Saturday morning: Stealing an hour for music video purposes, an artist
pal and I walk through a break in the fence to the 30-foot stone tower whose
octagonal roof opens to the sky beside a rushing waterfall. I change into a
sequin dress and pin a plastic flower in my hair, while he circles the outside
looking for a window that doesn't have penises graffitied on them. I
shiver on a cement plinth. Thirty degrees on the high end, and when he does a
close-up on my hands they are red from the cold.
My doctor pal texts me. He's released a 26 minute infomercial on the Moderna
vaccine. He also recorded a low-brow comedy making fun of anti-vaxers, and
did I know of any composers who'd provide background tracks for
free?
Too cold to shoot at the second location, I change back into street clothes and
we walk back to the parking lot .....We're both having lots of fun, not just
because we like collaborating on film projects, but we're both comic
book nerds and goob about the kind of stupid stuff that I used to hate before
the plague killed sci-fi conventions.
Saturday night: The doctor's fake covid infomercial was blocked on
YouTube as "covid-19 misinformation", a bulky video file
thumbnailed with a photo of him coughing thru a bloody hospital mask that
freezes and blue-screens my work laptop. He and my other friend the
neurochemist stay up late texting about background music, and I agree to
compose samples of samba and something "like the end of Requiem for a
Dream but punchier".
Tuesday: In the interest of time, I copy the final sequence of Requiem for a
Dream but in a different key and all the intervals inverted, which is the equivalent
of cutting a slit down the center of a tablecloth and calling it a poncho. The
samba can't be so easily replicated on a synthesizer, so I spend a few minutes
tapping every container in the kitchen until landing on a coffee mug, a wooden
spoon, and a glass jar of lentils for my percussion section. The doctor
asks if it can be "jazzier" and have I watched the video yet?
Wednesday: Someone froze to death in the park. A local film-maker, producer
of multiple documentaries on homelessness in America, fills a travel
dispenser with coffee and we drive to tent cities offering hot coffee, cigarettes,
and zucchini bread from one of the church ladies in my office.
During a donation pick-up (underwear! long johns!), we chew the fat with the
volunteer coordinator of the Big City Shelter, who is stressed as hell due to
spikes in the homeless population and a classist security guard who'll turn
away folks asking for beds because "they didn't look poor".
Volunteer coordinator: (eyes the film-maker) "You didn't hear
that."
Me: "Heard what?"
VC: "Wipe your mind."
Me: "Yeah, she's just stressed out from all the puppies and rainbows."
Film-maker: "So many puppies and rainbows."
VC: "So many rainbows. They go straight for the eyes."
Last stop is a client I've known over five years, a kindly dude with five cats who
finally agreed to supportive housing after cancer whittled him down to
eighty-seven pounds. He looks good today. Chemo is four miles from his
spot in the woods, and he makes the walk both ways every time now.
My first covid vaccination appointment is late afternoon, in a suburban
high school that is as organized and bristling with wholesome mother figures as
a Stacey Abrams campaign. I'm running on two hours sleep, on multiple
nights of two hours sleep, and when the receptionist asks "why do you
qualify for a 1-A vaccine?", I stammer out "when homeless adults test
covid-positive I have to transport them to-".
She cuts me off. Typing, typing. Two minutes later I have a
printed reminder of when to arrive for my second dose, and I follow blue
squares on the floor to the nurse's station.
I roll up my shirt sleeve and make small talk. Everyone is happy to be
working there. One jab later I move to the waiting area just in time to
catch the matronly regional health director say, "I'm so glad people
came, maybe some day I'll see my grandchildren again."
Thursday: I finally watch his covid film, which is exactly as good as the backyard
home videos we used to make in ninth grade. The whole project would be fun
if he stopped asking me to rope in professional film crews for no pay, and I
wonder what he gets out of this.
Friday: I'm standing on a five-foot rotating platform, pink lights strobing behind
my head, flipping my hair as I airbow to pre-recorded Christian rock music
and try not to hit the lights with my violin scroll. It's five percent music
school (count count count, subdivide the beat) and ninety-five percent modeling.
Bring six outfits. Do your own hair and make-up. Know how to move
with the light, when to open your mouth, when to slowly release your arm after
the high note.
After they get my footage, a second violinist joins me on the platform for a
"duel", red lights behind her and blue behind me, creating badass shadows
across the fog-filled studio and stage techs munching on Chik-fil-A. I've known
the other lady since college, and as we wait for the lights to change, we swap Lockdown
Mom stories (am I a bad parent? will my kids ever get used to the loneliness?
is everyone doing five jobs at once?). A rural clinic near us got shut
down for vaccinating teachers instead of frontline workers, and we quietly
sympathized.
I pack up in the dressing room, where the songwriter practices a dance move
in the mirror and zones out to exhausted silence the instant she's done,
happy to let the effervescent director choose her wardrobe. She doesn’t know it
yet but she’s actually suffering from a severe intestinal obstruction that will
require surgery, and she brushes aside the discomfort as nervousness.
That night I join a zoom salon on the topic of consciousness and the legal
implications of using brain death to quantify personhood, a cage match between
ten neuroscientists who claim to know nothing and one legal scholar who
likes to quote Ayn Rand, and only possible during Plague Times because half
these people lived in Oslo.
At some point our doctor friend chimed in, recounting a medical school class
where his instructor grabbed my friend's pet frog, scrambled its brains
with a pin, and commanded him to dissect it's still-beating heart. I've
heard the story many times and never get tired of it. But I understand why
he'll never go onstage with it.