The Real Life Ms. Frizzle: Kelly Peach
I started writing this months ago and never closed the tab in my browser. Occasionally dipping in to add a memory, change the phrasing, always with a painful desire to get closer to expressing my appreciation in the most accurate and appropriate way possible. It was a priority that I wanted to be reminded of daily. Then on the morning of Monday, April 13th, I decided that I could close it and get to it later. A few hours later I received the email letting me know that Kelly Peach had passed away.
Now I sit with the disappointment that I wasn’t able to share these words with her directly. The stakes felt so high. I needed to let her know how much her vivacious spirit had impacted me before she was gone. As time went on, I pressured myself to make it even more perfect. The guilt that I hadn’t done it yet only assuaged by a promise to myself that I would construct a piece of writing that was nearly divine in execution. Phrased in such a way to guarantee it would be received with overwhelming gratitude. It would be so moving that she wouldn’t be able to resist laughter and tears as little details once forgotten came back into the light.
In short, I wanted Kelly to feel just a pinch of what she offered me in our short time together. But every time I sat down to write, it felt like I was saying goodbye. And that’s because I was. And it never felt right to share that with her while she was still here, still fighting.
With that, I invite you to get to know my experience of the great Kelly Peach, the closest thing to a real life Ms. Frizzle I’ve ever encountered.
As our pack of curious hooligans journeyed towards the horizon of the desert night, she approached and asked if I had ever been scuba diving. We didn’t know each other very well yet and I was peaking on acid so I felt a bit vulnerable. Just as I admitted that I had not been scuba diving, she excitedly began her impromptu lesson on the magic of breathing underwater. There we stood, deep in the pitch black desert, stars over head, a thin band of rainbow blinking LEDs in the distance with only the glow of EL wire-necklaces lighting our faces.
This was probably the most one-on-one time we’d ever shared, although we’d known each other through our mutual gang of ragtag desert dwellers for a while. It’s a mysterious thing to meet someone while tripping balls in the desert. In some ways it feels like a much more honest way of getting to know each other. And at the same time, your mind is running on a different operating system so it’s very hard to know what’s what. Needless to say, it can be quite intimate.
One step at a time she began to explain the technique of breathing to move either forward or backward. Then it was my turn. And as she guided me through each inhale and exhale, I began to notice that she was moving towards me and away from me right along with my breathing pattern.
Suddenly I was reconsidering the fundamental nature of reality: “Wait, are we actually underwater? Have we been underwater this whole time? Holy shit.”
I was so struck by what I believed was happening, it was hard to continue. She kept me focused, pulled me back into the flow and I was certain we were actually standing on the floor of the ocean. We’d been underwater our whole lives, and somehow I’d forgotten.
Of course in ACTUAL reality, Kelly, without indicating that she was doing so, simply demonstrated what it would feel like to be underwater in that very instant. In a matter of minutes this witchy woman had me completely mystified.
The magnitude of that experience is hard to capture here, now. On LSD, I’ve often experienced the sense that a profound truth had just been revealed, but that it had been under my nose the whole time. Sometimes it’s familiar, like I’d seen it before, but I hadn’t quite received its profundity. Then it’s so absurdly obvious that it becomes laughable that I hadn’t noticed it previously. In this case, I thought I had realized that humans have been breathing underwater for millennia.
Kelly Peach orchestrated one of the most magical moments I’ve had on playa or off. She transported me beyond the laws of time and space and I was once again filled with that childlike sense of wonder.
But the gift of that moment did not stop there. After we returned home from the playa I received a letter in the mail from her asking if I’d like to be pen pals. I responded that I did and thus began a flurry of creativity and heart-sharing that I simply couldn’t keep up with. She teased that she was making something for me, and in the meantime would send a series of comic postcards that told the story of a recent love in her life. With the final postcard in the series came a callback to the wondrous encounter we shared deep playa: A pop-up of my lesson in underwater breathing.
To this day it is one of the gifts I treasure the most. It has been with me in NYC through several moves and sits in a box with few other invaluable items. I’ve had so many peak experiences on psychedelics over the years, and one thing that became clear very quickly is how temporary they are. So, to have this tangible object commemorating one of my all-time bewildering moments is very meaningful.
Who does this? The detail! The exhales and our bodies actually move back and forth by use of the pull tabs!
After a few journeys together, I realized that Kelly was an expert-level tripper. I wondered where she had learned all of her tricks. Who were the people she had been tripping with? Could I train with her to learn how to do it too? But Kelly brought an equal amount of play, zest and curiosity to mundane, everyday, sober life.
My favorite memory with her is the night of Ethan and Veronica’s marriage party and probably the first time we spent time together not at Burning Man. After an incredibly moving, beautiful, simple ceremony in Sammy’s backyard, one by one people began to go home. Eventually it was just Sam, Kelly and I cackling in a few lawn chairs underneath a string of warm lights. But by 1am even Sam began winding down, and was worried that Kelly and I were going to bother the neighbors.
We had the choice to call it a night, or find a way to keep it going. I’m not a night owl by any stretch, but I remember feeling fresh as a daisy and couldn’t stand the idea of packing it in. With Sam’s house full of people sound asleep and the backyard off-limits, we decided to just start wandering the streets of Los Feliz. We hit that natural flow when two people connect who don’t know each other too well yet and there is an endless amount of material to discuss. We spent hours just gabbing at each other, moving in and out of gut-busting riffs and genuine heart-wide-open connection until dawn was just about to break.
The piece that stands out all these years later was a dark joke she made about how all these weddings with our Burning Man community were fun, but eventually we’d be getting together for funerals, and one of our crew would have to go first. This was precisely what made Kelly such a magnetic presence - the feeling that truly nothing was off the table. The fact that she has become the first to go is perfectly surreal and ironic and in some way feels like a lesson. (That or a demonstration of her commitment to a good, dark punchline, as one friend has pointed out.)
Kelly is probably not aware of just how deeply she made her way into my heart and mind. I’m not sure I was aware of it until I went on one of the most far-out acid trips of my life. For several hours, “I” was gone, unresponsive to my friends as we hiked for 8 miles in Topanga Canyon. There are a blur of memories that I’ve since carved into a narrative that makes enough sense, but for the most part it’s hard to decipher.
What I can recall is that there were moments in which I lost track of chronological order. I couldn’t figure out if we’d ever left Burning Man or not. Usually I felt like my trips to the desert were quite dreamlike, a momentary break from “reality.” But in this headspace, it seemed like maybe it was actually flip flopped? That daily life was the momentary break from the reality of...Burning Man.
I remember a sense that I was cycling through lightness and darkness. This seemed to be both literal and figurative. The brightness of the light was nearly unbearable. It was hard to sustain awareness of it, and each time I seemed to turn my attention away, seeking comfort in the idea of Lauren, wherever she was, as I became overwhelmed.
In the midst of this cycling, I had the feeling that our crew of consciousness-exploring maniacs kept trying to meet up throughout time and space. And that it was not so easy to do. We all kept trying to find each other as we moseyed down what I can only assume is the actual pathless path. One of the faces I kept running into in this deep-mind hypnosis was Kelly Peach. Another of the dark cycles would pass and there she would be, just laughing like it was all more than perfectly fine. Only in retrospect did I fully make sense of what was being communicated through her laughter. It was something akin to “You don’t need to be afraid. The more you resist, the more painful it will be.”
Kelly sits in an elite group of people I know who seem to have completely embodied the quality of the cosmic riddle. At this moment, I can hear her saying with complete sincerity, “Oh, you’re not taking this seriously, are you?” Her ability to riff and turn anything into a joke was off the charts. Like a great comic, she could take any piece of her environment and bring it into the schtick. I’m not sure I know a better improviser and I’m not sure she ever even took classes or had any intentions with regards to comedy. She truly just lived that #YesAnd… lifestyle. It’s part of why she was such an infectious person to be around.
And while I could never keep up, she never let that prevent me from getting in the sandbox with her. We both knew she was lightyears ahead, but still she’d play with me as if I was an equal.
There was one instance when I think I really started to feel into the world that Kelly was actively inviting everyone to join her in. We were in the desert (on acid again) and a bunch of us were laying in the dirt and giggling. It was a little bit like a cosmic follow the leader where it seemed that we were actually communicating with our minds.
Next thing we knew, someone was standing above us and asked what we were doing. Without missing a beat Kelly said something like “Oh we’re just trying out different ideas. You wanna try one?” I burst into laughter as it was such a perfectly unexpected way of describing what we were doing. She then mimed as if she was pulling an invisible, but physical idea out of her head, and passed it to me, which I proceeded to put in my mouth to taste for myself.
I was filled with glee. Something about the way this motion was playing out gave me a new perspective on the way humans share ideas. The gesture perfectly articulating how we constantly share ideas with each other (often unknowingly) that have little more substance than the space we were passing back and forth in our hands. It feels basic now, but in the moment it had such an impact. While I tend to be verbose and a bit serious-minded, Kelly brings such levity to these exchanges.
Looking back now, that experience was essentially my real life version of the scene from Hook in which the Lost Boys help Peter remember how to use his imagination by having a food fight with decadent, colorful, completely invisible food. It filled me with a child-like joy that I am sad to say I rarely touch into these days. Kelly served as a reminder that adulthood needn’t be so serious and I am devastated that she won’t be here to pull me back when I need a good wake up call.
I remember laying in the back of a 1989 VW Camper Van parked somewhere on the southern coast of Iceland a couple of years ago when she texted me that her breast cancer had metastasized to her hip bone. It hit me pretty hard and tears filled my eyes as I realized that life was immediately, and forever changed.
Finding Burning Man in my early 20’s opened my eyes up to a whole world of possibility that was previously inconceivable. It illuminated self-imposed constraints at every turn and presented a taste of what is available when I let those go. The people I met were magic sorcerers, superheroes and wizards who invited me to go on my very own ‘choose your own adventure’ with them.
Perhaps no one exemplified that spirit and invitation more fully than Kelly Peach. And as I laid in my sleeping bag surrounded by the beauty of Iceland, the idea that she might not be with me for the rest of the adventure was heartbreaking. It marked the beginning of the chapter where I’d lose my adventure buddies. I suppose I always knew this, but it seemed to be so far away at the time. In that moment, any remaining naïveté about our story not coming to an end, came to an end. As far out as we’d all gone, none of us would escape our mortality. We would all have to go, and it was only a matter of time.
KP and I social distancing before it was cool.
In February, I was able to see Kelly one last time. Sam asked if I might be able to take her to see Lauren in Harry Potter and The Cursed Child in San Francisco, and I am so grateful that he did. When I picked her up from her apartment I saw those same radiant eyes, but the frail frame of a woman who was deep in her battle with cancer. Only two days prior she’d gone through another round of chemo and she was toughing it out to take a spin around town with me.
Adorned in a rhinestone-encrusted beanie, black leather moto jacket, flamboyant purple pants with her glittery cane in hand, I helped her down the stairs and we got into a car to go to the theater. Immediately she’s cracking jokes and weaving our driver into our conversation. Same ol’ KP.
We used her Cancer Card to get complimentary ticket upgrades and watched the double-header performances from the best seats in the house. While the show is a dazzling display of visual effects and theatrical mastery, I was engrossed by the vision of my friend. Her tenacious spirit still shining through.
In between shows we went to a diner and I sat in reverence as she talked about her experience with radiation and all of the side effects and implications of a massive amount of pharmaceuticals intended to heal and mitigate the pain. All the while she had me in stitches. The depth of the pain gave her more material and she wasn’t wasting any of it. I then watched her struggle to stand up and delicately walk herself to the restroom and back and was left flabbergasted.
She was on an incredibly rigid diet of strange smoothies and coconut oil. The Doctors told her that although the chemo appeared to be working, she may die of starvation. She had to be diligent with her use of energy because her body was only able to take in so many calories. The fact that she chose to spend that limited energy with me was a gift that is almost too generous to sit with. It brings tears of gratitude to my eyes now as I think about it.
Kelly, thank you for squeezing the juice from every second we had together. You taught me more than I could have asked for, and I know the lessons will keep coming even if you’re not with us in the same way. I will so miss your magic eyes, irresistible charm and relentless, mischievous spirit. I don’t know how much more time I have, but I vow to play more every day in your honor.