Andrew Houchins
@houchinsandrew with his back yard lights.
-Theatre-
I ended up at Andrew’s house by mistake. I had meant to go to another person’s house on my list first that day but copied the addresses down incorrectly. So that was the kind of start to my over scheduled day I was having.
And he lives in Snellville. Which isn’t just a short jaunt from Marietta. Luckily he was an excellent sport and insisted on getting out of his workout gear to chat with me on a Saturday morning. That shows some real gentlemanly manners in my book.
Interviewed 6.6.20
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: So first and foremost, how are you?
Andrew: I'm all right. I'm okay. I'm great. I'm doing fine. I had some health issues last year and they seem to be smoothing themselves out, so I'm doing fine.
Casey: How have you been during quarantine?
Andrew: During quarantine? Mostly fine. Staying busy with grad school. I'm doing the University of Kentucky online master's in arts administration. And so for the first part that we were in our socially distanced mandatory regulations, I was finishing up my first semester and then I had a week off and then I went right into the summer session. So even with dramatic hourly cutbacks at the tavern, I've still been staying really busy, which has been extraordinarily helpful.
I think everybody has these moments of, "Everything's fine!" And then all of a sudden everything feels not fine. At least that's true for me. But having the luxury - I hate to use that word, but to be able to just like, “I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to do anything necessarily. I can take a day on my own schedule and just decide I'm going to watch crappy television. I'm going to play games on my phone. And that's all I'm going to do.” So that's been very helpful, actually. But for the most part, everyone's been fine.
Casey: You think that the things that you've been doing to self-care have worked?
Andrew: Yes. I started setting up a little workout space in my garage. So I've been able to do that much more regularly. Being able to have more free time to take my dog on walks. Getting more time with my kids because they weren't in school and they weren't doing after-school stuff. They were still participating, but they were doing it from here. So even just being near them has been really, really nice. And the fact that we have a house that's spread apart enough to where in those moments when I need to decompress and have some alone time, I can do that too.
Casey: How is your family holding up? How is everybody?
Andrew: They're good. My wife has a little bit of hypochondria. So she goes through these stages where she just uses jokes to mask some things. But she says, "I'm sure I already have Covid. I can't smell anything today." She doesn't. But she does that to sort of diffuse the stress about it.
My youngest daughter always wants to be homeschooled anyway. So this has been a dream for her. It's gonna be real tough whenever they open back up. And then my oldest takes dance classes from a studio not too far from here. And they've been doing a lot of Zoom classes. She can create her own schedule. And she's a hard worker. So she got her schoolwork done in record time. So she's been doing a whole lot of extra yoga classes and extra dance classes with other theatre companies and dance companies from all across the world that are posting things.
Meghan's been really heavily involved with creating the new school of the arts that they're building over at Central Gwinnett. So that's been keeping her busy.
All told, though, we've been fine. We've been very fortunate to be very fine. Sometimes it feels busy. Sometimes it feels like just intentional distractions. We've been going through all the Marvel movies, watching them in order and having that as a nice little “all of us being in the same place”, experiencing something together. We've got a handful of TV shows that we watch sometimes in small groups. Having the distractions is helpful.
Casey: If he didn't have the distraction, what do you think would happen?
Andrew: Oh, Lord have mercy. It's very easy for me to get a little locked up in self-conscious thought. I dwell on past mistakes. I worry about future ideas. So probably an unhealthy amount of time would be spent on that. But I'm sure we would find something. I would find something to do. Being able to read books for fun that I don't really have time to read even in this sort of scenario might happen. Other than that, I don't know. I have no idea. I don't even want to think about what it would be if we didn't have the luxuries that we have.
Casey: How is your extended family doing? Have you been keeping in touch with everybody?
Andrew: Yeah- So my mom is set to retire at the end of this month and back around Christmas time, she said, rather jokingly, that she wishes she could just burn through the six months. She wanted to just hibernate and just have them fly right on past her. And so she kind of got her wish.
And she's still doing her mom things where she's still waking up in the mornings and getting herself dolled up the way she likes to get herself dolled up. My brother-in-law is a naval chaplain. And he needed to have some experience in a church before he could become a naval chaplain, apparently. So they moved out to a base out in Norfolk. And they're still in the process of getting settled. So that's been a plus for them, too.
Meghan's family lives in Indiana and in Kentucky, and they're all doing fine. We're, again, very fortunate that nobody's gotten any kind of sick from any of this that's been going around. I think we all took it very seriously when it started to happen. And we committed to the lockdown. We had groceries delivered and tipped them very well because that's very important. And, even though we weren't at the stores, we're still wiping [groceries] down. And before we put them away and then as soon as we finished putting them away, we wiped down everything we touched and we immediately go shower and scrub. It's a complete decontamination unit happening with everything. So everybody's been doing fine because I feel like everybody's been, “we're not taking this for granted or taking this lightly at all.”
Casey: What do you miss about before quarentine?
Andrew: I miss the ability to take for granted that there's something that I can go do if I need to get out of the house or go do something by myself or with the family. Those sort of moments kind of planning short term, you know? In the summers we'll sometimes just have a day where we decide, “OK, tomorrow we're gonna wake up early, we're going to drive out to the beach we're going to spend the day at the beach. And that's what's going to happen. We're just gonna do that as a day.” And we haven't really had that kind of freedom.
The ability to decide, “Oh, I've got tonight off. I'm going to go see a play over at Aurora or go check out who's playing at the Tabernacle or whatever.” And of course, being able to have visual/physical contact with my friends and peers here because I am a very sort of visual person. When I teach apprentices, a lot of it is what I see, their physical cues. So not having that has been something that I've missed.
Casey: When do you think that will come back?
Andrew: I have no idea. That's part of what's so scary is the complete unknowing. The idea that live performance venues, even with a vaccine, whenever that comes out, are still going to have to strongly consider modifying how they operate and potentially inventing and pursuing new business models and ways of interacting with an audience. It’s intimidating. It's daunting. It's a little exciting in the sense that, “oh, well, maybe this is the opportunity to innovate or die.”
I'll be really interested to see companies that rely so heavily on large ticket sales to fund spectacle…To see what they come up with. To really have to strip down, to get more creative, to find ways to stretch their dollars. Not that they don't already, but to have to go even that bit further. This is that moment where they're filming Jaws and the stupid Bruce the Robot won't work right, so you've got to come up with new ways to film those scenes. That's what we're gonna have to be doing for a while.
I have no idea when, though, to answer that question. I have no idea when. I don't think things are going to get back to any kind of new normal. We can't go back.
There are some say psychiatric and psychological experts are saying that we're gonna be creating a whole new community of agoraphobes and of people developing all across the spectrum various OCD behaviors and tactics for navigating their surroundings. So it's gonna have to be redefined and reconsidered.
Casey: Are you still creating in quarantine?
Andrew: I've got the podcast, the Atlanta Theater Life podcast. And last year, I was dealing with a lot of physical issues, some health issues that sort of just took a lot out of me, not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally. So I wasn't able to commit to it as much last year. It's funny, I had plans and I had scheduled to go do the interviews that I intended to do, kind of like you do where I can meet you anywhere. And then this all happened. And so now kind of recalibrating and finding ways that I can do some of the distance conversations has been great. So being able to have that to be able to go back and listen to some of the older conversations that I haven't been able to put out yet and create that way.
This past semester, one of my big sort of semester-long projects that we had, it was a leadership and management class, and the semester-long project was basically creating your own company. And so that was the whole thing - is developing, devising, coming up with how would a board of directors work with this company? How would the layout be? What would a staff look like? What's the purpose of it? And that was also combined with a technologies class. So a lot of Photoshop and that sort of thing. So now I've got this packet of how to launch a new company that I'm just sort of playing with, tweaking it, modifying it and seeing if it's potentially viable. So that's been fun, kind of creating a new company as opposed to creating a piece of art or piece of theater, but to develop something that could potentially house that has been exciting and fun.
Casey: And you find the motivation for that... how?
Andrew: Because it's, mid to long term, what I want to do. It's something that I've wanted for a while. That's why I started to pursue the Masters, was because I knew that my long-term dream is to be an artistic director of a theater company, whether that is one that is already established or one that I create on my own.
And first, to a certain extent, there's been some treading of water that I was doing the past few years. I was enjoying the acting and the directing opportunities that I was getting. I was really liking - and I still do like - all of those things and working with the apprentices at the tavern. But in terms of the overall management and the leadership of running a company, I knew that there were things that I knew and I knew that there were things that I don't know. And I knew that there are things that I don't know that I don't know. And I wanted to lean into that a little bit more and find out what those things are. And so that's sort of the motivation for that... Is having sort of recalibrated a little bit more of the “being an actor” and “being a director” are absolutely outstanding. But I think I have some ideas and I think I have some ways that I can contribute that go in a slightly different capacity than that. And being able to do that, to create that, to help others do that as well, has been what's sort of been pushing me.
Casey: Do you have any new habits or hobbies or rituals or routines that you developed during quarantine that are helping you with self-care that you want to take forward into post quarantine life?
Andrew: Being able to set up a little workout space in my garage. I'm still paying for a membership to the gym, but the nearest gym is still like a twenty-five to thirty-five minute drive from here, at least in terms of what's in my budget. But when I factor in the drive time there and back, it adds a whole extra hour to my day, as opposed to being able to spend that extra hour doing the stuff here. So setting aside that time and continuing to develop that regularity, to feel generally healthier, to feel a little bit more energy and to feel better.
Being able to follow my instincts on when I need to take a step back and know for myself that, "Ah, this is an introvert moment where I need to not be around people," to have that kind of flexibility in this time has been great. I don't know how easily that's going to translate back into a regular working schedule, but being conscious of that for myself is certainly going to be helpful as well. At least to know if I get to those breaking moments, I can clock it for myself and not just fall into stress or anxiety and risk accidentally unloading that on somebody else. I can mark it for myself.
Continuing to drink a bunch of water has been good as well.
Casey: What do you think you'll take out of this? Let's pretend this is almost over. Looking back on the last thirteen weeks. What will you look back and have learned or taken out of it?
Andrew: I'll say this, I think the events of the past two weeks are going to ultimately be more impactful for me than the Covid 19. Where I grew up has a really dark history. Where I went to school is named Lee Davis High School after both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, because, you know, it's not enough to name it after just one. And the mascot is the Confederates. And my middle school, we were the Stonewall Jackson Rebels. And those two schools were named right at the peak of when many communities in the state of Virginia were fighting school segregation.
And as much as I hated it, I can't deny that that experience has poisoned me in certain ways that has taken a long time for me to really fully acknowledge and come to grips with and to do the genuine work, not the surface-y work of expunging, expelling that poison. And it's been scary and it's been fraught. But I'm not going to run away from it anymore. That's a big impact for sure.
And then with the rest of the covid and the quarantining... Working really, really hard to try to be aware of when my judgments are not taking into consideration other people's situations. That's an aging thing as well. Just getting older and having my own life experiences. But if somebody doesn't show up, it's not because they don't want to show up. It's because something's preventing them from showing up. And it's not personal. That's gonna be a big thing.
Casey: What do you think your girls will take out of this?
Andrew: Yeah… Actually, today is Stella's birthday. She's turning 14 today. And then Molly turns 11 on the 25th.
Stella’s got an Instagram account now and I check in on it every now and then. And she is social justice warrior out the wazoo. She's great. She's always had a strong work ethic. But she's really turning it up hardcore in this situation. I think she's gonna take a lot of that with her. That personal drive to internally and externally continue improving herself.
Molly is getting a lot of naps. She's learning a lot about self-care in a slightly different direction. She's enjoying all of her time exploring Harry Potter. She is definitely mildly obsessed. So I think I think in general, for both of them, it's also going to be general consciousness of other people. The only reason why you should look at your neighbor's plate is to make sure they have enough food not to see if they have more.
Casey: Well, hopefully, their consciousness will make their later teenage years easier for you.
Andrew: That's my hope. They were great kids when they were younger. But I think the fact that they were really mentally well-adjusted in their youth. They didn't have temper tantrums. The only time that either of them ever really got super vocal and stressed out about anything is Stella would never sleep in a crib. She always had to sleep with us near us, between us until she was like four. And that has its own stresses. But if that's the tradeoff for her not to have meltdowns in restaurants or in stores, I'll take that.
