taking care
One of the things I did at my first real job was book travel arrangements for other people. It got to be routine pretty quickly: calling airlines and hotels, inputting confirmation numbers and arrival times into the template schedule that I would save as a PDF and send to the guest's assistant, who would pass it on so that her boss could fail to read it and then text me the day of the event to ask, like, where he was supposed to be?
It was a good education in: people who are good at one thing are not necessarily good at everything. People who become "leaders in the field" of the thing they're good at are often the ones who have no shame about asking other people to do the work that isn't their specialty, or their interest. I sort of debated making a point about gender here but it's hard to imagine that it doesn't play a role: that, as a woman, I feel ashamed to ask someone else to know my schedule for me, because what menial labor and form of care-taking am I not supposed to take on? I've been acculturated since birth into the idea that I should work 5 days a week and clean my house on the weekends; anything less is selfish and lazy. I don't think I've ever heard a male friend agonize about hiring a housekeeper quite the way my girlfriends and I do. (Questions of class and race, in that particular example, also obviously have some role to play.)
Anyway! I'm in New York this week. Someone is paying for me to be here; someone else booked my flight and hotel room and sent me the confirmation numbers in a PDF. Until very recently all of my work was in event production: thinking through all of the boring details of putting on a show so that someone else could take the stage. I would be lying if I didn't say that it feels good to allow myself to be the talent for once: to show up after the venue is booked and the mics are set up and the tickets are sold and the co-sponsors have been brought to heel, to say "where do you want me?" and wait patiently for the answer.
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Recently:
I wrote about being out and about in Los Angeles for the protests at LAX.
I interviewed Kate Hart about her book After the Fall and Stephen McCarty about his spiritual vegan cheesecake making practice. (Yes of course really.)
And I covered the Academy's Makeup and Hairstyling Awards Bakeoff, a weird Hollywood tradition even to someone who was raised up in weird Hollywood traditions.