I haven’t always been a nervous flier, but since I began flying alone in college it’s gotten progressively worse. Can you blame me? I‘ve flown Alaskan Airlines before. I’ve flown Breeze. I’ve had to pay a la carte for my seat, my carry-on, to press the flight attendant assistance button, for my ice in my drink, and an extra $50 on my card for the plane to land, you get the idea.
When I start to feel the plane rattle, I calm my nerves by walking through everything I’m going to do when I land:
I’ll pick up my clunky, ugly orange suitcase at the baggage claim.
I’ll call an Uber to my destination.
I will absolutely listen to Welcome To New York during the car ride. Probably three or four times.
I will check in, put my things down, and walk to get a matcha.
As the plane (Delta) shook and I thought about that Alaskan Airlines flight (if you don’t know, now you know), wondering if I too, would meet that fate and have a cool icebreaker for my conference, I smiled down on New York City’s skyscrapers. My fear of turbulence was lying to me.
And then the pilot dipped the left wing on such a stark angle it was as if we stuck a pinky toe into the Hudson.
I walked towards the baggage claim, sweatier than I was two hours ago, and with excellent timing, my clunky, ugly orange suitcase greeted me at the first carousel.
I stared out of the window of my Uber for the entire ride to my hotel in Midtown. I was nauseous and had been awake since 2:45am, there was nothing glamorous about it. Yet, I found myself getting teary-eyed listening to Welcome To New York, embracing the cliche as hard as I possibly could.
Over the weekend of January 12-16, I attended the Association of Performing Arts Professionals in Midtown Manhattan. I spent the weekend networking with industry professionals and learning about innovations and issues facing the music industry in real time. It was one of the best experiences I could give myself to prepare for post-grad, and I’m so grateful to the College of Charleston Arts Management Department for their financial support!
I spent a lot of time in hotel ballrooms as a child and as a teenager. As a competition dancer, you get invited to conventions, where guest choreographers are brought in to teach to a room of hundreds of dancers, there are auditions for scholarships to the following season’s convention, and a competition to follow. This is usually a fifteen hour day.
The room shakes out like this: the really aggressive girls head to the front and place themselves mere inches away from the choreographer. If you wanted a fan kick to the head, you stood directly center. If you were on the younger side of the age group, good luck, because you shuffle out to the back. I often found myself on the left side, negotiating real estate on the rolled up floor, sometimes pirouetting on hotel carpet, other times slipping and sliding on the slick linoleum. I fantasized about being one of the injured girls with a leg elevated and an ice pack resting on their knee. In my opinion, sitting out with a Starbucks cup in hand was a highly sought after position. Worst of all, if there was a male dancer in the class, it was game over. Surely, the guest choreographer would pluck him from the crowd to perform the combination, set to a Celine Dion or Whitney Houston song. It’s all coming back to me now.
If all of those hours in a hotel ballroom taught me anything, it’s that I just have to keep moving. Sitting out with an iced latte sure would be nice, but it won’t get me where I need to be.
So I pushed myself into the deep end, far away from my comfort zone. It felt like I spent countless hours over this weekend in a hotel ballroom, talking to booking agents, marketing directors, one-man-bands, and producers from the United States and beyond. I gushed about my last internship and how much it meant to me that I got to work in live music, and my dreams of becoming an agent. I shared the same story over and over again, about a night I spent shadowing the audio engineer at my internship, wrapping stage chords that connected microphones to amps, and how that experience alone showed me how impactful working behind the scenes is.
I attended distinct sessions on mentorship, booking and touring, and learned about Camp from Sasha Velour, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 9.
I asked everyone I talked to share with me career advice they wished they knew when they were freshly post-grad. What I learned is that there were no complex answers, no secret sauce to this idea that felt so abstract to me.
“Just work harder than everyone else. If you do that, no one can outwork you.”
“If you always lead with the best case scenario, things will always work out for you.”
“Care a little bit about what you do, and people will take notice.”
My lock screen on my phone for almost a year now has been this picture of two pink circles, one small and next to it, a bigger one. Two fish are centered in each circle and the caption reads, “It’s bigger and scarier and much better for swimming.” The big stuff and the scary stuff is where everything begins to change- you just have to believe it’s for the better.
As I sat in the LaGuardia airport on Monday, I felt a tinge of sadness to leave New York, yet feeling lucky to be headed back to Charleston. I was still nervous on the plane and practiced the same walk through I always do:
I will set my alarm for 7am tomorrow morning.
I will go to my first day of my last semester of college.
I will count down the days until I return to New York, hopefully next time to start my post-grad job.
As I wrap up my insights, I feel it’s necessary to share how I spent my downtime. I’m so grateful to my parents for taking the train from Baltimore to Manhattan and spending the weekend with me, just like they did years ago, waiting for me outside of hotel ballrooms.
What I listened to over the weekend:
Burning - Maggie Rogers
Ship To Wreck - Florence + The Machine
Do My Thang - Miley Cyrus
Girls & Boys - Good Charlotte
Time to Pretend - MGMT
What I read over the weekend:
The Maid by Nita Prose
Being tourist-y:
We walked all the way up to the Met, and on the way back experienced what I can only describe as “Krusty Krab Pizza Wind” - again, if you don’t know, now you know. We got to visit the Women Dressing Women exhibit, which was so interesting.
Places we ate, that you should absolutely try:
Gemma - in the Bowery Hotel.
Anassa Taverna - in Midtown.
Bobo - in the West Village.
Serafina - in Midtown.
Some advice:
DO NOT! I repeat, do not even THINK about Gregory’s coffee. I got the worst matcha of my entire life here. I feel qualified to share this, as I possess two years of barista experience. I ordered an iced matcha latte with oat milk. I would even venture to say that this is hard to mess up. The barista handed me a warm matcha with no ice, in a cup intended for an iced drink. All I can say is, that’s showbiz baby? I still tipped, I took my L and went on with my day.
That’s all for now. Love you.