Get Out! GAY Magazine – Issue 464

Of course, I know I wasn’t really alone. By
April 1st, I could count the number of New
York friends that still had a job on one
hand, all working from home. By May, even
my mother in Iowa would be working from
home.
“This doesn’t feel real,” I kept saying.
Some days, it still doesn’t.
I keep thinking about the “Over the
Rainbow” quartet. Growing up, I loved
The Wizard of Oz more than anything.
Of course, the movie is iconic (as is the
underrated sequel, Return to Oz starring a
young Fairuza Balk), but my love didn’t stop
there. We painted my childhood bedroom
emerald green, the walls lined with framed
pictures from The Patchwork Girl of Oz, a
pair of stuffed stockings donning a pair of
ruby red slippers sticking out from under
my bed. I had a jar filled with broken yellow
bricks–-chunks of broken brick my father
spray-painted yellow, but insisted were real
pieces of THE yellow brick road-–and the
top shelf of my bookshelf held every Oz
book by L. Frank Baum. My most recent
additions to the collection include a set of
graphic novels written by Eric Shanower,
with art by Skottie Young, and a bag from
Coach’s Oz collaboration. It was a gift from
my boyfriend for my 30th birthday.
I was wearing the bag that morning, on
the subway, while the quartet sang. I held
onto the dangling bag charm, a small ruby
red slipper, my lucky rabbit’s foot. “Birds fly
over the rainbow, why then, oh why can’t
I?”
The bag has been hanging on a hook since
March 17.
How long would we be quarantined? When
could we go back to work? Would there be
work to go back to?
James and I didn’t know what to do. The
world bought up all the toilet paper and
pasta. From their mansions, celebrities
urged us to stay inside, losing their sanity
with every Instagram post.
My mother wondered if I wanted to come
home for a while: I saw my fellow New
Yorkers flocking to their humble beginnings
to wait things out. I talked to James about
it, but we wanted to stay in our apartment,
surrounded by books and movies and
clothes and cats and all of the things that
remained unchanged by the outside world.
James and I did the only thing we could
do: figure things out one day at a time. We
stocked up on food, stashed a six-pack of
toilet paper under the bed, and prepared
ourselves for a simple summer.
PHOTO BY STEVE BRENNAN