Seabirds singing like doves

For months I thought there was an owl outside. When I would walk with Bowie in the morning I could hear it. A hoot, maybe, or a song if the notes it strung together were to be believed. I looked for it. When Bowie would force us to a stop so he could sniff a lawn he has sniffed before, I would scan the trees for a glimpse of life, but it never appeared. I’m from the Yukon, I mutter to myself that if anyone should know an owl, out here in the dark and the cold it’s me. But it was never to be seen. It was just an idea hidden in the trees, and without a body it was only a song lingering in the brisk air of the morning.

I don’t really like to sing in front of people. I have sung karaoke because I have been alive, but it was always when I was drunk, and it was always done with hesitance and great coercion, and I only really had the one reliable song — “Werewolves of London”. I don’t have many life lessons, but I will say that everyone should have one go-to karaoke song in their back pocket, just in case. You might have to be alive again, someday.

I don’t like to let people hear me sing because being perceived through my voice is a ghost I have never been able to fully exorcise. My voice fell into a pit of disrepair before I transitioned, and it has never fully climbed back out to the surface. I lived and worked in a very masculine environment before everything shifted for me, and through that I grew a rough and sullen beast in my throat. Sometimes, even now in the early morning, it is deep and rumbly, like a car with the bass turned to an unlistenable degree heard through a kitchen window. I do my best to brighten it, to be heard as I want to be perceived and not as I used to be, but I’m not always successful, and when I forget to put the work into who I am I worry that the part of me slips away.

I have an anxious mind that overthinks all of this, that tells me I’m spinning in place, that I am not real and this is partly why I love Bob’s Burgers. I love anything that holds in its heart the capacity for change, and the desire to turn anxiety into something that feels alive. Every new corner turned, Bob’s slowly learns new things about itself and the people it has given life to. Not just who they have been, but about the people they have become, it gives the stage to their lives and the people who thrive in their orbit. Grows new skin to replace where the past has shed away, leaving the weight of days gone in the dirt as each year provides a new route forward. Even heels and villains, like Jairo the Capoeira instructor, grow and become part of the dirt that build the pathway. Maybe all of these sad and broken people who were once thought so villainous were also struggling to find their feet and purpose and with time they found it, and with it found their voice.

It is a show with infinite heart, that has allowed itself to challenge the ideas of its younger years and finds new words to describe old bones. This is what has helped watching and rewatching the show become a balm for all of my own anxieties. A show that holds in its heart the opportunity to grow into someone new while holding memories of the blood in the body left behind.

It took me longer than I care to admit to realize I could use the bird call app on my phone — Merlin Bird ID heads rise and be counted — to record the owl who haunted the morning when Bowie and I were out walking. Part of me almost didn’t want to find it, because finding it meant that the mystery had been solved and there’s something beautiful in the unknown darkness of the morning. But I had to know. I had to know who this owl was so I could call it by name and know the unseen companion to our shuffled morning feet. All I had to do was wait for it to sing, and once I wanted to hear it, the singing stopped.

I don’t like to let people hear me sing, but I sing around Lysh because we live together, we’re alive together, and I’m never more safe than I am when I'm alive. My anxieties and the way my brain is wired means that often when I am singing, it's about the little actions I take; grinding coffee, cleaning the litter box, checking my little emails. My brain takes the silence in the air behind mundane things and gives it purpose. I sing about the things that mean I'm alive. Bob’s Burgers lives by this same logic, a musical hidden in a cartoon that takes every opportunity to use someone’s fears and anxieties and turns them into a song.

There are so many fucking good songs in Bob’s Burgers you guys.

There’s the song about Topsy the elephant that Gene writes for a science fair project that almost kills his sister. There’s the Die Hard/Working Girl mashup musical they build out of competing musicals — one on the stage and the other in the boiler room. There are multiple Thanksgiving songs, Christmas songs, and songs about a mad pooper. There’s a song about trying to train a cat for a commercial audition. There’s a song about gluing Bob to a toilet. There’s a Philip Glass arrangement of kids playing shitty grade school Xylophones that will break you down and leave you in tears, only to rebuild you as someone who knows what pain is, and what heartache is, but still somehow prepared to feel it all again. And then, most recently, there is Marshmallow singing “Seabird”.

Marshmallow has long been a point of contention for Bob’s Burgers, a show that has shown its desire and ability to challenge what it has been, in favour of where it can go. Marshmallow has always been stuck somewhere in what was, waiting to grow into who she has always been. In the sixth episode of the first season — “Sheesh! Cab, Bob?” — Bob has to take a second job, moonlighting as a cab driver for their beautiful lunatic landlord Mr. Fischoeder to pay for Tina’s 13 birthday party. Bob swiftly meets three trans sex workers — Glitter, Cha-Cha, and Marbles — and the first vision of them is shocking close-ups of missed stubble and Adams’ apples. Their bodies built from tired tropes, but they were still real, and they were the haunting idea of something more when I first saw this episode in 2011. It’s at the end of the episode where we are introduced to Marshmallow, a Black trans woman (voiced at the time by a cis white man) who enters every room with a confident “hey baby”, and there is not a body alive in this fictional New Jersey boardwalk town who does not love her.

Marshmallow was beloved by the characters in the show, but she was still a caricature of what could be, a trans character given the promise of life, held back by a voice the betrayed the truth of her. But we are always working to challenge the ideas that have carried us here. The shows' creator, Loren Bouchard, credits Kristen Schaal for pushing them to expand the voice cast beyond being mostly dudes, even for the women who exist in their universe. Using a cis white man to give life to a Black trans woman was wrong, it has always held the character back, but there was always hope that she could become something more if given the chance to live.

The owl sang again one morning when Bowie and I were out, and for a second, I almost forgot my plan to record its voice and give it a name. I fumbled for my phone in my pocket, held it out in offering to the morning air and waited to catalogue the song that had carried us up the street and through the park so many times before. This was the morning I learned that my owl had never been real, and that it had always been someone else.

The past has shed away once more, and Bob’s Burgers has given Marshmallow the life that she has always deserved, with a voice given breath by a Black trans woman named Jari Jones. In a recent episode — “Hope N Mic Night” — with the school cancelling their talent show, the kids convince Bob to host an open mic night at the restaurant. There are concerns about the cost and the feasibility of pulling this off. Bob has to rent a PA, which I agree is annoying but also surprisingly affordable and the show’s primary villain Jimmy Pesto — no longer voiced by a January 6th insurrectionist — pesters him about needing to pay licensing rights for cover songs (which is not really true). Bob worries he might have to cancel, just as Marshmallow walks in and softly demands to be given the stage. Her parents are going to be in town, and she needs them to hear her.

Weird open mic nights feel like such a product of a small town, even though I’m very aware of their persistence nationwide. An open mic feels like a product of community, they serve the people who exist in a space, and it’s one of the things I miss about my own home town. I don’t really go home, and I don’t go out to bars when I do, and so they just exist without me now. Watching Teddy and Mort do a kind of high-school-hardcore-band-with-a-Bossa-Nova-guitar-player cover of “Hold On Loosely” feels like a memory I have only kind of lost. Bearing witness to people you know, even the ones whose names you have never known despite their familiar faces, displaying talents you never thought them capable of. Taking a familiar song and turning it into something beautiful and unlistenable all at once. This is the magic of an open mic, the chaotic splendour of the stage.

The stage at Bob’s Burgers is in service of Marshmallow. Her parents are in the audience, sitting huddled together at a booth watching their daughter who lives away from them now take the spotlight. She has a voice now, different from the one we knew but familiar, and I wonder if it's the same for her parents. Parents that don’t see her that often, that are very old, that might not always be around to make new memories to store away. Marshmallow tells a fire marshal trying to shut the event down, “they have never heard me sing before,” and I know what this means. Sometimes I wonder if my own parents have ever really heard the voice I have now. The one that belongs to the truth of me and not the idea of me. How does one’s voice change in the memories of others? Does a voice only ever exist as its last breath?

Marshmallow covers “Seabird”, a late-70s pop song by the Alessi Brothers and the room stops being anything but in love with her for a minute. This is a memory being born, the moment where someone you knew, someone you have always known or have known as a few different someones reveals themselves. The opening verse lingers and soars over a gently strummed guitar as Marshmallow’s parents hold each other a little closer and I wonder if this is the first time they have seen their daughter as their daughter, and not as someone they have struggled to know.

There's a road I know I must go

Even though I tell myself that road is closed

Listen, lonely seabird

You've been away from land too long

They are seeing her, beautiful and captivating and loved by all who have gathered here at her instance. They are seeing her world and how it thrives around her. Seeing how she is safe and loved in her chosen home with her chosen people. Marshmallow’s voice fills the room, a voice we had never heard until this moment that is now so familiar and warm. A memory that replaces all other memories and becomes something new.

My owl was never an owl, and it was always a mourning dove. I looked at the recording in my phone and was surprised and a little delighted to know I had always been wrong. You would think I would know this, but I am just as imperfect as anyone. I should remember that perception and reality are different, that it’s important to learn someone’s name and hear who they are. Hear the tune they are singing and understand it as an extension of themselves, the song that holds their place in this world.

It's a testament to the beauty waiting within change that Marshmallow's voice didn't just suddenly shift into someone new without celebration. It's worth championing that she was given depth and a spotlight and the opportunity to be heard as she is. It's a reminder that despite how unseen we might feel right now, it will not always be the case. We might someday find ourselves standing tall, perceived as beautiful and beloved people around which a world thrives. We have to stay alive to feel alive, and we do that by finding the people who get us there and building a life around them.

I’ve been thinking of this episode lately in the face of all the terrible news. The terrifying rumours and the what-ifs of an uncertain present. It is often daunting and terrifying to exist as a trans woman in this world, but it is beautiful more than it is anything else. Marshmallow singing “Seabird” reminds me of just what can happen when one of us is given the opportunity to be seen and heard for all that she is. She sings, and I think about the owl that never was, and how it reminds me that we are all of us seabirds, waiting to be heard as doves.