“The future sucks.”
I met up with my friend who used to be a tour guide on the double-decker buses. Not just any tour guide, either– an award-winning tour guide who was highly in demand. Tour guiding wasn’t just a job for Pella, it was something that gave his life meaning, purpose, and joy. He dedicated much of his time outside of work to reading every book he could find on the history of the city. He was like a walking, NYC-centric version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” In addition to the bus tours, he had his own business doing private walking tours.
Walking around the Lower East Side with him, I felt like I was in “Back to the Future II” and seeing the future I needed to prevent.
“Every time those buses go by, I feel sad. So sad that I don’t want to come into the city from Jersey any more.”
The buses have had GPS-activated recordings ever since “social distancing” made tour guides “non-essential.” Pella’s job never came back, and now he works at a security job that he finds profoundly unfulfilling and low-paying.
“I don’t want to say I’m at the end of my life now, but…”
I thought about how I re-invented myself after leaving the city and assured him it’s entirely possible to move on, but recovery doesn’t look like becoming your old self again. I’ve compared my recovery since leaving to the plot to “Inside Out” before– the islands of personality in my mind were destroyed and needed to be rebuilt.
It still felt like we were in the wrong timeline and we should be figuring out a way to travel back and prevent this version of the city from happening.
This isn’t a time-travel flick, though; the best I can do is help people process what they’ve been through.
The night of the “Out of Lockstep” preview was so overwhelming and fast-paced that once again, I never had a moment to take my own photos. This was an ongoing issue I had the entire time I lived in NYC, and it always drove me crazy. Very often, I’d be working up to the last minute on a project, race to get the final product where it needed to be, finish up the last details, and have no time to catch my breath before the show was over. People used to ask me why I didn’t film myself sewing costumes, and I thought that was the stupidest question I’d ever heard. Filming it would require looking good on camera in addition to doing the actual job, which would require way more time and resources that I didn’t have. This time around, “Out of Lockstep” was on display for about three hours, but it took over 18 hours total to make those three hours happen– and that was with re-using things I’d taken to the last two exhibits and not needing to make anything new. For comparison, it took maybe an hour or two total to set up at Washington Pavilion in 2023 when I did my first preview, and that went on for a couple of days. NYC is just incredibly inefficient and tiring in a lot of ways that are impossible to anticipate until you’re there.
It’s hard to even explain what took so long. A lot of it was getting myself “camera ready” for the video that Pam took. Way, way too much of it was struggling to move things around the city without destroying my back and/or budget for that trip. At least six hours of that time was made much less efficient due to having anxiety because the people I needed to coordinate with weren’t answering their text messages. Two of them had passed out from exhaustion for most of the day. My backup plan if I didn’t hear back from the friend who was setting up the venue by a certain time was to show up at her apartment building and have the doorman call her unit until she woke up. At no point had I dealt with anything like that in Sioux Falls or at PorcFest in New Hampshire.
The only photos I have are some behind-the-scenes shots that Rachel Haywire took for both of us to use:
A side note on spending HOURS to get around the city in order to run errands, meet up with people, and actually get to the venue: tourists are always impressed with the NYC subway system because it’s better than what most of the US has for public transportation. For locals, though, it’s extremely grating that everything takes about 45-90 minutes to get to in theory, and in practice, it’s actually much worse.
I downloaded “Final Fantasy IV” on my phone to make the commutes more tolerable, but for some unknown reason, that kept killing my phone 10x faster than it did the first time I downloaded that game on my phone for commuting over a decade ago.
The only thing that city drains faster than phone batteries is peoples’ stamina. Everyone I met up with was running late and complaining about being tired. By the last day I was there, I was no different– I ended up cancelling my plans to go to Macy’s Santaland before leaving because I felt completely drained and unable to handle going into Midtown on the same day I had a flight to catch (the flight wasn’t until 7pm and Macy’s opens in the morning). All I had the energy for the day of the flight was sitting in the common room of the hostel drinking free coffee and talking to the other guests. I’ve heard much less of this sentiment from first-time tourists than from people who have lived there for a while though, and I hear much more of it from anyone who was there during the lockdowns.
(At least I got a photo of it from the outside before I burned out).
It was worth dealing with all the aggravation and fatigue for that show, however. The next day, I got this message from a friend I used to work on many different film sets with:
I am super proud of you for:
Speaking your truth with this exhibitAdmitting/exploring your grief process w/ this exhibit, and it gave me permission to accept the negative feelings I’m still processing from 2020. This is an important and difficult exhibit, and I really respect you for doing it.
On the same token, I was quickly reminded of how infectious & authentic your laughter is – and why I broke on so many sets working with you – and I need you to know the importance of that as well.
She mentioned in another message that even though there were a lot of comedic elements to “Out of Lockstep,” she cried when she got home.
I would certainly go back to the city again someday just because of the people I know there, and I don’t think I could ever say “no” to showing “Out of Lockstep” there again, no matter how draining the city can be at times.