Posted by grillcover on Jul 18, 2022
Reflections: (September/October 2021)
September was where things started to turn around for me– or really, where the bottom fell out. My months of mania had finally sunk me into a deep depression, and despite filling the holes in my heart with things to do I needed to eventually step away from organizing work for a bit. I’m going to go through this period chronologically as my priorities shifted and my brain healed.
On September 1st, with BKBX auditions still underway, I was visited that evening by Hurricane Ida. Of the five floods I’d experienced in this fiercely fought-for ground floor apartment, this was by far the worst. Of course, I knew it was coming and had prepared to an extent: a plastic barrier and garbage bag fit around the rim, sealed with 30 pounds of dumbbell weights, surrounded by towels and a small absorbent dam protecting the rest of my apartment from the bathroom.
My defenses were immediately overwhelmed. The rains that evening were historic, the storm at times dropping half an inch or more of water in just five minutes. So when the flooding came, it came fast and hard. I put together a video documenting as much as I could for my case against my landlord, from before the main storm, to when I enlisted my super’s help to try and plug the toilet, to our efforts to bail the bathroom, to the various flooding occurring across the ground floor. Later I found myself on hold with 3-1-1, standing barefoot on an industrial mop, squeezing it into the pipe with all my weight and force while the geyser fought to lift me out of the bowl.
I can’t imagine what my apartment might have looked like had I not been somewhat prepared and had the urgent support of a super who also lived on the ground floor. But I got a sense of what it might be like the next morning, after staying up all night cleaning, mopping, and reclaiming my nerves. Around 6:00 AM, a woman I’d never seen before emerged from the apartment next to mine in a nightgown looking horrified, asking what had happened. Turns out she’d just moved in the day before, went to bed early, missed the whole storm, and had awoken to a flood of sewage escaping her bathroom. Of course, the landlord hadn’t mentioned this longstanding issue when she sought and signed the lease. She moved out that day, and I never saw her again.
I had work I was trying catch up on, and was supposed to record a VO audition for an old friend, but needless to say the flood threw me off for days. It also deepened my desire to organize against my landlord, and escalate to legal measures if necessary. The 3-1-1 operator had seemed unimpressed by my situation (not surprising, considering the tragedies elsewhere) and it took the city over a week to even come look and say there was nothing the Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the sewer lines, could do; my limited options for recourse were again hitting dead ends. I’d have to go through HPD (Housing Preservation & Development) and, likely, housing court. But using tools like JustFix and WhoOwnsWhat, I was able to dig up dirt on my landlord across their portfolio of properties, including what appeared to be incomplete plumbing upgrades in my building. This gave me some confidence to organize and fight back.
I think in part to shake it off, I turned out September 4th to a rally and march to Chuck Schumer’s apartment in Park Slope, called by the NYC-DSA Ecosocialist Working Group in support of the Green New Deal for Public Schools, a national DSA legislative priority at the time put forward by Rep. Jamaal Bowman to direct stimulus infrastructure spending to our nation’s crumbling public schools. This had also becoming tied in with the PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize) and we were jointly celebrating Labor Day Weekend. There was a sizeable crowd, but it was lacking any real militancy.
So we trod, via stoplight and sidewalk, from the Grand Army Plaza Park to Schumer’s building and briefly held space out front while the choir was preached to. I had a nice conversation with a non-DSA member who came from AOC’s mailing list, and I truly hope connections were made and people were mobilized. But given what a mess the whole Build Back Better fight became, never mind the now-all-but-abandoned GND4PS, I have to wonder if massive phonebanks and timid marches were an adequate strategy for urgent, transformative demands.
On September 11th the Racial Justice Working Group had another strategy session after being in limbo. We had to organize around anticipated changes for how priority campaigns are structured in NYC-DSA, as well as reconsider our tactics. One idea that had consensus support was building our outreach toward holding Community Conversations. We’d collaborate with our electeds to put on events and facilitate discussions about public safety in the communities most impacted by both police brutality and austerity on the one hand, and interpersonal violence and crimes of poverty on the other. Deep organizing doesn’t work on campaign cycles and is notoriously difficult to measure impacts, but really is all the more crucial for these kinds of radical reforms.
By then I was feeling demoralized by national and even municipal politics, and was looking to organize hyper-locally. So when a question arose in the neighborhood DSA groupchat about an unsightly metal wall surrounding an undeveloped lot in Flatbush, I was excited to dive into the research about who owned it and what the story was, and whether it could be put to better use by the community. Sure enough the lot had a long, winding history of owners and violations and stop work orders, but no clear answers. So on September 12th I met with a handful of other neighborhood DSA folks to make a plan to reach out to the community about the lot, engage them about the chapter, and see what people thought could go there instead, like a tot lot or community space.
Below: The metal monstrosity that has stood on this high-traffic corner near the subway for several years. I was able to pull up all the info on the owner and property, but the question of eminent domain or other legal moves remained open.
But I didn’t get too involved in that project (which eventually became moot when construction finally kicked into gear) and also had to step back from several other things I’d been intending to do in September. Because just a couple days later, buckling under pressure from work, organizing, family, and my own sense of impending doom, I had a serious emotional breakdown that left me scared about my mental health and personal safety. When I was through it, for the first time in a while, I understood the importance of my own survival and the effort it would take. And whenever things get dark, I have to remind myself: I’m not gonna do the fascists’ work for them. They may well get their chance someday, but if they want me dead, they’ll have to do it themselves.
On my birthday, September 21st, I tried to recenter myself and recommit to living the life I’ve got. I went to the garden store, thoroughly cleaned my chestnuts of the spider mites that had taken hold and were killing my little forest, went off to Broken Box rehearsal, and got some drinks with friends. For just a day I wanted to feel like I had before everything changed. I even almost did.
The NYC-DSA Citywide Convention was held on September 25th, and I attended in person as an alternate delegate. After I arrived, I was briefly seated and set up to vote with hundreds of other socialists from across the city, before the delegate I’d replaced showed up. It was just as well that I was released; I was more interested in observing the proceedings and hadn’t studied the resolutions nor followed the debates as closely as I would have if I expected to be voting. I had my sympathies and general opinions, but I’d be shooting from the hip on some questions of the day. And with the org now pushing 8,000 members in NYC alone, these decisions could be pretty significant.
My takeaway from the day was pretty cynical. Most of my early involvement in NYC-DSA was as a rank-and-file volunteer and field lead, desperate to channel my roiling political energy into something productive. But my eagerness had blinded me to the longstanding political and interpersonal dynamics that operated on micro, macro, and every other scale in the org. By the time of Convention I was feeling deeply irritated by org dynamics in the face of crisis, and this event just underscored my opinion. No doubt an important learning experience in how things operate, what works well, and laying concrete ideas in my mind for how things can change and grow, but overall a bit of a let-down.
A memorable disappointment came when the keynote speaker, India Walton – the DSA-endorsed mayoral candidate from Buffalo whose establishment-backed opponent later successfully waged a write-in campaign – was asked to explain her wholly unsatisfying statements and criticisms of calls to defund the police. Incredibly, she reiterated long-debunked Democrat talking points to the applause of about a third of the audience. Instead of acknowledging that many of us in that room had worked tirelessly on demystifying and implementing that movement demand which had arisen from the largest multiracial protest movement in our lives, most of Convention later attended a combined afterparty fundraiser for India. I was relieved to be able to debrief and decompress with Emerge caucus comrades instead.
In October I really started to put politics behind me for a bit. I was just too cynical, too useless. I saw a play of my friends’ for the first time since the pandemic, outside at a park. I took a train out of the city to hang with some old friends, enjoyed another friend’s engagement party, got drinks after rehearsal. Visited my parents. Went and saw a friend’s concert in the East Village. These efforts to socialize, not always easy, were definitely the real beginning of the healing.
On a lovely Thursday, October 7th I went on a little chestnut hunt around Brooklyn and Queens. According to the highly-detailed and seemingly trustworthy NYC Street Tree Map, there were quite a few remaining Chinese chestnuts around the city, with some clusters in close enough proximity that you could expect to find them all bearing nuts. Considering how expensive chestnuts could be, and wanting to propagate local trees, I figured they would be worth checking out. I mapped a handful of locations on what would become my NYC Chestnut Map and planned a little route through the boroughs to hit up as many as I could in an afternoon.
But I noticed something strange as I located these trees and nuts. The leaves were definitely similar to Chinese chestnuts, but the nuts I was finding weren’t. The spiny green husks were familiar, if smaller and harder to ID this late in the season, but while I’d seen small chestnut varietals these nuts were clearly more acorn-y. And each set of trees I came across, whether it was listed as Chinese or American chestnut, seemed to produce these same nuts. I dutifully collected samples from each tree, but became increasingly sure there’d been a mistake.
Above: A series of photos taken on my unsuccessful chestnut hunt. The bark and leaves are close enough that it’s an easy mistake out of season, but the nuts are a clear giveaway.
Sure enough, when I got home to my computer and did a little digging, it turned out I had visited a dozen different saw-toothed oaks, which outside of flowering and fruit-bearing times are sometimes misidentified as Chinese chestnuts. And the acorns, sadly, are considered last resorts even for NYC wildlife. This doesn’t bode well for the hundreds of “chestnuts” listed on the street tree map or the official 2015 tree census, but the process of “ground-truthing” can begin in earnest in 2022 if I’m able to enlist some help and get started a lot earlier. I’m prepared to be mostly disappointed, but maybe we’ll get lucky!
Then on October 10th I finally moved the rest of my poor, withering chestnut saplings out of my apartment and spaced them out a bit in bigger pots. Unfortunately after having borne multiple shocks and inadequate care none of them were able to survive the winter. Still, it was good to say goodbye to them and get my hands dirty again. I learned a lot through the process and the four survivors are happy, healthy, and getting ready to be planted together on a property in Delaware.
But the biggest single contribution to my improved mental health was the Broken Box Mime company residency from October 11th through 15th in the Hudson Valley on the Sharpe Reservation. Interrupted by the pandemic, our annual trip was always a wonderful place to bond as an ensemble and generate the sparks of new work for the season. Vaccinated and tested in a tight COVID bubble, with cabin space and beautiful, nearly empty campgrounds and buildings at our disposal, we retreated to the woods for the week to rekindle some of what had been lost.
Above: After the pandemic postponed or canceled all of our work for years, we were finally back in a generative mode. With three new members and bursting at the seams with creative energy we attempted to pin down our collective zeitgeist. We left less resolved than in the past, but definitely began the process of alignment.
The impact of the week is impossible to overstate. It was a powerful combination, between the stunning natural scenery, a complete retreat from the daily grind and unfolding crises, and the invitation to be vulnerable and expressive and creative with some of my favorite people. Relearning the normalcy of sharing big meals and close quarters without masks, realizing how starved I was for physical contact as we played and improvised our silent stories and moving metaphors, getting super stoned under the stars and communing with the darkness of the woods – it was all very profound. I was surprised to realize after I returned that the involuntary tics and spasms that I’d developed had largely stopped. A relief in itself, of course, but it was also proof that whatever other invisible injuries I’d sustained were capable of healing, too.
Back in the city I was still in mime rehearsal for our upcoming tour, but I was also approaching the deadline for my City Artist Corps-sponsored remounting of the Stuck Layer Players. Originally I’d intended to regularly pop-up the street show through the fall, but rounding up the materials and literally getting my act together took longer than expected with everything else going on. But in the end, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, October 24th, I parked myself by the Endale Arch at the top of Prospect Park’s Long Meadow and treated passersby to some radical mime, canvassing, and crowd work that I hope left an impact.
Above: With a chalkboard full of provocative questions and color-coded fliers containing tons of resources and info about organizing, I set about my mimed vignette until people approached to variously play along, ask questions, or talk about politics.
I’m (eventually) going to follow up Part 1 of the story with a longer post about the process of transforming the boisterous soapbox of the debut into a quieter, more intimate durational work, what I was hoping to achieve, and some of the great stories that came out of it. But suffice it to say that I was extremely pleased with the final design and performance, and inspired by the audience participation and feedback. And despite all my canvassing and performance experience, this style of street theater brought its own stomachful of butterflies I was proud to have harnessed. At the time I thought I might be able to bring it back in the spring; that hope remains for this late summer and fall.
Finally, on October 26th I was back to bunking with Broken Box as we flew out to Boulder, CO for a whirlwind tour of performances and workshops at the Dairy Center for the Arts and nearby schools and theaters. Some of our members are from the area, and a couple had even sought COVID refuge near home and had a place for us to crash. We still had a blast being together, but this time with rehearsals, tech, five shows, and two workshops over five days. It was my first time performing indoors in years, and many audience members’ first show, and it was all very well-received. And considering our final performance fell on Halloween and a Bronco’s game, it was remarkably well-attended.
Below: We called our touring show Above/Below, even though the setlist was totally different from the original NYC version in 2015. It’s just a good title! Also pictured: our crew outside the Buntport Theater in Denver, an old haunt of company member Matt Zambrano, that graciously hosted a workshop.
Intentions: At the time, I was looking forward to hitting the ground running after getting back in early November. I think I had forgotten just how much going on tour, even (or especially) for such a short, concentrated time, can take out of you…