During a recent book tour event with poet Kate Baer, she asked what I’ve been watching on TV. I confessed my love for horror — and zombie movies and shows in particular. This is a feat, considering how my imagination used to run rampant in the dark after watching something scary.
My kids also get frightened when we watch anything the least bit scary, so I told Kate about a trick that I’ve used with them: I tell them about craft service.
Craft service tables, for those who do not know, are the tables full of food for the crew on movie sets. Have I ever seen one in real life? No, I’ve never been on set. But I’ve seen pictures, and yes, I have an imagination.
I tell my kids that, somewhere off screen, there is a table full of snacks for the actors — maybe bagels and cream cheese if it’s early, and probably a coffee station. Surely actors, like writers, need coffee.
Yes, when Voldemort shows up in the Harry Potter movies, or the Trunchbull in “Matilda” is chasing the girl and Miss Honey through the old house, or that man in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” reaches into another man’s chest and pulls out his beating heart, I bring up craft service. I remind my kids, particularly my young son, that these are just regular grown-ups in costumes, many of them moms and dads, and any minute, the director will yell “cut,” and everyone will take a break. Voldemort will walk over to the craft service table for a snack, and in that moment, he’s not someone evil at all. He’s just a guy eating a bag of chips, trying not to get crumbs all over himself. This image always makes my son laugh, then he adds his own details: “And then maybe he wipes his hands on his costume, and it gets all greasy, and no one wants to tell him!”
I tell the kids that maybe this villain-on-break texts or calls his children to tell them when he will be home, just like any other grown-up does from work. Maybe he will make silly faces at them over FaceTime with that ridiculous makeup on and make them laugh. Maybe he texts a long string of emoji and GIFs that make little sense, the way my own dad does now and then. (Why would a “congratulations” text be followed by a dancing hot dog? I don’t get it. But that’s my dad.)
Maybe when the director yells “cut,” Harry Potter and Voldemort start laughing about some old private jokes, and they walk off toward the craft service table together. Maybe Miss Honey and the Trunchbull have a cup of coffee together. Who knows? They’re just regular people whose job is pretending, and when their break is over, they’ll go back to pretending again.
“Craft service” came to me as a comfort strategy for my children because of something that happened to me years ago. I watched “The Ring” and started having nightmares. I would wake in the night and picture that dead, longhair girl spider-crawling from a wall across the floor. I hated even getting up in the dark and walking across the hall to the bathroom. (My imagination can be a good thing, except in cases like this.)
Then, one night, flipping through the channels, I caught part of the 2003 MTV Movie Awards. When they announced the winner for Best Villain, this adorable little girl walked up onstage to receive her golden popcorn. That was the girl from “The Ring”? That regular, sweet-looking girl, who was the same age then that my daughter is now?
After seeing her out of costume and makeup, I was no longer haunted by her character. She wasn’t crawling through the apartment anymore after dark. She was just a girl who had been paid to play dress-up.
“Craft service” as a strategy is about pointing out the artifice to children — showing them that things are not what they seem. That long shadow? Click on the light, and it’s just your hockey stick leaning against the wall. That sound in the next room? Look, it’s just the dog snoring. That terrifying undead monster from the movie? She’s just a little girl, scarfing down a muffin at the craft service table.
There are times, mid-movie, when I pull out my phone, Google the scary character’s name, and show the kids what the person really looks like, smiling at a film premiere or caught by paparazzi while walking the dog — nothing to be afraid of.
And it works! My son told me once that he has used “craft service” when I’m not with him, when he has watched movies with his father or his grandparents. He pictures the actors awkwardly jockeying for their favorite kind of cookie or the last granola bar. He reminds himself that none of this is real; they’re pretending.
That is the easy part of parenting.
But sometimes, the bad or scary things are what they seem, and there is no “craft service” to explain them away. Covid? It is as bad as my kids think it is. Actually, it’s worse, because (thank goodness) they are not privy to the data and images we see every day. Climate change? It is absolutely that bad and then some. There is no Googling a forest fire or a melting glacier or a hurricane and showing my children the harmless, off-the-job image.
“Craft service” does not work when what scares them is real. What then? In those cases, as parents, what do we do?
In my poem “Good Bones,” I wrote: “The world is at least/fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/estimate, though I keep this from my children.” If you read those lines and are tempted to argue with me about their statistical accuracy, let me remind you: I am not a mathematician; I’m a poet. It’s a metaphor. The world is wonderful and terrible, and some days, we can feel it tipping more in one direction than the other.
That strategy I describe in “Good Bones” — shielding my children, keeping them unaware of the terrible parts of the world — worked for me when I wrote that poem. It was 2015. My son was 2, my daughter 6. I could keep the dangers of the world from them at those ages, and to the best of my ability, I did.
But now, they are older, and they know more about this world, both the wonderful parts and the terrible parts. So we talk. That’s the new strategy: age-appropriate conversations. My children have questions about things that “craft service” cannot explain away, because the dangers are real — no costumes, no scripts, no pretending. Most of those questions don’t have easy, comforting answers, but I do my best to balance information with reassurance.
Because the world is half wonderful, too, and when I am with my children, I see that clearly — no tricks or feats of imagination needed.
The world is half wonderful, and that’s also a conservative estimate.
Maggie Smith is the best-selling author of several books, including “Goldenrod,” “Good Bones,” “Keep Moving” and “Keep Moving: The Journal,” out on Oct. 26.
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