Do you remember Tony Kushner’s Angels in America? The two-part play today is remembered as a great work of art that dared to topple theater conventions. It made Kushner’s name as a great American playwright.

But I wonder if many people remember how much his play was a search for magic? How much it was a cry-of-the-soul against the senseless ravages of AIDS. It felt in those darkest of years as Angels hit Broadway that hope in magic was all we had left. “You have to go see Angels,” people would say. “It’s transformative. It changes everything.”

My partner and I watched both parts on consecutive evenings, surrounded by an audience of mostly gay men, many of them openly weeping.

I enjoyed the play and remember thinking to myself, “Well, this is very good but there’s nothing magic about it, is there?”

Then over the course of the next week I realized I was re-energized. I felt suffused with hope. I felt much more closely spiritually connected to the friends and colleagues I was struggling with. I think most of us felt it. Profited from it to do and be better.

My own version of your clothes tree taught me magic isn’t real, that the universe doesn’t work like that. Kushner’s angels taught me magic has a place in the world after all, even if we might not recognize it when we see it.