Friends, do you remember when I was so excited about my matching red glasses I bought from the Christmas Tree store like I was a real adult a few months ago?

That picture is of them now and man oh man do they feel like symbolic of 2020 for me.

I started out this year doing what I love (stage managing – bonus points for it also being in a foreign country I love), but excited and fairly apprehensive about making a change and doing a contract teaching.

I leased an apartment. I learned (and am still learning – constantly in progress learning) how to teach. I sort of settled in a little bit.

Anyone who has been reading along the last few months knows I was not all in on this settled down thing and have had one foot out the door planning my escape the entire time as well.

Which was fine, right? I’ve been stage managing for years, if I want to pop back into that world, surely someone will hire me. Heck, I had hopes and dreams of maybe my old company hiring me for one of their tours (because if you ever get a chance to work for The Works Entertainment – you take it – it’s a good place to work).

And I had an offer of a five flipping year contract to sign at the university I was teaching at if I could just figure out how to quell the urge to run.

Which I never did fully manage to quell. But alas, COVID killed that options as well.

At any rate, there were options. So many options. The world was my oyster.

But something about these busted red glasses with their sad, fake crumbling plastic finishing just triggers me daily about the lost potential of 2020.

I have largely tried to make lemons out of lemonade and look to some of the bright sides of the last few months – and there’s no denying that for me there have been a few.

But I sometimes also overwhelmingly feel the what the f*ck of the moment right now, especially when I think about theaters and live events.

The uncertainty of the future is a lot and speculating about the state things will be in when they reopen isn’t exactly pretty.

I think that for a little while, there will be a lot less jobs.

There will be additional expenses in sanitizing and monitoring health that have to be paid somehow, and let’s be real, producers are going to shrug and turn to all of us on the front lines and reduce our pay rather that doing logical things like less video walls or consumable props or sane choices like that.

I also was pretty disheartened by the General Management panel at the Broadway Stage Management Symposium when every single one of them said something along the lines of expecting the stage manager’s job to expand to cover these additional sanitizing and health monitoring duties.

I mean, stage managers aren’t exactly unaware that’s what’s coming for us because we have been speaking up against it from almost day one of quarantine.

Stage manager doesn’t mean catch all for every random job in the theater.

I had hoped General Managers might have heard our protests about overseeing the health of the casts, but it seems like it didn’t reach those three on the panel. And clearly, from their tone of voice as they talked about it, the GM mindset is very much that of course stage managers will be the ones that will be doing these things.

On the flip side of this, after months of not working, are stage managers, especially non-union, likely to turn down jobs just because they have to take some temperatures and keep records of it? My guess is no. We’ve been asked to do far crazier.

Wow, this rant took a little bit of a turn. I was mostly just triggered by the sad state of my glasses and the sad state of my future prospects.

I thought I was mostly upset about the fact that I am never, ever going to get approved for a mortgage. Apparently my career is bothering me even more. Who knew? Thanks, stream of consciousness writing.

I think some of this may come from all of the wildly overwhelming bad happening all across America and the fact that in the past, even when everything else was falling apart – my career has always been a stable thing in my life. That lack of stability is like… a lot… amiright?

I suppose the main point of this rant was a reminder that this life isn’t always sunshine and lollipops. I mean, I think we all know that, but I know I’ve been incredibly lucky in my career – though there was that several month season of burnout you are welcome to go read all the crazy posts I wrote circa 2016-17.

Just another terrific reminder of the non-linear life of a stage manager.

Sigh. Alright, back to our regularly scheduled program of trying to make lemonade.

How are my other folks in the arts doing? Ya’ll hanging in there? What lemonade have you managed to make during this time?