Thoughts. In A One Sentence Story.

One of my favorite theatre companies here in Chicago is A Red Orchid Theatre. I can go into details of why at a later date, but one of the reasons that is relevant to this entry is because of a thing we do just about every Monday called Studio. We get together for three hours and talk, share work, share stories, ask questions, and be in community with one another. I haven’t been in some time for various reasons, but this past Monday I went because I promised a friend I would do my best to be there. It was a smaller group, but I had missed some of those folks dearly so it was good to be there. The friend that I had made the promise to, shared a one sentence story she had written and it was so viscerally beautiful. I would like to try that exercise below. I don’t consider myself a very gifted writer, but I’m not afraid of trying something and keep learning and growing because that’s all we can do is practice, so here goes…

2020 was a hell of a year, and saying it was because of the Covid-19 pandemic is, to me, an oversimplification, because there is way too much wrapped up into that long period of time in isolation away from friends and family, where we had nothing to do but sit with ourselves, even among the endless bingeing of TV and film, video games, reading books, yoga classes, Zoom calls, and braving the outside to get our essentials from our local grocery stores, filled with long lines of masked, socially distanced folks;

when we weren’t doing those things, we sat with our thoughts, and mine were filled with moving out of my condo with my boyfriend at the time (now husband) as soon as possible so we could put it on the market for sale and buy a house somewhere in the city that we could afford (surprise we ended up in the suburbs because housing prices in the city continue to price folks out of affordable housing), while also realizing that I was burnt out from work and didn’t even know it, so while friends and peers were grieving the loss of our industry in the arts, I was in a surreal twilight zone of vacation, until I wasn’t; once the boredom sat in, then came the loneliness, and then the realization that I missed being around black people, something I hadn’t had since my freshman year of high school when my parents moved us from Indianapolis to West Chester, something I had never had in my career and didn’t realize I was missing and wanting, and then came the depression and the desperate desire of something that I still couldn’t have just yet because hundreds of thousands of people were dying and we still had no vaccines and leaving the house was scary;

months of sickness and death and playing through the last of us and last of us 2 were finally lifted when vaccines arrived almost a year later, and we were relieved, and theatre started trying to re-emerge, but then Omicron came, so we all got shut down again, hoping this wasn’t going to be another year of shit, and then finally 2022 allowed us to gather with safety precautions and performances were revived, but things looked different - things never fully recovered - things were never “back to normal” again; and they still aren’t, even though we all try to act like they are, because survival is all we have sometimes, as we push on and push through and search for what it means to be thriving; 2022 let me have my job back and I did get my first all black production in 2023 and my second the summer of 2024 and I still want more - more shows with black people, more community with black people, more meaningful friendships with black people because I love black people and there is a sense of belonging and welcoming and communing and joy and peace and collectiveness that just doesn’t exist in other spaces when you are the only one or the other and it’s like exhaling a deep breath that you’ve been holding in for decades without even realizing it and we don’t need another instance of I Can’t Breathe;

we need to be each other’s keepers, hold each other close, love on each other deeply, keep telling our stories and make our art and live softly and joyfully because that is the best resistance and that is the kind of love I want to give and receive and surround myself with as much as possible for the rest of my days.