Veronica Viper

The Slipper Room, Lower East Side

It was a confirmation for me. You know, it went from that feeling of being in the audience to being like, okay, you know, I made I made the right steps here. This is exactly where I belong. My voice is valid and that I'm not, in fact, invisible, regardless of how invisible the world makes me feel. It brings me into focus, it brings me into reality, and it allows me to have the voice and the power that people like me have been denied generationally and continue to be.

Yeah, it's very empowering, it's very confirming. The response I get is so intensely marginalized that it just shows our current political climate and our current situation. Just to the tee. This for me was a different kind of loss, and it's the kind of loss that so catastrophic that for many of us, the only way to move forward is to lock it all up in a box and just keep that bitch quiet til the time comes.

That's what makes us artists. You know what I mean? I have been very thoroughly aware of its absence, but I have not yet processed what it means to be without my vocation for ten months or whatever it is. I put on weight and watched a lot of TV and drowned my feelings out any way that I could and talked to my therapist, of course.

I haven't dealt with it. I'm not currently dealing with it. I'm just hopeful that it's going to end. That's where I'm at. I have not been feeling great, you know what I mean, like it's that few moments on stage that fuels that feeling of being safe within yourself, you know, and that that feeling is fleeting.

I am a communal person. I thrive on community. I thrive on people. Without it, we just it goes dark so, we need it. There's no coping without it. It's not about coping. It's about surviving. We're here and we're waiting and we're dormant. We're not gone and we're waiting for that stage. We're waiting for the audience. You know? We're waiting to be alive again.