Guest: Heather Capezio

It’s Wednesday, so we're heading to the kitchen!  At my kitchen table this week is Heather Capezio.  I knew Heather in the way back of middle and high school, and while we haven’t seen each other much IRL, we’ve stayed connected through socials.

Today, Heather talks about tapping into her creativity, starting her own business, and ultimately leaving her corporate job.  But she chats about a lot of other things well, including her love of theater, her preference of the Mexican dialect of Spanish that we learned in high school (RIP Mrs. Kreeger, 2023), and what it means to her to be "hands and feet" for causes she believes in. 

Heather indulges me by reminiscing about school - the gifted nerdiness, journalism, and choir of it all.  Pull up a chair!

Intro riff by Dale Lytle (concert husband).

All content edited (I use that term very loosely) by Karen Shaak.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

It's Wednesday, which means it's time to head to the kitchen. At my kitchen table this week is Heather Capezio. I knew Heather in the way back of middle and high school, and while we haven't seen each other much in real life, we've stayed connected through socials. Today, Heather talks about tapping into her creativity, starting her own business, and ultimately leaving her corporate job. She also chats about her love of theater, being involved in video production during the evolution from analog to digital, and building a community network through which she supports other local small businesses. Heather indulges me a little bit by nerding out over school and gifted classes while also reminiscing about some of our favorite teachers. And yes, fellow Susky grads, she drops an unknowing while speaking fondly of Mr. Lee's. Pull up a chair. I love that. I love I changed my Google in my car. Um like the Android Auto pairing uh to a British accent as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Yes, my husband prefers a nice Australian lady. I have a British and who gets me where I need to go.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

I love it. I love it. My sister realized that I changed it to a British accent, and so she'll text me when she knows I'm in the car, and she'll text me swear words, and then they're in a British accent.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Uh how are you today? I am doing well. Had a good event last night, so I am uh regrouped for tonight. What was the event last night? Um, we did a live succulent picture frame. Oh, very cool. Yeah, so we take a picture frame and we create the box and things that we need so that we can plant live succulents in it. And people planted five live succulents in this, you know, four by six kind of picture frame. That's actually that's really cool. It was. It was it's crafty enough that people enjoyed it, but it's not stressful enough that non-artsy people felt like they couldn't paint the right cherry blossom or what you know, whatever the case was. That would be me. It was a little messy. It was only the second time I've done this workshop, so I'm still figuring out the logistics of how to make it work the best. And this was a group of 20 um in a restaurant, and most of them were trying to eat at the same time. So wow. I did warn them, they're like, Can we get food? I'm like, yes, but we are playing with dirt.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

So dirt in your food.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Just be aware. There's moss and there's dirt, and none of them are condiments. Like no.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

20 people in a restaurant, is that typical for you or not so much?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Um, 20 is like that's a good class, but I wouldn't say it's the biggest class. Yeah. I I maxed this one at 20 because that was the amount of supplies that I had left over from the last time I did this. Um, the boxes and stuff, not the plants. The plants I get new every time. It it wasn't as much of a hit the first time I did it, but it was a good little trial run.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

So this one I was like, okay, so we'll take that and turn it into, and then it was a very short sign-up time because we had the date reserved, but we hadn't posted the event. Okay, well, we're just gonna throw this one in there and we'll just have it at a 20-person maximum. And it filled up like right away. That's so crazy and awesome. Which is a great, it's a cute project, like it really is a nice looking project when you're done. Yeah. So I think that attracted people. Um, and it was a good venue to host it at. So now I kind of took the pieces from last night. I'm like, okay, so this needs to change here, and this part needs to go a little better and always tweaking. Have a little couple more things prepped. People raved about like how it looked at the end. They raved about the plants, which makes me very happy because I have a local grower who I've been using, and his plants are just phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

So that's also very cool too. And I didn't even really think about like from a supply side perspective. I'm gonna have to try to remember to come back to that as we're chatting, because that is also I'm I'm always intrigued by small businesses who are also supporting others, you know, small local businesses.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

That is like I use that hashtag all the time. I don't care if hashtags are dead, I still use them. I do too. Small business supporting small business because that like what I do ties in a lot with other small businesses. Because if I didn't have connections with other small businesses, I wouldn't have any venues.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, then let's dive in because we'll definitely get to to all of those things before we do. Would love it if you would introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Oh, this is the hard part, Alice. It is okay. Well, my name is Heather Capizio. You knew me as Heather Bem, which is my maiden name. Grew up in small town central Pennsylvania, suburb of Baltimore. Family is originally from Baltimore, so that was where my connections lie. We moved to Delaware in 2014, and that would be after I had graduated from college at Goucher College, after I had met my husband when we were both working in video production. We have two sons, I have two older stepchildren. Uh, we have a house in central Delaware, and I am currently a self-employed artist and art educator.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

I love all of that. And we're gonna actually probably touch on so much of the stuff that you have just put out there. That was awesome. You know, for somebody who was like, this is the hard part, you kind of nailed that.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

So I feel like it was a very brief, concise, generic version, though. There's a there's a lot more, you know.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Sure, sure. I will dive into all of that. Okay, so yeah, let's just start with like childhood stuff. You're you're right. I did know you as Heather Bem, and we've known each other basically since eighth grade, because I moved uh to that area between seventh and eighth grade. And I would say we were probably fairly good acquaintances. I don't know, I mean, we weren't super close. What kind of kid would you have described yourself as? Like, what were the things that intrigued you in school? What did you like as a kid?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

I feel like I was not as sentient and aware as a child as I am as an adult. I was like looking back on childhood. I was somebody who enjoyed school for the most part. I enjoyed school, I enjoyed the learning part of it, I enjoyed the social aspect, although that wasn't my strength.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Is it was it any of our strengths?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

I always felt well, I I think it was, you know, it was a product of the time. It was a product of being, you know, um secluded into a gifted program, literally in a bubble going from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I was in the same class with some of those people from K through 12, which sounds like a one-room schoolhouse situation. Um, but it wasn't. I mean, it was mainstream public school. They just identified, you know, high-level learners at an early age and kind of kept us all together in that in that setting, um, for better or worse. There's some detriments either way.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Um totally agree.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Yeah. I mean, I enjoyed I enjoyed the challenges of most of the learning. I enjoyed being involved in school. I was a a theater person, I was a field hockey person, I was uh involved in student government kind of person. Gosh, Spanish. Yeah. Yeah. Senora Krieger.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Yeah. I, in fact, oh, total sidebar, and I can cut this if it's not real, but I think I I was looking her up not that long ago, and I think I read that she had passed away.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

It wouldn't surprise me. She was one of the older teachers back when she probably wasn't really that old, but just seemed old to us. Right. She was amazing. And I I did look her up at some point too. Yeah.

unknown 7:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

She was hands down one of the favorite teachers, I think, that I had had.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Absolutely. We'll reference her. And you know, that I took some Spanish in college. I intended to be a Spanish minor, and all of my teachers in college were um Cathian Spanish. Ah, yes. And Senora Krieger was Mexican Spanish.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Mexican Spanish, yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

I love Mexican Spanish so much. And I didn't actually get my Spanish minor sidebar. Year I was focusing on my major credits, and my theater minor was very demanding at that point too. And theater minor was because it was fun, because I loved it. Why not get credits for it too?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

So I didn't do any Spanish my junior year in college, and then my senior year I had one or two classes to finish, and one of them was ancient Iberian literature. Oh god. And I found that my vocabulary had degraded.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Oh boy, just in that short period of time.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

By not reading it, by not writing it. Um, I was never what I would say completely fluent in speaking because I had never gone anywhere to use it regularly, which is really what you should do if you're planning to master another language. And I struggled very much to pass that class.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

And I did not. So I withdrew from it at the end before it could, you know, completely impact my GPA.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

And I had to fight at the last minute to get credit for an extracurricular independent study that I was doing, a video project uh that I'd been doing and helping the the department of the chair with, but hadn't asked for credit because it was just kind of a cool project to work on. And it was kind of like, please, uh may I have these three to pass and graduate. And it worked. And here we are.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

What's okay? So I want to go back to a couple of things. Like no, that was like a lot and awesome.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

I feel like that's a lot of everything. I I have an elevator speech, but it's really a lot.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

No, no, no. Well, that's why we're here. We want to take that elevator speech and we want to stretch it out. Okay, so first of all, can we just go back to the gifted program for a second?

SPEAKER_02 10:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

When I moved, so I too was in the gifted program. And before I moved, the school district that I was in outside of Philadelphia, it was separate. It was like a separate class. You were taken out of class and you were put with all these other kids who were also gifted. And so when I moved to our lovely school district, it was not, it was like, it was so weird. So how you described that, that whole like having been with those same kids K through 12, I was sort of stunned that that's how you guys had it. I still say you guys, like I didn't graduate from there too.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Those other children's, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

But it was that was how the the grades were split out into blocks of classes. So you were with like what were we, eight, eight, E, and F. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

It's like and F too. It was never A or B.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

That's also odd, and I never really thought about it.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Hmm. And it's funny because you say you guys, and then I'm thinking back like on the K through 12 experience, and you probably wouldn't have realized this, or if you did, you know, find out about it later because you weren't there until eighth grade. We had this whole cohort from the other elementary school.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

That's right. So where did you go to elementary?

SPEAKER_00 11:16

I was at Southern Elementary. There are two elementary schools in the Southern School District, and uh Friendship Elementary did not have a fifth grade, it was only K through four. So in fifth grade, we had all of their gifted program kids merged into literally two classrooms, I think. And it was like two, it was like the sharks in the gym. You know, there was there was no dancing and there was no blood feud. But it was weird. It was this dichotomy of kids who had grown up with each other and other kids who had grown up with these other kids. And it was like, okay, well, who are the popular kids and who's the like it was just this weird, weird. There was this whole like other section of kids who were not our familiar kids, but were in this same other weird bubble, and we had to kind of come together, yeah, and integrate and integrate. So by middle school, and of course they did it the year before middle school, which was weird anyway.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Such a weird time, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

And we were already, you know, labeled as probably weird kids before going into middle school. So then we were extra weird, we were double weird, double weird.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

What I love about hearing you talk about that is I I don't know if you listened to the episode when I had Vic on, but we chatted about being the new kid and that whole like coming into a situation where everybody already knew each other and like for a long time because it wasn't like you guys had a ton of move-ins, even from kindergarten.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

There were a few people who I've looked back through like the class photos that my parents had, you know, the the whole class sitting there on the steps with their teacher. And I've looked at some of those, I'm like, oh, this person moved away, or oh, I remember that that guy, he was only here till third grade, you know, that like the the little kid kind of memories that you have with it. Yeah. But no, there weren't tons.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

It was a very small town, very, but it felt at that time with me coming in, it felt very much like you guys were this unified again. You guys, it's it's so not the sharks in the you guys, you guys. It felt very much like I was the odd man out for like a long time because it felt like everybody else had known each other basically since kindergarten. So it is really interesting to hear that you guys probably had your own situation like that, where there were some growing pains, and who the hell are these people? So that's really I just didn't know that.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Yeah, that was a whole fifth grade thing. So I'm sure we'd, you know, and then transitioning to middle school. Um, I'm sure that by then, you know, every other daily drama had taken over that that short-term angst. But at the time, that was like the only thing. That was the only thing, you know, in whatever capacity a fifth grade brain can come the drama of the day.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

That that makes so much sense. And then I would say too, a little bit late. I mean, obviously I knew everybody a little bit later on, but heading into high school, which I think is its own fraught situation for many people, I felt like I was like already conditioned because I had just come in the year before. High school was not that scary to me because I already had all the scaries from the year before that still probably carried over a little bit. But it felt very much too, and I know we kind of talked about this in our background Zoom, like, you know, as kids, we we categorize each other, right? We bucket each other. And what's funny to me is hearing you talk about all of these creative things and knowing what your endeavors are now, you were not in what I would have called a creative bucket back in school. You were very much in like my honors classes journalism bucket.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Oh, yeah. Well, people ask, I'd had somebody ask me that at the workshop last night. Did you take art classes in school? Were you an art major? And I laugh. I mean, I I laugh a lot. I try to laugh through most situations. Yes. But I said no, I said not at all. I said, honestly, I don't think that I took any art classes in high school. Wow. Really took any art electives that I can remember. I had chemistry two. So I I had two chemistries because I wanted to get to the unknowns with Mr. Lees. And so I just sent that whole thing to a class the other day because we got on a chemistry kick and I was like, but wait, there's a reason I didn't take biology. I didn't want to dissect fetal pigs, I wanted to blow things up.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

And I love knowing that about you. Yes. The whole hallway smelled of sulfur. Just picture. Um, but I did, I did three journalisms and I, you know, did the extracurriculars, you know, journalism one and two. I loved writing. I loved writing.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Which is also creative. I just don't know how much we considered that at the time. Yeah. When we think of like creatives, because there was a little bit in high school that separation between like art classes, but like writing is something you have to do in English, period. And so I think it's because I also love to write. And it's also why I did journalism and ended up getting into photography. Still would never have considered myself creative, which is a little crazy.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Yeah, that's a that's a I mean, that's a visual medium that people say photography when they're saying creative mediums. Writing, not so much all the time. I mean, I I did a lot more professional writing than creative writing ever, you know, vocation. And uh I still fall back on that a lot to you know, to to do written things. That's how I ended up merging visual with writing for marketing.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So I know you did though some creative stuff in high school. It just I don't think it it didn't really ping for me in my brain, but you were also in choir and theater. Yes. Okay, and you do love theater.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

I did, I do, and I did choir from um the time we could in middle school. Uh Mr. Nicholson was the choir guy the whole way. Yeah. I loved choir. I mean, I did I did choir, I did ensemble, I tried out for districts and fine found out that that was not really my forte. But then I did opera lessons in college and that was a lot of fun, believe it or not. You did? I did. We had an amazing teacher, um, Serafina di Giacomo.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

I still have my opera books down by the piano in the piano bench because I like to pull them out every now and then. And that was that was actually really fun. But yeah, choir all all through. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the music. I, you know, uh was good enough at it to be part of groups and and things like that. I liked doing the solos. Um, I liked going into the musical aspect of it. I did musicals from 10th grade on, ninth grade on. I don't remember. I know I did I did summer theater before high school with this at the Stuartstown United Methodist Church. Wow. At a summer program, and I think it still goes on. Um, I know it's not the same director. I'm not 100% sure that it is going on, but I did, you know, I did follow it for quite a while. And it was a group of kids from um Kennerdale, so from the Stuarts Town area, um, and all high school, middle school, high school aged, and it was directed and put on like a full-scale theater production, dinner theater in a church basement think, you know, where there's um the ladies of the church would serve meals traditionally, that kind of thing. They outfitted the whole thing with a full stage production. And it's a great opportunity to be part of things. And uh they did musicals, they did a lot of musicals. It was still going on through my brother, did a few of them, and he's five years younger than me.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

So this information is blowing me away for a couple of reasons. One, for those of the teabags who are not southern York County familiar, what you need to understand particularly about that area back then, now a lot of it is a lot more built up. There's been a lot more migration from Maryland in particular. But at the time, you're talking very highly rural areas. So even like where we went to school, um, I know Glenrock is one of the what the three like major areas Glenrock, New Freedom, Shrewsbury. We call it central Pennsylvania, but it is south central Pennsylvania. So Heather and I actually grew up a mile away from the Maryland line, but it was still at that point super rural. So all these other areas that she's talking about are kind of a drive, right? I mean, it's like it sometimes takes like 15, 20 minutes to get into some of these other areas because they're just not built up. They're just small towns.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

And not 15, 20 minutes by a highway. We're just 20 minutes on little back roads in hills and woods and dams and valleys where where cars where cars run into embankments and deers jump out in front of you as a teenager driving. I specifically remember some of those asked me where my first college car went. Yeah. Over in a cornfield in southern York County, Pennsylvania. It was an ice storm, but still, yes, driving to Stuartstown was a 15-minute, 20-minute back road through the woods to grandmother's house. And this was all summer long.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Yeah. And then the second reason why this is so surprising and shouldn't be because this is something I just talked about in an episode that I dropped a couple weeks ago with a friend of mine who is very, very involved in community theater in upstate New York and has been involved in theater for her whole life too. It's like if if you're not aware of it, you don't realize that it's happening all around you. But you will literally find community theater in the smallest of places. And the second you actually decide to look into it, you find it like everywhere around you. It's kind of insane.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

I've I haven't done any theater since I did a a stage reading production back at college. I was asked back by uh by the theater director to be a voice. And it was um, I forget the name of the show. It had it was like radio talk show or talk radio, that's what it was called. And it was um a a radio DJ, which is probably almost becoming an obsolete thing. That's horrible to say. I know. But and these callers and how he interacted with them and it Wasn't an acted production. It was we were literally reading the parts. So it was like an audio version of the stage production that people see. But that was the last theater I think that I've done. And I have looked into theater around here in Delaware since we since we moved. And since I've kind of had more of my creative time to myself, we'll see. There are some there are some fun things that they do in uh in Kent County, in Milford, um, with again small community theater. And um they have people, they have a is it once a month or like once a quarter? They have people can submit short act plays on a theme that they give out ahead of time. So somebody has written it. They can choose to be the director. They literally bring their script with them, they hand scripts to people in the audience who want to come and participate, and they do cold readings of these short act scenes. It's called pop, like pop theater.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

So it's so fun.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

I love that idea. And I don't know whether it's that I want to write one or I just want to go and watch, or if I want to get roped into being up one stage, which is probably what I would do. Right. Yeah, it's it's on my radar. So now that I've said it out loud in a public space, I guess I have to go.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Well, I think at the very least, you owe it to yourself to go check it out.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Go check it out. Yeah. But they have troops around, like it's it is, it is everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Yeah, it really is. That's so cool. I didn't even well, and again, I didn't know that about you. I didn't even know that that really existed.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

And I lived there for five years. Yeah, it and it it again had longevity. I mean, these were great productions that were very well supported, and it went on for a long time. And I think a lot of that had to do with uh there was a gentleman, David McDowell, who ran the product, he directed or brought in other directors and was kind of he was connected to that church as a pianist and organist. Yeah, but he also had this love of musical theater and theater. And I mean, he oversaw production after production for years.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

That's so crazy.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Wow. Well, let's get into theater a little bit too. I want to kind of shift gears into college. Um, but before we do, I think we have to talk about the area. And I I want to do it for a reason. So you already said you went to Goucher, a little bit north of Baltimore. Again, for those who are not familiar with Goucher, that area is just kind of a special little spot, I think. But there is something about sort of that little university row kind of area. What drew you to Goucher?

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Initially, so the first college flyer that I got back in sophomore junior year, you know, when when colleges find out that you're interested or you've taken the PSAT or SAT and scored decently was from Michigan. And I was like, ooh, Michigan, that's far away. And my parents saw that gleam in my eye and heard me talk about it and said, You have a four-hour radius because that means that they could drive or I could drive there in a day. They were thinking plane tickets, they were thinking economy, they were thinking I want my child to come home. Fair enough. Or not leave home. I'm not sure what they wanted at the time, but that's what they wanted. So uh I say Goucher was a little bit of my rebellion. Fine, I'm going half an hour away because really that's all it was was a half an hour drive down. I'm like, but I'm living there. So I applied to a bunch of schools um in, you know, within that four-hour radius. I applied to Elizabethtown, um, Millersville was my second choice. Uh Goucher, I applied to some of the other Baltimore area schools, Chestertown, uh, which, oh no, Chestertown was the town where Washington College was. They were mostly all um D3 schools as far as sports. So I could play field hockey, but I didn't have to be recruited, which was good because I wasn't that good, but I was good enough to play, but not good enough to, you know, find a scholarship or anything like that. I didn't care about that. Um, I did apply for scholarships um academically and you know, from being involved in a lot of things. And Goucher gave me a very good scholarship. I had a presidential scholarship which covered uh tuition. Amazing. So we know what we know what that was then and what that translates to now. Didn't cover room and board, so we did, you know, pay for that. Like, well, I got that clutch covered, I can I can at least live there. So I didn't I didn't want to commute, I wanted to be at school, even if school was only half an hour away. And I'm really that I did that. Yeah. I have friends for commuters and it was just a very different experience for them. Um, and so I'm glad that I didn't have to worry about that part of it. It was enough trying to figure out how to be a grown-up on a, you know, in a college campus in the 90s.

unknown 26:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Isn't that the truth? It is funny that you say that. It is a vastly different experience. My daughter did not want to live at school, and she picked a private school near here. And we sort of made her well our rule was you have to live on campus for at least one year and experience college life. That was sort of our parental four-hour radius.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Yeah, you impart what you know. You I'm sure my parents had good, smart reasons for doing that. Sure. I in turn will probably not impose those restrictions on my kids because I go where they think they want to go, even if it means they're gonna end up coming home or they end up living someplace far. That just means I guess I have someplace far to go visit. We're not tied to Delaware in the long run because we don't have any family here. Then I've grown a business and we made connections. But, you know, 10 years down the road, I don't know that we'll be in Delaware. In fact, I pretty much know we probably won't be in Delaware.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Fair enough. Um, when you were at Goucher, talk about so where were your levels of creativity? I mean, obviously you stuck with theater. Were you able to sort of explore outside of college? Because Baltimore has a really, just like most cities, but Baltimore has a pretty unique cultural, not district, but cultural presence, I would say, uh, for the arts.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

You can um, yeah, Baltimore, and again, I can't speak to modern Baltimore because I haven't lived there and haven't been there, you know, uh as a frequent visitor in any way. I can't say I'm part of, you know, the culture now. But at the time, I I did feel like I had a really good handle on the northern Baltimore vicinity, not so much down towards DC, but you know, the town and and the northern parts of it. There are a lot of museums. We would go to the Walters Art Museum. Goucher had a really great arts program. They're actually a um, their dance program is phenomenal, and their theater program was great. I mean, I was part of it, so I guess I'm a little biased, but it was a black, they converted to a black box theater, which was very kind of avant-garde. You could put on any kind of production, you know, it wasn't your traditional stage kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

Explain that a little bit. What what does it like for the for a teabag who wouldn't know theater?

SPEAKER_00 29:08

Yeah, absolutely. Um if you think of a traditional theater, or you think of what we had in in high school and what what a lot of people probably had in high school, there was an auditorium with seating facing it on an elevated stage with a big red curtain that opened and closed. That would be what I would think of as a traditional theater. And I'm not a history major. I'm sure there are many variations that have happened of that. Um, when I say black box theater, it's literally kind of where your mind goes. It is black walls and black ceiling, even though there are lights and fixtures, they've been, you know, made to kind of fit in with the scenery, black floor, and there is no fixed seating. So any part can be the stage, any part can be, it can be configured in any way with elevations, with seating, with spacing. For our senior production, we did Marat Sad, which is a very off-the-wall, I keep saying avant-garde, but it's it's very not mainstream everybody's cup of tea kind of theater. Gotcha. It takes place in an insane asylum, and the Marquis de Sade is one of the patients. Love this.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

And now I need to explore this.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Everybody was a patient in the asylum, and we seeded it so that the patients were sitting with the audience members in a in a round-the-circle kind of experience. Everybody had their ailments that we had explored and their isms, and and it was all about the Marquis de Side had written there was a play that featured all these characters. So the inmates were the characters. You were playing an inmate, playing a character, interacting with the audience. Wow. This is what we picked for our senior project. We were overachievers.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

I love this so much though. Like, okay, so what did you guys get on your senior project?

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Um we all passed amazingly. In fact, we're all we have our we have our 30th college reunion.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

Oh, you said it right out loud.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

I did, I did. I we have our 30th reunion next month, and we're talking about trying to get everybody back together for more than, you know, more than a few minutes or a chat. Some, I'm sad to say, I don't think we'll get back in the area. And some have chosen to not keep in touch. I have a few friends who don't even use social media. They've they've really gone over an extreme and and said I choose to withdraw from some of the discourse, some of the dialogue, some of the, you know, things, and good luck trying to snail mail them and get it different. It is hard. And I'm it makes me sad. And I I guess that's at the surface right now because I I have tried to reach out recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, there was a singing group at college called Red Hot Blue that was started before we got there, but it was to raise AIDS awareness and to raise funds for AIDS. So they would pick songs and themes that were kind of progressive and and talking about different things or or recreate new arrangements from popular songs that had themes that they wanted to use. Um, and it is the 35th anniversary of that group. So uh one of my good friends and I were both actually two or three of my good friends from college were in that group with me. So I sang in that group in college as an a cappella kind of group. And they want to get people back up in the group for this at reunion to get back and sing again. I'm like, oh, they don't know what they're asking. We'll try it. That is so cool. Tenners instead of the sopranos or whatever would be.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Oh, that's so awesome. It's like I just actually was at Elizabethtown not that long ago because my niece goes there and she is the president of her a cappella group. Yeah, it was I it was awesome to see the event that they had put on, you know, people coming and supporting. And they also had former members. So they have anybody who is a graduate who is in the group, like please come up onto the stage. And yeah, very cool.

SPEAKER_00 33:18

Yeah, that we were. I just talked to my uh my one friend and you know, confirmed that we were both gonna be there. And she said, Are you gonna do uh the red hot blue event? I'm like, Well, I didn't really understand the specifics because we had read different emails. Um, she said, Well, basically, I think it's if we're there and they're singing songs, they want us to join in. I'm like, I wonder what if they do any of the songs that we did. Right. You know what I mean? There was like Seals, Kiss from a Rose, and there was um Africa, Toto. All these strange popular songs that we had re-rearranged. Um, but then there were some that, you know, were just more folk or things like that. I'm like, I wonder if they still do those. And do we still remember the harmonies? Are we just gonna sing it all melody now? Because I don't remember what that harmony was. Or will it be somewhere locked away and I'll just like magically hear the notes and start and it'll all come back. I'll remember that weird harmony that the Altos always had to do. Because you know you were in the section. I was, yes, you were a pro Alto with Renee and I remember that.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

I was oh my god, I can't have you I can't believe you remember. Also, because I didn't do choir past ninth grade, I wasn't allowed. Oh yeah, yeah, that's like a whole other podcast episode.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Um yeah, no, I do remember just because we were short. That's true, that is true.

SPEAKER_01 34:37

So while you were in college pursuing theater, you're pursuing singing. Were you taking art classes at that time as well?

SPEAKER_00 34:45

I still did not take any art classes. There was a whole visual arts department, and it was in the same building as the theater. And many people did both because dance was such a strong uh major and strong presence at Goucher. A lot of people were involved in dance, but they were also other majors. So you had a lot of cross-mixing. It wasn't like it was just arts, just theater, and oh, then all the science people. You know, we had bio people who were also dance majors, we had dance majors who were theater minors and artists, and and vice versa. But I guess between the theater, which I knew I loved and wanted to do, communication, which was kind of the catch-all major for anything to do with video or film or journalism in a lot of ways, it wasn't an English. English kind of took a southward turn for me as much as we all loved our 11th and 12th grade English teacher as a challenge. I didn't get good. It was the best. I didn't get good grades and she hated my writing. What? Which, as somebody who loved writing was really hard to take. And used to getting good grades, having been in this high learning track and all, not getting good grades was also something hard to take. Um there were Cs, which I know doesn't sound like a terrible grade, but for somebody who was a steady A B person, a C without intending it to be a C, a C with effort, like comes with a little bit of a sting. And I think I sent her a copy. Did she really? I am pretty sure that I did. And another teacher. And then I didn't take any more English except what was required, and I did all my writing through the communications program.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

It honestly, that makes a lot of sense, and I understand what you're saying about how C's probably don't sound like a bad grade to a lot of people. That would have been nightmares in my house. So I totally feel that deeply in my soul. That actually happened to me with math, and again, it's like, you know, you're on this gifted track, and you should, it's the expectation now that you just get good grades and that you just get them across the board. And I will never forget I got a D in like algebra two, and it was a nightmare in my house, but it was also just a personal nightmare because it's like, what are what do you even mean? A D? Like, I've never gotten a D.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

Yeah, I didn't realize that that much was gonna come to the surface. I apologize.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

No, no, it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Do I need therapy about this? Maybe maybe a topic we should explore with a qualified person to talk me through my expectations and self-management. I get it though. So yeah, I let that see go now. I've forgiven myself.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

You forgave high school Heather for her C in English. Yeah, but it also kind of tracks though, even just going back to what you said earlier about your your writing focus being a little bit more professionally focused, it all becomes clear.

unknown 37:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

You don't need a therapist, you're on a podcast.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Hey, you can wear both hats.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

It's there you go.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

But I'll get certified. You're already halfway there. Halfway there.

SPEAKER_01 38:06

Um, okay, so no art classes.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

No art just theater and the directing and the scene building and the lighting and things that I never did because I was always on the front of house, you know, in high school. Uh so it was that was creative. Yes. It's part of it. Um, but no, no visual arts, no painting really, no painting.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

But then you but you were a communications major. And did you have so I know it was kind of a catch-all at the time. I think it's probably slightly more specialized.

SPEAKER_00 38:39

And now I don't know that mass communication is really a major that's offered. I feel like most of the colleges now are offering much more specialized, you know, marketing track, or you have uh, you know, digital design, or you know, even when I went back and took some master's classes much later um at University of Baltimore, it was what was it, multimedia or mixed media? It was, you know, HTML and graphic design and typography. It was getting into the digital side of really what's become normal now. Yeah, you just go on Canva and create all the things you want. Then I had to, you know, I went from I graduated with communications and I ended up working in video production. And that's like small town news station kind of things. And then I got into corporate video, and that's when video was like pushing the tape in, syncing up the machines and using the audio board and the the you know big equipment switcher to go back between that's all foreign words that nobody will understand now unless you're of an age.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

I was just gonna say, for those of you who don't know what a tape is, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

And what kind of tape was it? Was it VHS? Was it SVHS? Was it Bay? Was it three-quarter? It depends how advanced your lab was. That's so nuts. Look those up if you don't know. And then at some point I had to transition that same studio from analog to digital, digital, where Adobe Premiere came in and everybody was just like, oh, the light from the screen cast us all in this glow. But yeah, and then it it you know it turned digital, and then that was a whole different creative.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

When you when you landed that job, was that something that you had been seeking out? Did you have a goal when you were in college with that communications degree? Or was it like a I have this degree, where where will somebody hire me?

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Oh, let's see. When I graduated from college, I moved back home all the way 30 minutes back north. All the way. All the way, straight up 83. That's interstate 83, if you didn't the lifeblood into Soyoko. I had three jobs actually for a little while. I worked at a like before school daycare in the morning. I would then go to college because it was close enough by and there really weren't any great living in small town USA. You either went 30 minutes north to York or 30 minutes south to the Hunt Valley Towson area for a mall, for the movies, um, for any real access to libraries or studying or anything like that. Now I'm sure they've improved and have more access to all the things. And of course, you can look them all up on your phone. At that point, you literally needed to go search the microfiche in the York library to find topics for your study paper. It's true. That in high school. So I went back down to college into the career building, and my second job was finding a job. It was pumping out resumes, it was having, you know, tweaking my resume, it was sending things out because they had an online database because not everybody had an online database at the palm of our hands, or that would dial up very slowly to AOL. Um so my second job was finding a job, and then my third job, I waitressed at Ruby Tuesdays up in York. So I did all that while looking for a job before I found the real jobs. And then yeah, that was my intention definitely was to get out with a degree and say, hey, I want to do something in video production, is really what I ended up wanting to do. Editing, primarily using a camera. So that's awesome. Yes, awesome. I knew that I didn't want to get into news. I felt like news was very negative. What would make you think that? Um, but yeah, I didn't want to be, you know, covering body found, you know, shot nets. That wasn't what I wanted to do. And I didn't want that pressure of being called out in the middle of the night or, you know, I wanted something that was more a little more regular, yeah, a little more creative and not just a high pressure kind of response to deadline. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 42:59

And then how how soon after college and you find like finding your video production job, did you meet your husband?

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Um, I think when I started at the company where we were do where I was the video editor, he also worked there. So you met at work. We did meet at work and had a mutual attraction. He thought I was cute. I thought he was cute. We sound like school kids. And he would sing over the it was a small company and he would sing when the moon hits your eye over the intercom. And supposed to be just in the editing room, but it was a small building, so I'm sure everyone heard us. And anytime I hear that song, that's what I think of now. And and he was not a singer, he still is not a singer. He has and much vibrato and not as much tone. There was a lot of passion and feeling behind it, but not always the right notes.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

Sometimes that's what matters most.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

There's a lot of gusto, but um, so yeah, so I'm I met him and uh we didn't either of us stay at that job, you know, in the long term, but that is where we met.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

And so after you guys are together, living together or married, do you stayed in the York area for a while? Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 44:24

We did. Um, we were in Red Lion for a little while, and then we were in um York. My parents had moved from New Freedom up to Mount Wolf, so in the York area, and had a house there. My brother had moved to Carlisle, so that was not too far, about an hour from the York area. Um, and then at some point, I want to say around, well, we had we had Sean. Sean was 2003. We got married. Sean was our ring bearer, so that tells you the order that happened in. Um, we got married in 2007. We had been together for 10 years at that point. So we had an unconventional route to things, but it was, I say it was 10, and then we got married on 987. So even when we're old and senile, we should hopefully remember 10, 987. But that was purposeful. Smart. Yeah. And then So Sean was our ring bearer. Um, my two older stepkids were in the wedding, and we then had Josh in 2008. We were still living in the area. And then my parents, my dad worked for um international logistics. He'd always been based out of Baltimore, and then he took jobs in other companies, um, having to do with international freight forwarding, ships coming in, um, trains, getting big parts of things from one part of the country or one part of the world to another place for a certain project. That's kind of the short version of what he did and still does because he is still working. Um, at that point, he moved, he was um transferred to Kentucky. Okay. Um, when Josh was very little. So that would had to be like 2008, 2009, probably 2009, I would say. And uh they have since moved to Tennessee. We stuck around in that area for a little while longer. I did a lot of communications kind of marketing jobs. I worked for um junior league for a little bit. Was it junior achievement? Sorry, junior achievement. Um, I worked in the well span healthcare system for a little bit. Using the design background, I had started to morph from video into graphic design. Okay. Used a lot of writing. So when you combine those three, sometimes it looks like marketing, sometimes it looks like admin on a creative side, all in kind of a corporate or nonprofit setting for the most part. And my brother moved from Carlisle to Florida. My parents were then in Tennessee, and about the same time my brother moved to Florida, we said, Oh, you know what? There's nothing really here. My brother's going to be moving. My aunt and my cousin still live there, but we still keep in touch with them regardless. Sure. My parents aren't here. What's to say that we don't just pick up and go somewhere else while the kids are still young? So Sean was in fifth grade, Josh was in going into kindergarten, and we said, you know what? There seem to be some good job opportunities over in Delaware. And we kind of put our finger on the map.

SPEAKER_01 47:29

And that's like such a fun way to do it.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

It was no, let's go. It was like, oh, we're just gonna, I hope this is good. We can always come home. We can always come home. We can, you know, we can just move back if we really need to. But we rented a very small house. We had, you know, nothing fancy to our name. This was not a period of uh pros, you know, great prosperity or anything like that. It was a little necessity because we really found, we really felt like we needed to find a place to really land and start growing. Uh we survived that first year.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

What were and so you were at that point, you're still seeking the same types of roles, right? You were still very much in corporate slash nonprofit.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Still that marketing and communications and graphics sort of background, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:23

Yep. I weren't I worked in healthcare for a little bit. Um I I did some part-time jobs because the first year we tried to homeschool, Delaware is very open and has a great uh network for homeschooling. And I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. I have a very uh very bright oldest child. Josh was just going into kindergarten, so we didn't know what his uh how he was going to be. He was a very energetic child. Um, and uh we didn't love the options that we looked at initially for schools. Knowing what I know about them now, I'm sure they would have been fine. We did end up returning to public school after that first year because Josh turned out to be a real challenge, my youngest, with reading. He had to read for me, which that kind of sealed the deal. I'm like, well, if you're not reading for me, you're reading for somebody. Yeah. And back into public school he went. And he already read, and now he's a junior, so we're good.

SPEAKER_01 49:18

So that's that worked out.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

Yes, our experience with homeschooling find some good co-ops, do all the work if your parents tell you to do it, and buy a trampoline because the trampoline was like phys ed, it was like we're tired of learning, it was like let's just just just get outside, will you please?

SPEAKER_01 49:35

So Oh my god. It's funny because like I I applaud people who do it and who do it for a sustained period of time. Absolutely. We did it for like a year or two with my oldest, and it was like a middle school time frame. And really, the only reason we committed to doing it was because you still could do all the sports through the school. Um, that was still very much available, and that was something that was super important because he was super active in sports. If we didn't have that option, we probably would not have chosen to do it, but it became pretty clear that that it wasn't gonna work out for me. I know a lot of things generally. I'm not necessarily great at teaching them or guiding the teaching of it. I it would probably be different now, but at the time and you know, with other kids and whatnot, it was it's not for me.

SPEAKER_00 50:32

Teaching your own child is way different, I feel, than teaching anybody else. I teach a lot of people how to do a lot of things, but uh it's a totally different relationship. It's a it's a different closeness that you have with your kid, and and they may or may not respect you at any given moment for any given subject, you know, and having two at two very different ages, it just was not it was not for me. Yeah. It was I feel that. And it wasn't in their best interest to to keep it going in that way. Um, Sean was very into soccer when we moved here, and he only cared about joining a soccer team. He didn't care where he went to school or anything like that at that point. He just wanted to make sure he was on a club travel soccer team. Yep. So we had that covered and he continued with soccer through high school.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

So yeah. Yep. Well, kids care about what's important to them, and school is never it, and school's always there. So it's like, yeah. So at what point now you're in Delaware, kids are settled, you guys are settled. When do you start sort of revisiting your creative side?

SPEAKER_00 51:38

So I was still working um in a marketing role, actually, for a um a community, E5 Plus community. So they had a lot of amenities. So the marketing job really was dealing with all the dining facilities, coming up with menus, marketing them as a wedding destination event because they had a beautiful, you know, clubhouse where people would use for weddings and things. Um, there was the external marketing, there was the internal marketing, that kind of thing. They had built a building and wanted to bring in entertainment as one of the options. You know, it would be a great place to have a band play or have a big screen thing for the Super Bowl. We should host some paint nights. Those were the conversations that people were having about this new space that was being built. Um, the builder who was there and had a very big say in how things were used and the management of the club itself. And I had been to a couple paint nights just kind of with friends at random. It wasn't a thing I did often, but enough that, hey, I painted something, it doesn't look half bad, that kind of thing. I still have that one, or at least one that I remember from that. I'm like, look at this thing that I'd made back when I knew nothing. Um and I basically said, I could do that. That's really how it started. And I was like, okay, so what do I need to do that? Do I need to buy all the easels? Maybe. I don't remember whether I did for that first one or not. I don't think I did. We definitely need canvases, we definitely need brushes, we definitely need paint. So figuring out where that came from, how much that cost, how much do we charge per person, is anybody gonna come? How do we advertise it? Okay, that I got covered because I already did the newsletter and all the social posts at that point. And people came and taught a class, and we picked a subject that was way too hard for somebody who had never taught a class, who didn't realize that most people coming to these things also were not painters or had any grasp of perspective. We we painted, and I know everybody's part of it, it's the bicycle with the flower basket. You know, you see part of a bicycle wheel and you see some of the frame, and the focus is really this basket of flowers. Bicycles are hard to paint if you've never painted one. And they weren't pre-drawn canvases, so I was having everybody draw their own or paint their own through the process. I learned some things.

SPEAKER_01 54:04

I was just gonna say, this is how we learn lessons.

SPEAKER_00 54:07

It was, but it was successful. People had fun, some people did great, some people didn't do great, but they had a couple drinks and they were fine. They still enjoyed themselves. And I did it again. And then after a few, I said, you know what? I wonder if there are other places that would want to do this because they weren't saturated at this point. There were places where you could go and do a paint and sip kind of experience. And there were a few companies, a few franchise companies that would offer this at different venues, but they weren't saturated. There was, and it's still, I mean, Delaware is very small, which is also uh something that you have to understand. I understand small town because that's where I grew up. Delaware as a state is literally small. I mean, you can drive from top to bottom in under two hours, but even in its closeness and its demographics, there are parts of Delaware that are very small. It's just a running joke with anybody in Delaware that you're going to know somebody. You go somewhere, it's somebody who went to high school with your brother or somebody who knew your aunt's cousin, because people stay here a lot unless you're a transplant. You're either a transplant or a local. If you're a transplant, you'll never be a local. Yes. No matter how long you've been here. Now, if people ask, I would say, yes, I'm from Delaware because I've been here since 2014. Right. But I'm not from Delaware. Like you have to have that emphasis. And that's what people want to know when they ask. Are you from Delaware? No, originally from we moved from York.

SPEAKER_01 55:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:45

Like this week I've said that more than once.

SPEAKER_01 55:47

It's like that you have to give this whole dissertation. You're introducing yourself.

SPEAKER_00 55:53

You absolutely do. So as a small business, it was reaching out to places that didn't already have connections with other people. And then it turned into kind of marketing of self, which I can I can market. Sure. And uh for better or worse, I don't have a lack of confidence. So, and you know, I feel like I'm personable enough to to start conversations and that kind of thing. So I I mean, and I still say that. I'm like, if you have a place or an idea for a project, I'm like, just point me in the right direction. I I'm not shy, I'll talk to them. Yeah. And it, you know, sometimes it works out and it has continued to work out, sometimes it doesn't, or it's not a good fit, or whatever. I started branching out from doing just painting on canvas, which is traditional paint and sip with acrylic paints, to doing painted wood signs, small porch signs, not stencils, because I still haven't mastered my Cricut. I have one finally. That's what it's it's on my creative list of things to conquer, but that list is very long. Painted porch signs, which are more like art projects. You know, now at this time of year it would be spring flowers or Easter bunnies or something to decorate your porch or lean up against your fireplace, that kind of thing. People saw value in that than a canvas, which they traditionally won't decorate their own house with. Maybe you'll put the really nice one up for Christmas that you did that you really like. But in general, you're not going to decorate your whole house, except for that one time where I came home and my husband had put like five of my paintings up in the foyer, which was very sweet because he liked them and he thought that they made very good decorations for the season that we were in. That's so lovely. It was very lovely. And I do use a few, like around the house, a few of my favorites. There's a certain snowman that I'll break out every Christmas, and you know, he stays up for winter. Um, there's paint pouring abstract that I like just because it's bright orange and it kind of goes with this one spot. But in general, no, I'm not, I feel like that.

SPEAKER_01 57:48

Not hanging your bicycle project on the wall.

SPEAKER_00 57:51

I am pretty sure I don't have that one anymore. And I have a lot of my old canvases. In fact, I've separated them now into the ones I still like and would use as examples, ones that I need to touch up, or I should turn into a mixed media, because I can sell those. Like if you add glass or resin or or do something fun to it, and people see it as an artwork, they would purchase that. Right. And ones that now I just need to paint that stuff over. Just paint it black and start over. This is where we are. That'll be a that'll be a reuse canvas. Yeah. That I'll use to paint an example for another project. And then plants kind of started taking over. So I moved into doing things with succulents and terrariums. Um, sea glass is huge around here, being coastal state. So I use coastal glass. It's not all real sea glass, and I make sure to say that because people get kind of fanatic about real sea glass.

SPEAKER_01 58:46

I can imagine, and I actually do have a friend who um he and his wife moved to, they're both my friends. I don't even know why I said it like that. But I'm friends with both of them. They moved to Delaware, probably was right early days of the pandemic, and she's from California, and she does um like silversmithing, she makes her own jewelry, and that's her her area where she does a lot with sea glass, and and I guess now probably coastal glass too. But yeah, she does a lot of events and and things as well in Delaware. And I want to say they're like in the Milford area. Oh, that's right down.

SPEAKER_00 59:19

I was in Milford last night for my event. Yeah, Milford's right down the road. It's a very, it's a very booming, thriving area, and I I like working there a lot. But glass has to have been found on a beach tumbled by the ocean. Like that's the criteria of sea glass. It was a bottle that came from somewhere and has been washed by the sea. And this the sometimes I tumble my own glass that's been broken, or I've procured it in boxes that come in, brown boxes that come from foreign places, and they may or may not be tumbled and rebroken and that kind of thing. But they're all colored glass, and we mix them with gemstones and shells, and we make pictures out of them, or make tree forms or wreaths and things like that. Very pretty, very popular projects. Um, but I always make sure and give that little discourse at the beginning of my classes too. People like, I thought this was real sea glass. There is real sea glass in there. You're always welcome to bring your favorite sea glass and incorporate it. Sure. But if I my joke is, and I've said it at more classes than I should probably continue to say it at if I had that much time to walk on the beach and find that much glass, I wouldn't have to charge for my classes. I'd be retired walking on the beach in Florida or Puerto Rico or wherever.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:27

That is Chef's kiss.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:30

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:31

Yeah. So at some point, as you're amassing all of all of these different forms and you're obviously it's it was getting more successful. At what point? And sort of what was the impetus for you to be like, okay, I'm finished with corporate or nonprofit or whatever, and I'm gonna move solely into this.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:53

Hmm, how to discreetly. Um I would say there were really two impetuses, is it impetai. I'm not sure how that goes. Um I don't hope you just created a word. I think I did, which we we like doing that. My son, I'll I'll throw this little tidbit in there. My son, my youngest son, used to make up words and he would make uh conjected conjunction words, taking two finding them. And tomorrow should be in the dictionary. I'm just leaving it there. Tomorrow. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:24

Tomorrow morning. Oh my god. I was like, wait a second, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:27

You're going to morning. Tomorrow I have an appointment. I love that. I think it should be real. I think it should be too out into the into the universe now too. Um in I was working in a healthcare field and in a marketing capacity in a community education, dealing with the public, marketing about this um healthcare business that I was in. And I'm being purposefully vague. And then COVID happened. And my job had previously required me to have contact with a lot of places where you could no longer have not could you, not only could you not have contact with your average person in the grocery store and wear a mask and everything else, but you certainly couldn't go into senior centers or 55 plus communities or assisted livings or hospitals to talk to doctors and to talk to um oncology groups and things like that. So we were all sidelined, members of my team, um, because we were not clinical. We did not have access in a clinical capacity to reach these places, nor should we have. That's that was just it was the pandemic, it was COVID. You know, nobody knew what it was or how bad it was or it was bad.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:39

Well, and especially in some of those particular areas that you're talking about, there was there was almost worse in those spaces.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:47

Oh, in the the assisted living was it was heartbreaking. I mean, I know personal stories of people who had loved ones in assisted living at that time and were not allowed to visit them. Yeah. And you know, uh it contributed to the the patient's mental health decline, you know, and the and it's heart heartbreaking. And thank God I wasn't in that personal scenario, but I, you know, I witnessed it and I was familiar with the people who were dealing with it from the healthcare side and from the personal side.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:15

But from a job perspective, it meant that what could we do besides create Zooms and send emails, which got old really quick, nor did the uh time to communicate that way. That takes longer than walking with somebody down a hall and having a conversation. You have to schedule the appointment, you have to make those things happen. And the administrative side of it is not something that I enjoyed at all. Um, I will say it contributed to my own mental health. I really struggled at that point. And it was not supported in a way that probably it would receive that kind of attention now, were we not in a worldwide crisis. Right. So I supported, you know, myself by trying to find things to do. I did some video projects. I reverted to, hey, what can we do? We can put out a new promo. They didn't have anybody to do that. I'll try and do that. Well with that. Um, but working from home and that seclusion really took a drain on my abilities to focus, my abilities to be a good worker.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:19

Honestly, probably at this point, you know, looking at it retrospectively. Um, and I left that position with the salt in my mouth. I didn't feel good about myself and I didn't feel good about the leaving or the process of it. Yeah. I went back into, you know, post-pandemic, I went went back into corporate kind of a small business kind of setting, um, working in marketing. And the long and the short of that is management is not as creative as the creative positions are. I enjoyed a lot about management. I enjoyed the mentoring, I enjoyed the overall scale of it, you know, looking at the bigger picture, transitioning to a new website, like all things that were part of my purview at this other job. Um, but the missing the creative piece, I was still doing the creative thing part-time through all the occasionally. Now, over COVID, in that scenario, um, there were some Zooms. I did some Zooms for the library, would paint together kind of thing. But it's very different. If I can't see your painting, I can't help you with it. Right. I can't show you what I'm doing on mine, and then you show me yours, and I really try to have this diplomatic look. I'm like, oh, I like your color choice. My face is not always diplomatic as the rest of me or my writing. My words can be good. My face says its own thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:44

Your face has its own inside outside voice situation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:48

Yes. And on Zoom, you can't hide that unless you put the painting up in front of you.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:54

That is so true.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:57

At a given moment.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:58

That is so true.

unknown 1:05:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:00

So Zoom was not my favorite. Um, I mean, we survived it, but I didn't enjoy it. I tried to do some DIY kits, but then there's the whole sterility of supplies and things like that, which some people didn't care about, you know, after the initial fear of COVID had worn off some. And it was just the longevity of, oh crud, we got it again. Kind of I did get COVID twice where I had to quarantine with my dog. I wasn't really sick terribly either time. I was hiding in the basement with my dog, really, is what happened.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:29

But I was gonna say that's how you handle your mental health. You're like, I got COVID again. See you guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:36

No, because they didn't feed me very well. I want more soup. So I don't know, where were we?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:49

We've lost the thread. No, we were just that I mean, it's it's that impetus. So you were talking about the two sort of reasons why you ended up um, you know, doing the managerial position ultimately.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:01

Yeah. Um and again, not in a positive, healthy way necessarily. I took a lot of great experiences from it. I made, you know, I really felt strongly about the mentoring, about enjoying the creativity part of it. I had been doing more of that. I did put my paintings up in my office.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:21

Did you?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:22

Which felt good. And it was the creative projects that really sparked joy for me. I know that's a cliche phrase, but that's really where I, you know, lit up. That's really what I enjoyed doing. I mean, you know, Christmas decorating or or oh, I got to do this this specific, you know, graphic design for something rather, which was not something that I did. It's usually something that I delegated at that point. Right. Um, and I enjoyed it. So when I had the opportunity to pause and say, oh, I don't have to go into work tomorrow because I didn't have that job anymore, I decided to take a break from finding a day job.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:05

Financially we were able to, thankfully, at that point. And I could say I wasn't really even focusing on what do I want to do next. I mean, I did think about that some. I still think about going back and um finishing my master's degree because if I want to get back into marketing at any point, if I ever want back into communications in the more senior level, I think that that would be very helpful. And having been out of the job market for a little while now, that would be a challenge to just jump right back in and be like, hey, I was at this level, I'm coming right back. Right done for three years now, because this will be your number three. Okay. I created a small business whereby I educate people on connecting with their creativity and market to other small businesses in the Delaware and Eastern Maryland region, creating small business opportunities to improve their bottom line on slow revenue evenings.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:02

See, listen to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:04

That you're a writer. And for private groups and fundraisers and team building, we get a group together and I help people who are creatively shy or uh disconnected from their creativity because I get tell so many people say, I can't draw a stick figure, sister. We're not making any stick figures. Good. You know, but people have that self-deprecating, they don't feel like they can do it because they have never been successful at doing it. Yep. But there's no grade assigned. I say this is one of those things where whether you agree with me or not, everybody gets a trophy. That's it. We all participated. And you get to take it home with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:59

You get to take it home. I love it. I love it. So when you decided, when you when you hit pause, and I know you, you know, you said you were like you felt comfortable with it, you were financially secure enough that that was something that you could do. Was it something that you sort of discussed with your family, your husband, or were you just in a spot where you were like, yeah, I'm just doing it?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:22

It wasn't a, hey, I'm gonna try this for three years and just see what the bottom line looks like. I wish I was more organized in some ways. I I think everybody who actually knows me would probably also wish that for me. I I said something like that to my friend from college the other day. I said, you know, uh that she is more order and you know, structure, and I am I am more chaos.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:49

Somewhere we meet in the middle. Um, but it was more of a this really makes me happy. I enjoy this and I seem to be doing well at it and that other people are enjoying it and there are more opportunities. So let's just kind of let it roll. Yeah, still kind of where I am. I feel like I'm I'm adding more structure to it this year and giving it a little more formality of goals, you know, places that I want to connect with that I haven't, um, adding more fundraisers because I really enjoy the idea of not only doing the creative projects, but having them serve a purpose. Yes. Yep. People will come to support an organization or a fundraiser or a nonprofit, and people will also come to do something creative. Yeah. You can have that as a win-win.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:38

Yeah, totally. It it resonates with me. I know we were kind of chatting about you want to you wish you had a little bit more organization around it. And I was like the opposite where I kind of wished maybe I had more whimsy because I did a whole like created a panic spreadsheet before I quit corporate America. I was like, how long can I survive before I need to get a job?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:01

My my brain was so full of Excel spreadsheets when I left that last position that I think I've refused to Excel anymore. No, I'll draw it. I'll draw you a spreadsheet, I'll color code it with markers and paint and sparkle.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:17

Here's my pros and cons list painted with glitter, like a craft supply thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:24

I've made a yarn diagram.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:28

But I do think that there is something it, and I don't know if it is life stage, if it is something about tapping into that sense of creativity, if it's maybe generational, I don't know what that is, but I have talked to so many other people, whether they've quit or not, or whether they've tapped into their creativity differently or not, but that sense of I really wish that I were doing something more mission-driven is that that part 100% resonates with me. So whether it is how you're navigating your small business, or whether it's how I'm looking at nonprofits or, you know, corporate, I'm I'm cool with a corporate job, but it has to be with a good company, you know, that kind of a thing. I'm hearing more and more of that just in my day-to-day interactions with people.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:18

So yeah, I would agree with that 100%. It it helps when you do. I mean, there's the cliche of do what you love, love what you do, but that is also true because if you find joy in what you do, whether it's the task of it, whether it's the process of it, or whether it is just the your own approach to it personally, some kind of fulfillment, it makes all the difference. And then if you can connect that with a greater purpose outside of your job and yourself, it it gives it meaning. It's not just a rote, I guess Wednesday morning at 6 45 a.m. It's time to make the donuts. Donuts would be great, but no sidebar.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:09

I don't know if that was the best example.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:13

Okay, time to do the spreadsheets. Well, that might bring you joy, but it would not bring me joy anymore unless there were sparkles involved. You know, if you can connect it with some other greater meaning, one, you're gonna have connection with people, which, you know, even if you're an introvert, there has to be some kind of connection at some point in some way, um, with a, you know, a greater idea or a group or or something like that. Um, or if you're an extrovert, then you need the actual connection. You need to actually have that conversation or be part of a group. I mean, I'm sure I I have some extrovert tendencies left over from theatrical things and stuff like that. I don't mind being up in front of a group. I don't mind interacting with a group, I don't mind getting groups to interact with themselves. Yep. And for the most part, I think people enjoy that and enjoy the events. So why stop that? Why not try and connect them in ways even bigger than just hey, coming together and making this thing? We did a I have a project, it's a pop art pet portrait. Try saying that 10 times fast. People love their pets. Yeah. So send me a picture, I draw the outlines, we paint it together. It's a glass project, so you're painting on glass.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:30

That's very cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:31

Some people, um, but everybody takes home this picture of their pet, which is already outlined, so it's gonna look like your pet no matter what. And you've painted them orange and purple or green or or their true colors, whatever you want. And we connected that with an animal rescue. So it was a win-win. And the restaurant that we hosted it at offered a fundraiser called a dine and donate.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:56

That's super cool. So again, okay, so this brings me back to what I the it was not even a question that I had had. It was just in the chatter at the beginning. And that is talk a little bit about small businesses supporting small businesses.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:10

That is the hashtag. I know hashtags are supposedly dead, but I still use them. Hashtag paint plant create, but hashtag small business supporting small business because it really is. Um, I work if I didn't have connections with small businesses like restaurants, with wineries, with breweries, with communities or groups doing fundraising, groups doing team building, then I would not have a business because I don't have a studio. Everything I do is mobile.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:39

I travel to places and it's a win for them because traditionally it's on a slower night. They have guests who may not have otherwise come in, or they have guests who are regulars who wanted to do something else, so they're coming back. Um, they're getting revenue from food and drink in every case. It's giving them more marketing in a positive way. You know, any marketing is good marketing, but in this case, it's hey, we're doing something fun. Hey, we're connected, hey, we have a reason for you to come visit us. And I in obviously it benefits my business, but I also enjoy that that I can then promote, and I have promoted, I've been very happy with myself, my own little, you know, I feel good about this. And when people ask for a venue, I have a whole list of ones that I can tag, like not just recommend, but if it's a social post, I can be like hashtag this person, you know, tag this place, tag this place. And then that owner sees that and knows that they've been recommended for this opportunity, usually some kind of event or something that's going to bring revenue into them.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:43

Yeah. Outside of the business aspect, which I love, and I definitely, so over the last year and a half, two years, I've tried to do a little bit more in my own community. Um, you know, I always talk about the fact that, you know, I I love my small accessible city, but I'm not, I don't live in the city of Pittsburgh. I'm I'm about 10 miles-ish outside of the city of Pittsburgh. And I definitely would say that I'm not, I have not been great at getting involved in my own community. And so probably over like the last five years, I started to, my husband and I would host um blood drives and we would, you know, engage with a couple of different organizations to have that in our local community center. And it's funny when you start to even just make little strides in that, you start to see like this whole fabric around you that I think I know for myself I lost sight of. And so I definitely do more in my my community and like neighboring communities now than I think I probably have since my kids were little. Um, and from a mental health perspective, that matters to me. And so I'm wondering outside of the business perspective for you, how much does that mean to you, particularly as a person who is never going to be a local? They will never look at you and be like, there's Heather, our fellow Delawarian. Is that the word?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:10

Um, so I will say that there are a lot of transplants. So I am not the only not non-Delawarian, but in certain circles that does come up. I think having, you know, having the connection to the nonprofit world, which I I always will feel connected. I always feel like we should be connected to some, you know, the missions that we feel like we should support. You should support them both vocally and, you know, if you can financially, but always with your time. Um, hands and feet, it's a church reference from, you know, uh back in the day, but you know, being the hands and feet, being the people who are doing something active for whatever it is that you want to be supporting. Yeah. It's one thing to say you support it. It's another, obviously necessary part to support it financially. But even if you can't do some of the other things, you can always just show up. Yep. You can always just show up and or be a voice or use whatever your talent is. So if if my talent is I'm not shy, I'll go talk to people. Maybe that's you know how I get word out about something, or I don't mind showing up and doing grunt work, doing manual labor, doing literal, you know, carrying things. Um, I work with uh an organization that supports um unhoused people. And uh sometimes it's showing up for a community day where people come and get donated clothes and food and things like that, and no questions asked. People who may not rub shoulders with lots of other people in polite society in you know, a good part of the day, and then people who do, and you would never know that they needed help. Right. You know, sometimes it's just making a hundred peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every other week and dropping them off, knowing that they're gonna go to the people who need they they need to go to. Yeah, that's awesome. But anything that you can do to be a tangible, make a tangible difference in whatever way, I feel like is really important. So I do personally always keep that it that doesn't always connect to the business, but that's always part of who I am when I'm looking for opportunities to connect to those. The one that I talked about, that pop art pet thing, I had that date secured to do an event, whatever event I wanted. You know what I mean? I have kind of those relationships with a few places where we've booked dates and we're gonna, okay, on this Tuesday in May, we're gonna do this thing. But if I can turn that into something else by reaching out to an organization, by having them give me permission to do it on their behalf, so they get a truckload of animal supply donations and money from the place because it was willing to be donated. Any donation that people have given or that I can give towards that, it's it's not so much I'm not showing up to pet the animals or take them for walks or that kind of thing. I've just been a connector, yeah, which I love doing.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:08

Yeah, that's incredible. So before we wrap, let me know if you have any advice that you would give to other people who are considering it, doesn't even have to be like a big career shift or job shift, but who are considering how to get back in touch with their creative roots. How do you make those connections to maybe find a different path? Do you have advice or thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:36

I don't feel like I'm a a person to give lots of advice because I I feel like I personally feel like those people, the people who give great advice, are the ones who have made the plans. They're planners, they're not the whimsical fly by the seat of your pants. Well, I think we'll just try this kind of thing. But I think there has to be a balance. I think there has to be an element because you can make plans and shoot down plans and find all the reasons why you shouldn't do plans because they don't look great on paper. Or you can reconnect with things that you've always loved and maybe just dabble in it a little bit without, you know, to the detriment of giving up anything else. Um, you know, try that one thing that you like, that art or that theater or that connecting with a nonprofit, you know, things that are not necessarily, hey, jumping in with a business plan. The the meaning behind it, at least to me, was the most important. It was the doing something creative and connecting with people. And then, oh, hey, we can turn this into a business that supports itself by continuing to make connections. You know, I'm I'm not in the red. I'm not making a whole lot of black, but it I'm not in the red. You know, I make sure that I've learned how to price things, I've learned the parts of the business that I didn't know about sourcing supplies and keeping stock. And yes, I really do need to use all the supplies that I have before I go buy more, which is so hard. My name is Heather and I have a craft supply problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:09

Um my God, I really need to hook you up with my friend Annette. Oh my lord.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:14

Yeah. But just, you know, uh it does take a little bit of self-reflection, which I am also not great at, but I know what I enjoy. And having a positive feedback from that first few experiences allows you to continue it. I mean, if you hate it and you get shot down and you you're terrible at it, then maybe you have more things to learn about whatever it is you want to do and then go learn it because learning is everybody has that opportunity at this point. I mean, if you have a phone, you have the opportunity to study things. It's not a tuition and go to college and do all the things. If you have 20 minutes to scroll TikTok, you have 20 minutes to learn something. I'm preaching to myself here, but yes, anybody can learn more about or reconnect with things that they thought they ever wanted to try. And maybe there is an opportunity to connect with other people or to turn it into something at least that you enjoy, if not a sustainable business down the road, if not more.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:10

Yeah. That's awesome. All right. Something we do at my kitchen table is we do three good things about your week. Rolling seven days. It can be big or small, doesn't matter. It's sometimes it's the little little things that keep us grateful and going every day. And sometimes it's like big, awesome stuff. So I'm gonna turn it over to you for three good things about your week.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:32

Three good things. Um, I would say that the event last night was a highlight of my week. So if we're stopping it today and going back seven days, um having a a great event and getting good feedback from people is a huge boost to morale, to myself, um, but it's a huge boost to the business because I know that there are 20 people who enjoyed themselves immensely. And that's you can't pay for more than word of mouth advertising. Um, reconnecting with a friend, and we went out on St. Patrick's Day and wore green mustaches and sat at the bar and didn't care that we were the the older ladies having weird drinks with green mustaches on at the bar. It was lovely, and it was good to reconnect in real life. Sometimes people, you know, you connect online or you text, but you don't actually get to see them because we're all busy. Yes. Having that that reconnection was good. And and by the same vein, um, reconnecting with one of my college friends just via phone. Um, but again, it's hearing a voice, it's reconnecting and making plans to get together in the future. So those were the three most recent highlights.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:44

Yeah, those are three great things, and I think there is something to be said sometimes for when you're reconnecting with a friend, it's also you're reconnecting with like a piece of yourself. And sometimes I like to sit with that a little bit too and be like, yeah, I remember her. Where because it's you're remembering you, you know, the you who you were with that friendship, and it's pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:06

Uh agreed 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:08

Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so fun.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:11

This was a lot of fun. It feels weird to talk about oneself, I will say, um, even though I I talk a lot, um, but talk about myself and I don't necessarily enjoy that piece of it, but it is nice to tell a story and to realize that you know I am happy with what I do and and this place that I am, you know, with my business.