet Britney are demoralizing, but the true quandary comes when Starlee realizes that her obsession with finding Britney in public is providing more fuel to our unhealthy obsession with celebrity—the exact kind of obsession that keeps Britney holed up in her house in the first place. This leaves Starlee with just one choice.

The only option left was to get to her the most old-fashioned way of all: by paying for access.

It turns out that a meet and greet ticket for Britney’s Las Vegas residency requires $2,500 and a passing knowledge of the poetry of Robert Frost. $2,500 is a ridiculous sum of money to pay for a few seconds with a celebrity. But for Starlee, the stakes are even higher than throwing away the median monthly mortgage payment for a house in the state of California. Solving this entire mystery hinges on Starlee’s interaction with Britney. And so, to make sure that she is prepared, Starlee calls the Ticketmaster customer service line. 

The phone call that she has with a random customer service representative named Dennis makes me tear up every time I listen to this show. This call is why Mystery Show is so phenomenal, why our lives can be enriched when we stop to savor our hidden cosmic connections, and why I’m writing this essay. 

If you don’t listen to the rest of this episode, give yourself the gift of listening to this six and a half minute conversation. The link below starts at that conversation, which occurs 26 minutes into the episode.

Transcribing Starlee and Dennis’ conversation is a paltry stand-in for listening to the vulnerable and beautiful connection of these two strangers transcending the roles of customer service agent and customer. But the written word is my medium and there is one section that I have to highlight here. After a bit of back and forth, Starlee asks Dennis if he has a role model.   

Dennis: Sort of. My mom would probably be the closest one. She did raise me and all my brothers by herself. I have six brothers total. My dad passed away when I was like five.

Starlee: Oh really.

Dennis: Yes, so she had to raise all of us. She had to work two jobs, worked a lot. And we all reminded her of my dad, and she loved my dad. It takes a toll on you, losing someone like that.

Starlee: Do you remember him?

Dennis: Slightly. I remember playing games, like dog pile and stuff and a couple of other things like that.

Starlee: You guys must have had a good dog pile with so many of you. Are you the youngest?

Dennis: I’m the second youngest.

Starlee: You are pretty close to the top of the dog pile or the bottom. How does it work? The little ones get all piled on right?

Dennis: Yeah, it’s just a random game, sometimes you are at the top, sometimes you are at the bottom.

Starlee: That is kind of like Britney. Sometimes she is at top, sometimes she is at the bottom.

Dennis: Yes I guess so.

Starlee: Maybe life is one big dog pile.

Reading this bit of the conversation is powerful, but I cannot emphasize enough how much it is worth listening to the audio to really get a sense of the connection that happens between two strangers. 

After speaking with Dennis, Starlee gets ready to go to Las Vegas to meet and greet Britney. Highlighting again that we all have random serendipitous connections to Britney, Starlee meets a cab driver who drove Britney Spears around Vegas early in her career. Starlee makes it to Planet Hollywood and joins 50 other fans in the line to meet Britney, with the entire mystery hanging in the balance. 

So, did Britney read To Feel Stuff? Did she like it? Both of those questions are answered in the podcast, but I have to leave some mystery in my own essay, so, instead of answering here, I’ll just leave you with this picture of Britney and Starlee. 

Encore

I couldn’t end this essay without going back to Starlee and Dennis. To share a traumatic event with a random stranger on the phone could be sorted into the negative bucket of oversharing. Oversharing is real, of course. To mindlessly dump your problems on another person is to abdicate your own agency, to deny yourself the kindness of believing in your own ability to interpret your life, while simultaneously burdening another person. And yet, there is so much more that we can share, so much of ourselves that we suppress out of fear and a sense of propriety. 

But if we remember that we all come from the stars, if we really listen to the six and a half minute conversation that Starlee and Dennis shared with the world, if we stop to savor a sore-throat-inducing night of karaoke, then I think we can find a different perspective. 

Here’s what I mean.

Maybe life is one big dog pile—a random game that sometimes finds us at the top and sometimes at the bottom, built from the same material that has transformed us from elements in a collapsing star to people in a connected world. 

After listening to the second episode of Mystery Show—opening my aperture to let in as much light as possible, to process and feel the infinite connections that link me to Starlee, to Dennis, to Britney, to the entire universe—I am left with a joyous feeling and a new mystery:

If we’re all made of starstuff, then why do we pretend that we all aren’t connected? 

1. And only the kind of mysteries that can’t be solved by searching the internet.

2. My strongest Britney-related memory is that in middle school my friend’s older brother tried to sell me a bootleg copy of …Baby One More Time.

3. Britney filmed the music video for her 1999 song, Sometimes, at this same restaurant. Presumably buoyed by those fond memories, Britney and her family returned to Paradise Cove to celebrate Britney’s mom’s birthday. The mysterious photo was taken following that dinner.

4. There’s a mixture of self-help (Power of Now, The Secret, The Four Agreements); popular fiction (Eat Pray Love, Horse Whisperer); and classics (Pride and Prejudice, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Candide).

5. In 2008, the year that the photo in question was taken, Britney was the most searched for celebrity on Google.

6. When I listened to this episode of Mystery Show with my partner, she revealed that she too had a hidden connection with Britney—a family friend who had briefly dated Britney.