Rebecca Twiggs
@twiggling on her front porch with a book.
-Theatre-
Twiggs and I go way back. We’ve been working in Entertainment at Stone Mountain Park during the Christmas season together for more years then I want to claim. I’ve known her since she was in high school and now she is a freshly-minted college grad, okay? Is that enough info for you? I’m getting old. What do you want from me?! Everybody’s doing it.
I knew that Twiggs would happily supply one of the points of view that I wanted most to hear; 2020 graduate. She now has a BA in English from Georgia Gwinnett College. She had internship applications in and side hustles on campus to fill in the gaps. She was doing everything “right” and then the shit hit the fan. She is bright and personable and kind beyond measure and will get through this fine. But my heart broke completely in half for her as we talked. She should be soaring but she, well, you can read for yourself…
Interviewed 5.13.20
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Twiggs: Let me tell you my mother's maiden name, Social Security number, all that.
Casey: Perfect. Oh my God. Amazing. That's exactly what I need. So how are you?
Twiggs: Today I am feeling good just because I had a reason to do things today. In general, the days have been blurring together a lot and I have bounced back and forth between being hyper-productive, like “Oh, I'm going to reorganize this entire room” or “I'm going to clean everything.” Some days it feels difficult just to be able to get up and do things, especially since college ended and I lost my on-campus job. For the last week or so it's just been very much a struggle to find a reason to get up before 3:00 p.m. and be able to do things.
So I just finished my degree. I graduated with a liberal arts degree. Great time to have any sort of arts degree. I was lucky enough to be able to keep one of my jobs being able to tutor on campus. We just switched to an online platform.
Casey: Of course you did.
Twiggs: So yeah, I'm very happy that being able to do classes and being able to work from home, especially, that gave me some motivation to do things and a reason to wake up in the morning. And then I remember the day I had my last class. It was with Jaclyn. And I finished up all the work for my degree.
This was actually our last Zoom class. We've already been quarantined for a while. I remember right after I signed off from that last class I thought, like, "Oh, I'm gonna be happy. I just finished my degree. This is the start of my post-grad life. I just was like crying for a while just because I had the fear before this pandemic happened that once I graduate, I'm never going to be able to do the things I want to be able to do again, like write, theatre, all of those things. This pandemic has kind of made it worse because I feel like I'm just starting my artistic career and it's taking a hold for however long it's going to be.
Casey: Why do you feel like after college you're not going to be able to write and do the things you want to do anymore?
Twiggs: I think that's just always been a fear of mine. I am never doing enough or I'm never good enough for these things and being quarantined has really forced me to do a lot more self reflection than I have of, why do I have those fears? Why do I feel this way? Also being able to see that literally everyone has those fears and just different ways of coping with it.
Casey: So do you think the quarantine is making it worse?
Twiggs: I think it's worse initially just because I've had to sit and think about it a bit more rather than being able to distract myself because my way of coping with that fear was just usually drowning myself in a million and one things to be able to be like, “Look, I am doing things. Look at me go.” But being able to sit and address why I have those fears, I think in the long run has been useful, but initially was very difficult.
Casey: Are you feeling more optimistic now if not hopeful?
Twiggs: Honestly, so are you familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
Casey: No, I don't think so.
Twiggs: So basically he was a philosopher, and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, basically states as a pyramid, your basic needs need to be met. So do you have food, shelter, access to water before you can worry about self-reflective needs or am I artistically fulfilled? Am I able to have love from other people? So by that logic, people in quarantine shouldn't be worried about making art or connecting with others because pretty much everyone I know is barely past the first level of needs of making sure they have food, shelter, they're safe and they're well, their family is well.
But yeah, seeing this quarantine and seeing this pandemic has kind of disproved that. Even if we aren't entirely sure of our personal safety of our health, where our money is coming from, we're still going to have a need and a desire for connection and to make art. And that's been really, really beautiful for me to see, seeing all the digital theatre things and seeing all my friends trying very, very hard to connect with each other. So that, more than anything, has made me more hopeful in that the initial fear was like, well, I'm not going to be able to do these things for X amount of time until this pandemic is over, but now I'm seeing there are still opportunities and there are still ways to make people feel like their lives are worth living and they have things to do.
Casey: This is a time when a lot of people who are recent grads generally are the most hopeful and most excited. Do you feel like anything has been taken from you?
Twiggs: Yeah. So, this was a few days before my campus had closed, I was talking to a tutoring director for a full time university tutoring job.I had to like a summer contract lined up with a theme park to do some performance stuff and I was talking to some other theatres in town about apprenticeships.
Twiggs: Yeah. And then on March 13th . . .
Casey: The state closed.
Twiggs: Yeah. Contract had been rescinded. The people who were talking to me about the tutoring job, all the universities are currently on a hiring freeze. So I can't accept any jobs. I can't even look at my application. Most of the apprentice companies, I've only heard back from one of them in the past few months, just because those theatres don't know if they're even going to be able to open back up within the next year. It was kind of devastating those first few days just because I had lost a lot of the things I felt like I had been working for.
I'm sure in 10 years I will somewhat regret being very narrow minded during a global pandemic. But yeah, by March 16th, I felt like the future I was looking forward to right after I graduated, all of that, had just been very much taken away. In addition to just being worried about food, money, security, all that; it was—oh, these things that I've worked for for years just aren't going to happen due to something that's just out of everyone's control. It was very, very hard just to be self-reflective, like, why do I fear that I'm not going to be able to do these things? How am I going to address this fear now that it's very much confirmed that I'm not going to be able to do these things, at least in person for a while?
Casey: Okay, so all those things went away. What have you been doing?
Twiggs: Reading. I've been reading a lot.
Casey: What have you been reading?
Twiggs: I've been going back to a lot of my high school and middle school literary obsessions. I re-read The Hunger Games series. Suzanne Collins paints a beautiful picture of what mental illness and PTSD looks like and I really appreciate that it's not a triumphant apocalyptic novel. It's like these are the actual real-world ramifications of forcing kids to fight each other.
I've re-read some of the Harry Potter books. I've re-read a lot of John Greene's books. Right now, I'm just reading this book about boys falling in love with each other and having a grand old time. Nice light stuff.
One thing about having more free time is I've been able to read more for me. Just because there's a reason I wanted to be an English major, because I loved reading. But in doing a lot of the coursework and the writing necessary to earn my degree, I haven't been able to do as much of the reading I'd like to do. But being able to go back to those stories and relearn why I wanted to make art and do these types of things in the first place has been really beautiful. I do have a very soft spot for YA fiction.
Casey: So what is your dream job? What do you want to do?
Twiggs: I really want to be involved in developing new works in a local theatre around Atlanta. I applied for the Horizon Playwright apprenticeship, and that's the one I'm most hopeful for, I guess, just because I really just want to either be directly involved or just help writers find their voice and be able to tell their stories. There's a lot of plays by white dudes out there.
Casey: Preach.
Twiggs: I want to be able to elevate my own voice and different voices within the Atlanta area in any way I can.
Casey: What do you miss the most?
Twiggs: This is going to sound very nerdy. But I miss my college professors, especially Jaclyn cause she's been my biggest mentor and one of my biggest supporters these last few years. I think it kind of felt like I almost graduated two months early, but I'm realizing how much I actually do enjoy the culture of being on a college campus and just being able to speak with very smart people who have spent years studying a very specific thing and I can pick their brains about at will.
Casey: Do you think you'll go back to school?
Twiggs: I would like to. I've explored the option of graduate school, but right now it's just not a financially feasible option. Within the next few years, I've thought about just going to Georgia State to get my TESOL certification, teaching English as a second language.
Casey: Yeah, yeah, yeah! You can travel the world on that. You can.
Twiggs: I know that's true. I mean, world travel would be great. Also because I would like to get more into theatre education There are a lot more bilingual camps for young performers that are popping up.
Casey: Do you have any new sacred habits or sacred places in your routine that you want to take into the future, post-pandemic?
Twiggs: I need to work out in my day, to take jogs or walks every day just because, you know this, being so busy I rarely got the opportunity to work out every day, but just taking an hour to myself to just run in nature.
Casey: Have you been doing that?
Twiggs: Yeah. I got a slight foot bruising yesterday because I tripped while I was running. So I haven't gone out the past two days, but pretty much every day that it's not raining, I've gone out and jogged or I've just driven down the road to Stone Mountain to hike on one of the secluded trails. I'm guilty of this, but too many people are taking the public trails at Stone Mountain.
I think I'm lucky in the sense of I've worked there for so long, so I'm familiar with pretty much all of the trails there. So I know the ones that literally no one will be on. I'll be lucky if I see another person and their dog walking. .
Casey: Yeah. I'm sure. Are you creating right now? Are you doing anything artistically? Why or why not?
Twiggs: I've been living in Self Tape Land which is a fun land to be in.
Casey: That's great!
Twiggs: I've also finished three scripts to submit to various digital script writing festivals. Have not heard back from the one I submitted to. I have two others that I'm submitting to by the end of this week.
Even if they don't choose my script, I think I'm proud of what I wrote. I think even if it's not chosen for this, I could adapt it to be an in-person script because it was written specifically to be performed in quarantine. So I could easily adapt the story to fit post-quarantine life or I could find a Zoom call with some friends and have them read it out loud so I can take notes on it to see if there's any blaring changes I should make.
Casey: Sure. You know, that's a big part of the process.
Twiggs: Actually my capstone project script, it had to be canceled because part of the capstone was a staging, a workshop reading of it. So as of right now, I'm just planning on having a reading with a few friends of mine just so I can still have that feedback in that part of the process with me for this project.
Casey: Is there anything else you feel like you want to share about your experience that you think other people would be interested in hearing or would find helpful to hear?
Twiggs: I think on the days where it feels very hard just to be able to get out of bed, you're going to waste a lot more time beating yourself up for having those days than just listening to your body and letting yourself be. Because on the days where I don't feel like moving, I then spend the next three days being mean to myself about having that day where I could probably have been slightly more productive if I had just had that day and accepted that that was what my mind needed to do rather than just being continuously mean to myself. So overall, be kind. But also, if you're tired, don't feel bad about being tired.
