Rose quartz

Nurse Bettie’s - Lower East Side

This pandemic has been extremely challenging. I lost my aunt to COVID like right at the beginning, when we didn't really know much about it. And that's really impacted me and my family. I feel very far away from Rose these days. I know there are people that are doing like, online performances, but I haven't been like, really motivated to do that. It's hard to do that when you're in like a little tiny apartment and you don't have an audience and you're by yourself and you feel depressed and there's like a mess in the corner. There's no lights and your rabbit is eating your costume and the costumes don't fit. So yeah, it feels very far away.

I feel like most performers I know, we're all kind of feeling the same way of like, little hopeless, not motivated, stuck. How are we coping? I mean, I think a lot of people are finding other outlets to create, you know, I've been doing the clay jewelry. I've been finally journaling which I'd never did until now, and doing like other therapies and trying to really work on myself. I feel like everyone is struggling that I know right now. We're all just trying our best in terms of coping, I really want to do burlesque because I have a lot of self esteem body image issues. And a lot of that comes from like trauma and then I wanted to reclaim my body and take the trauma and the pain and create something beautiful with it, you know and just get more comfortable with my skin so it was kind of just like a challenge for myself and most of my burlesque pieces are about mental health. Depression struggles within a masked in like a really tacky, gaudy campy, I like bright colors to contrast that I guess I get to see it from a different perspective. It gives it some distance, and it gives it a voice that's not super destructive if that makes sense.