What’s Your Fantasy Superpower?

BY JOANNE CELI
KONKLIFE FEATURING WRITER

I’ve often fantasized about being able to eat whatever I want and never gain weight. There was a 1991 movie with Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep called Defending Your Life. It was a comedy about the afterlife and one of the perks of being in heaven was being able to eat anything and everything and stay fit. It really stuck in my head. What a great superpower! Of course I’d love to guiltlessly eat cannoli for breakfast, fried shrimp with french fries and some more fried things for lunch, super-stuffed lasagna for dinner, chocolate ice cream sundaes for dessert and so on and so on. But it is a very self-indulgent and childish dream.

My friend, Barbara, shamed me with her fantasy superpower – being invisible. Sounds silly, right? But her goal is to use it to help humanity. She could go anywhere undetected to scout out our enemies. She probably could have taken out Osama Bin Laden much sooner and without danger to our visible army. Even innocuous punishments like tickling someone like Trump while speaking publicly would be very satisfying. Which makes me wonder about someone actually achieving this fantasy in the Giuliani dye-dripping speech??

My husband, Lou, wants desperately to be able to communicate with dogs. What is Ziggy saying to Lou when he comes down the stairs in the morning for breakfast? He’d be able to find out why Ziggy and Ozzie are barking at other seemingly non-threatening dogs. Plus, he’d be understood when he tells them to stop barking. When they bark at thunder, he can tell them to take a deep breath, think of something pleasant, like a bone, and calm down. He can find out what they learn when they sniff other dogs’ butts. What do they understand about movement in a car? Or an elevator? If they look a bit off-kilter, he can find out if they’re sick or what we can do to help. 

Kristen’s fantasy superpower is the ability to levitate. If she’s stuck on a crowded street, she can just raise herself a few inches over the irritatingly slow people and zoom around them. Kristen’s fantasy is very complex and involves different levels of ability. Her levitation comes with SuperBoost – the ability to gently fly over that irritating crowd. To make things even easier for her, any creature or thing that she touches while using SuperBoost would also temporarily have the same power. So, if she’s carrying heavy groceries, they levitate right alongside her.  She and her dog, Sami, would be able to “swiftly cruise through the hood”. All very impressively thoughtout. As opposed to her husband’s fantasy superpower – Ben still has a childhood fantasy about becoming Pope (Ben is Jewish). He would use this insider power to dismantle the Catholic Church. He was clearly a seriously precocious child. 

Since talking to people about this, I’ve decided to change my superpower to being able to understand and speak all languages. I could be an ambassador of goodwill wherever I go. I’d be able to give and receive directions. And most importantly, like Elaine in Seinfeld, I’d know what the mani/pedi people are saying about my feet!

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