My plan, my dream, the thing I feared saying aloud in the presence of another human, was this: I would buy property somewhere remote, on a mountain or deep in forested country, and on it I would build a replica of the Three’s Company apartment building. I would live in an identical re-creation of Jack, Janet, and Chrissy’s apartment where I would wake and eat, and bathe and sleep, and around the apartment building I would build the world seen on the show—the Regal Beagle bar, the Arcade Florists flower shop, Jack’s Bistro, Nurse Terri’s hospital waiting room, secretary Chrissy’s office building. It would be a small city. And I planned on living the lives of each character in succession, one after another, until the years ran out.

I would start my life over in the year 1977, when Season 1 began, and the décor of the apartment and everything around it would also start in Season 1, and it would be Season 1 for me, Bonnie Lincoln, a fresh start, the pilot season, for however long I wished. As the show progressed, I would, too, as would the surroundings, to reflect the series’ later seasons. This would all be thanks to the indecent amount of money I won. It was the largest amount ever won in a single national lottery, and I was the only claimant.

Jack, Janet, Chrissy, the Ropers, Ralph Furley, neighbors Larry and Lana, later roommates Terri and Cindy—they were my surrogate family by that time, impervious to death or harm, preserved forever in an eight-season arc. I wanted only to live among them, to breach the seam between sick reality and my favorite fiction, step through, and sew up the hole behind me. Oh, I had yet to work out the specifics, and there were many—how I’d maintain food or supplies, how I’d go about replicating the characters’ lives down to the minutest detail—but in my hungry fantasy these questions were inviting and juicy, beckoning me forward like a banquet table receding into the distance, laden with an endless feast.

The planning itself was its own odyssey, its own cocooning world. I spent days in my trailer making notes and gazing into the middle distance where, on the dingy twelve inches of my kitchen countertop, the last two bananas sat rotting on the stem. My dreams seemed crucial, urgent. Risky. I planned to manipulate time itself, to escape it and warp it, bend it to my will.

I had no intention of allowing any audience to see my creation. No tourists, no tickets. No, my escape would be real and total, fully lived and experienced by me, a lone human, and shared with as few people as I could get away with. Mine would not be a soundstage, or have any reference to cameras or lights, or acknowledge an audience or fandom; nor would it hint that it was a fictional show: I would live inside the show. I would burrow past plotlines or jokes, I would bury myself in it. I would figure out everything I needed to survive, alone, and then I could dismiss every other person on earth, living and dead, with one triumphant wave goodbye.