Casey Gardner Ford

@caseygford with her ivy and jade

-Theatre-

Elizabeth: So as you always say, first and foremost, how are you doing?

Casey: Today, I'm feeling really good. I've had a great little brunch with you, which is lovely. I'm generally managing my stress and anxiety well today, which is good. There have been more good days than bad, so this week is good. 

Elizabeth: Have you had times over the past year where there have been more bad days than good?

Casey: Absolutely … I felt like I completely lost control as it got so much worse. That was like early April, and then Dan suggested this project, which was a lifesaver. Then the Black Lives Matter protests started and I felt the world pull out from under me again. That really made me kind of re-evaluate how I was experiencing everything, not just Covid — as it should and hopefully did for everybody — but I was reading a journal entry and I had written, “I feel like my cup is so empty. I can't care anymore. I can't give any more than I possibly already am. I feel completely emotionally drained.” That's when stuff started to go off the rails. (I) felt like I was in the middle of a hurricane, emotionally, where it was like: You don't have any footing. You don't know when your jobs are coming back. The world is in turmoil. People are dying. People you love are sick. You can't do the things you're good at. You're not finding joy in the things you can do that you used to enjoy doing. What is the point of all this? How long is this going to go on? And is this now a forever thing?

So that's a really scary thing for anybody to think, especially the year I was planning my wedding, in the year that I was really supposed to be launching this new life with my partner that we kind of felt had the brakes slammed on. It definitely was not good there for a little while, but it has gotten much better.

Elizabeth: What was that turning point for you? Did you have to do something to get out of that?

Casey: Getting my mind right and getting my body right — which I had been neglecting for a long time — helped things seem a little clearer and seem a little less scary because I knew every day that I would get up and walk and meditate, and I could at least count on that. All of this (was) under the umbrella of people in my life caring for me and making sure I was fed and housed and things like that. If it weren't for Dan, I would be in a very, very different place. I think physically I wouldn't be living in Atlanta anymore. I wouldn't be able to afford to. I would be emotionally a train wreck … But after meditating for two hundred days in a row and exercising and really getting into a yoga practice and an exercise-walking practice, my mind built up this new muscle of realizing that it's not all as bad as it could be. 

Elizabeth: You had a pandemic wedding. When you sent out the invites and held your ceremony, it was a time of peak Covid anxiety. What was that like to decide to still have your wedding and then ask people to attend your event in the middle of the pandemic?

Casey: When Covid hit, we said, “We're not postponing. It'll be fine.” July rolled around, which is when we wanted to send invites, and summer was bad. And we were like, “This has got to be the worst it's going to get. It'll be fine in October.” So we sent out the invitations, but we sent the invitations with a massive email with this big caveat saying, “We 100% understand that you have to make the best decision for you and your family, and we are not going to feel any less loved or a part of your life if you choose not to come. We understand. Here the safety precautions.”

Elizabeth: Did you have any difficult conversations with people?

Casey: My parents, constantly. They definitely encouraged us to really consider postponing, and Dan and I didn't want to. And it wasn't in a selfish we want a wedding situation, but we sat down and we were like, “What is the point of a wedding for us, personally?” And we both were on the same page (that) the day we get married is the day I want to put on a white dress, have my dad walk me down the aisle and someone tells me I can kiss my husband. I don't care about the party. I don't necessarily care if there are three hundred people there like any good Southern girl should…

It got hard when we started getting RSVPs back, and it was kind of fun because they say, you know, “Prepare for like 10 percent, 20 percent of the people you invite to say no.” Sure. We had about half of the people we expected and invited to have come.

There was one member of my mother's family there — my cousin's daughter. She goes to Auburn. So she was the only representative from my mother's side. I feel like that was a really hard thing for her. It felt weird not having those kinds of people because I had dreamed of this event, not necessarily that was super grand or lavish or expensive, but an event with the family that I had grown up going to weddings (with). My mother comes from a big Italian family. I imagined all 30 of my cousins being there and all their parents and my aunts and uncles, and that just didn't happen. So my father's family all came because they’re local, which was great, except for a couple of people who had some Covid issues.

It definitely was not the event we had imagined, but it turned out the best it literally could have. 

Elizabeth: When did you come up with this project? Why did you feel like you needed to do this?

Casey: I didn't come up with the project. Dan did. I was in a very not happy place, just feeling not useful. I found a lot of value in myself in the work I was doing. So if I was doing good work, I was a valuable member of society and I was important. When I'm not doing work, I feel unimportant and unvaluable. Those things should not go together, but that's how I felt, especially because I was doing such good work. Before the pandemic, I was at the top of my game. I had booked everything out through June of this year, 2021. So I was like, “I've got it made. I'm going to have money for my wedding and we're going to go to Ireland for the honeymoon.” I was going to be great and then it all fell apart. 

So when we were in this for about a month, Dan said, “What's the holdup? Why do you feel invaluable?” And I was like, “I can't do what I'm good at, which is taking pictures of artists at work.” He said, “No, you can't do that, but you can still go and take pictures of artists. … If you want to go take pictures of the people you love, go do it and find out how they're doing. Go check in on them.”

Elizabeth: You've been able to see the entire arc of how the Atlanta theatre community has experienced the pandemic — from the initial anxiety and all of the shows shutting down to the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, and then our second wave of anxieties. Now we're coming through the tail end where the light appears to be at the end of the tunnel. As you've interviewed people, what does that arc look like? Did you notice trends in what people were saying or how people were feeling?

Casey: Most people were concerned not about getting the disease but giving it to someone else. A lot of people, it seemed to me, felt unsupported. It felt like to me, as their interviewer, that they were scrambling for money or scrambling for jobs and kind of just felt abandoned. … It was just kind of surprising to see how we were all kind of on the same page. You hear super polarizing things on the news and on your Instagram, on Facebook. But when I went out and talked to all of these people who are in this very specific community, we were all kind of on the same page, surprisingly. I kind of imagined people being a little bit more all over the place, but everybody was like, “I'm having trouble focusing. I'm worried about unemployment. I'm not able to be creative, but I'm trying to find other outlets and I miss my friends.”

Elizabeth: Was there anything that surprised you in the interviews?

Casey: I was surprised at how willing people were to share. There were interviews where people started crying immediately just because of the relief to sit down and talk to someone. That doesn't happen so much anymore. With the interviews I've done, people now are kind of in their PR-speak about how they feel about the whole thing. But when I was in the thick of it, like last summer, I would just sit on someone's porch like, “How are you?” and I'd immediately get tears as they told me about X, Y, and Z. 

Elizabeth: You asked a lot of people what they saw this meaning for the theater industry in the future. What are people thinking?

Casey:  I started reaching out to arts administrators to ask them what their game plan was, and some of the things they said were really shocking, really exciting things. But the theater industry is like a freight train. Once it gets started, you can't really stop it or make as many changes as you want to. So you're hoping—at least I am—that Covid was enough of a stop that when we go back, things really change. And that is in reference to, very first and foremost, Black Lives Matter and just diversity and representation in the shows and in the casting that happens in Atlanta. … So a lot of the arts people I'm talking to—that's a top priority for them, which is great. 

But also artists are known for being, you know stereotypically, highly emotionally wrecked people who we’re like broke and have weird relationships and just aren't stable people because we work in a non-stable environment. We don't have work for steady periods of time. We are expected to work crazy hours in crazy situations where we're maybe not able to get food as often as we need to get food or, you know, things like that. So theater administrators are like, “We want to shorten tech weeks, we want to shorten rehearsal times. We want to get rid of unpaid internships, finally.” 

I hope that Covid is enough of a stop that when we hit the ground running going back, they can implement those changes immediately because I'm afraid that if they don't do it from the beginning, it's not going to happen. And it's all going to have been lip service. And that's one of the things that I've heard the most from people about the theater stuff is like we hope that Covid and Black Lives Matter has made enough of an impact that when we as artists go back to theatres, the theatres have heard us and have made those changes. 

And if they don't? The artists I've spoken to have said, “I won't do the shows. If there's another show that poorly portrays people of color or people in the trans community, I won't audition. I won't go.” And then the theatres will have to hear it that way. They'll have to hear us. So artists have felt like, it seems, that we have been screaming for change, but theatres have kept saying no for either their budget reasons or time reasons or whatever because, like I said, it's a steamroller. Hopefully, when we go back, they've made these changes administratively and creatively, so that we can all go back to a newer, better normal. 

Elizabeth: I wouldn't exactly describe you as an isolated artist because over the course of the year, you've talked to over a hundred people. How do you feel like this time would have been different if you didn’t have this project?

Casey: I don't think I would have found the things that have brought me so much joy. I don't think I would have found and stuck with the meditation like I have because I felt like I needed to be put together for the people I was interviewing. I needed to be okay in order to make sure they were okay. I needed to fill my cup before I could pour anything into theirs…

Every interview I've gone to, I've made sure that I was in a good place before I started it. Even if that meant sitting in my car and being a couple minutes late because I had to pull myself together. So doing that — especially when I was doing four or five interviews a day during the summer — it gave me a little bit of a purpose. It helped me figure out what a positive outlook looks like in the time of the global pandemic.

Elizabeth: What are you going to take forward with you, as you say, after we return to some aspect of normal?

Casey: If I don't take my stupid meditation practice and my stupid yoga practice, I'm going to just reach into the past and punch myself in the face. It's been so good, and I've experimented with not doing it, and I realize how shitty I feel if I don't…

I love the amount of grace that I'm giving myself. That was one of the things that everybody said, like at the end of their interviews. … I think New World Casey is a person who takes time for herself even when she has crazy hours as a theatre photographer [and] is a person who has a little bit more control over her emotion—and not in pushing it down kind of way—in an ability to look at it, realize what it is and take a more positive path in processing it.

I've already been able to start doing that, and it feels like a superpower, like I feel like a wizard. It's freaking amazing. And she's also a person who knows her value, which I think is the part that I'm still struggling with. It's knowing not only what to charge for photos ... but knowing that my value is not tied to my output. My value is who I am as a person, and if I want my value as a person to increase, I need to invest in myself, which is how and why you do things like meditation and yoga and read and go on trips and hang out with your friends. And that felt like a secret. It didn't feel like something I knew before this. 

Elizabeth: What are you so excited to do when you can?

Casey:  Oh my God. I am going to weep openly the next time I see a show in person, in a theater. I'm just going to weep openly. I think about the last show I saw in person with you, which was Indecent at Theatrical Outfit…

I think the first time that I can sit in an audience elbow to elbow, specifically with strangers, and we're all just so stoked to be there. I know people are excited about concerts and stuff. I don't really care about concerts because they're scary … but the one thing I have not and will not be able to do is see a theatre performance with a full audience, and when I'm able to do that, then I'll feel back.

I've photographed theater. I photographed theatre last night, but it's not the same. I'm incredibly grateful for it, but it's not the same. When I know that a show is going to have a full audience, the actors behave differently, the crew behaves differently. It's like nerves, but it's also excitement and that gives a better photograph to be completely honest. And it's a level of excitement that I haven't felt for anything.