Member-only story
I’m scared to work at an Orlando theme park during COVID
I’m afraid I’m part of the problem
Recently, I moved to Orlando to perform at a theme park right in the middle of COVID. Terrible timing, right? The thing is, we all thought the world was starting to bounce back, and it was then or never, but here I am about to start work as theme parks around Orlando start to drop Halloween events, some raising capacity all while positive COVID cases climb without a lock-down in sight.
And instead of getting hyped up to be in this incredible city and do what I love, a part of me keeps wondering if I’m part of the problem?
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” That is what I asked my mom, a 40-year E.R. doctor, when the first wave of COVID news started to come out what feels like decades ago.
It turns out it was pretty bad. My mom is a woman who’s seen the worst of the worst: Ebola, typhoid, SARS. Or, as my mom put it when she went to the front lines in that terrifying, flat doctor voice, “it’s serious.”
When she went off for said deployment, it was a very “oh shit” moment. Life wasn’t just on hold it shut down. Do you remember what it was like? How at first we clumsily had “fun” with it, like it was a sleepover but only one to distract the kids…and we all were the kids.
