We’ve all been to magical places. Lands and times that while we’re in them allow us to deny the urges that make us lame.

As a youngster one such place was a hunting cabin in the Catskills where I saw my first Playboy. My buddies and I flipped through the best and worst pictorials of 1988 without fear, because we were fairly certain that a nun’s power to see and hear all – which kept (keeps) us St. Paul’s kids leashed in like an invisible fence – could not penetrate a mountain shed in the outer reaches of Delaware County.

As an adult, another happened to be some guy’s lawn on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where a pretty girl complimented my hand sewn Mardi Gras cape. “Aren’t you a pretty little princess?” she said. And for a few hours, by God, I was.

All of us have been there. For some it might have happened while wandering through the logistical and cultural wonders of New York City, or the alien Redwood trails of Northern California. Many have visited worlds beyond Hogwarts in the wave pool at Enchanted Forest and underneath the stars at the Unadilla Drive-in. Under the Red Mill Bridge in Norwich, cars going over sound like freak thunder claps, the loudest you’ve ever heard, and rock-skipping records are set every day in the summer. Or at least they used to be. Magic can happen anywhere; on the other side of the world or down the street.