[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Transcript of "Pandemic Pivots: How Artists Stay Creative in the Era of COVID"
Michelle Miller: I'm Michelle Miller, I'm the Performing Arts Network Chair for Brandeis alumni, it's part of Arts alumni. We've been doing all these events all year and we have an event next week. I'll talk about it a little bit later, but it's centered around fine arts. This is centered around all arts, really. We've had various events all year, really proud to be part of six of them. We've done everything from networking and entertainment events to panels like this one, and sort of geared towards different subjects. We've had TV film panels, we've had theater panels. We've had a short film over here. Courtney Suncar, by the way, is going to every once in a while and give us really, really great information. So far, it's been a wonderful welcome. Thank you, Courtney. So this particular event is just Arts alumni and Hiatt Career Center. So we're hoping to get current students as well as alumni in this event, as we talk about different parts of the arts. We have three wonderful alums on this panel that we're going to introduce shortly, and these three have had very different parts of the arts world, and so we're going to talk about their time before the pandemic. What's going on after the pandemic and great hearing from them, I'm going to do a quick Arts alumni message. So the Brandeis Arts Network is a group exclusive to Brandeis undergraduate and graduate alumni that enables anyone involved in the arts, both professionals and enthusiasts alike to engage, share, and experience the vast array of artistic endeavors, and fellow Brandeisians on campus across the country and abroad. The Brandeis Arts Network also encompasses and supports the efforts of the Performing Arts Network and the Brandeis alumni in film and television. With that being said, we do have Facebook groups. I don't have anyone who still does Facebook. I know Jason does not. But we have Facebook groups that we would love for you to join, and every once in a while we'll post events like this. We'll post maybe alumni news and profiles and alumni will post things that's going on. I know I've done it, so we are going to post shortly in the chat, the film and television Facebook group, The Arts alumni Facebook group, and the performing arts Facebook group. I highly suggest joining all three of them because they're all great and all slightly different. Wonderful. Great. I'm going to just start I guess because why not, right? All right, now I can do full screen because I don't have to read an arts alumni message anymore. So hi guys, I'm Michelle Miller, I'm Class of 2011, and also the Performing Arts Network Chair. So many people have come together for this event. Arnon Shorr was part of this. We have Melissa O'Karma, Courtney Suncar, thank you guys so much. I want to say this in the beginning, so I don't forget, as well as the Arts Alumni Council that's always been so supportive. Please feel free to join our Brandeis Facebook group. Excellent. Thank you so much, Courtney. I appreciate it. I'm an actress in New York City, so I sort of cover that realm. I also have a podcast called Mentors on the Mic, which I introduce people to different wonderful people in the entertainment industry focusing on how they started and how they moved up. That brings me to the introduction because one of my mentors was David Pepose. So David Pepose, thank you.
David Pepose: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
Michelle Miller: Thank you for being here. Then we have Jason Dick. Hi.
Jason Dick: Hi.
Michelle Miller: We have Emily Eng. Hello.
Emily Eng: Hello.
Michelle Miller: Welcome, everyone. So happy to see you guys and talk to you guys. This is so great. We are going to be talking about various parts of the arts, which I think is the best part. So let's start with David. David can you just introduce yourself and just introduce yourself. Just a brief introduction.
David Pepose: Yeah, I'm David Pepose, Class of 2008. I majored in American Studies, double minored in creative writing and theater. Yeah. I'm a comic book writer based in Los Angeles. I've written books like Spencer & Locke right here, Going To the Chapel, and my latest book that came in on Kickstarter, The O.Z., and the new series coming out in 2021 called Scout's Honor. So yeah, I'm happy to be here and thank you guys so much for having me. I'm excited to be part of this panel.
Michelle Miller: We're so happy to have you, David. Emily, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Emily Eng: Of course, my name's Emily Eng. I graduated from Brandeis in 2014. I'm currently based in Athens, Georgia. I'm studying conducting in a doctoral program at the University of Georgia, and recently I started a non-profit called Lift Music Fund, and we'll talk a little bit more about that, but probably a lot more about that. Yeah. That's me.
Michelle Miller: Thank you, Emily and then Jason Dick/Phoebe Jeebies, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Jason Dick: Sure. I am from Brandeis graduating class of 2014 as well. I went to Brandeis the same time as Emily, and I guess we overlapped a year, we all did, I guess. I majored in health science society and policy, and theater, a common thread here, and I am a drag queen in New York City. So a little bit different.
Michelle Miller: A little bit different. We have all spectrum here. So I'm going to just kind of briefly start this off with just asking each of you to just talk about a little bit about your life prior to pandemic. What was your normal, what was your day-to-day, what kind of stuff were you doing? So let's go backtrack. Jason, what was life before the pandemic, aside from our book club, which it's a little bit defunct right now because it's hard to me. What are some things?
Jason Dick: Pre-pandemic, let's see. I was bartending at a Broadway theater as my, my day job, and about a year ago, September of last year, I started doing drag pre-pandemic, and was getting the ropes and going out to bars and clubs and doing [bleep] nights at midnight, getting home at 2:30 in the morning, taking the train home in full makeup in New York City. Kind of the full experience of getting your sea legs in the drag community, and starting to just kind of, glow up and learn. Let's see what else. I was planning two shows, one, we're supposed to be at the duplex. It was going to be my first one-woman show, a solo show cabaret, where I was going to talk about my journey with mental health and how that's married with my journey in drag to teach me self love and acceptance, things like that, and I was going to do another show very different with a friend of mine, a comedy show, parody, and song parody, both of which got canceled. One was supposed to be an April, the other may. But during pandemic, I pivoted but I guess I'll hold off on that.
Michelle Miller: Hold up there for a second. I want to just paint the scene a little bit. You are performing in various clubs, you're pretty well immersed in the drag scene like you have a drag mentor.
Jason Dick: Yeah, a drag mother.
Michelle Miller: A drag mother. Sorry.
Jason Dick: That's how we call it.
Michelle Miller: Sorry.
Jason Dick: I actually did a play.
Michelle Miller: Yeah.
Jason Dick: I did a play that a friend of mine had written a part for me called Serotonin. That was the name of the drag queen in the play. They asked me to do it and I said, "Yeah, that sounds like a blast." As the show began to approach, I slowly realized I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I didn't know how to do makeup. I didn't own any wigs. I didn't even own a pair of heels that would work. So I was introduced through a friend of a friend to my drag mother, whose name is Gloria Swansong. She loaned me makeup and taught me how to do it and it lit the spark and I thought about it for a few months and I said, "Do I really want to do this? It's going to be so difficult. It's going to be so hard and everyone's doing it right now because drag is very popular."
Michelle Miller: Yeah. But you've got great feedback on that show. I'm pretty sure I saw that show.
Jason Dick: Yeah, people really loved it and it awakened a different part of me creatively and excited me in a way I hadn't been excited in a while. So that was the reason for the career shift.
Michelle Miller: Yeah. I loved that and we'll talk more about how it changed obviously, but of course, it changed because you're not really able to perform live.
Jason Dick: It's totally different.
Michelle Miller: So that's a big thing, a lot of reformers, it's just a complete different ballgame.
Jason Dick: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: But I loved what you did with that pivot and so we'll talk about that. But let's go into Emily. Emily, a little bit different. Tell me about how it was a year ago prior to the pandemic, what was life like for you?
Emily Eng: Yeah, so being a grad student in conducting is very, I mean, you don't wanna go into grad school with zero energy, you have to go and full throttle. So as a conducting grad student, we lead ensembles. We give lots and lots of concerts. We teach conducting classes. We take our own classes, do our own research, and so just a lot of performance. I think when COVID struck, I had four concerts lined up on the book. So Jason, like what you are saying, it's very hard to let those commitments go and you get ready for them. You study, and you practice and everything. I think the thing is with arts, we all know that what you see as the final product is the result of months and months of hard work. So letting that go was really hard, but I also was very tired when February, March came around. So in a way, it was like, "Oh, wow, I can relax recenter, regroup." So that was pretty welcome. But yeah, just a lot of performance activity up until COVID hit.
Michelle Miller: What's your performance schedule then beforehand?
Emily Eng: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: Yeah. What was it like?
Emily Eng: At UGA, it's a big state school, and they're a huge band culture. I study wind conducting. We have a 400-person marching band which plays at all the football games in the fall, I usually am involved with that. Then in the spring, all of those students take spring ensembles like concert ensembles. In the spring I was directing every once a week a 100-person band. So you can imagine when you don't want 100 people blowing aerosols into the space anymore. So that all stopped and we went fully remote. Then I was leading some smaller ensembles, did some new music performances. I was in the middle of some collaborations with composers, a chamber ensemble. I'm supposed to do Schoenberg Wind Quintet in May. Also a couple of other pieces for another 60-person band.
Michelle Miller: Wow.
Emily Eng: We have four bands going on in the semester at any given time. So it's very active and it's just bouncing from rehearsal to rehearsal in the week.
Michelle Miller: How long is your entire program at UGA?
Emily Eng: Yeah. So it's three years and this is my last year, which is hard.
Michelle Miller: Right.
Emily Eng: That's also been emotional, figuring all of that out, but It's okay because I'm in the middle with research and everything and I got a lot of performing time in my first two years, so I'm grateful for that.
Michelle Miller: Are you also simultaneously teaching and studying as well?
Emily Eng: Yeah. I'm fortunate here to be a graduate assistant, so we get full tuition plus a stipend that we can live on. So with that comes TA-ing the different ensembles, taking attendance, setting up chairs and stands, and also teaching, conducting to undergrads, music ed students, mostly.
Michelle Miller: Yeah. You've been studying for a while because you've got your masters right out of Brandeis, right? Then you went right into this program. Is that correct?
Emily Eng: I actually took two years off.
Michelle Miller: Took two years off.
Emily Eng: Between Brandeis and my master's.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Emily Eng: So in those two years I was working in Alumni Relations and Development at New England Conservatory. Then after those two years, I was like, well I love this music environment. So I did my master's at NEC for two years after that in wind ensemble conducting.
Michelle Miller: Great, wonderful. I think we lost Jason and so hopefully Jason comes back. Oh, there you are.
Jason Dick: I'm here. My boyfriend's getting home, sorry if I pulled the attention. I'll be right back.
Michelle Miller: Thank you so much, Emily. Before we transition to David, I forgot to say that if anyone has any questions, feel free to just write them in the chat for us, thanks. At the end, we are going to have a 15-minute question and answer period. So David, tell us a little bit about what life was like prior to the pandemic for you?
David Pepose: Yeah, my life is all about juggling things and so pre and post-pandemic, it's just choosing which things to juggle. I usually split my time between working on new projects, they'll be coming out in the next year or so, promoting the projects that are about to hit stores. Then I did a lot of travel for conventions, a lot of comic conventions all over the country. I would sell my books basically by hand. I think I had 16 conventions scheduled this year, and I got to do two.
Michelle Miller: 16.
David Pepose: For me, it was very crazy because I not only did a lot of networking professionally at these conventions with different editors and people who might pick up more work for me down the road. But I was making rent at those conventions. So for the comic book industry, things were really crazy with the pandemic. Our leading distributor put the entire industry on freeze during all the stay at home orders. Baltimore got the stay at home, so the distributor basically pulled the plug on the entire comics industry for, I believe it was two months. So the whole industry was in free fall for a little while. Everyone was freaking out about what are they going to do next, publishers were figuring out how they're going to stagger things that were already in the pipeline. They were really tightening their belts on what new things they were going to pick up. So for me, I switched gears to Kickstarter. I put up my new series, The O.Z. on Kickstarter.
Michelle Miller: This is going to be an amazing story, I just wanted to ask.
David Pepose: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: Because this is something I think that's going to come up if we talk, when we talk about their Kickstarter, I wanted to get this across. How was it publishing the first capital? So if we can talk about.
David Pepose: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: Going to Chapel and Spencer & Locke. What was the process of putting that out there so then I can compare it later to
David Pepose: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: Kickstarter life.
David Pepose: Yeah. For me, it was working with a publisher in the actual comic shop market versus an online self-published, apparatus.
Michelle Miller: Yeah.
David Pepose: When you're working in the comics industry, there's a lot of pitching, there's a lot of rejection. I always joke, I survived online dating in New York City and it's very much like that. You couldn't get a whole lot of no's and you just need the right, yes to move forward. My first book, Spencer & Locke, was a book that was what if Calvin and Hobbes grew up in Sin City. That got rejected all over town. But Top Five publisher told me it was the best pitch he'd never published, which I wear as a badge of honor. But like I said, it only takes the right yes.
Michelle Miller: Yeah.
David Pepose: Action Lab Entertainment picked up the book. Pretty much the moment they saw the pitch, they e-mailed me about 20 minutes after they got it, asking when they could get it done. Which was a real chill down my spine. Because then I said, "Oh, I have to actually make this book." So I've been working with them ever since they published the first two volumes of Spencer & Locke. They're going to publish the third one once the production's finished. They published my sophomore book, Go To the Chapel, which is a Die Hard meets Wedding Crashers. It's a little bit different because it's a very different ball game. As somebody who's read comics his whole life, there are certain steps that I knew you pitch the publisher, and then you call the comic shops and you have to figure out, "Okay, how many issues can I publish a reasonably take on from an unknown talent?"
Michelle Miller: Yeah.
David Pepose: Trusting, for example, that your publisher will handle the printing of the book.
Michelle Miller: Right.
David Pepose: Handle the distributing of the book, and making sure that it's print-ready, and working with the distributor to do stuff like that. When you're doing it on your own and I can talk more about that later.
Michelle Miller: Yeah.
David Pepose: The Kickstarter model, you realize, oh, you're doing it all on your own. All the things that you took for granted with a publisher, you realize, "Oh no, I got to do that legwork", which is why I have 2700 units of books in my office right now.
Michelle Miller: Twenty-seven hundred.
David Pepose: Yes. It's a lot to pack, but I think it's really empowering because now you don't have to really ask anybody permission anymore. You can put out your books for a sizable margin. If you're willing to put in the grunt work of the packing and the shipping, you can really have a very self-sustaining career out of that. It was definitely a learning curve and I think my whole industry was really grappling with that. You saw a lot of very established people. Scott Snyder, who was the writer of Batman for about a decade. He launched his Kickstarter the same day that I launched mine.
Michelle Miller: August 17th.
David Pepose: Yeah and so it gives a really seismic shift for the whole industry and I think everyone's figuring out. You have readers that just go to the comic shops and those just buy on Amazon and those who just go to conventions and those who just go to Kickstarter and it's how to
Michelle Miller: It's like four different lanes.
David Pepose: Yeah. It's happened to my Brandeis upbringing. It's how do you bring the diaspora together? How do you invite all these people to the same table and have them break bread together? That's been sort of the existential question that I think everyone in my industry if they're not having it, they should be having it. It's something that certainly has been informing the way that I'm going to approach business in 2021 and beyond.
Michelle Miller: Love it. We'll just go right into that data. Let's continue with that. The pandemic hit, obviously everything changes. Have you been thinking of putting a Kickstarter together prior to that happening? Was it at the back of your head?
David Pepose: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: What made you decide to go with it?
David Pepose: So much of the way that I do things in the comics industry is usually if I have two problems, I try to solve them with each other. I wanted to do a Kickstarter for a while. I had a lot of friends here in Los Angeles, a lot of comic creator friends who had a lot of success on Kickstarter and said, "You should really be doing this." My friend Charlie Stickney, the co-publisher at Scout Comics and the writer of a comic called White Ash. He and I have been friends for a little while now and he was the one who really convinced me saying, what I was discussing earlier is that the Kickstarter crowd is a whole new demographic that aren't the people hitting a comic shop every Wednesday. I realized that's a whole demographic of people that I've done no outreach to in the three years that my books had been on the stand. Meanwhile, I had a book called The O.Z., which was what if Mad Max took place in the Wizard of Oz. We had the first two chapters drawn of the book. A lot of publishers, just the way that it tends to be in my business, they drag their heels, things happen, they get distracted, there's limited bandwidth for acquisition. I had a lot of people say they were interested in the book, but nobody was putting a contract in front of me.
Michelle Miller: Yeah.
David Pepose: When my industry was in free fall with our distributor shutting down, I realized, like I said, let's solve one problem with another. I have a book that felt like some of my best work and I wanted to do a Kickstarter. Why not? Why not bring some of my best work to Kickstarter? Kickstarter was really successful.
Michelle Miller: Let's talk about how successful it was David. When did you reach your goal? When was it? How long did it take?
David Pepose: Two hours.
Michelle Miller: Two hours to reach your goal?
David Pepose: Two hours. I had thought maybe if I could just get the print costs, it would be enough. I could make my money back in the convention scene, and the convention scene came back. When the Kickstarter was over and combining that with back-end orders on BackerKit, we made almost fifty thousand dollars.
Michelle Miller: How much percentage over was that?
David Pepose: That was $44 thousand more than what my goal was. It was very crazy. That's the only word you can use to describe it.
Michelle Miller: I think I wrote down 475% of your initial log.
David Pepose: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: That's insane.
David Pepose: It was really insane. I attribute a lot of it. Some of it was right place at the right time. Kickstarter likes to keep people in the ecosystem. Having the writer of Batman launching a Kickstarter on the same day, I had a really strong wind at my back. I had my readership from my previous books in what we call the direct market. That's the comic shops. Those people who had read Spencer & Locke, and Going to the Chapel, were primed to join in on board. Then people who really like the Wizard of Oz. Surprisingly, that is a very big fandom.
Michelle Miller: Tell us about the Oz, just so that we have an idea of what that particular comic book was.
David Pepose: It's the story of Dorothy Gale's granddaughter who's a disillusioned Iraq war veteran. She is swept up by a tornado and stranded in what has become the war-torn land of Oz. She finds out that because her grandmother killed the wicked witch of the West and then split the resulting power vacuum turned Oz into something not unlike Baghdad. This Iraq war veteran, she has a second chance to make things right. She's going to have to navigate these factions lead by her grandmother's former friends in order to bring peace to the occupied zone, or as the locals call it The O.Z. I think it's a really special book. The thing about comics is, at least in my mind, I'm the weak link. I'm just the writer. I'm not the art team, and so working with an artist like Ruben Rojas, a colorist like Whitney Cogar. The book looks pound for pound as good as anything else you'd see in the stands and so that's been my philosophy is work with talent that is up and coming, that is as hungry as I am, that is unique and no one's seen them before, because then the book becomes undeniable. Then it's very freeing for me. Nobody cares what I write. If the art looks really good, then it really provides nice cover for me as the writer. I've been very fortunate with the creative teams that I've been working with and I think The O.Z. is really no exception.
Michelle Miller: Yes. So I wanted to briefly talk about this because I felt like there was a lot of creativity that I saw because I felt like I was a part of the whole
David Pepose: You were part of the launch.
Michelle Miller: You interviewed for so many podcasts, not just mine, obviously prior to the launch date, so you are ready to go. I felt like the first couple of weeks you had multiple podcasts coming out, multiple interviews. That was part of your launch. I felt like your Kickstarter was so successful for a myriad of reasons but one being your launch was so successful prior to even launching it actually.
David Pepose: Thank you.
Michelle Miller: I was really impressed by how creative you were in coming up with new incentives because like we said, you reached your goals so quickly within 24 hours it was three times your initial goal and now you have a whole month left to try to raise money?
David Pepose: Yes.
Michelle Miller: How do you come up with ways to incentivize people. You have to have new prizes, new incentives. Can you tell us a little bit about the creativity behind that?
David Pepose: Yeah. Sheer unadulterated panic. When I went into Kickstarter, a lot of my friends had said, "Go very conservatively. You haven't done a Kickstarter before. You don't have that Kickstarter audience and you want to make sure that you have a goal that you can hit because this is a book that is really good and if you don't hit your goal, it's just going to be a big black mark against the book." I had said, "What's the minimum amount that I could do on this Kickstarter without feeling like I've wasted my time? So I said $6 thousand." You spend that time going into the Kickstarter and I spent about a month planning that Kickstarter, thinking how do I get to $6,000 in 30 days?
Michelle Miller: Yeah.
David Pepose: When you get there in two hours, you're suddenly not just like playing a brand new sport. You're like in a whole different planet with its own laws of physics, and you have to figure it all out on the fly. I was really fortunate that I'm friends with a lot of people who have had success in Kickstarter. So I was able to pick their brain very quickly and say, "Okay, what do I do here?" Things like having enhanced covers, for example, or adding pin-ups to the mix. Our digital comics extravaganza where I contacted a dozen friends in the industry and I said, "Hey if you give me a free PDF of your first issue of whatever book you want, that is 1250 people who are going to get exposed to your work and will hopefully pick up some of your stuff." Things like pin-ups, stickers, enamel pins. It's really kind of a Rubik's Cube game where you have to figure out what can I offer that is extra that is not going to blow up my pre-existing shipping budget, and even then, there has proven to be a little bit of wiggle room as far as that is concerned because the post office upped all of their rates about a month after my Kickstarter ended before we had books that we could ship. You have to have some wiggle room in the budget for that.
Michelle Miller: Right.
David Pepose: But I've seen a lot of Kickstarters in the past who had promised the world. Promised things like t-shirts or statues or action figures and have completely annihilated their budget because they don't realize how expensive it is to make and ship those things.
Michelle Miller: Wow.
David Pepose: Figuring out things that I can offer digitally was a real asset. A buddy of mine, George Marston, my best friend, actually, is a musician so I had him come up with a theme song for the book. I did a writer's commentary for the book once we hit a certain amount. I offered a secret incentive cover if we hit $45,000 and we made it on the very last day. It's adding just one more buyable collector's item to the mix. There are certainly things that I would do differently looking back, especially with the fulfillment side, but that's the thing, it was my first Kickstarter and I feel very empowered knowing all the hiccups that I hit on the first one, which we're not even that big.
Michelle Miller: Yeah. Small hiccups.
David Pepose: Very minor hiccups, things that were totally solvable. But now I know the next Kickstarter, that'll probably be in February or March. These are the things I'm going to do differently to streamline the process a little more. Yes, we will be doing at least two more Kickstarter to wrap up the series and then possibly a third one for a collected edition. We're still figuring out, we're ironing out the bugs for all of that. It's a wonderful way to connect directly with the readers and build up your own individual fanbase.
Michelle Miller: That leads me to my last question I think for this part is, you've created a community. Right off the bat, you created a community. I mean I started seeing your updates were all about addressing the emerald army?
David Pepose: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: I thought that was so great because you already had the lingo, you already had the name for the communities so I should really ask quickly about that. How did that comes out?
David Pepose: Yeah. I wish I had been smart enough to come up with it before the Kickstarter started. The adrenaline hits and more ideas hit, and so when we were backed in two hours, I was so stunned and sleep-deprived and pinching myself, and suddenly the phrase Yellow Brick Road Warriors, came to mind, so I started, all of our readers read that and people seem to really like that and calling them the Emerald Army. I felt like I was channeling Stan Lee, a little bit. He always was the comics grandpa. His style was showing readers a peek behind the curtain and treating them very informally, like their friends and so I channel that a little bit to my sales approach. I mean, Kickstarter, that's its business model, is they want you to feel not just like you're a consumer, but you're part of the reason why the project exists. It is certainly been a learning curve, figuring out the customer service elements of it all. Ninety-nine percent of our backers are wonderful, sweet, enthusiastic people. But of course, you're going to have one percent that is going to say, "Well, I have a problem with XYZ and you have to figure out, all right, how do I do that?" Because I want to keep these people as readers as long as they're not bigots I, of course, want to keep them around. I think for me, coming into independent comics trenches, the only numbers I care about are the number of readers that stick with us from book to book. I don't care about the dollars. I'm the world's worst son of an economist for saying that. But for me, it's all about what's the book that I can put up that lets me sleep at night? I say that enough that I think that my readers trust that, and so they feel like even if I'm not the guy writing Batman, I know I've got room to grow as a creator. They know that I'm going to leave it out on the field to the best of my abilities for every single book. That lets them roll the dice on me. I'm always very grateful for that and I try not to forget that. I know it can be easy to do so as you build up in your career. But I just remind myself, I wouldn't have a career without every single one of these readers. I have 1254 people who have proved that, so I try to be grateful.
Michelle Miller: Yeah. Well, I've said it a million times, but I'll say it again. Congratulations on all of that, and on your third Ringo nomination.
David Pepose: Thank you. Yeah, that happened in the middle of the Kickstarter and it was a lot going on in that month. It was my big month and I'm very excited. People seem to be responding to the work.
Michelle Miller: Thank you, David. I'm going to transition into Emily because it's a little different here. But Emily, tell us a little bit about what happened with the pandemic, how that affected you, and then how did you come up with Lift Music Fund?
Emily Eng: Yes, certainly. There was so much time, I think, for everyone to sit and think, and I had nothing but I should have been doing more research and everything and working on school stuff, but there's just a lot of stillness I wasn't conducting, I was waving my arms around, I wasn't going to perform. In June with the kind of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, it was a real reckoning obviously for everyone in our country and in the field of classical music. On particular, we live on this space that really privileges white people and maybe without meaning to, but maybe intentionally excludes others, and so I was just sitting on my couch thinking about why is this? What are the root causes of this? There are so many, I mean, institutionalized racism is in everything, from top to bottom. But I was thinking a little bit more broadly, a little bit more foundationally, and I was thinking about, "Oh my gosh, music is just so incredibly expensive." I studied cello when I was a kid. Cello lessons can be like 50 to 100, some of my friends take lessons that are 200 dollars an hour. To keep doing that, you have to start at such a young age, to have all the equipment and everything and so for a family who doesn't have access to wealth and income, that can be a real barrier for students to pursue music and the income gap, the wealth gap really affects certain communities, black, LatinX, Native American communities in our country, so I was trying to think about how we can help and what our music field can do to improve the situation? I was thinking, kind of researching what sort of scholarships are available to young musicians and I was looking for something that offers an ongoing source of funds, but that aren't 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, these bigger scholarship numbers. I wanted something out there that could buy a set of strings or help prepare an instrument or something like that, and that students could apply monthly and then find out within that same month if they got it or not. Because with so many of the scholarship applications you apply in like December and you don't find out until March, April, May. That doesn't work when your instrument is broken and you need it to play every day. So I start talking to people, started talking to the music community and everyone I talked to was either they're like, "Wow, I really wish I had something like this growing up. Or they're like, "Wow, I realized how much money my family spent to make me as successful as I am today. To be a successful musician, often to be a successful artist, it's either you had a lot of help or you already come from a place of privilege. That's where this all came from and so start talking to people, getting people involved, putting together a fundraising model, putting together our strategy. What our organizational scheme would look like?
Michelle Miller: Values.
Emily Eng: Yeah, exactly.
Michelle Miller: A website, mission statement.
Emily Eng: Yeah, all of that. As I mentioned earlier, I worked in Alumni Relations and Development. I'd done that at Brandeis. I was a phoneathon kid at Brandeis so I was one of those calling you alumni, asking for money and then I get the text today and I'm like, "I'm sorry." All that to say is that Brandeis phonathon was the first time I stuck my toe in the world of development and fundraising and then I had that in that set of skills that was lying a little bit dormant. But this felt like the perfect opportunity to synthesize my professional life, conducting music leading with like this fundraising, abilities and background and project management and that kind of thing. Through all of that, we did a crowdfunds. Similarly, David, we were fundraising at about the same time. We started in August, went to October and raised almost $30,000 to fund the first year of micro-grants.
Michelle Miller: Amazing. You've had three months so far being able to give all these people, the recipients, scholarships or grants or micro-grants, so how much did each recipient get? Because we've already had three months and each month is about 14 recipients, am I correct?
Emily Eng: Yeah, it depends. Each student can ask for up to $250, for whatever they need. Some of them ask for money for books or whatever, and so we write up a little budget. It's a very simple application. We just asked where the student is in their musical journey, what music means to them, and how this micro-grant would help them and what impact it would have on their studies. They also have the option to upload a video or audio of himself playing. It's great to get to know the students in that way, and yeah, we have a review panel. We have a set amount of dollars that we are saying this is how much we're giving out this month, up to now it's been $2,000 a month. We're hoping for that to increase because just this past month, students asked for over $5,000 a month and that's really hard, because we want to be able to support them fully and there's such a need, but we only raise so much money. I'm hoping next year we're going to also do another crowdfund in February, March time, so that will fund the next year.
Michelle Miller: Have you been getting donations in the meanwhile or is that like, I imagine, slow and hard to also try to fundraise, accepting scholarship applications while deciding, Oh, that's a lot", but have you been getting any donations since the crowdfunding?
Emily Eng: Yeah, so the crowdfund, we had close to 40, what we call mini-concerts for micro-grants, so friends, friends of friends gave 30-minute performances and they basically ran like a telephone. You play a little, talk a little bit about your musical journey, and then also ask for donations. That brought in the bulk of our fundraising. What was great about those was, a lot of people didn't have an opportunity to perform live during the pandemic and so they were like, "Well I wonder what do I work towards right now?" This gave them something really fun to work toward at the end of the summer and into the early fall. Also, it gave them a chance to be a part of dealing with racial justice and helping fight for racial justice. We still had a couple of mini-concerts after, because when everyone was doing it, other people were like, "I want to do one, too", so we've been doing that. Then it just gets around and some of the students, teachers or friends and family, they are very supportive so they'll find out about us. Yeah. Yeah. That's been
Michelle Miller: I'm going to hold up on my last questions because time-wise, I've completely messed this up a little bit, so I'll give a little bit less time for question and answers, so please still bring them in, and I'll hold my last question because I think I'll have time at the end to ask you. But Jason, tell us a little bit about your post-pandemic life and how you transitioned and pivoted because you're not able to perform anymore, in clouds we weren't able to do your shows as well. So how did you transition?
Jason Dick: It was very jarring because drag has completely rooted in live performance and more than that in interacting with an audience. New reason you go to a drag show is you hold out a dollar and a queen or a drag artist comes up to you and they grab the dollar and they'll play around with you, mess around with you interacting in the crowds, jam-packed bars, and clubs. So that does not really work for a global pandemic and all the bars shut down, and a lot of them have in fact closed during this time, which has been pretty devastating here in New York. So my thought process was, "Okay, I'm new at this, and not a lot of people really know who I am or what I'm about, and was taking this time going to bars and clubs to discover, what my aesthetic, what's my brand? What am I offering to this community, to this art form that somebody else isn't? I am a lover of baking. I started teaching myself to bake two years ago because I like to cook. I was always afraid of baking because I didn't think there was any room for creativity or improvisation. So I decided I'm going to bake at least one thing a week for a year. This was before I started to interact. So I did that over the course of the year, I probably baked 60 or 70 different things because I would double up some weeks and
Michelle Miller: Because I was in book club with you...
Jason Dick: You've got to sample a lot of them.
Michelle Miller: I've got to sample so I was super happy.
Jason Dick: Yeah. It ended up being something that I was quite good at. Once you learn the fundamentals of baking, you can improvise, and that was when I really started to enjoy it. I started to create my own recipes, and a light bulb just went off. I'd had this idea in my head of doing a scripted series, wouldn't it be funny if my drag persona did this at home with Ammy Saderas or Mister. Rogers-esque fourth wall show, and then it became, "Oh, what if I just taught my recipes? What if I actually taught my recipes as me?" So my brother let me borrow his camera and I got into drag and in the first video, you can see how new I was because it's crusty looking makeup, and I taught how to make my shortbread, which was the first thing I ever taught people how to make, and it was fun. I enjoyed it and I made a few more.
Michelle Miller: What was your show called?
Jason Dick: Phoebe Gets Baked. Sorry, that's important to share. I had made the episode already and I was like, "Oh my god, I don't have a name for it." Phoebe Gets Baked, why not? I made a few episodes, but it proved very challenging for me because I had to borrow my brother's computer. I didn't have a computer capable of software editing. I had a laptop that the battery had died and I couldn't even use it unless it was plugged into a wall. So I took some time off from the idea, focused on doing some digital shows.
Michelle Miller: Which were really great.
Jason Dick: Yeah, I did one in June. Speaking of George Floyd, I was planning a pride show, a digital show with Dear Drag Sister, another drag queen, Jenna Sais Quoi, and we were going to do the show and collect tips and all that and everything happened. I had a conversation with her and I said, "I don't want to cancel this show, I just want to refocus it." So we did a show called Don't Mask Your Pride, and we raised money for the Liberty Fund. Which posted bail for people who were arrested during protests when we had a curfew here in New York and it was really rough here, and then the other half, we donated to a non-profit that provides grants and scholarship money for young people of color working in the arts, because that was something that my friend was really passionate about. We ended up raising $800 in an hour on Instagram Live, which was unfathomable to us because we're used to bringing in $20 in dirty singles from a bar and taking it home and being like, wow, what a great night. So raising $800 was pretty incredible. Kept doing some online content, and then I got approached by a [bleep] networking website that was starting called Queer Social. They said, "We saw your baking show, we love it. We would love to have you bring it to our website as an exclusive content", so I said, "Okay, time to get a computer", and got a new credit card with no interest rates, got a computer with great editing capabilities, and we were in business. I started my show up again.
Michelle Miller: Talk to us a little bit about the show. What's a typical episode or show like there?
Jason Dick: Sure, so I will basically take you through one of my recipes, an original recipe that I have created or that I've adapted. I will take you through the steps and we'll have a bunch of laughs on the way. It's very silly. My aesthetic in drag and as an artist, I love comedy. I've done sketch comedy and improvisation and that's what I love to do. I love to make people laugh.
Michelle Miller: I think that's an important point of your style because you'll do a song prior to talking about the recipe and the whole recipe is really funny and all that. But the song prior to, you'll perform, but in the middle of singing or lip-syncing, you'll also insert these little bits of comedy from different comedies, and it's so fluid and excellent. There's a lot of preparation I imagined to that.
JASON DICK: Yes. I have become very technologically advanced, compared to where I was. It requires it. We call them mixes and drag, which is where you'll take songs and you'll mold them with dialogue in pop culture, and you'll center that around a theme. It's very big in drag culture, it makes people laugh. It's really fun. It's funny. You take a big hit song, you mix it with something from the Real Housewives of New York or something like that. Everyone laughs and has a great time and hopefully tips. So I became very good with GarageBand and with creating content like that, which I had already been familiar with. Then there was the video editing. I had no idea how to do that.
Michelle Miller: The production of your videos is just fantastic. I'm not just saying that, I really think it's all very seamless. You put out a music video not too long ago, it was beautiful, I highly recommend. We'll put a link to it. Also I can transition into this now, because when asked each one of you, how do we support you, Jason? So what are ways we can support you and see your work?
Jason Dick: Sure. I am on Facebook as Michelle mentioned, not a place where I enjoy being, but I am on Instagram, which is where I post a lot of my content. Should I post it? Let me post it on chat. I had it already typed up. I'm on Instagram. I'll put the handle and everything in here. I have a YouTube channel that I recently started where I post all of my videos, including the music video I just did and all of my baking videos, and then I actually sell my recipes, something that I started doing later into the pandemic.
Michelle Miller: How much are the recipes?
Jason Dick: Five dollars. I consider it, if you're watching the show, it's a tip with a perk, like a Kickstarter. So you're supporting artists and you'd get my recipe, which includes pictures and tips and tricks and things like that.
Michelle Miller: Occasionally you'll do raffles or you'll do, you'd put it up when we talk to someone else that way it's not distracting, but you also do raffles so people should follow for that and also for Thanksgiving, I don't know if you're going to do it again, but.
Jason Dick: I sold pies.
Michelle Miller: You sold pies, so I bought a pie, I bought an oreo pie. It was fantastic.
Jason Dick: Season one is ending next week of my show, and I'm going to put all nine recipes together in a cookbook of sorts and sell that for a lump sum and try to do stuff like that. We did cocktail pairings with a friend of mine who I think is here, Eliza. I'm trying to really go on with my brand.
Michelle Miller: Yes, I love it, and then Emily, how can we support you and Lift?
Emily Eng: I'll just throw the stuff in the chat as well.
Michelle Miller: Sure. Same with David, please. I'm going to ask you in a second too, but feel free to post as well because God knows, I have to get the question and answer soon.
Emily Eng: We have a website. You can find our past recipients. If there are any students who are eligible for Lift Awards. If you know musicians in your life who have students, there's the application and that whole process there, and that's all there. Also, if you're interested in donating, as I mentioned, there is a need and we're not able to meet that need right now, but we're working on it. So any support there is obviously very appreciated. We're also an Instagram, Facebook as well.
Michelle Miller: Amazing. Thank you, and David, how can we support, you? No, you're muted. You were doing that thing.
David Pepose: Yes, my dog was being a diva and so I had to switch rooms. The best way to support me. I actually have a book in pre-orders right now called Scout's Honor. It's about a post-apocalyptic cult whose bible's an old boy scout manual. You can order that at your local comic shop. The first two issues are available to pre-order now. You can also tell your Karmic shop at all five issues to your pull list. I'm going to add some links to all that in the chat. You can also subscribe to my newsletter "pep talks."
Michelle Miller: Highly recommend.
David Pepose: I'm sending a new one out on Tuesday. Follow me on Facebook, David Pepose Comics, Twitter and Instagram is Pepose D. Or you can visit my website, davidpepose.com. I'm adding all that to the chat right now.
Michelle Miller: Great. On that note I can get to ask you questions that other people have come up with. So this one is from Ingrid Shore, the lovely Ingrid Shore. For all the panelists, you have a sense that by working in the online space, are your students, or readers, or viewers from all over the world, and does that change the way you think about your work?
Jason Dick: Yes, I know for me as somebody who works in live performance normally, it's been exciting just to be able to have even just my parents be able to watch. They don't have to come to a gay bar at midnight on a Monday to do so. But it's exciting because you get exposed, too. This is a big thing with Instagram, but now focusing on online content really exposes you to people who aren't in the New York City area for me. It's actually been an incredible way to re-frame the way we think about doing drag as rather than just it happening at the bar, it's happening online. You can reach people who maybe are coming from areas where they don't have the chance to go out to a bar. People from different parts of America who would like a little drag in their life.
Michelle Miller: Yes. Emily and David?
Emily Eng: I'll say for me as well, similar to Jason, my parents were also able to watch all of my friends' many concerts. We had concerts every night in the month of September, October time. So that has been really great. Also, students from all over the country are finding out about us and applying, and we have a very vibrant following on Instagram. It's basically all high school students, college students who are part of our community. That's really cool support. It also made me think a little bit more about what can we do? Because everything has developed in a virtual space, so I'm already thinking, "What will we do when we're actually in person?" That's fun also to think about.
Michelle Miller: Yes, and you have time to think about that. A preparation thing.
Jason Dick: Like how you can marry those two things.
Emily Eng: Yeah.
Michelle Miller: Yeah. It's true.
Jason Dick: They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Michelle Miller: I was thinking a lot about that even creating these events, we've been creating Brandeis panels and stuff all virtually. But how great would it be to have that in person again, but also have that virtual component for people who are not in the same city. David did you want to close out that question?
David Pepose: Yeah. The comics industry, because most of my books are usually printed at least nationwide. Then oftentimes there is some trickling in internationally. The big conversation in my industry has always been about representation. That's the big global view that I always try to approach in my work is, I'm going to be honest with myself and that I'm a white, straight cis, Jewish writer in Hollywood. It's not like I would consider myself a minority in any capacity. While I can't speak with authenticity to anyone's particular life experience, what I can do is at least make sure that my characters have representation to them. The comics industry for so long has been dominated by the straight white male archetype. You look at the Justice League, six out of seven are straight white men. For me, a question that my collaborators and I have always asked ourselves, going from my very first book is, if this could be led by a woman or a person of color or someone for the LGBTQ community without veering into negative stereotype, why not do it? I feel like it's low impact for me. But it's something that I feel it's a baby step in the right direction. I feel like that speaks to my overarching imperative which is, how do we bring more people to the table? How do we bring in people who might not have felt comfortable in this industry or might not have felt like there was anyone like them in this industry to say, "Hey, look you can have women action heroes. You can have action heroes of color. You can have anybody in this book, and there's some book for you to read. I consider that my responsibility as a creator. So that's something that I always try to take into consideration, is how can we have a more global approach to the content that I'm working on?
Michelle Miller: Love it.
David Pepose: Yeah. Just to try and pivot it all online.
Michelle Miller: Right, and Lauren Elias wants to ask you guys being pivoting, what advice would you give to artists about pivoting during the pandemic?
David Pepose: Mine would be, just be compassionate to yourself. I remember going in therapy during all this and my therapist saying, "This is truly unprecedented." You don't wake up thinking, what happens when my entire industry shuts down for two months, and all the conventions that I've planned for the year are just not going to happen. So you can give yourself a little bit of time to figure out, first off just reel with the initial impact of, "Oh, man what is going on?" Then figure out, "Okay, how am I going to pivot? How am I going to change gears?" These things don't happen overnight, and expecting yourself to do it overnight, I think can be counterproductive to your creative output. I think collaboration is really important. Anytime that you can bring multiple people to stick together, I think it can become a force multiplier. I think chances are, you are not the only person in your boat who was freaking out about how do I pivot from here? So building that community, that's something you can do online no matter what, and you guys can sort of figure out a smart path forward from there. That's my choice answer.
Michelle Miller: I love that. I think with all three of you really gotten this idea of, even in a time of uncertainty, even in we're not sure that we're doing the right thing or how we're going to do it, or what steps we have to take to doing it. I feel like there's this element of just do it anyway. Just push through that uncomfortability. Push through that I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if this show is going to end up happening. I don't know if we'll be able to crowdfund. Both situations. Jason, did you want to add?
Jason Dick: I also think that to remember that in a digital world, we're all performing constantly. Even people who aren't performers, people are putting things on Instagram, or Facebook, or Twitter about how successful they are and you don't see all of the work that goes into it. You don't see all of the nights of thinking, "Why am I doing this? I'm a failure." Looking in the mirror, all of the stuff that we all go through. All you see is photoshopped, Vogue cover or whatever and it's just not the way it works. I'm constantly doubting myself, fighting constantly to remember that my art has value and to continue to do it despite feeling like nobody cares about it sometimes. You're just going to have tremendous ups and downs in addition to what we're already experiencing in unprecedented times. I completely agree with David, be kind to yourself, and also remember that everyone's going through this and what you see is not necessarily what they're going through.
Michelle Miller: Very well said. I think it's something we mentioned right before starting this panel, we were talking about David's career especially and specifically just because I've interviewed before so I know a little bit about that journey, and you were talking about all the rejections, all the failure because we can all relate to that as artists. This idea of, "Yeah, we're looking at this incredible moment in your life with this Kickstarter and how successful it was. But there's still so many moments prior to that led you to that moment.
David Pepose: I'm a firm believer that the thing that will make a creative career, it's ultimately not your talent. It's just your threshold for pain and how long can you stick around and say, "I'm not going anywhere." That can be really challenging. Emily was quite right saying that so much of a creative career can be rooted in either coming from a background of privilege or having a lot of help. You can't discount that. But I think ultimately it's a long game. There is no such thing as an overnight success. It took me 10 years to get my first book out. It will not happen overnight. But I think, jumping off of what Jason was saying, I promise you your art does have value and somebody out there is listening and there's someone out there, even if it's just one person, that your work is going to mean the world to them. So keep creating, keep doing it because I promise you, if you stick at it long enough, you will look back at it and you will say it was all worth it in the end.
Michelle Miller: What a great moment to end on that regard, that's beautiful, thank you. Then just one more thing. I've got the questions. I appreciate Rachel Kovacs for asking. Will any of the artists be available to be contacted for some specific questions after this session, and if so could you write down in the chat, I know a couple of you've already written your Instagram, but just some way for people to contact you after subsequently. Excellent.
Jason Dick: Yeah, I included my e-mail and my Instagram. So you can e-mail me.
Michelle Miller: Excellent. All right guys, just one more thing. Courtney mentioned it, this is the last thing I promise. Next week December 14th at noon, we are having another alumni arts panel, not panel, it's really more of a focus on artists' works. We have three alumni artists that are being featured, Brian Tavares, Marlon Forrester and Naomi Safron-Hon. They are going to talk about ways into shifting with the pandemic and their careers. How Brandeis education has informed each of their creative processes. So please register for that. The link is in the chat. Thank you guys so much. This has been so fantastic. Thank you, Emily, thank you, Jason, thank you David.
David Pepose: My pleasure.
Michelle Miller: This has been wonderful. It's our last arts alumni event for this sort of thing now, up until obviously our fine arts one next week. Thanks, Courtney. Thanks, Amy. Obviously thanks Arnon. Thanks Melissa. Thanks all of you. I'm going to end this. It's just going to be me talking. Have a wonderful night everybody. This will be recorded so you can watch those if you missed something later, you could send it to someone. Have a wonderful night or evening depending on where you are.