I was hoping to get a response where others could see different scenarios where they could escape characters. It deserves it’s own article I believe. But perhaps there isn’t a way to do any escaping anywhere 
In this particular instance (this is actually a little different than the first post, but it’s the same project, and method I was trying to above), I am trying to enrich to get a record ID so I can update (patch) it on airtable…My original source is actually shopify, so I don’t know what the record ID on airtable is unless I enrich, to enrich in airtable, you have to use a formula, and columns with spaces in them need to be in curley brackets. I confirmed this by testing using Postman, and learned it has to arrive {like this} (double quotes, apostrophe, or double brackets don’t seem to work to escape anything, anywhere in the URL.
This is what worked on postman:
https://api.airtable.com/v0/appTaCoTuEsDaY/ShopifyChild?filterByFormula={Variants: Id}=“39920792600691”&fields=Variants: Id
fields is to simply the payload, I don’t really need anything because it will come back with the record Id.
The problem is airtable wants to see {Variants: Id}, but Parabola sees it as a variable and will say the column doesn’t exist, which is true… It would be nice to see all the little tips and tricks (like this one)on escaping somewhere (originally, but I have little hope that escaping is really possible.
However, there is a workaround I discovered all by mi lonesome sevy…
but if there is an easier way I would love to know… I had to add two transformations… Insert Text Column & Find and Replace…
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Create a column, give it whatever name you want, mine was “no escape”, you’ll refer to it in step 3. all of the values will be the same… I can’t use {anything in brackets} yet because Parabola says it doesn’t exist and it won’t add any columns… so give the value of this column whatever text because you’ll find and replace that text with the {Variants: Id} in step two, I used “blah” in my case.
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Now replace “blah” or whatever with {your formula column}.
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Now in your url you will reference your column (mine was no escape, and your replaced value will arrive to airtable (or wherever you need it to send off to) in curley brackets…
My parabola Get request to airtable looked something like this…
https://api.airtable.com/v0/appTaCoTuEsDaY/ShopifyChild?filterByFormula={no escape}="{ViD}"&fields[’]=Variants: Id
(I had to add the apostrophe to [’] otherwise you get a box on the community form, not sure how to escape that at the moment)
This is what it took me to go get the record ID so I could make a patch request to update changes made in shopify in my airtable base.
Anyone reading this has tips to share, please share, It took an hour of trial and error, and giving up on trying to escape characters for me to think of the work around, but there was a way!