Tag: Work

I think I mentioned I’ve been watching videos by music teacher Rick Beato (so many good ones). The most recent one I happened on was made in response to a commenter who suggested Mr. Beato knew nothing of real work. Gauntlet thrown.

As Beato offers his biography and resume, the stops along the way all featuring employment, it got me thinking about all my paying jobs. Here I go. At first I thought, How many could there be?

• When I was about 12, I started babysitting in the neighborhood, an occasional cash gig ($1 to $3 an hour was a going rate, depending on how late at night I had to stay); I babysat all through high school and college, and for extra cash when I was a public high school teacher, supplementing my $17,500/ year income as I paid off a student loan and my truck;
• When I was 14, I spent various hours of summer afternoons walking across the street to help my neighbor Mr. Flaherty, who owned and operated Woodbridge Driving School out of his basement (his wife taught special education in our county, and I babysat their three kids), and helped him file and organize his invoices (he taught me how the drive the summer I was 17—great teacher);
• At 17 (now with a driver’s license) I got my first regular job as a cashier/stocker at Woolco, which job I had my senior year, all the summer before college, and my college Christmas break; this job paid for all my books, clothes, and toiletries for my freshman year, and luckily I didn’t have to work through the terms;
• The summer after freshman year, Woolco had gone defunct, but I was able to get a job at Dart Drug, in the same plaza where my mom, Lynne, managed Crown Books. I remember filling out the application by hand, running across the street to the realtor’s to pay $1.00 to have it notarized, and returning to Dart where I was given a smock and told to start the next day. I worked as a cashier (which also meant washing windows, collecting carts from the parking lot, and other tasks) every summer, winter break, and spring break for the next two years of college;
• Between my junior and senior years, I acted professionally ($75!) at the Virginia Tech Summer Arts Festival in Seamarks by Gardner McKay, a two-hander where I had half the lines, and that same summer I house sat for my costume design professor, Felice Proctor, while she spent the summer doing the costumes for the Utah Shakespeare Festival. I lived in a townhouse shared by theater students and rode my bike the few miles every day over to her place to collect and her mail and newspapers, empty the ever-running dehumidifier, and water her flower garden, all while attending summer school for education classes, and bike back to my place so I could catch the bus to rehearsals and performances; at summer’s end and the following Christmas, I spent a few weeks back at Dart;
• During my senior year, I auditioned for and got a job as a telemarketer for the Virginia Tech athletic boosters, giving a survey to alumni and asking for money; I also babysat for assorted professors’s kids; during breaks I was back at Dart;
• After graduation, I lived at the same townhouse for the summer and worked as a Christmas tree shearer in the Blue Ridge Mountains; getting picked up by a fellow college student at 5:00 AM every day for the 45-minute drive to Floyd County, where I learned to don chaps and shear pines with a long knife, pee outside, and eat ham sandwiches from my little bag that held my half-frozen gallon water jug; in the evenings I’d drive my friend Liz’s family station wagon over to her apartment, pick her up, lift her into the passenger seat and fold up her wheelchair and toss it in the back, drive over to the Performing Arts Building, park, get her out of the car, wheel her to the steps where some guys would come out and we’d get her chair up to room 204—I swear I have no memory of this, but I know we did it, and out again; I was her assistant as she stage managed the play Tennessee for the VT Summer Arts Festival; I’d drive her home at 10 PM, get myself home, no sooner hit the pillow then suddenly my 4:45 alarm would go off; I also acted in a show called Rich Lives: The Voices of American Homemakers as “The Woman from New Hampshire” for the 50^th Anniversary of the Women’s Extension Service for 3,000 farm women from all over the United States, all while recovering from near-fatal blood poisoning due to poison ivy; I also realized too late that I was way over-extended taking care of Felice’s house again, so all her flowers died; at Christmas it was back to Dart;

• Between my student-loan backed 5^th year—where I was a student aide, student taught, co-directed a local high school musical, and took a bunch of education classes in preparation for my Boards—and my first job as a paid schoolteacher, I once again acted in the VT Summer Arts Festival, this time as several characters in Andre Gregory’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland; I did not house sit for Felice; at some point I got paid for doing a mime show at a nursing home. Possibly this event closed out the hardest total year of my life;
• Next, I was, finally, a full-time public high school teacher, a job I got in a rural county where outsiders never came (I told you that story), and taught English 9, English 10, and Speech and Drama, and directed four plays my first year; I also had to host the VHSL (Virginia High School League) AA One-Act Play Competition, both District and Regional (meaning I did all the communications with the other competing schools, by phone, and had to procure all the judges, set the schedules, arrange dressing rooms for all the kids, figure out the lighting, sweet holy mother), in a town with nowhere for lunch so I got our Food Services class to cater (bless Tawana Lee); and I had to repeat all of this the next year while also co-sponsoring It’s Academic and Forensics; and then repeat all that in my third and final year sans the Christmas play and my drama class, instead being given a section of English 12—guess why I quit?;
• My next jobs were in my year off (after my first summer of five in grad school at Bread Loaf), where I lived in the country and worked a little catering, did some babysitting, and was a reporter/photographer for the Virginia Farmer, a rural paper, writing feature articles and learning how to use a Pentax K-1000 SE (thanks to my professional photographer friend Jay’s over-the-phone tutorials);
• My next job was to be found when I moved back home to Northern Virginia; while trying to get an interview with a school system (my letters of recommendation apparently sabotaged by a vindictive superintendent, is the best I can gather), I worked the weekly afternoon-to-evening shift at Minnieland Daycare for three months until I could land a job…
• …which I did, partway into the year as a replacement teacher, at my second and final high school, where I went to high school (I told you that story) where I worked for twelve years, all told in my career maybe 2,500 students, before I…
• Moved to NYC and was hired by an educational publisher, an entirely new career, where I still work 22 years later, having helped create (I think) eight full reading programs, Grades 5-12.

Here’s a challenge: if you are feeling a little lost, a little, “What have I even done with my life?”, take an idea from Rick Beato and Miss O’ and perform this service for yourself. Nobody comes from nowhere; nobody does nothing.

So. I’ll wait.

Would you look at that? Yes, you did that.

There is no doubt in my mind, none, that all our youth would be far happier, less depressed, more fulfilled, if they could point to an assortment of work they’ve done with their hands, out in public, something for others—you know what I mean? My god the miles I logged on foot, on my bike, on the boards of theaters, around stores and parking lots, in classrooms and down endless hallways. How did we do all that? And we did—and also went out with friends, did art, built stuff, listened to music, danced, made meals, had holidays with family, traveled, and moved, and moved again, and again.

And here we fucking ARE.

Come on now!

Sending love,

Miss O’