Preston Goodson
-Theatre-
I thought it very fitting that Preston wore his Atlanta Musical Theatre Festival t-shirt for our meet up at his apartment. It is a project that we are both very passionate about and I’m sure somewhere in his mind he thought that would be a nice thing to wear that day when we got to see each other.
Preston’s career is so fascinating to me because of all the twists and turns away and toward theatre. I think he is pretty much stuck with us now.
Interviewed 5.30.20
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: Hi, Preston.
Preston: Hi, Casey.
Casey: How are you?
Preston: I am doing wonderfully.
Casey: Are you really?
Preston: No. No.
Casey: Tell me how you're really doing.
Preston: I know everybody has their own struggles, you know. But I'm doing better than a lot of people I know. And I'm focusing on that. My dog recently had a little health crisis and she's doing a lot better now. But for a week she couldn't walk and was peeing everywhere. So we got a carpet cleaning out of that. And I just spent a week at my parents. I was able to get a Covid test and prove my negativity so I knew I wasn't gonna make them sick. They're living in a hermitage up in North Carolina so they haven't seen anybody in probably six months besides me and my brothers. They're doing well. So that's where I'm at. You know, just concentrating on the fact that it could be so much worse.
Casey: For you or for the world?
Preston: Oh, for me. And maybe the world. The world is going to be what the world is going to be. I can't control that.
Casey: What have you been doing in quarantine?
Preston: Well, I am lucky enough to work for a company that was able to get a [Paycheck Protection Program] loan. And so I was on unemployment for a month, but then was able to get reemployed. I have not been able to do my sound work, so I've been essentially assisting our development department in looking for grants and assisting with, like promotional videos for stuff that we were going to do but essentially didn't. So that's what I've been doing professionally. Outside of that, I've been playing Animal Crossing, watching the only kind of sports that now has not stopped, which is video game speed running. And I've been doing a couple of small projects for myself, including building a hurdy-gurdy and getting some new synthesizers.
Casey: Yes, it's sitting right here and I'm very excited to take a picture of it. What do you miss? Obviously, we miss what we do, but....
Preston: I mean, that's a really big thing. So my career path has been a wave of going between science and art. For a long time, I worked as a research specialist at the School of Medicine at Emory, and there was a time while I was there where my time had to be focused there and I didn't do any theater for like a year. And it took me that year to realize how sad I was. I had a friend who was sort of a high school counselor for the Minneapolis school system at the time. He basically high-school-counseled me. He was like, “Well, what do you enjoy about theater that you're not getting in your science work?” And what it was was the collaboration, you know, that we were working together to make a thing. You know, what I was doing in science was very much, go here, do the same thing over and over again for eight to twelve hours, and get paid pretty well for it, and hopefully change the world. But, you know, there were lots of people in the lab. It didn't feel like it was a team event. And working in theater, working on films, working on games, working on music, it always felt like a collaborative event. And that's what I miss the most, is just being with people, working to make something better.
Casey: Have you found any ways to do that or fill that need in quarantine?
Preston: Dungeons and Dragons? Yeah. Because I've actually been playing more Dungeons and Dragons than I've ever been able to. Any player or DM will tell you that the biggest enemy in Dungeons Dragons isn't a dragon. It's people's schedules. And people are available. And it's improvisational storytelling that can involve art, and you're collaborating to work towards something, even if it's something imaginary. But that's art in general.
Casey: How is your motivation to create during this? I know you're building this musical instrument, which seems like that took a lot of motivation. How are you finding that?
Preston: Well, to be fair, I don't think I really am finding that so much. This is just a fun side project, the hurdy-gurdy. It's easy for me to spend a day watching YouTube and playing video games. Like I said from the beginning, I've been a very big proponent of the, "The best thing you can do is stay home. The best thing you can do is see as few people as possible." And I'm inherently a lazy person, so it was actually fairly easy for me to. Again, I've been very lucky to have continued employment. So with that caveat, it's been a little easy for me to just say, "You're doing the best you can. If you don't have work today, you don't have work today and it's time to play video games." You know, trying to see it as how six-year-old Preston would have seen it if his parents are keeping the worst things away from him. So, you know, you've got to compartmentalize.
Casey: Do you have any new habits that you've started for yourself during this downtime that maybe you'll take forward?
Preston: Yeah, absolutely. My apartment is the cleanest it's ever been. It's only mildly dirty because I just came back from my parents. So the carpets are clean, the kitchen is clean, my bathroom is clean. My room is clean-ish. I've been cooking so much more. And, you know, as much as I say I miss the collaboration of theater, I have been talking to people just, in general, a whole lot more. You know, theater can sometimes take 8 to 12-hour days and then you go home and you don't really have social time to yourself because theater is a thing of the night, and there's not a lot of social activity going on at 2 in the morning. So I’ve been seeing a lot more people that I haven't seen in a long time. With video games, I've been playing games with people I haven't played with in a long time. And so I've found this social time to be a lot more valuable.
Casey: Do you think you'll be able to keep that outreach going?
Preston: I think so, especially because I think, going forward, just American and world society in general is going to realize how much time we lose just getting to work and working. Hopefully, going forward, we're going to see more things like keeping the same salaries, but getting like six-hour workdays or a lot more working from home, and things like that. Obviously, with theatre you can't do the show from home. But, you know, a lot more of the prep work just being done from home, instead … In many ways, we're gonna come out of this better and realizing we need to not focus our lives on being producers for the economy, and focus on being producers for each other.
Casey: What do you think you and the rest of the world will take out of this chapter in history?
Preston: Hopefully we will all get high-school-counseled and realize what we find important with the time we spend. And for me, it was working together with people, not working, and being with people that elevate you, not just being with people. You know? And so I think everybody's going to be finding their priorities and the world will be better for everyone finding their priorities, instead of just doing what we've been doing on autopilot.
Casey: What do you think your priorities are?
Preston: Being with the right people and doing good things with them. If I can make an upper-lower class income on that, then I'll probably be happy.
