Aloha, Among Other Things
Happy Monday!!!
I am fortunate to be able to write this week’s post from the insanely beautiful island of Kauai, where one of our subjects lives. It has been so amazing getting back into production with this new vision to execute. We actually don’t start filming here until tomorrow but I couldn’t be more thrilled and ready.
Today was spent getting familiar with the landscape and scouting locations, making a schedule, etc etc etc. I’d be lying if I said we didn’t find ourselves floating in the Pacific once or twice. Island time really does feel like an unavoidable mystery, especially when time zones make it difficult to know if today is, in fact, today or yesterday or tomorrow. Morning is also afternoon and lunch is dinner. Last night bedtime was at 8:30pm and unfamiliar birdsongs at 4:30am don’t wake you up because you already are.
Tomorrow is going to be quite a day that I already look forward to writing about next week. The trust instilled in us to be welcomed into peoples’ homes is not lost on me. These are real lives. Real friends. Real families. After spending so much time at Wynonna Earp conventions last year meeting fan after fan and being repeatedly in awe of the relationships formed and cultivated by a fandom, it got me thinking about the other 361 days of the year. How do these fandoms and these relationships fit into everyday life? So many people have said “this show has changed my life” and I would be remiss not to witness and share that as well.
About a year ago we started production in Pittsburgh where another subject lives. At that point she hadn’t been to a con yet and hadn’t met so many of the other people in the fandom she was in. These humans, however, she considers closer friends than some of the friends she has had for years and met in person, in a more “traditional” sense. I knew it was important to see her life both before and after what would surely be and was a pivotal experience. Her life was changed. Lives are continuously changed by what should be the simple thing of being seen and represented. We plan to revisit her and Pittsburgh as we’ve been invited back into her and her family’s life - a look into the after.
Tomorrow I get to watch a family dynamic full of love and support. It’s often not the case to have a fully supportive family when it comes to sexuality or choosing to travel multiple times a year to the ends of the globe to spend a weekend with other like-minded people who love a television show to the same extent you do. It’s not always easy getting people who don’t get it to GET IT. But tomorrow, I get to see love and I get to see just how important it is to be lifted up and supported for being who you are. For just being who you are. Because really, that’s what’s at the crux of it all. That’s what we’re all fighting for.
I hope you all stick around to hear about how the shoot goes tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have some amazing stories to tell. For now, it is time to shower the salt off and be taken out for some tequila because that’s what our host’s mom prefers! And who are we to argue with tequila, or moms.
