Obituary

A poem by Jamie Rosler
I hold grudges
Or maybe
they hold me

Time and again
I remember
The things I didn't say
The points I didn't make
The wrongs I didn't right

Or you didn't

Or we

Forgiveness
without an apology
Forgive you
For me

Old friends & ex-lovers
visit dreams
Surreal impossibilities and mundane meetings,
in the world
in my head
Interrupted sleep
Startled by imagined moments

There was a wake yesterday
I've been sleeping better

One less grudge
One loss I'm not sorry for

Not sorry for me
Though
sorry for a mother's loss

Forgiveness
without an apology
Forgive you
For me

I hold grudges
Or maybe
they hold me

3 Questions for your “Coronaversary

By Gabbi Traub

I recently read an article  about the three questions you should ask yourself for your “Coronaversary.”  The author also mentioned how the term “Coronaversary” wasn’t quite the right term considering it’s not something to celebrate, and I happen to agree.  But there isn’t a better word for “the one-year mark for when the world shut down and everyone lost something due to a global pandemic.”  So, Coronaversary it is. 

But her questions were really thought-provoking, and I thought I’d share them with you, as well as my answers, or what I’ve come up with so far.  

  1. Where were you last March? 

I’m going to answer this question and all subsequent questions both literally and figuratively, because I think both are important to note, and because it really has changed for so many people.

Let’s see, last March, the Before Times.  I was living in Jersey City, commuting 5 days a week to a job at a restaurant in Manhattan, and dreaming of a day when I wouldn’t have to work in the service industry anymore (LOL). I was overworked (though I didn’t know it at the time) and simultaneously stressed about money (I had just taken a week off work to attend a friend’s wedding out of state, and no, servers do not get PTO). I was exhausted, but complacent enough as I was making good money for easy(ish) work and thought I was “doing what I was supposed to be doing”. I was also happily cohabitating with my partner and the cat we had just adopted.  

I remember thinking – man if I could just afford to take a month off of work and do nothing and reevaluate things maybe I could finally breathe and get my sh*t together. (Little did I know my wish would be granted, tenfold). Looking back I see I was doing it all to myself – I could have taken fewer shifts when I needed to, I could have buckled down and looked for a new day job.  But I had always moved very quickly, filled my days to the brim, overworked myself until I had to completely shut down for a time and reboot.

  1. Where are you now? 

Physically, still in JC living happily with my partner and our cat (who I have come to love more than any other creature in existence and that includes my partner – don’t worry, he knows and feels the same about her). But wow.  This past year has kicked me in the a$$.  I just hit my one-year unemployment-versary (this “versary” is also not quite so celebratory…).  My restaurant still hasn’t opened back up, and I just didn’t feel safe looking for another restaurant job during the pandemic.  Plus my partner works in healthcare and I didn’t want to add to our risk.  I’m currently at a crossroads of what I want to do with my life in terms of profession, though my path has recently become a bit clearer. I am living in a constant state of limbo- and that has a lot to do with my partner’s career being up in the air as well.  It’s hard to start anything new when you don’t have solid footing.  

  1. How have you changed in the past year? 

I could talk for days about how much I and my life have changed. Here are my most important highlights: 

My priorities have shifted a lot.  I have always been career first, relationship second. However, being with my current partner and making it through quarantine and covid together (so far) has honestly saved me, and, at least in my eyes, really strengthened our relationship.  We’ve always been pretty good at communication, but having to share a space 24/7 while having totally different personalities has been quite a…challenge. This was definitely a make-it-or-break-it scenario for so many couples and I just got lucky.  I wish I could joke around and say we were at each other throats or wanted to kill each other but sappily this just reaffirmed why we chose each other and why he is a priority for me.  (And for anyone who knows me well, is a HUGE world shift).

The pandemic (and subsequent political issues and racial reckonings) put a lot of pressure on my relationship with my family and have really redefined how I view my relationships with them.  I have always been close with my immediate family and still am, but it has definitely been an eye-opening year. Cryptic I know, but there are some things strangers on the internet aren’t privy to (no offense, I’m sure you’re all lovely). 

My relationship with my body has changed.  I honestly don’t know if that’s better or worse.  I gained most of my pre-covid “working too much eating too little” weight back.  Not being busy and being forced to sit still has left me with no choice but to both “make an effort” and to think about it constantly.  I spend much more time thinking about why my thighs don’t gap and why my skin isn’t clear and glowing. On a positive note, I now have a consistent workout routine, and I have gotten very creative with my cooking and baking adventures.  But it’s no longer “easy”.  Which I know is a luxury to say, but it’s still such a challenge for me.  I will say, with a year of workouts under my belt, my butt has never looked better. 

Finally, theatre, my true love and professional aspiration since I was a little girl- has fallen by the wayside.  I barely sing anymore (except the occasional Bridgerton Musical sing-a-long on Instagram; don’t @ me, it’s incredible). While performing will always be my first love, my drive for being a professional performer just isn’t there anymore.  I want to love what I do, not fear and loathe the process. I hope it comes back into my life in a fun and loving way, but my priorities have shifted so much that there isn’t room for it to be my whole life anymore.  

On that mildly depressing note, I do want to say that overall I feel much more secure as a person than I did a year ago.  Granted, I’ve been in therapy for 6 years now and that definitely has something to do with it, but having the past year of forced stillness and reconciliation has taught me so much.  It’s kind of like that saying “the older you get the less you know”? I’m just excited to learn and move forward in a way that’s just unapologetically me.  I think I’ll get there, but change takes time, and patience is not my finest virtue.

Pivoting During the Pandemic

By Chrissy Brooks

Chrissy Brooks is a San Francisco Bay Area wife, mother of 2, actress, singer, dancer & blogger. Check her out at: chrissybrooks.com

On March 13, 2020, amidst the settling of the bleach-like powder in the audience seats, sprayed earlier in the day by men in white medical grade suits in an effort to disinfect the theater, I belted out Climb Every Mountain to an audience of a select few. As I performed this stirring aria, I tried not to choke on the chemicals floating in the air, or the emotional finality of the performance. The audience, the actors, and the backstage hands – we all knew this would be the last of our live performance opportunities for a long time. The musical, The Sound of Music, produced by Broadway By the Bay, was never opened to the public, and our country was on the brink of complete shutdown to address the COVID-19 spread.

And now here we are, one year later. I have not returned to the stage since March 13, 2020. Over the past year, I have spent the majority of my time tutoring my 10-year old. She struggles with the stress of online learning, like so many others. So, I am able to, and have chosen to focus my energy on helping her power through this tough time. With in-person learning on the horizon, soon she will be back in school; and I will have time on my hands again. But what should I do?

The performing arts world has come to a screeching halt, and jobs are difficult to find. Instead of going to a Palm Reader, which I seriously considered, being a virgin to palm reading, and so desperately needing guidance, I decided to ask my colleagues and friends for help. I wanted to hear other people’s stories in hopes it would help me find inspiration and direction, so I reached out to a few of my colleagues I have met over the decade of my life performing, working and living in the San Francisco Bay Area. These lovely humans are just a few of the brave people I know who have pivoted during the pandemic.

They are:

  • Leandra Watson (Pre COVID: Costume Designer / Present: in process of rebranding herself)
  • Tripp Hudgins (Pre COVID: Admin & Student / Present: Communications Catch-All)
  • Katie Coleman (Pre COVID: SF Hamilton Pianist & Musical Director / Present: NYC Real Estate Agent)
  • Nina Meehan (Pre COVID: Artist Director of BACT/ Present: CEO and Founder of BACT)

Leandra Watson, 32, was a full-time costume designer for theatre and opera. PreCOVID, she was traveling the high seas as a wardrobe supervisor for live entertainment on cruise ships. But once COVID-19 started affecting her work, she had to pivot. “Yes. At the time, it was out of necessity for survival,” Leandra explains. She was not making enough money doing theater, and her job kept her from making her health a priority. She continues, “I used it [her job in theater] as an excuse not to take care of myself, letting my health get pretty bad. It prevented me from having much of a social life or dating. And I couldn’t see it at the time, but it stood in the way of a lot of dreams and goals I have for my life.” Leandra hopes to have a career centering around herbs or interior design, but also hopes to settle down and raise a family as a full-time mom. Looking back, Leandra feels grateful for having to pivot careers, and she advises others looking for a career change to not “let fear hold you back from seeking your highest potential!”

Tripp Hudgins, 51, is a “communications catch-all at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, VA”. Prior to this position, he was writing his dissertation and working for Design Set Match as an admin in Berkeley, CA. “Then, everything shut down and the almost full-time nature of my [his] job ended as he went online. I worked far fewer hours from home. My wife’s position was also terminated. Then, to make matters more interesting, my family and I had to move. Our building scheduled to be torn down. This was not a surprise, but we were forced to move about a month after everything was shut down in the Bay Area. As fate would have it, we found a place to live all the way across the country in Richmond, VA so we could be near family.” Tripp is still looking for full-time work in and around Richmond, and even so far as D.C. His family’s move across country was necessary and motivated by the pandemic. His advice to others looking to pivot is, “you have to be really flexible and imagine ways of rebranding yourself as an employee. Get creative with how you re-imagine yourself. That’s what I have done and I have a phone interview tomorrow.”

Katie Coleman also left the Bay Area for the East Coast, after the pandemic hit. She moved out of necessity and was motivated by the pandemic. Katie is a professional pianist, and pre-COVID she was a musical theater director and pianist for the SF company of Hamilton. In March 2020, the SF Hamilton show abruptly closed. Katie then waited for months, not sure if the show would open again. She writes, “For the first six months of quarantine, there were a lot of teasers regarding when theater would come back. At first we thought we’d be shut down for 3 weeks or a month. Then two months. Then it was announced the show wouldn’t reopen in San Francisco.” Knowing eventually she wanted to end up in New York City, she decided to move across the country where she eventually got her real estate license. She officially started her new career as a real estate agent on February 1, 2021 in NYC. Her advice to others is “try your best to not have imposter syndrome, and instead, fully embrace FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.” She has re-invented herself many times before, and thinks that this won’t be her last.

Nina Meehan, CEO and founder of Bay Area Children’s Theater Company (BACT), has gotten creative with her pandemic pivot. She used to hold the title of Artistic Director at BACT, but since the pandemic hit, she changed her career path to help her company survive. She writes, “my job involved the art on the stage, the education programs happening all over the Bay Area, the audience experience, selecting future seasons…There was a lot of hands-on work that it takes to create live theatre.” Since live theater has suffered during this time, she pivoted to focus her efforts on creating Audio Musical Subscriptions boxes. She oversees a team in charge of packing, shipping, and creating online audio-musicals kits called Play On!. She views her pivot as necessary to her company’s survival, and is glad she made the shift in her career. Her advice to others having to change careers is to “try to give yourself the space to see the positives and the opportunities.”

It’s now March 13, 2021, and the world looks very different than it did a year ago. So many lives have been lost, jobs have been laid off, schools are struggling to open, and our country’s division and history of inequity has been brought to the political forefront. The physical and emotional strain of today is unprecedented, but we still must survive.

I am proud to say these brave few, interviewed in this article, are my colleagues and friends. They have persevered in unique ways to evolve in the world around them. Although their situations can appear to be unique to the Bay Area, we can all relate to their struggles. Their need to pivot during the pandemic is a global reality. These inspirational stories have helped me gain the confidence in making hard decisions.

This seems like the right time to take a leap of faith, to be brave, and to look for new opportunities. Once my kids are back in school full-time, I will be committing to a new career. What that career is yet, I don’t know. Although I am looking forward to the return of on-stage performances, I need to take this chance to explore other career opportunities. The performing arts world has been devastated by this pandemic, and it will need time to recover and renew. So, check back on June 14th at undiscoveredworks.org for an update on my pandemic pivot. I promise you this: I will be brave.

Finding the G_d in Small Things

By Dylan Goodman

“When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit.” – bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

I can mark the changes of a year’s worth of living alone in quarantine by the abundance of silence. It did not used to be this way. Me, a queer Jewish unicorn with extroversion to spare, making it work in Brooklyn. In fact, I used to wonder if what I was missing in my twenties was an ability to sit still. Well, be careful what you wish for.

Under the pandemic, my life is slow now. I regularly fill my evenings with the time it takes to make dough from dollops of butter, eggs and flour. How the methodical kneading against the bowl can meld these disparate materials into a cohesive, sticky whole. I get lost in the routine of a baking recipe. It still feels like alchemy the way the same few ingredients, in slightly different combinations, make multitudes. A cup of bone-dry yeast, with some warm milk and patience, murmurs with bubbles – like dust into life.  As much as I want to control the outcome, the ultimate ingredient is time, waiting for the right chemical reactions to create a change.

I like noticing the way the smell of my apartment blooms with sweetness once my latest concoction is done. Of course, it also helps me track my Covid status. That I still have the ability to smell, a luxury I didn’t even know to be grateful for. 

I fill the quiet with thoughts, as well. In my notes app, I scribble down ramblings about the world, and how I want it to be better. I think about immigrant detention centers, and wonder that our government fears immigration by land so much because it’s a reminder that borders are not real. I wonder about capitalism, how the U.S. only values its citizens as much as we’re able to do a job, evinced by the lack of urgency around any kind of comprehensive stimulus. I wonder about the Covid vaccine distribution; every boyfriend I’ve ever loved and what they’re doing now; the white supremacy of America; abolition of the police; my own mortality. I miss my friends. I wonder if it’s so hard to date these days because everyone else is thinking about their mortality too, and the stakes of finding a partner feel unrealistically high. But then again, the reality is that 500,000 people (and counting) have died.

In the early part of the pandemic, I flew to Hinge in hopes of finding an apocalyptic companion. “Looking for a partner for the end of the world,” I texted one of my matches. He said, “Me too.”

We fell out of touch because I realized he only wanted me for sex. Everyone copes in different ways.

It’s hard to accept that this gap in my life where easy chaos used to dwell is simply gone, cannot be replaced. I miss the tumult. I miss being surprised.

My therapist, over Zoom of course, encourages me to go outside more often. As cruel as Covid can be, she urges that – in my precise situation – the mental health challenges of such immense isolation are beginning to wear me down. After all, I had only just moved to New York in the fall of 2019; and the world went into lockdown just as I was beginning to make friends. Those people mostly left.

The isolation is its own kind of loss. And it is particularly invalidating when the loss cannot be witnessed.

A part of me is writing to you right now because I want to be witnessed, and to let you know that we might be grieving the same thing. We might not be alone.

A year ago, both of my housemates left our apartment in Crown Heights under the impression that they’d be gone for “two weeks” – each packing suitcases haphazardly for last-minute tickets. Whether by denial or obstinacy, the thought to escape never crossed my mind because I didn’t know what I was running from. Hugging each of them goodbye in that faithful week in 2020’s March ended up being our last shared moment. None of us could have predicted that a microbe would upend the very fabric of what we consider “normal.”

Within that first week of quarantine solitude, I journaled, “And I want to live. It came rushing into me all these days alone. I want to live so bad. I want to survive. And this determination balloons my spirit and fires my soul.” Even though this statement came from a place of rose-colored adrenaline, the words still ring true, and I can say with defiance that, even when my world evaporated into fragments, I still find G-d in the absences.

What I mean is that one small brown bird landed on my sunlit fire escape on a Friday morning, chirping; and I noticed, remembered its shape even, and looked back into its eyes. I have since replaced chasing men with chasing fresh fruits and veggies at the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market. I understand that taking the time to boil water and hear the gurgle of steam soaking coffee beans is equally as rejuvenating as that first caffeinated sip. When I see other people in my apartment pass me by, I try harder to extend kindness. One man on the floor below remembered my name to say hello as we passed each other in the hallway, and he chuckled, “We’re officially neighbors now.” It wasn’t revelatory or romantically charged – plus, I’m very certain that he is “a straight” – but it mattered all the same: the remembering.

So, even as I am grieving, I still have hope. “I want to live so bad” because the pandemic has reminded me that, in slowing down, I see that beauty never left, and there is so much peace to be found in stillness, in waiting. What I’m searching for as a twentysomething continues to evade me, but the grace of this collective pain is that I’m gaining the trust that I do not need an answer to be happy. Being is enough.

An Understanding of Basic Finance Born From a Global Pandemic

By Gyasi N. Barber

After thinking about the racial wealth disparity in the United States between Black people and White people, I knew I couldn’t just keep this knowledge for myself. After all, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the median household wealth for White people is $134,230, compared to $11,030 for Black people. 

I’m sure some of you have taken the “opportunity” since we’ve been working from home to pick up a hobby, do some leisure reading or something else to make up your time. If we took all of the people who picked up a COVID hobby, we could make a pretty large club. 

In the first few months of the pandemic, I definitely watched a lot of movies, read some books and spent a lot of quality time with my partner, Maddie and our dog, Champ. I also decided to gain a better understanding of and control over my finances. Before the pandemic, I always found different opportunities to spend money as a young adult with very few responsibilities living in the greatest city in the world (<3 NYC). 

However, when things closed up, so did my spending. I missed the flexibility, but I grew to appreciate the time to evaluate what I was spending and what I was actually getting out of it. I came to realize that I wasn’t getting much. Nice clothes, electronic goodies, falling for Instagram sponsored content. Not a good look for your boy. The reason why I wasn’t getting much is because of how I defined “much”. I was getting goods, yes, but those goods wouldn’t appreciate or help me in the future. 

So I reevaluated. I didn’t stop completely, but I made a conscious effort to think about what I was consuming. If I saw a nice candle on Instagram, I still bought it. However, it was nice to have a little extra money to pay down my credit card bills, student loans and actually start saving. I do want to take this time and say that, during the pandemic, I was able to keep my job and I already make a decent amount of money. For that, I am truly blessed.

I started reading more about basic finance, investing and anything related to it. I took a few classes on Udemy that were really insightful and got me thinking about how I could continue to help myself and the people around me to gain some control of their financial future. 

It took a few months to really understand everything that I needed to do to get my financial education on track. I figured out the best way for me to set a budget, I made a short-term plan to pay down my high interest debts and I started putting money away for an emergency fund. Then George Floyd was murdered at the end of May, and everything changed. 

It was a pivotal moment–especially for me, a Black man in the United States of America. It took me a while to come to terms with what everything meant and how I felt about it. I decided to enlighten and educate White people so they could understand how this all came to be, but to be honest, I felt angry, tired and I really wanted to give up a lot of the things I had taken on during the last few months. 

While I did donate a lot of my extra money over the following few months to various charities, bail bonds funds and really anything I deemed worthy, I decided that my long-term financial goals should not change. After thinking about the racial wealth disparity in the United States between Black people and White people, I knew I couldn’t just keep this knowledge for myself. After all, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the median household wealth for White people is $134,230, compared to $11,030 for Black people. 

Just as I did during the immediate months following the murder of George Floyd, I’m now choosing to help enlighten and educate people on their understanding of personal finance. I believe that there are people out there who were just like me last year. At the beginning of last year, I did not have a handle on my high interest debt, I was spending more than I was making and I was thinking too emotionally and not financially enough about my non-essential purchases. So I am starting a blog that will uncover my current journey as well as the journey of others. It will also break down why we as Black people are in situations like I was in last year to begin with.

I hope to help some people, but I hope you will enlighten me in return. I hope you’ll join me on this journey, and that you’ll use this space to connect, ask questions, and empower yourselves along with me. You can look forward to a conversation about the psychology of money and how our backgrounds affect how we consume as well as an honest conversation about the difficulties of setting budgets (but hopefully how to set one anyway).