Jenny Slate says she’s always looking for the light in the dark.

Photograph by Emily Sandifer; illustration by NPR

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Photograph by Emily Sandifer; illustration by NPR

Jenny Slate says she’s always looking for the light in the dark.

Photograph by Emily Sandifer; illustration by NPR

Welcome to Wild Card from NPR, where host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

I spent a lot of years hosting news shows at NPR and I got really tired of covering stories that reinforced how bad everything in the world was.

Basically, I was burned out. But it was also bigger than my job. My dad died unexpectedly and my mom had died a long time ago, so I felt empty and sort of lost. And I felt this urgency. All I wanted to do was think through really big questions about what it means to be alive. What experiences made us who we are? What lessons do we have to learn over and over? What beliefs help us make sense of the world?

And when I started opening up about this to friends, I realized that a lot of other people were also swimming around in these kinds of questions. So I thought, what if we talked about this stuff out loud? And wouldn’t it be cool to do it with people who, on the outside, seem like they’ve got their existential act together? But that’s a little intimidating. So we came up with this idea for a game to make it easier.

This is the way it works: we made this little deck of cards with really big questions on them. My guests pick cards from the deck at random. And then they answer the questions.

And I’m telling you, it’s amazing what happens. They start talking about ideas and experiences they haven’t talked about before, and then, I’m doing the same thing. I always leave these conversations feeling better — feeling that no matter how different we are, we’re all working through the same stuff.

And my hope is that this is going to happen for you too. That you’ll find yourself thinking about these questions and how they fit into your own life.

And I couldn’t have dreamed up a better guest to get things started than Jenny Slate. She is one of the deepest, most interesting comedians out there, in my opinion.

That comes out in her stand up and her movies, especially Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which is one of the weirdest, most random, beautiful movies. You might know her from Obvious Child or for her role as Mona-Lisa Saperstein from Parks and Recreation.

This year, Slate released her latest comedy special called Seasoned Professional, which, at this point in her career, she really is — even if she’s still figuring out life like the rest of us.

So, let’s shuffle the Wild Card deck and draw our first question. Which is…

Question 1: What’s an ordinary place that feels extraordinary to you because of what happened there?

Jenny Slate: This sounds maybe gross or something, but I really feel that way about our bedroom in Massachusetts. And not because I’m like, you won’t believe what went down in here [laughs].

My husband is someone I met as a stranger and I really felt that I would not see him again. I thought about him a lot and I heard from another friend about where he lived in Massachusetts. And it felt to me that he lived almost in another dimension.

And I just remember the first time that I went to sleep in his bedroom and I was like, wow, this is a real place. It’s kind of like seeing the Eiffel Tower, like, I can’t believe it is real. And even though we live in that house together now, I still feel that way.

It’s a house that was built for his great grandmother, and when he lived there by himself it was filled with, like, a hundred years of stuff. And it felt very bachelor-y, like Dickensian bachelor-y. Like, there’s a taxidermied tortoise in here and heavy draperies from before. And now that we live there, it’s very sparse. I prefer a more Shaker aesthetic.

Rachel Martin: You had been married before. Did something have to change in you to make this relationship work, or was it just timing?

Slate: I couldn’t stop the timing of falling in love with him. And it was right for both of us to fall in love. But while walking down that path, I was very aware that I was injured. And I had to learn to trust — not just the big things, like I hope this person won’t lie to me, but also, I hope they won’t tell me they’re having one experience while having another. I hope they won’t secretly resent me for the things that they first felt were attractive about me.

As a performer, you want to shine your power out and that can be really attractive to people. But then all of a sudden they can get angry about it. That it’s not just for them. And so I do think that I really had to do a lot of work on my side of the problem in terms of learning to trust self-worth issues. But I am also an operatic romantic. I just love love, and that really helps.

Question 2: What is something you think about very differently today than you did 10 years ago?

Slate: Dressing. Not salad dressing, I’ve always loved it and I’ll never stop. Dressing my body.

Martin: What is different about how you think of that?

Slate: I’m pleased to say that I’ve come through a fair amount of internalized misogyny. So 10 years ago I was 31 and it was like, “You better wear that bikini.” You know, just these horrible, brutal feelings about my physical body and about how I needed to present what sexiness was and how much of my body to show.

I’ve always had a pretty clear sense of what I find to be beautiful. But I feel like it was sort of muddled up, and now I just want to dress like Jane Goodall, but like sometimes with a crop top. Like, let it flow.

I used to feel that I had to prove that my butt was there. And now I’m like, it’s not relevant whether or not you think my butt is there. I know it’s there. My toilet knows it’s there. And my husband knows it’s there. And, unfortunately, some of my friends know it’s there.

Question 3: Is there anything in your life that has felt predestined?

Slate: I don’t really connect to the concept of destiny. Sometimes I get scared and ask my husband, “What if we hadn’t met each other? What were the chances?” And he always goes, “100%.” And I like that. I don’t know about the soul mate thing, and I know it sounds so cheesy, but I do feel like he’s my spiritual match.

I guess I believe in a spiritual eventuality, which you could call destiny, but it’s more like a point on the globe. It’s like a fixed point, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get there. You still have to do things to get there. It’s an option.

But no, I’ve never felt like anything was predestined. I’ve just felt as if every now and then there’s a kind of meteor shower and good fortune falls into my life like that.

Martin: Have you always been good about appreciating the meteor shower or has that come later in life for you?

Slate: I think I actually have been. And I think it’s because my mother, who I love dearly, can be rather negative. If you ask her to tell a story, it often sounds as if it were cloudy in the sky, like it’s just with this sort of tinge of dread and negativity. And it’s kind of drama. It’s drama.

My response to that has been to be, no — sunshine! And it can also make me be a terminal optimist in the worst way, like almost a fool. But I think I’ve always had that kind of look out. It’s not a Pollyanna-ish thing. It’s looking for light in the dark. That’s what it is.

To listen to this full conversation, tap play at the top for the Wild Card podcast.

A Meow Wolf exhibition is designed as a dream space, a walk-through floor-to-ceiling collection of psychedelic art with a sci-fi bent and an anything-goes, punk rock spirit.

Apples that melodically squeal when squeezed? One can find those in “Omega Mart,” Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas exhibition. A video game that grapples with an uncompromising, impossible-to-please parent? Head to “The Real Unreal” outside Dallas. A neon-soaked forest in a suburban backyard? That originated in Meow Wolf’s Santa Fe, N.M., home.

“We are undefinable in so many ways, and it makes people think, ‘It’s just entertainment,’” says Meow Wolf curator Han Santana-Sayles, 31, sitting in her newly rented Pasadena home. “But I truly believe we are a wild art experiment.”

Meow Wolf spaces, of which there are currently four open, are warped visions of reality, designed to get guests to see the world, and hopefully themselves, differently. They’re spots where the familiar — think a grocery store or a home — is used as an entry point to otherworldly, maximalist art that’s at once a fantastical twist on nature and a deep dive into why-are-we-here philosophies.

So what happens when Meow Wolf decides that its next place of expansion is the home of American make-believe?

Meow Wolf is coming to Los Angeles, and it aims to turn our city’s most ritualistic experience — that is, the act of going to the movies — into an interactive, art-driven wonderland.

The Santa Fe-based art collective-turned-capitalistic enterprise — leaders of the so-called “experience economy” — is in the closing round of negotiations that will bring a Meow Wolf exhibition to West Los Angeles, with an opening targeted for 2026. Meow Wolf will be taking over a vacant movie theater complex and intends to fully embrace the spot’s cinematic roots. Meow Wolf’s move into its largest market yet is intended as a statement piece, a declaration that weirdness and art-focused ventures still have a place in an immersive economy that’s been racked by closures and layoffs, Meow Wolf included.

“A movie theater is representative of the history of L.A., a city that has been known for over 100 years with Hollywood and moviemaking,” says Meow Wolf Chief Executive Jose Tolosa. “I think the location we picked is one of the components that embodies the richness and the history of the city, and the artistry of the city.”

Anticipate multiple rooms of narrative-based art that strive to test perceptions, grappling with not only the stories we tell one another but why we tell them, says co-founder Sean Di Ianni, 39, who is overseeing the L.A. project.

If Disney and Universal theme parks ask us to “ride the movies,” Meow Wolf will be challenging guests to question their communal power, exploring, via hallucinatory art, the minds of those who make them, sell them and love them. Expect it all to be delivered with hints of mysticism, as Meow Wolf artists will dabble in themes of ritual and religion.

Meow Wolf co-founder Sean Di Ianni says the L.A. locale will explore the communal power of film.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

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Like past Meow Wolf exhibitions, a significant number of installations will come from the local art community. Santana-Sayles, a Murrieta native who now resides a few blocks from where her grandmother once lived, will lead the outreach into L.A.’s art world, a process that is in its infancy. A Meow Wolf exhibition is a mix of elaborately designed environments and commissioned works from artists who reside in the host city.

“I’m looking for a super broad range,” she says. “I want to include people who do wild projection mapping. But I also want to find people who do just pastels — really, really well. Or they’re painters. Or they draw. They’ve homed in on this one thing. We don’t want it to read as a theme park. We’re a contemporary arts platform.”

And yet the company’s rise from experimental art collective in 2008 to an “experience economy” corporation has been meteoric, attracting creative talent from theme park giants such as the Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal. It has been embraced by the likes of the Themed Entertainment Assn., and Meow Wolf’s play-focused, active approach has shifted the industry, encouraging environments with multiple access points that increasingly push guests to lean in and participate.

Meow Wolf’s poster art for its in-development West Los Angeles space.

(Meow Wolf)

Meow Wolf’s roots in underground art and its penchant for flirting with popular culture have resulted in a specific kind of tension. Meow Wolf is a corporation, but one that staunchly believes in original intellectual property. Meow Wolf stands by the power of the individual creator, having long supported independent muralists, game designers or sculpture artists, but it also traffics in interconnected storylines that require the sort of environmental storytelling defined by Disney’s theme parks.

Its ambitions are high art, but it’s also extremely populist. And that says nothing of Meow Wolf’s outspoken penchant for progressive politics. Melding all of this with a capitalistic enterprise could seem like a contradiction, but it also feels uniquely fit for Los Angeles.

“I love the chaoticness of it,” Santana-Sayles says of Los Angeles. “I love that yesterday I was on the street and someone was flipping a sign, really incredibly. He had a Walkman on and was doing a dancing Jesus sign movement. On the other corner was a juggler, a Cirque du Soleil-qualified juggler. Then on the other side of the street was a kid skateboarding with a dog under his arm.

“It’s an active, creative, chaotic mix of things,” she says. “It feels like art.”

The Los Angeles announcement arrives at what has become a reflection point for the immersive community.

Meow Wolf, along with long-running New York-based theatrical production “Sleep No More,” defined the immersive space. Since 2016, when the once-scrappy Meow Wolf art collective opened Santa Fe’s “House of Eternal Return,” the company has welcomed about 10 million visitors across its four venues. Yet in April Meow Wolf announced it would cut 165 employees; exhibitions in Denver and Las Vegas were heavily affected. “Sleep No More,” meanwhile, which has been running since 2011, will end this year.

A suburban house leads to a fantastical twist on nature at Meow Wolf’s “House of Eternal Return” in Santa Fe, N.M.

(Kate Russell / Meow Wolf)

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The two spawned an industry of interactive, social media-primed spaces, one that saw the rise and fall of everything from projection-based exhibitions such as “Immersive Van Gogh” to Lost Spirits, a heavily themed Las Vegas rum distillery with circus trappings, which just shuttered. The Walt Disney Co. even got in on the action via the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a two-day live-action role-playing game that utilized a mobile phone app to drive gameplay with real-life actors and sets. It lasted about a year.

Meow Wolf’s Tolosa pins the recent layoffs on two factors. One, he says, the company has become better at understanding its staffing needs, having opened a Denver exhibition with more than 300 employees. Last year’s “The Real Unreal” in Grapevine, Texas, in contrast, launched with a staff of around 100. He also notes that attendance tends to peak from a period of opening to around 18 months after, necessitating that the company adjust its models.

A fixture in a neon city at Meow Wolf’s “The Real Unreal” in Grapevine, Texas.

(Emil T. Lippe / For The Times)

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“We remain committed to a growth path,” Tolosa says. “Not only in L.A. but beyond. We’re already looking into other cities.” Tolosa adds that Meow Wolf is continuing to build an app that will connect all of its exhibitions, and is exploring other mediums such as gaming.

Meow Wolf, says Noah Nelson, founder of immersive entertainment site No Proscenium and its accompanying conference, is still one of the most recognizable names in the sector. While the layoffs raised eyebrows, the pledge to future exhibitions is an argument that the audience isn’t eroding.

“Meow Wolf represents the paradox,” Nelson says.

“It was born from a wild artist collective that created these family-friendly psychedelic sandboxes,” he says. “It morphed into a business that became increasingly a business and is still trying to hold onto that family-friendly psychedelic sandbox energy. It’s still trying to maintain its soul. That’s a tightrope that is very hard to walk, and it has at times been downright scary to watch them walk it. The upside is that they’re still walking it.”

Meow Wolf’s Sean Di Ianni has seen the art collective through ups and downs. “I’ve felt the pain, the struggle, the beauty and the mystery and magic in all different ways,” he says.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

Di Ianni helped grow Meow Wolf from an artist community into a corporation.

“I’ve been on all sides of this,” Di Ianni says. “I’ve created things. I helped organize things. I helped form the business. I’ve conducted layoffs myself. I’ve felt the pain, the struggle, the beauty and the mystery and magic in all different ways. It’s still happening. We’re still experiencing it. People, sometimes people who weren’t around for it, think of the early days as some utopian fantasy. It wasn’t that. It was a chaotic, anarchic mess.

“I guess what I’m saying,” he says, “is it’s always been a struggle.”

Di Ianni and Santana-Sayles hope Los Angeles will be a point of healing. After all, it just may be Meow Wolf’s most personal artistic statement yet.

The large thematic touchpoints for what would become Meow Wolf’s L.A. space were sketched out about two years ago. Many of them originated with Matt King, whom Di Ianni credits for leading a significant portion of Meow Wolf’s philosophical bent. King died by suicide in July 2022.

While Di Ianni is keeping much of the narrative a secret, he said the team envisioned as its setting “a world at a distant crossroads” in the midst of some sort of ritual. “What if this place we’re creating has some event that occurs, and people are drawn to this event the way people are drawn to a panda being born at a zoo?” Di Ianni says.

Santana-Sayles digs deeper.

She was King’s fiancée at the time of his death, and at various points a conversation with her delves into a discussion on how to process grief. An art piece of King’s, a woven portrait of flowers, sits in her living room waiting to be hung. After his death, she says, she made the decision to return to L.A. to be closer to her family. That Meow Wolf would center its next project here became a fortunate coincidence.

Han Santana-Sayles is eager to work on an exhibition in her home region. “I love the chaoticness of it,” she says of Los Angeles.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

“It’s so hard to be split from people,” she says of the last two years of her life. “They become you, and you become them.”

She takes comfort in being able to bring one of King’s final Meow Wolf ideas to fruition, and she and Di Ianni speak of wanting to protect what King was envisioning. “It’ll be harder for me to work on a Meow Wolf that he had nothing to do with,” Santana-Sayles says. “That won’t be far off. It’s the project after this. That will be way more challenging for me. I feel like I still get to hold his hand.”

When discussing some of the themes for the Los Angeles exhibition, she heads to her bookshelf and digs out a stack of King’s books, specifically ones he was reading in the last year of his life. King, she says, was becoming heavily fascinated with theories that interwove astrology and the Bible.

“He would come to dinners and say, ‘I’m so excited to tell you that this chapter of the Bible is actually parallel to this incredible spring equinox and the equinox is a metaphor for the way Moses parted the sea,’” she says. “I thought Matt, frankly, was sometimes extremely discerning about his sources and sometimes not at all. He would flip between different texts — historic texts, and then things that were on the verge of conspiracy theory. He just wanted to absorb.

“This exhibit,” Santana-Sayles says, “I do think, in the funniest way, grapples with big mystical and religious questions. Not overtly, but in a way people will read themselves into. I think there’s a lot to be explored there.”

Santana-Sayles and her team will have a significant say in how. It’s early days but she’s in the midst of working with consultants to create demographic surveys of Los Angeles, striving to ensure the exhibit will fully represent the diversity of the region. As a SoCal native from a Mexican American family, Santana-Sayles says, “I would be dishonored” if the exhibit failed in its mission to capture the breadth of the L.A. population. A cultural engagement specialist has been hired for outreach to Indigenous artist groups.

“It’s really important to make that intentional,” she says. “I’m not just going out and saying, ‘They have art I like. I’m going to bring them in.’ It’s a combination. Yes, they’re an amazing artist, and they have a really important story for this region.”

Han Santana-Sayles will be leading Meow Wolf’s outreach to the L.A. art community. “It has to be immersive in some way that playfully subverts reality,” she says, when asked what she’s looking for.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

Santana-Sayles is asked what makes a Meow Wolf artist. It’s not always an easy answer. In Grapevine, for instance, “The Real Unreal,” housed in a former Bed Bath & Beyond, is centered around a family story of grief. On a tour of the space last summer, many of the locally commissioned pieces appeared designed to celebrate community and healing, be it a calming tower of reflective geometric shapes that feels like a place of worship, or murals that reference Greek mythology and hint at being at an emotional crossroads.

“We’re really looking for experiential art — it has to be immersive in some way that playfully subverts reality and that thematically connects with what we’re doing as a whole with the exhibition,” Santana-Sayles says. Then she references works from other Meow Wolf exhibitions.

“There’s so many different ways to do that,” she continues. “Ways people do that are with materials, characters and concepts. We have people doing Indigenous futurism. We have people working with only trash art, reconstructing everyday items. We have people making completely different planets that have their own interesting logic. The umbrella feels quite broad, but that’s really what I’m trying to find. I’m looking for people who have a really defined sense of what they do.”

Regardless of what is conceived, don’t assume a passive experience. The Meow Wolf design philosophy is one that’s based on active participation by the guest, a shift from less assertive forms of entertainment of yore, be it a museum or the early days of theme parks. Stray, not-so-hidden paths and an assortment of nooks dot a Meow Wolf exhibition, inviting guests to choose their own narrative. Story threads are peppered throughout. “Omega Mart,” for instance, grapples with environmental distress and corporate responsibility.

Meow Wolf’s West L.A. theater, says Di Ianni, also will be built for discovery. The byzantine paths and shifts in art direction are what he refers to as “good mystery confusion.”

“That was one of the challenges of using a movie theater as a point of entry,” Di Ianni says. “It’s passive. But there are stories told in movie theaters, and then there are stories of movie theaters and stories of the people who work at movie theaters. But when you get into that auditorium, it’s meant to be a blank space where stories are told. It’s a little meta. This is a storytelling space about storytelling.”

For those looking for further hints as to where the Los Angeles exhibition may veer, Di Ianni mentions that he and the team back in Santa Fe soon will be doing a group watch of Wolfgang Petersen’s “The Neverending Story.” The 1984 film is a fantastical work about the beauty of our imaginations and how art can bring dreamlike worlds to life.

Sean Di Ianni, based in Santa Fe, N.M., says Meow Wolf’s L.A. location will be “a storytelling space about storytelling.”

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

At Meow Wolf’s “Omega Mart,” guests first enter a satiric take on a grocery store, where portals lead to otherworldly art exhibitions.

(Christopher DeVargas / Meow Wolf)

And that’s ultimately fitting for a Meow Wolf exhibition. While there are narrative threads and elaborate ideas, Meow Wolf spaces are essentially places of wonder, where dozens of disparate artists come together to create something akin to an explorable fairy tale.

“We can’t control whether you decide to change your perception of the world, or change yourself or change the world,” Di Ianni says. “But we can set up the conditions for people to have a little more access to that possibility. It’s very high-minded and very activist in a way. That’s what art and entertainment does. That’s why we go on vacation. That’s why we go to Disneyland. We want to see the world differently. We want to open up possibilities.”

Meow Wolf’s exhibitions have always been theaters for fantasy, centering the guest as the performer. Eventually, they were bound to find themselves in a city whose primary industry is known for creating dreamers.

A number of Democratic lawmakers have reintroduced the CROWN Act, legislation that would ban discrimination based on one’s hairstyle or hair texture. Here, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signs Crown Act legislation on June 15, 2023 in Lansing, Mich. that will outlaw race-based hairstyle discrimination in workplaces and schools.

Joey Cappelletti/AP

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Joey Cappelletti/AP

A number of Democratic lawmakers have reintroduced the CROWN Act, legislation that would ban discrimination based on one’s hairstyle or hair texture. Here, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signs Crown Act legislation on June 15, 2023 in Lansing, Mich. that will outlaw race-based hairstyle discrimination in workplaces and schools.

Joey Cappelletti/AP

A host of Black Democratic lawmakers reintroduced legislation Wednesday that would ban discrimination against a person’s hairstyle or hair texture.

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., led a group of 84 lawmakers in sponsoring the reintroduction of HR 8191, or the CROWN Act (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The bill — which was previously passed in the House in 2019 and 2022, but blocked in the Senate — aims to end race-based hair discrimination in schools and workplaces for Black Americans and other communities of color.

If signed into law, the act would prohibit discrimination based on hairstyle or hair texture that is coiled or tightly curled — including locs, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots, Afros or any other hairstyle that is commonly associated with a race or national origin.

Watson Coleman said during a Wednesday news conference that lawmakers were introducing the bill again because “no worker, no student, no person should ever face discrimination because of how their hair grows out of their heads.”

“We can’t control the texture of our hair any way that we can control the color of our skin,” Watson Coleman said. “… and yet, Black Americans routinely face discrimination simply because of the way their hair looks.”

Adjoa B. Asamoah, a scholar and strategist leading the nationwide CROWN Act movement, told reporters Wednesday that “race-neutral” grooming policies reinforce Eurocentric standards of beauty, which she says are “problematic.”

“There is a longstanding history of racial discrimination against natural hair and protective styles in the workplace, schools, and society at large,” Asamoah said.

“…I have worked tirelessly to pass the CROWN Act and shift culture to mitigate the physical, psychological, and economic harm caused by race-based hair discrimination,” she added.

California was the first state to sign the act into law back in 2019, and has since been joined by 24 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Texas is the latest state to implement a version of the law. The legislation has been proposed in 20 additional states and Washington, D.C.

Senate Republicans have previously blocked attempts at passing the bill; in 2022, the legislation didn’t get enough support from Republicans to override a filibuster from Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul.

News of the reintroduction of the CROWN Act comes months after the ongoing battle of Darryl George, a Black high school student in Texas who was suspended for more than a month for wearing a natural hairstyle, was brought into the national spotlight.

The 19-year-old senior at Barbers Hill High School in the Houston area has faced numerous suspensions since the start of the 2023-24 school year due to what school administrators say is a violation of the school’s dress code.

George’s natural locs fall below his eyebrows and ear lobes, which school officials say violates the district’s dress code for male students.

The 19-year-old was suspended just before the Texas law went into effect statewide on Sept 1, 2023. Later that month, he and his mother filed a lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s attorney general, saying they failed to enforce the law.