Dove Letters: My FaceTime with Pee-Wee

thank god for Pee-Wee Herman.

The first thing that happens when you get a FaceTime from Paul Reubens, AKA Pee-Wee Herman, is he will ask you for your full name, your birthday, and your mailing address. He will be sitting in front of a desktop computer and it's almost like you're on the phone with a customer service agent for your bank. But it's not a bank. It's Pee-Wee. And he's typing in your info into what seems like a very important database of his own private records.

The next thing that probably happen is that he will politely say, “one moment please, my alarm just went off and I need to send my birthday texts. I have 11 birthdays today”. You're confused, but he will explain shortly, after copying and pasting a GIF of a woman jumping out of a birthday cake to 11 people. He will tell you that he has an alarm set for every two hours, every day, to send birthday texts to everyone in his database.

He says, very seriously, “I take birthdays very seriously”. And he does. It's not just the texts, he explains, he also sends gifts. Not just one gift. Sometimes seven. And these are personal gifts, ones he's thought of, picked out, just for you.

Paul will also have to pause your conversation to feed various types of animals during the call. The coyotes get fed around now, he'll say. The deer usually show up around this time. During COVID cats started showing up, so he became a cat dad. He has multiple now, sitting outside on a patio he had built for them. He’ll turn around the camera so you can see. His home is in the Hollywood Hills, so you can only imagine all types of animals that wonder around. He loves all of them. He feeds all of them.

And this is what Pee-Wee does best: he makes you feel seen. And taken care of. After the FaceTime is over, you will think to yourself, I just talked to someone who is so alive, who is so present, who saw me, and was curious and so smart and compassionate and so funny. You will start to understand why the deer keep coming back to his house. Because they don't just feel fed—they feel loved.

I experienced this first hand in March of 2023. I'll never forget that day. I was on tour, my first headline tour, and the band had just pulled into Austin. I was sitting in the back of the bus that was parked in some grocery store parking lot and Paul and I talked for about four hours. I think it probably could have gone on for seven, but I did have to go to sound check. Earlier that day I had fired my first manager of seven years. It was time, but I didn't expect to do it that day. I was absolutely frazzled. I've never been married but it felt like I just got divorced.

And then Paul assured me, even texted me after, how very proud he was of me for making such a hard decision, one that he believed would lead me to where I want to go in my career. He made sure I knew I did the right thing.

Around that time, I sent him an early demo of my song Hot Gospel. He replied, "It's got everything!". I didn't really know exactly what that meant then.

This past week I watched the new HBO documentary that just came out about him, Pee-Wee As Himself. I sort of sat there, sinking into my parents super large and dangerously comfortable couch in Missouri, feeling like I was again receiving vital information from Paul, from beyond the threshold of life. It felt like he was talking to me again, guiding me. Teaching me, us, about the cost and reward of living a life where you choose curiosity over fear, over and over.

In the documentary, Paul was talking about the experience of creating the world that Pee-Wee lives in and how it was a montage of all of his favorite things from when he was a kid. He said those words again: “it’s got everything!”. I finally knew what he meant. To have everything was to have everything that made him want to be an artist, that shaped him, that inspired him, put together into something only he could have made.

It's got everything.

And now sitting here, I'm realizing that one of the missions of the artist. To take all of the bits and pieces of life that your soul resonates with, that gives you life, that opens your eyes to a new world, and put it into whatever you are creating. Mix it all together like an alchemists lab to make your own unique gold. It's not about reinventing anything, it's about being all that you are. And all that you are is going to be singular because when you bring all of the things that make you you to the table, no one else is going to show up with the same ingredients. No one is going to be you, ever again. More specifically, no one is ever going to love all the things you love, ever again.

Paul passed away only a few months after our first call. My birthday is in December, so sadly, I never got the onslaught of birthday messages and presents, but I kinda feel like I won the lottery just by being able to be in the presence of his goodness. To see him go all St. Francis on all of his animals, to see him be a friend in a way that we all hope to be friend, to see how he looks at the world through the eyes of a child, the way I pray to see the world, too.

Thank God for Pee-Wee.