Zoe Ziegfeld

Branded Saloon, Brooklyn

Emotionally, it's horrible. It's so bizarre to be in this room right now. I've done a couple of digital shows, Switch n’ Play gets together digitally on Zoom pretty regularly just to like catch up and be family, because we are at this point. I think really special to have like a roomful of queer people come together to bear witness to one another in a celebratory way, I would say less than 50% of my income was coming directly from burlesque per se, once in a while, I get a contract with the Metropolitan Opera as a snake charmer, and that is not burlesque. But it came about through burlesque. If I hadn't been established as a burlesque performer, I wouldn't have gotten the opportunities that brought me to snake charming that brought me sequentially to the Met. Mostly, I don't daydream, like I know nightlife will be back with a vengeance eventually, but I don't really think about it. It is devastating. It breaks my heart and it makes me furious. I just can't give it that much space in my head right now. I spend too much time doom scrolling on Twitter. You know, I've been out protesting. And that's the other thing that I should say is that on the one hand, it like parts a lot to think about nightlife and what I've lost and on the other hand, or maybe it's the same hand, there are other things that are more important right now. It's just a waiting game and nothing that I want to be doing right now is worth unnecessarily dying for and more importantly, unnecessarily killing for and that's what's at stake.