56 Scene
GOLDEN HOUR
STUFF & THINGS
Stepping up
Off the ladder
) At the present moment of writing I have my feet soaking in a concoction of hot water and salts, barely able to keep my eyes open, and I’m one of the lucky ones after eight long months of not working. Remember Fatima’s next job in cyber and the stream of hilarious spoofs it produced? Turns out it’s not actually that far from the truth in a couple of very contradictory ways.
) Some people have callings when it comes to jobs or professions. They have a dream, a desire, an urge to become a chiropractor or a chiropodist or other things beginning with ‘ch’. You’d be all stunned to hear that I never felt such a calling. I never had a desire to become a vet or a policeman or a doctor or anything really. Apart from a pop star. I think we all thought we’d be pop stars when we were young. I wanted to be Cheryl Baker. She was my ‘ch’.
BY BILLIE GOLD
Understandably, the government ad that encouraged us all to retrain was met with unprecedented anger, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Most of us have worked so incredibly hard to be the entertainers we are today, honing our skills and being the very best we can be, and my god do we love our jobs. But behind that ad there was a hum of panic. Should I retrain? What if the world never comes back the way it was? Am I simply done as a performer? None of us are ready to say goodbye to everything we love, and in a lot of ways for me specifically, thinking of something else except my art as a job sort of felt like a betrayal to my career. But loving my job was never going to stop PAST DUE letters coming through the door. ‘Retraining’ as a turn of phrase was somewhat, how do I put it, cute. Retraining takes time, courses, and money, which as a suddenly out of work performer who has likely been left behind by government financial help, I and others simply don’t have.
“My career will never leave me, I don’t have to betray it, but I do need to pay my rent. I see no better way than fondling the snot of strangers hoping for a very quick end to the most boring apocalypse ever” The performer community was outraged mainly because to Joe public it looked like our jobs didn’t matter, that they were ‘silly’. I refuse to regurgitate internet memes about art mattering, because I suspect we have all been in an Instagram scroll hole for the past year anyway, but the fact is the same. Looking at your life not from a stage and saying ‘how do I feed myself?’ is a very real thing that we have had to do and personally I have been surviving unconventionally until just recently. (Webcamming is much like therapy in lingerie, but we aren’t the only ones out of work, and there are hordes of beautiful people saturating the sex work market, so it’s not as lucrative as you’ve been led to believe).
“None of us are ready to say goodbye to everything we love, and in a lot of ways for me specifically, thinking of something else except my art as a job sort of felt like a betrayal to my career” Thankfully my search for work has very happily come to an ironic conclusion. The thing that put me out of work is now my work. I have been working with the most fantastic group of people Covid testing and joining the national effort to make this horrible virus sling its hook. And in the space of a week I have found myself humbled by how big this thing is. My career will never leave me, I don’t have to betray it, but I do need to pay my rent. I see no better way than fondling the snot of strangers hoping for a very quick end to the most boring apocalypse ever.
BY JON TAYLOR
“Who knows where I’d be now. Hobnobbing with executives from around the world, jumping on to private jets and taking phone calls about the project in Cancún” My Mum and Dad were both teachers and I saw what they went through in that profession, which was enough to put me right off it! So without having a career to aim for I just sort of fell into working in retail. And it’s alright, it serves its purpose. If it weren’t for the public it’d be marvellous! Ultimately I was very lucky to be in a position where I didn’t need to earn the big bucks or feel I had to climb a corporate ladder. I’d inherited some money from my grandmother, which 25 years ago was enough for a deposit on a flat. Would just about pay for a decent secondhand car now. So, as my outgoings are relatively low, I don’t have to earn much to get by.
“For some people their work is their life. They eat, sleep and breathe it. It consumes them like a fire and absorbs all their energies. For me, my job is a means to an end” So this meant that I didn’t have to push myself or drive myself forward into my career. On the downside it meant I didn’t have to push myself or drive myself forward into my career. Perhaps I could have become a higher-up retail kinda guy, working weird shift patterns and never having a weekend off. Perhaps it would have been necessary to go into more responsibility and therefore more pay kinda jobs. Who knows where I’d be now. Hobnobbing with executives from around the world, jumping on to private jets and taking phone calls about the project in Cancún. It’s not really me though.
“I never had a desire to become a vet or a policeman or a doctor or anything really. Apart from a pop star” For some people their work is their life. They eat, sleep and breathe it. It consumes them like a fire and absorbs all their energies. For me, my job is a means to an end. My energies go into my creative life, into my singing, my writing, my performing. In an ideal world, I’d earn a bit of money from doing these things but that’s a bit of a pipe dream. But who knows. The ideal that we all look for in our work life is to be paid for doing something we love. Whatever that is. If you love being a teacher, that’s brilliant. If you fall into retail and find you adore it, that’s fab. I’ll go back to my retail job in a couple of weeks and get that part of my life up and running again. I’ll need to find something else I think but, for now, it’s all groovy. Perhaps I’ll look to see if the position of Cheryl has become vacant.
