It is with great pleasure and relief that I report to you the closing of a most vexing mystery.
And last night, we saw the Meow Wolf documentary… more on that below.
The Mystery of the Meow Wolf Postcard
Back in early June we received an unsigned postcard summoning us to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I explained the particulars of the case when we put out a call for clues.
We had our suspects, but we couldn’t solve it… until Lisa caught a break.
Case Closed
For the past 7 years (with one exception), Lisa and her longtime friend Roslyn have chosen a single day to walk the ~35 mile perimeter of Manhattan. The event is called The Great Saunter (although they never do it with the group or even on the same day). This year, they did their Great Saunter in November.
When you walk 3 dozen miles with a person in a single day, the conversation tends to cover a lot of ground. Roslyn, who had been a character in our wedding puzzle, mentioned that she had visited Meow Wolf.
With that little bit of information, Lisa unravelled the puzzle that had been vexing us for 5 months.
We had suspected so many people from the escape room and immersive theater worlds that we completely neglected to scrutinize suspects from other facets of our lives.
Meow Wolf Documentary
In other, related news, while we still haven’t had a chance to visit Meow Wolf (and we truly want to), we did go see their documentary in the theater last night. It was equal parts entertaining and interesting.
If this kind of thing interests you, it’s now available for rent or purchase via the interweb.
A few hot-take thoughts:
- The documentarians who pulled this together from old and new footage did a fantastic job. The film was energetic.
- Meow Wolf’s origin story was legitimately riveting. Watching a collection of talented anarchistic artists struggle with success, organization, process, and commercialization was compelling.
- The friends who’ve been to Meow Wolf and described it to us did an amazing job.
- The film ended exactly where I was expecting, which was a declaration of aspirational commercial goals. This was an elaborate and artful commercial. I can’t blame them
- Hearing someone say something like, “we don’t want to become like Disney” with contempt in their voice made me smile.