 Welcome to this edition of Talk of the Town. I'm James Milan. And you have just been seeing some highlights, some scenes from the public art installation that we are here to talk about today. By we, I mean I am joined as I hope to be each and every year going forward as these public art installations continue to proceed. I am joined, first of all, by Cecily Miller, who is the curator for public art and community engagement at the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture. Cecily. Thanks, James. It's good to see you. Absolutely. And also, by Nilum Chala, who is this year's artist in residence and who is responsible for the installation that we are going to be talking about today. And hopefully, you guys are all enjoying already. Cecily, I wanted to start with you, though, because we were here a while back in the studio, pre-pandemic, to talk about the first of these kinds of installations, persistence, with Michelle Lujie last year and yourself. And I know that the ACAC, this is a big part of what it is that you guys want to do is have these large-scale community engagement projects that also involve, of course, artists like Nilum. So if you don't mind, just tell us what is the genesis of this part of the ACAC agenda? And then, how did this particular one come about? Sure, OK. Well, people think of a lot of different things when you say public art. They might think of a 19th century sculpture of a man on horseback commemorating a war. They might think of benches in a park that have been painted with colorful patterns or even a mural, street art. These tend to be more permanent. The approach that we've taken in Arlington is to do public art that is more temporary, more ephemeral, might be here for a month, might be here for a year or a couple of years. And part of the reason for that is so that we can be flexible and timely and sort of respond to what's going on in the now. And also, there are technical reasons that it can be easier for an artist to create something that's not made out of bronze and granite and has to last for 50 years and be engineered for that. So starting with this idea of kind of nimbleness and responsiveness and doing temporary projects, we grew to really value engaging the public, not just as an audience, not just as the people who would see this art, but as people who participated in the making in some way contributed to the meaning. So that emerged as a priority for us to really try to incorporate the voices and perspective of the community and have people have a sense of ownership over the pieces that are led, very much led, though, by professional artists who have extraordinary skill and insight and ability. Then the second kind of philosophical part of the way that we do public art is to address the issues that matter to people. I was actually once, when working for another city, criticized for having a piece that weighed in on a controversy that people in political office had a set opinion about and I said, that's what public art is for, to give people a place to talk about what matters to them. And even though I was told that early in my career that no, art is for something that goes over the sofa, I have continued to believe that art is a really powerful way to address the circumstances that we live in. So Michelle's project was looking at the problem of plastic pollution, which has been so important to activists in Arlington. There's been organizing from the elementary schools to the zero waste committee to try to eliminate this threat, really serious threat to our environment. And that project was very much, we persisted in it. The title of it is persistence, but it was derailed in many ways by COVID because the whole thing was organized to bring people together to crochet and share materials and make fabricate together. Niel's project, we took into more than took into account the fact that there was a pandemic going on. It's really about the pandemic, about the experience that we've all lived through, the thing that was probably most on people's mind for the last year. And it came about because I have worked with Nielu before and therefore I follow her on Instagram. She's a wonderful artist, always kind of coming up with new ideas and new images. And these drawings began to appear on Instagram that were her personal work, which she'll talk more about, reflecting on the pandemic. And so I did a really great project with her called Rhetoric of Opposites on the Bikeway that some people may have seen, which paired opposite words on the pavement of the bikeway and got people thinking about divisive language. So I got in touch with her essentially and said, is there a way to build an artist in residence project on this work and to share this work with the community? Well, on behalf of the community, I welcome the renewal of this partnership because I do remember Rhetoric of Opposites myself from my time on the bike path. And it was, it made me think and I'm sure it did that for others as well as will this project. So the project, and let's start to dig into that a little bit, the project is reflections on our pandemic experience. And I'm struck by the fact that the genesis of that though is a very personal, very individual reaction to this thing that we were all dealing with. So we had our individual reactions ourselves, yours took a particular form. So why don't you start from that and then just kind of bring us into how that moved from a very personal thing to becoming this very public thing. And actually the title of the project reflecting on our pandemic experience is definitely crucial because it wasn't just mine. So in thinking about what we were gonna call it, the hour is definitely a very important component of this public art project. Going back to, I would say March 13, 2020, the day of the lockdown in Arlington and surrounding communities, chaos, fear, uncertainty, schools were shut down. We had seen an inkling of that because one of the schools, public schools in Arlington, the elementary school had been shut down before that for a day or two, but this was the big one. And there was just so much unknown. I'm a graphic designer by training and have always been playing with the art side as well, trained in both for my degrees. And it seemed like a moment that I just needed to get to start doing something that would regulate me over the course of the next few weeks. Not supposing that it would carry on, extend into a year, at least if not more. Everything was just a few weeks out, right? At that first moment and yeah. So the day after the lockdown, March 13, 2020, which is very important to me personally, although the shutdowns could have happened in different times in different communities. This was the first sketch I made, trying to capture the idea of this virus, spiraling uncontrollably or even the chaos internally that some people were feeling just total craziness, running to grocery stores or getting sanitized or cleaning equipment, nobody knew whether you should touch your friend or not see your family, say goodbye, whatever. And then through the course of the next few weeks, it started becoming a sort of practice where I started playing with different textures, different colors. So here are a few examples of some of the things I started creating, different shapes, and really thinking about how to sort of channel myself into this regular practice that could then stabilize me at some level, stabilize the family, therefore the community, and you keep expanding outwards. Can I just ask you a question before you go further? And that is I'm struck by how abstract what you produced was and how it's about color and texture and patterns and things like that. Was that because it's of a piece with how your art usually is or was that in response to the feelings that you were having or both? Good question. I mean, as a trained designer, I'm always deciphering messages for other people to send to an audience. So this is definitely more personal. I mean, this was my second drawing and it's much more looking in contrast to the first one that was swirling. This is more about resilience or being determined. It has the idea of roots or plants. This is the third one and this one is all about grids. It actually talks about the idea of six feet of separation who's contaminated with the red spots who isn't, but this idea of living in a grid system where now we can't get too close to anybody. So just be in your space and be away from everything and alone at some level. I love that the drawings have these meanings that you can deconstruct, but I also think you described them as meditative and it was a powerful way to kind of take a time out and have a quiet space and see where the marks led you. And I would suspect that some of the time it was unconscious and you were just working with the feelings that you were experiencing and processing them and I love seeing them here and their physicality and you can tell from these rounded corners that some of the pages they're from sketch pads and others are fragments from another notepad and I picture you at your kitchen table or your desk working on these and accumulating them and 365 right before you stopped marking each day. So James, I did continue for 300. Well, I went up to about eight months and then I was rolling around October, November, okay, gotta do the 365 I got to finish the year. So luckily for me, the pandemic was continuing for another year. Luckily. So there was no end in sight at least for us who are not in the health medical professions who had gotten vaccines potentially earlier. So kept going till March 13, 2021 by that time Cecily and I had already started talking about the idea of bringing this into the public space and how can we get it out of the digital space on Instagram and do something in Arlington in the community with the community component. Yeah, I just wanna say that what we've been calling an artist in residence is an attempt to give the artist this time and space to not only do their own private work but to take on that community engagement piece. And Neela is an experienced interviewer. She's a storyteller, a story collector and storyteller. And so she immediately responded to that challenge with the idea of interviewing people and we were planning to do it by Zoom. That was one of the things about this project. It was designed as something that could connect people but in the way that we could during a pandemic. Right, obviously the project itself at that moment in March earlier this year, as you guys conceived of it, it was hard to tell still when we were going to be able to come out of this. Impossible, right? Yeah, so you had to be working with what was right in front of you at that time. I am struck though by the fact that as you pointed out earlier Cecily and talking about these particular projects that the ACAC sponsors, that community engagement piece was always an important part that people, as you say, not simply be consumers and appreciators but also participants. And then obviously Neela took, you took that to an entirely different level in this project by directly incorporating the testimony and the experiences as expressed to you of a bunch of different people in the community. But go ahead and tell us exactly how that worked. So I mean one of the first steps was to figure out what were the questions we were going to ask also in tandem looking for the site. I think that was a very important piece and we landed upon the site at Minotomy Rocks Park. It's a neighborhood I live in and where I go very regularly. But there was a space in the woods where this beautiful Andy Goldsworthy type sculpture on the ground had already taken place with a lot of branches, a circular formation around this one single tree. And there was a bit of a clearing around that and I definitely wanted to use that. And that was an anonymous sculpture. We found out later, created by a neighbor five years ago with his seven-year-old daughter. And interestingly he was inspired by things he had seen on a safari trip in Africa that were constructed by people to create safe spaces. Protective, yeah. Protective, yeah. He called it a nest or like a, you know, the Maasai tribesmen and they create the sort of wall around the, you know, temporary village that will protect them from, you know, outside elements anyway. It already had so much motion on the ground, this particular site and a lot of trees surrounding it as well. So it just seemed like a perfect space to come and contemplate and be peaceful and calm away from the chaos, you know, of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we were very fortunate. We got approval from the, you know, parks department. And the friends of Monotomy Rocks Park have been very supportive and have even contributed to making the project possible. But I just wanted to say that it was core to Nile's vision that people have this place they could connect with nature because this was meant to be healing and contemplative, a place where people could find resilience. Peaceful and all of that is there in nature. And we're so lucky in Arlington to have these beautiful green spaces and especially this park, which is such a jewel. Yeah, and we opened the show with just a little bit of footage from the installation and people could see the banners or flags waving in the air. And let me ask you just again to guide us through how did it work once you decided, hey, I'm going to go beyond my own personal experience and working with and through Cecily and the ACAC, I'm going to extend this out into the community. So I assume you did interview folks, et cetera. What's, you know, connect for us that impulse to what we can actually see in Monotomy. Yeah, okay, yeah, sure. So I mean Cecily and I came up with a series of 10 questions and it started with taking people back to the beginning of lockdown and then bringing them forward up till today. And you know, what is their experience? What have they seen? So slightly contemplative and definitely reflective. Through some official channels, we got very fortunate to interview quite a few people in the town, the Department of Public Works. Mike, I think is the head. Adam Chapdelain, town manager, who'll be, you know, here later. Who else? Planning department, the fire chief. So this was, I was so excited just by a couple of those interviews, just having that energy of like the town's folk into the pandemic, you know, project. I think that gives a lot of weight to it and to understand what they were going through. All right, talk about the frontline workers, I mean. And also the head of circulation for the libraries and that I should mention, the libraries have been a wonderful partner on this whole project, a key partner. And they, people needed their books during the pandemic. So the library was like busy, at least twice as busy, if not three times as busy as it normally is while still dealing with their own, keeping their own staff safe. Right, yes. So these are the kind of issues that you got a front seat. Exactly. Seeing how they unfolded for. And then regular residence too, definitely, you know, some essential workers as in grocery stores and other public health and medical. Also talking, I also spoke to some youth, lot of elderly residents, I interviewed the tenant president at Drake Village. So really trying to get through a big slice of Arlington, all different professions, all different facets of life and teachers as well, because they doubly had to take on a lot of the weight and responsibility in the 2020, 21 school year and the fall and spring of how to like pivot to this remote academy versus, you know, hybrid versus in school and how we're going to manage all of that. I do also want to mention the library is going to have a recording of all the audio interviews. So we originally started thinking we would do 15 to 20 interviews. We've ended up with at least 75, 40 of them or 45 were face to face that I did either via Zoom or in person in our backyard, as it was safe. And that is- So the library is going to be kind of archiving basically these interviews and making them available. The library had established a COVID archive, a community-based COVID archive and we saw this as actually a way to support that archive to activate it and the questionnaire that Nilu finalized that is online will be online for the next year so people can continue to share their stories. And actually we'd like to get that message out that it's not too late, it's too late to have your work translated into visual form for the installation but not too late to have your voice included in history. And we all know it's important that, you know, regular people who've been through history share their perspective so that when people look back on these events, they know how we were all impacted and the truth of this situation or the multiple truths, the variety of truths. Well, as you point out, it may be too late for their words to be reflected visually for this particular project. Let me ask you, how are the people who are fortunate enough to be, their expressions have found a new form here? How did that happen? And how can people experience that now? If they go to Minotomy Rockspark, what are they gonna see if they go to Kickstand Cafe, et cetera? And if they go to the park, of course there are 100 meditation flags so what we've done is taken 50 of my original flags that I did out of the 365 and combined it with 50 community interviews. I've selected those to represent a wide, I guess, cross-section of Arlington, Arlington Stories, and each of the flags of the community interviews have a word attached to them. This word isn't necessarily what someone said, but it's the feeling. I mean, they could have said it, but it could also be based on a kind of emotion or feeling that the person was having at some point during the pandemic or during their interview. It captures sort of the core meaning of their story. And the process for me was pretty much going, obviously interviewing them and then going back and trying to figure out what were those high points in the audio interview and then finally sitting down and translating all of them. There's a difference between the interview images and my original ones. My original ones are a lot more raw and are done without so much, I would say, translation and definitely the community interviews they tell a story in a very different way and the way the marks are made are trying to communicate something about that specific person's experience. So my training as a designer has come into play with some of those flags, but the way they fly at Monotomy is they're alternating on each length of rope and they are eight trees that radiate from the central tree, it radiates out almost like a maple. So that's what the installation is about. A row of arborists helping us, they were climbing ladders and installing at Nilu's instructions and an incredible amount of organization and precision went into her measuring the space between each tree trunk and figuring out exactly how many flags and which string would radiate to this tree and to this tree. And the effect is really, when it kind of takes your breath away, it's quite wonderful. It changes with the light, the light filters through the trees and illuminates the flags and you have a lovely way of saying that the tradition of prayer flags, the idea that when the wind. I mean the whole format of the flag itself is definitely the Buddhist prayer flags which have been around for millennia, I should say. But not the idea that God will be dispersed around, it's more like peace and contemplation will be provided for everything it's surrounding. So just this idea, again during the pandemic to have a space that brings you there and you can feel some sort of solitude, like that was the idea. I should say in contrast to that, Kickstand Cafe was Emily Shea who is a corner at Kickstand, she was one of my interviewees and they pivoted and ended up running their cafe outdoors, outdoor seating sometime last summer, so I approached her and she agreed to have a different sort of component of the installation in a much more busy social area, also that belongs to the cultural district. So we have a set of 20s, we have a set of 13 flags or 26 flags flying at Kickstand, but those are word and image flags, so it has pull quotes from the interviews of 13 interviewees and they will be up there as well as long as the monotony park one is up. And I love both the continuity but also the contrast between these two installations because a fundamental principle of successful and meaningful public guard is that it's site specific, that it responds to the place where you experience it. And so the one that's so social, it's like the town meeting place, right? That that's where you get these fragments of the story transparent, there they are, you can read them and it's more mysterious in monotony rocks and you have to kind of imaginatively respond to these as well as you have that space to go inside. And I'll just add one other personal note which is I mentioned earlier, I live adjacent to monotony and lucky enough to do that and so therefore spend a certain amount of time in the park on a regular basis. So I've been able to go to the installation four times so far and each time I have focused on, different things have come to me, I won't even say that I've taken much agency in it. And I think that that's what you have offered as well by having this in a place that is accessible to all, but also separate from the kind of pace of life that we do slip into that kind of contemplative space when we're there and it rewards revisiting in a way that wonderful art always does. Thank you. I mean, I do have one thing to add which is, I mean, I don't look at myself so much as a translator more like a conduit and just almost inhaling a lot of these interviews. I mean, didn't recommend our system for a while, but the minute I started sketching it out, it was incredible just to get some of those people's stories out there on paper was really important for me and to be part of this community project. Well, we are going to hear from a number of the participants, your interviewees, a nice smattering, a nice cross-section from different perspectives and participation within and reactions to the pandemic and we look forward to that. But before we move into that part of today's show, I just wanted to ask you one last thing, which is for you personally, this seems you were just describing how there was a sense of being, if not assaulted, you were caring a lot. And so this must have been an extremely full experience for you in many ways. How, what do you feel that on a very personal level, you're taking out of this? Where it was my transition point, I think I got vaccinated during the process and then just having the project up and out, I could almost leave physically and even emotionally leave the pandemic behind just a little bit and start trying to relish some sense of normalcy. Also with schools going back, my daughter had chosen hybrid to full school. So things were turning around May or June. That's not to say where I still will always be aware of some things coming down the pipeline, but just the fact that it has been a good way to step out and away from COVID-19 and start attending to other life, you know, things. Well, as I knew I would, I really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate you both being here, Cecily. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nilu, wonderful work. And we are going to go ahead and move on now to a broader conversation, a panel conversation that Nilu will moderate between herself and five of the participants in this project. So we'll be right back after a short break. I'm James Milan. This is Talk of the Town. Thanks for being here. Hi, my name is Nilu. We met earlier, you know, during the recording and I'm so happy to have five of my interviewees here. I'd like to go down and introduce everyone and then, you know, we can launch into a couple of questions. Sanjay Vakil, Adam Chapterlain, Pietra Czech, Jan Pagliosotti and Christopher Gauthier. I was very fortunate to be able to interview these five people as part of the larger interview set of over 50 people whose community stories and drawings are up hanging at Monotomy Rocks Park. So I'd like to start with you, Adam, as the, you know, town manager of Arlington, taking you back, you know, again, a year and a half ago. Where did you feel Arlington was then and where do you see it now? So maybe we can do a past and present sort of check-in. And just, you know, during the process of our interview, you mentioned the humanity of the town departments and how everyone was working together and, you know, what was that experience like just managing the chaos of COVID? So I guess I would start by saying like most of the world in early March, we were hearing news and hearing reports about the threat of the coronavirus or COVID-19 and taking them seriously, but heeding the guidance of the CDC, suggesting that up to a certain point there was no threat being caused to Arlington or to people in Massachusetts generally. That rapidly changed in the second week of March. And I remember very clearly being on a call with a number of local leaders in various cities and towns in the region on that, I think it was March 12th, maybe it was the Friday, maybe the ninth was the Friday, talking about a need to act very quickly. And I think this was maybe one or two days after the first positive test in Arlington at the Straton School. But Arlington, fortunately with the guidance of our Health and Human Services Director and other expert staff, taking further guidance from the State DPP Asian CDC decided to take that, I think Jesus, did it start as a 10-day pause? You know, probably at that time still thinking very foolishly that this was a one, two, three week, maybe a month long issue. But I do feel proud that I think Arlington was at that point one of the leaders in the state and acting quickly. Even if we didn't know exactly what the story would be, acting quickly to try to be as protective as possible. Fast forward to today. You know, I think Arlington suffered loss like every community did over the past 18 or so months. But I think Arlington also fared very well in its trust in science with the, again, the experts we have in our Health and Human Services Department advising us, as well as the fact that we have a very educated, thoughtful populace that I think for the most part has done what they should have done over the past year in terms of masking and then getting access to the vaccine when they were eligible to get it. So I think today we're in probably as good a place as you could be coming out of what we've all dealt with. Again, over the past 15 or 18 months. But there's a lot of recovery work to do and it's not over, right? I think we are in a good position today, but there's still more to watch, more to learn and more to see in terms of how this virus changes and adapts and how we as a human people respond to it and what measures might need to be put in place. You know, I don't, from a town perspective, we don't think we're immune to another part of the country and other parts of the world we're seeing right now. I think we're hopeful that our vaccination rates continue to protect us, but nothing's a given. So we stand ready to see what the next chapter will be. And that's an interesting state to be in. I mean, this idea of being an emergency alert, but then also trying to, I mean, cause definitely the first few months, it sounds like the town was constantly in that mode, like things were changing even on a daily or weekly basis. So now that's kind of settled a bit more, but maybe preparing if things slightly, you know, shift in the future. It's kind of like, you know, difficult space to be in. It's interesting that Julia Kayama, CNN contributor and security expert coined this, but she said, you know, basically people in role like mine or fire chiefs, police chiefs, health human services directors, we are trained to some degree in crisis management, but that crisis is very finite, right? It's like a one or two, maybe not even a one day thing. This was obviously felt like an eternity. So we all had to learn how to be, you know, long-term crisis managers. I think many of us have adapted well in that regard, but you're right now we're sort of still, we're like coming out of a crisis still within a crisis, but hopefully better prepare that if we need to roll out more protective measures, much more able to do so than we were rolling back the clock. So Sanjay, I'm going to go to you next because you were there in the beginning within the first few days trying to do some sort of emergency response with our product you developed. Yeah, it was interesting and it's interesting with Adam talking about what the town continues to do, right? One of the things I worry about is stockpiling. And so it's sort of interesting whether, you know, one of the things that happened back in last March is that stuff ran out, whether it was gloves or masks or sanitizers and so on. So I just wanted to check in with the town as an Arlington resident that we've been stockpiling in sort of pre-emptive mode before we get to, you know, whatever is after Delta Echo, whatever is after Delta Echo. Epsilon. Sorry. Epsilon's a really small name. Thank you, Nealoo. So I, back again in March there was, I was also sort of on the leading edge of learning that this was happening partly because I have compatriots at my job in different parts of the world. And so Zurich was in the process of shutting down by the end of February, more or less. And so my coworkers were being sent home. And the lack of protective gear was sort of on everybody's mind at the time. So the term that I had not heard before, and I hope never to have seared into my brain again, is PPE. Our healthcare groups need PPE. And so I got an email on a company list basically saying, hey, my brother-in-law's working with somebody else at the Brigham on making some emergency protective gear. And he's doing it with duct tape and a little bit of hope. And could you please find somebody at Google who has a 3D printer and so we can make some prototypes and see if we can do something a little bit more organized. This was sent out by a co-worker of mine at, you know, 10 p.m. on a Saturday night. And by Sunday morning he had like 180 replies from everybody, including me, saying, yes, I have this stuff. How can I help? What do I do? And so it grew from there into a non-profit called Masks On. And what we were doing is we ended up going in a bunch of different directions to start with and ultimately focus down on modifying devices that look like this. So this is a full face snorkel mask, which is a pretty cool toy, you can all see it. And the idea is that, you know, if you remember what old snorkels used to look like, they were sort of a piece that went over your face and then it was a big J pipe that came in that stuck out. These work slightly differently. They actually cover your entire face. And then there is a tube that comes out here that sticks out like a weird unicorn horn at the top of your head. This piece comes off. And what we realized is that, if you had the right adapter, you could actually connect it to existing filter technology. So this turquoise filter on the top that you're seeing here is a standard, it's called an anesthesial do circuit filter. It's a standard filter that hospitals have. And importantly, it was a filter that wasn't in the consumer space. So you couldn't go buy them up, right? You couldn't, they didn't disappear from the shelves. And this ends up being sort of like N100 equivalent. So we ended up raising about two and a half million dollars from some generous donors in and around Boston and beyond. We bought 40,000 of these. And anybody who needed them, we just shipped them to. And you managed to distribute about 10,000 or more? 38,000 got distributed within the US and Haiti. And then we had about 2,000 left and the last of those landed in Mumbai actually yesterday. And so we're distributing them basically wherever they can go. The need is not here anymore, right? And so, but there are still healthcare workers and clinicians in India and beyond that we're trying to get stuff to. Piatra, I'm gonna go to you next. As a public health professional, I really want to know what are your thoughts for as you saw this thing coming or hearing of it, maybe ahead of the curve. And also, what are your responses to that then and now? So for me, I guess like Sanjay and Adam both I was hearing more about it maybe than the general public was because I work in public health. And I was sort of thinking along the lines of a lot of people at that time well, we know how to deal with this. We know how to prevent pandemics from getting here. We know how to deal with them. Once they come here, it's gonna work out. It won't be too bad. That was how I was feeling in February. And then I started to see that our response was a lot slower than I had expected it to be. And that was when I started to get nervous. And I actually was pleasantly surprised at how quickly Arlington reacted once it became clear that things were a lot worse than we had originally thought in the closures and that Massachusetts was being Massachusetts and reacting very quickly to the risk that we saw before us. But I was surprised, I am aware that for decades we've had some disinvestment in public health across the board, internationally, globally and in the United States that affected us and our ability to respond. But even knowing that, I assumed we had capacity that was not necessarily activated quickly enough. And I think we've seen the aftermath of that since then. And what about the vaccination rollout? Do you think that's been pretty successful rollout in terms of? I think that there have been successes and things have obviously picked up over the past few months rapidly, which is very, very encouraging. I do think that health equity, which is my specialty, is not a strong suit overall in the United States. And so the response has been very uneven and there are very vulnerable and most affected and highest risk communities that were not prioritized in the vaccine rollout and are still lagging. In addition to, of course, the fact that the pandemic and public health measures related to the pandemic were politicized early on and that has also impacted at the national level our ability to have a more even vaccine rollout so that it's Massachusetts overall at the state level is doing great, but we have pockets of this state or not even just pockets like Springfield, fourth largest city in New England and the vaccination rates are lower than they really should be. And there are still access barriers and room for improvement. But I think overall there are lots of people working very hard on that particular issue when things are starting to get better. So John, I'm gonna go to you next and bring you back to the day before the lockdown, actually. You're an essential worker in one of the spaces and if you wanna talk about a touch of your experience. Yeah, I work at a grocery store, not in Arlington, but in a neighboring town. And you just work a few days a week but happen to be working, things were wild anyhow, leading up from February, March shortages, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, all of that. But I happen to be working the day that they announced schools were closing. And I think the word that's on mine is madness because things did just people panic. And it was unbelievable, the amount of food that we sold that day and everything in the store. The shelves were empty and continued to be for a long time. We even, we have a very good process of ordering what we need for the next day's delivery. The company just stopped that, they just sent what they could get. You just got what you could get in the store and you figure out how to put it out and people could eat. We take polenta and try to make it look like the shelves were full because that was all we could get for that shelf at times. So we really, it was, people were really good about it, but people were really worried about getting access to food. Yeah, I mean, did you see that anxiety through the customers or? Well, it was both, it was the anxiety about getting food, but it was more what they were being, what they were worried they were being exposed to. So we had, a lot of people stopped coming into the store which made perfect sense. And so they'd have, we'd have one person shopping for the entire extended family, which made a lot of sense, but they'd come in with huge orders then. And of course, we were trying to move people through quickly so that, we did a really good job of keeping the capacity low in the store, sanitizing everything. We swam in hand sanitizer before each customer came through, after it was constant, cleaning all the carts, cleaning all the surfaces, the high-touch surfaces. And I think we did a really good job of making the store as safe as it could be. But, people were nervous and people continue to be nervous to some extent. Everybody sort of figured out their way of handling the anxiety, but some in rational ways, some in not too rational ways, but it worked for them. Some people put everything in a produce bag. Every item gets its own produce bag when they come in. I don't know what that does, but it helps them deal with the anxiety of shopping. Which they're gonna remove on the conveyor belt anyway. Well, no, they didn't want us to, so we'd scan through it. But it's always already been touched. But how does that compare to what, all the news coming out recently where it doesn't live on services anyway? That long story, you've spent all this energy. It's what they need. It's what they needed at that time. What they needed to feel comfortable shopping. And to some extent, it was interesting too, during the pandemic, because shopping was sort of the only thing people could do. Yeah, that's true. So we had a lot of people coming just because they needed to get out of the house. So it was a challenging time, but people were really good about understanding, waiting in line before they came in the store. Respectively. People were very supportive. So I'm gonna move on to Chris. And I did want you to touch upon a little bit what the experience was as a teacher in a neighboring town, high school teacher. What was it like? What were the student's expectations? What were the parent expectations last spring? And then coming back to this past academic year, everybody had to pivot to a different way of teaching. So what was that like for you? Well, it was initially extremely confusing. And thinking about, I think, just how perhaps we all sort of assume we started hearing the news that maybe it wasn't gonna reach the US and that our response would sort of attenuate how significant the impact would be in the US. I still remember I had one particular student in my US history class who was, and she was an anxious kid, really bright kid, but had been following the news and was really worried about this virus. And I remember saying to the kids, you know, I'm pretty sure, you know, we'll be okay. You know, we're gonna leave school. And I said, I don't think that's the case. And sometimes, you know, with software, sort of like with snow days, right? There's someone gets a hint that there might be snow and suddenly we'll be out for a week. There'll be a blizzard. You know, we try to tamp that down. No, no, no, no. Even if we think there might be a snow to the next day, you tell them you're gonna be in school and say, why don't we do their homework, right? Don't think you're not gonna be. So I kept on saying, oh no, you know, this isn't gonna be the case. And I remember that particular day when I made this statement, just trying to reassure my students with what I thought was the right information, although it really knew. We got called down to a meeting after school and that actually marked the last meeting I had in school. That was in the middle of March until school started the next year. And the principal said, I can't tell you anything in particular, but I just want you guys to be aware that there are these different technologies that we can use for teaching. So just in case these become necessary. He wasn't able to make the statement because the superintendent had to make it. And as we was driving home, we got the message that we were out. It was gonna be a week at first and maybe 10 days and then eventually being pretty clear we weren't going back. And that meant that we had to shift to teaching in this remote way. I had never heard of Zoom until this moment. I think at this point I kind of wish I never had. But it proved to be a pretty good tool. And it was really hard. I mean, think about some of the things that you struggle with just when you have students in front of you. Students with various learning differences. Students who are struggling to just access challenging content and then imagine not being able to meet with them face to face. And those students not being able to interact with their peers in the same way. Levels of anxiety around the pandemic. Layered on top of, I think, at least the discourse of my school is that our students are already experiencing an elevated level of anxiety just in general. And then you add this on top of that. So that was really hard. And some students that had, students that we were struggling to connect with and working really hard to connect with, that became that much harder. And how do you reach them? And then again, I think about always students with some differences in learning who need that a lot of supervision or just simply just need a different kind of approach. We need to sort of be in contact with them, checking up on them all the time. Firstly, impossible to do in that new format. But we did the best we could with it and learned all kinds of new technologies, screencasting and using Zoom and so forth and so on. And then as we moved into the fall, we all worked really hard over last summer too to try to figure out what we were gonna be doing. It was this hybrid model. Half the students in, half the students at home, which meant sometimes I was teaching a class of the students that were there and some of the students were on the computer. And then in some cases, I was developing separate assignments for the students that were home. And even the students that were in school were masked and separated from each other. So there was that, even in the physical space, there was a real sense of isolation and separation, I think. And so I think about two populations of this. I think about the seniors that I had who their senior year this year was a very unusual year, their junior year, leaving, and then coming back in this very unusual way and then we ended the hybrid model after April vacations. They had maybe two, maybe six weeks. Just like Arlington, yeah. And that was basically their upper class experience was about six weeks. And some of them hadn't seen classmates for a really long time. And then there were sophomores that had essentially done a little more than half of their first year and then basically we're all coming back together right before their junior year. And I think that just leaves a lot of questions is what's coming next. But I will say this, I was just, and with this I was so impressed with so many of my students and their resilience. So many of my colleagues worked so hard, all my colleagues worked really, really hard as well. But we just went to a pass-fail model. And essentially you just had to sort of produce something. And because it was virtually impossible to grade, it was very hard to do and to assess what's going on. And I had some students that absolutely transcended themselves and just produced incredible work, even when everyone kind of knew the grade was going to be a P anyway. Which sort of, in a strange way, I reinforced a certain sense of admiration I have for my students, how hard they work. And it kind of reminded me that I do take this stuff seriously. It isn't just about the grade. So actually I'm going to go backwards starting with you because I have certain words that came out of your storytelling, your one-hour storytelling interviews with me. And yours was intractable. But if you had to think of a word that sort of encapsulates your experience over the course of the pandemic, and now what would it be? One word that encapsulates the experience of the pandemic. Or just something that comes up. I'm not going to say I'm a president. In this moment. Please don't. Yeah, so sorry. Yeah, I think... Exhausting. It could be negative. It could be positive. It could be inspirational. Just something that, you know... Well, I think the word that comes to me is social. Social. And, you know, if I can add another word, the other few words, the importance of the social. You know? But just all things social. It just means reflect on that. Jan, if you had to think of that. And your word was madness because I was thinking about, you know, your place of work and what was going on there. But if there's something that you take away from the yo and, you know, the pandemic sort of lockdown yo. Yeah. You know, I really do think it's sort of the supportiveness that the community, you know, and customers and colleagues all sort of pulled together. And, you know, under circumstances where everything was changing every day, people really hung in there, rolled with the punches, supported each other to make it work. Pietra, your word was compromised. And I was thinking of public health in general. But is there something, you know, you would say similar or differently to that? I think my overall take is community. So I think in a lot of ways, we've seen how community can be supportive, how important community is for the social, how people found different ways and new ways of connecting and reconnecting. I managed to connect with a lot of old friends that I hadn't spoken to in a long time that would not have happened otherwise. But also community to me, partly a lesson from this that I'm hope, sometimes I get discouraged, but I hope we'll learn is that sometimes you're, we live in a very individualistic country and the pandemic has shown us that we need to be there for each other. What I do affects everybody around me, not just me and my family. So living and being in community, I think is something that has really come out of this. That's a great point. Adam, your word was humanity. And you mentioned that in the interview when we talked vis-a-vis the humanity of everybody else in the town administration. So I'm wondering on a more personal note, you know, what would you think of that would come to mind for yourself? So I guess probably to tie into humanity, I would say resilience or resilience. Oh, you took my word. You can say it too, you can say it as well. You know, I just feel like, I know resilience can be a bit of a tricky word in the society we're living in today, but I feel like humanity has demonstrated itself to be, obviously quite vulnerable, but exceptionally resilient in the face of all this hardship over the past 18 months. So I think that would be my word today. Yeah. So I'm totally taking resilience, but I'm gonna take it a slightly different direction if I might. We talk about the resilience of humans, which I think has absolutely been shone a light on it, but I think that there's a weird way in which our society, organizationally from a business standpoint, really values efficiency and having minimum stock on hand. So you don't have too much that rolls over to the next day, getting answers at the last moment as necessary for what's happening. And I think organizationally, we need to put a value on our society being resilient and having stockpiles and having sick days and having these things to deal with the realities that we have to deal with and the forces are right against it are pretty strong, right? Like it's expensive to be resilient. Turns out it's really expensive not to be. Yeah. Actually, one of my second sketches on the virus series, which was my Instagram mode of starting this project, the second one that I showed you earlier, which looked like a plant, its title was resilience and it was done on the second day, the day after the schools locked down. I'm just thinking about this idea within this chaos and uncertainty, how do you stay strong and hold everything together? But let's go ahead. Just after having interviewed so many people and having heard so many stories and heard people choose their word, what would be the word you would choose? It's tricky. So I had 365 words. I never actually ever latched on to one and for me it was the combination of all of them. Yeah, so that would be my response. But thank you. Thank you everyone for being here. This has been Talk of the Town at ACMI.