I wore a disintegrating lace blouse from the 1930s to match the disintegrating interior of a deserted turn-of-the-century train car.
Sometimes living an adventurous life means ignoring posted signs.
…Like the No Trespassing sign in front of this train.

Luckily, instead of posing for a mug shot, we posed for this Instax shot by the incredible Najva Sol.

In fact, over the course of 3 days, we adventured into 4 historic spaces…filled with stories from yesteryear, places that are endangered and close to being torn down or lost forever.

In the film we’re shooting for our Kickstarter project, Revolver (set to go live in September, cohorts and future backers – don’t you worry!), we are traveling to these abandoned spaces and capturing them.

We do this to record them, to let them live forever, to keep them from death.

As a reminder of my adventures, I carry a scar on the thumb of my left hand, right below my knuckle, that kissed a rusted file cabinet from the 1930s, left over in a certain abandoned power plant in Yonkers. It required stitches and a tetanus shot, but I keep going back.

In all of these adventures, I’ve been stopped by the police once. It was for this shoot for Danger Dame, in the then-abandoned McCarren Park Pool, a community pool that opened in 1936 and was shut down sometime in the 80s.

Wearing a gigantic crinoline and rocking a Lucille Ball vibe, I was able to talk my way out of getting arrested. As my friend, Kat Wise says, “If you can’t convince, confuse.”

I confused.

Our exploring skills were put to the test last week, when one of our locations was directly across from the office of the State Police and on a busy highway.

How did we not get caught?

A magical technique I learned from travel partner and house mate, Contessa Montebello, just might have done the trick.

Because goodness knows, we have needed this technique maybe once or twice before…*ahem*
Our minds are powerful magical tools.  Our imaginations can color our realities.

If intelligence headquarters around the world participate in mental cloaking, it’s pretty safe to say there’s something to it.
This is how it works:

• Imagine stepping into a box.  When I do it, I envision a cardboard refrigerator box.
• I make a mental picture of myself walking into a refrigerator sized box, and then both myself and the box becoming invisible.
• Contessa has told me to imagine putting black X’s on every panel of the box to cross out vision.  So, begin by putting an X in your mind, first, across the panel in front of you, then the panel in back of you, then both sides – to your left and right, then above and below.It has worked wonders for me. Once you keep visualizing this, it becomes easier and easier to just “jump in a box” and disappear when you need to vanish for a moment from the public eye.

So far, so good.

You can use the “invisibility box” to cloak yourself in awkward social situations to help yourself from bumping into that someone you might not want to deal with at the moment.

Now back into my invisibility…I’ve got 4 more adventures to go this week where I’ll need it.

Love from this sometimes ghost of a girl….
Vv