My name is Steven Middleton.

Since 2008, I have produced 16 documentary films dealing with the strange and curious lost histories and even sweet talking anniversaries.

After all these years of producing films, I realize that I've never had a shortage of interesting people to focus on or places to travel.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, so many of us became isolated and removed from so many things that we knew and loved.

This, in turn, created an interesting set of circumstances for so many with creativity.

People learned new hobbies created art, and absorbed the time to learn something new or build upon lost interests.

So over the past few months, I have sought out, looked for and struck out with my camera for people who are creating, writing and building something unique.

In these post pandemic times.

I've been searching for unique stories of creativity that have come since COVID-19 changed all of our lives forever.

As the years have gone by, my hair has gotten a lot grayer.

My old boots worn and my camera has gained many hours of use.

But I am still back to my original mission to search for those humans that are doing things their way.

And off the beaten path.

Come along with me to see Stages and Waves, an excursion through challenging times.

Are we rolling?

Okay.

Oh, my name is Steven Middleton.

And I have decided to produce this film Stages and waves based upon my own experiences and what I learned from myself.

But also the inspiration I learned from others when they told me what changes occurred in their life through the pandemic and COVID- 19.

Now, so many things have happened to us as a culture, as people.

And honestly, if we didn't learn something about ourselves through this whole process.

It's very shocking to me.

The pandemic hit at a time in my life where I didn't want to slow down and all of a sudden the world stopped and I didn't know what to do.

Personally, I suffered greatly at first.

I learned so much about myself for the first time in my life.

I was forced to be face to face with aging and isolation and loneliness and decided to make this film give you an insight.

Strip away the politics, strip away all the noise machines, but find a series of people who use the pandemic as a time to learn more about themselves.

Practice things in their life, and produce something that was very unique.

Music Under To open the film, I want to showcase the ever optimistic side of youth.

For the past few years, playing music with the New Beckham County Ramblers, we kept coming across this amazing musician that was so full of life from his stage energy to his Western wear, to the power of his voice.

I was amazed this artist was approaching the craft of bluegrass and country music with such refinement and history.

After meeting after a show, I come to find out he's quite the sensation on social media.

And after getting to know a little more about this fine musician, I learned that during the pandemic, his entire high school experience was nothing but virtual.

Instead of giving up or losing track, this artist put work into writing, performing and reaching a wider audience all while moonlighting by day as an old time radio deejay.

I'm excited for you all to meet my friend Colonel Dreyden Gordon.

And I’m Dreyden, Gordon.

I'll be here till 330, hopefully playing something you might like or tickle your ear for a little bit or warm your innards.

The song was Twister.

Well, we've got a request coming up right now, which goes out to Catherine, who's one of our loyal listeners right here on Afternoon Bluegrass here on WG.OH She informs she has a birthday...

So as long as I can remember, I wanted to be in the radio business.

I used to set it when I was a little kid and I'd be like five or six years old and have youtube up or something, you know?

And we'll have such and such a song by so-and-so.

And you're listening to whatever station letter call letters I'd made up, you know, in my head, you know, and i’ve always loved music and everything.

So I would say probably one of my favorite things in being a deejay is just the ability to get on the airwaves and talk to God knows who out there and play all your favorite music and answer the requests and answer the phone and all that other stuff and get to hear from some loyal listeners and maybe some first time listeners sometimes.

And just a real good time and playing all the good music.

So Son of a Ramblin Man from his album, Tall Fiddler, that is Michael Cleveland and flame keeper featuring legendary... would always be listening to and I always enjoy it.

Sometimes I'll get a request for something I maybe never even heard of, so that kind of opens your eyes a little bit, opens the doors to get experience in a little bit different.

A little bit different from the mainstream of what you're always, always listening to.

So that's one thing I would say it really helps with.

All right, I'm ready when you are.

I'm just trying to get it to stay in tune.

You just take off whenever you're ready.

Here's a song I wrote some time back.

One called No Life to Live.

(Dreyden singing) It's snowing back home.

So they say, I wouldn't know.

I'm stuck.

At the age of seven, I kind of took up an interest in singing and I actually played the spoon for a little while, but more or less singing for the most part.

And so ever since then I've been playing and pickin and singing, and music has always been the dream of mine, the biggest dream of mine, I guess I could say.

And it's been been good to me.

I've been fortunate enough to sell several records and to be able to tour pretty, pretty much full time.

A lot of people ask if I have a writing process, I do not have a writing process.

I will.

I'll on occasion see something that might inspire me a little bit.

And I think, well, somebody ought to write something about that.

And then I get thinking a little bit more, Well, why not me?

You know, I've always said that it don't matter if I've got two people at the show or 2000, as long as maybe I can sing something that my audience might relate to just a little bit or that I can relate to, if I can't relate to it or my audience can't relate to it, I might as well pack it up and go on home because they're.

The whole reason to do this thing (Dreyden singing) and the only time you do is when your dead this city.

Life.

It ain't no life.

to live.

(off camera Steven Middleton) That's great.

The pandemic has been hard for all of us being stuck at home, little to no socialization and way too much time on social media.

But I discovered while on social media person doing something I've only seen in historical archives in museums.

Meet Megan Snook, photographer renowned Megan used The pandemic and the isolation and the time to learn, research and produce a unique brand of art.

Megan uses her creative and free time to produce, create and showcase old time tintype photography.

My favorite thing about this, this type of photography is that people get so excited about it, you know, I bring them to my house and I take them in the woods and I take their picture and I let them come in the darkroom as I process it.

And and they watch themselves come to life on a plate.

And everybody leaves elated, everyone leaves excited.

And every person that I photographed has said, this is the favorite.

This is their favorite picture that they've ever had taken.

So my name is Megan Snook, and I've been a photographer for basically my whole life.

I got my first film camera when I was five years old for my fifth birthday, and it was like a Barbie, you know, it came with a Barbie doll.

It was pink it had Barbie on it.

But I've always wanted to learn how to make tintypes.

And so in the summer of 2021, my friend took me to Paw Paw West Virginia and took me to her friend Lisa, who makes tintypes and teaches workshops.

And she taught me everything I know.

It's something I always wanted to learn how to do, but with all the free time that we had, you know, it was it was easy to to get into it and to have something to do during the pandemic.

So it's not just a photograph, it's an experience.

And it then becomes a family heirloom.

You know, these these people really, truly treasure these pictures.

And I think that it's got something to do with, you know, everyone's got a camera on their smartphone in their pocket.

These days.

Everyone can always take a picture, but people are rarely getting their portrait taken.

And so I think that people are finding much more meaning with these photographs than they would with a digital photograph.

There's no snapping a photo of anybody in this process.

So you need to learn about the chemicals that you're using.

You need to learn about these cameras.

It's not just a simple point and shoot camera, the chemicals that you buy for a normal darkroom, you know, making black and white pictures as is, that's prepackaged chemistry.

So you get a powder in the mail, you mix it with water at a certain temperature by bodda bing bodda boom.

You've got your chemical here.

We're mixing all kinds of weird chemicals together and it takes a lot of focus.

It takes a lot of intent.

My favorite picture of all time is my daughter and in the woods right before spring.

And my second favorite picture is my my friend Lisa, who is my teacher and also one of my great friends on this earth.

And I took a picture of her at her house the weekend.

I learned how to do this process.

And yeah, I love them.

I hope these pictures end up on people's mantles and, you know, at their funerals.

And I hope they're cherished objects that people can hold and and remember by.

Well, I'm on the Instagram @mlsnookphoto my nook photo and mlsnookphotography@gmail.com.

When I was a college student many, many years ago, I met a young person in one of my classes that had a very unique job J.R. Rock was a professional wrestler, and I was so inspired by our new friendship that I featured him in my film Fire in the Mountains.

Fire in the Mountains won the best short film at the 2009 Appalachian Film Festival, was also shown at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.

Later that year.

I went several years without seeing J.R.

Earlier this year, I saw J.R. out with his family, and he told me that he was doing something unthinkable.

He took the time during COVID to retrain and hit the ropes even harder.

J.R. is now doing more shows than ever post-pandemic.

And this summer, traveling to all Kentucky county fairs and wrestling at every show, I decided to go out and visit J.R. on the job and see what he's been up to after all these years.

Still doing it.

Well, me and some of the other guys that do this have decided that wrestling is like any other addiction.

Once you're hooked, you're hooked.

You can't get out of your blood.

And ain’t no rehab for this.

Sometimes I can't even get out of bed in the morning.

My ankle hurts my knees, hurt my hips, hurt my back, hurt my neck, shoulders, you name it, it hurts.

It aches.

In this business, I'm getting pretty old.

I've cut back on a lot of shows that I've done.

I do this fair tour more than anything, and then select shows here and there, but mostly just the fair tour.

The last several years they’ve been worried about my health and well-being.

They want me to go ahead and stop now.

So the rest of my life would be better because I keep telling them I'm already at the point now the damage is done.

If I stop now, I'm still going to be hurting when I'm not doing it.

Wrestling is a love hate relationship.

Sometimes you love it, sometimes you hate it, sometimes you regret doing it, and sometimes you can't live without it.

But unlike you, instead of just watching it saying, Oh, I remember watching these guys, I can say, I've been on shows with those guys really anymore.

It's about the relationships you made on the road.

What you watch on TV is not wrestling more.

That's sports entertainment not wrestling.

This is wrestling.

This is where it started.

This is where it comes to die.

This fair circuit is ran by rated X.

He's in the Kentucky Wrestling Hall of Fame.

He runs the United States Wrestling Federation.

That's probably been five or six years ago.

And I've been working on the fair circuit and every other show he's had since then.

I've known him for a lot.

We were trained by the same guy.

We both trained by Danny Fargo.

So we've got ties going way back.

It's different.

You never know where you're going to be set up.

And if you're under pavilion, if you're on the go kart racetrack, or if you're on the mud sling area or you're at the petting zoo.

So it's a little bit of everything.

Since the fair tour started in late May, we've been doing 4 to 5 shows a week and then on top of the local non shows around, I'd say well into the hundreds probably.

The fair tour ends in October, so I'll keep on going through October.

That's when the last tour show, when the season's over, come out and wind them up, they get heated.

They’re never going to change.

Well, I'm at the point now I don't have to do anything to get them fired up.

As soon as my music hits and they hear it, the chants of hate start before I even come out the curtain.

What have you done to this case?

Well, I've wrestled in this region for so long, and I've just been so mean and nasty to their heroes over the years, hanging them, making little kids cry.

They just don't like me.

So have you decided to change your ways and going to shake hands, kiss babies, or you kind of prefer to being nasty.

I think I'm beyond the point of changing my ways at this late stage.

your reputation precedes you sir!

Yeah.

How many more years you think you're going to be doing this.

When I can't walk anymore?

More than likely, that's when we all give it up.

When they make us stop.

If anyone, gets a chance.

Come to the fair, check us out.

We're on the fair tour every year in Kentucky.

We do one end of the state, to the other.

While so many of us.

During the initial days of the pandemic, we're stuck inside looking at our computer screens, phones or gaming devices.

Our next featured person took the time to do something extraordinary, having a background in IT and technology just sitting around doing nothing didn't sit well with Patrick Gonzales.

Patrick soon started researching, building and attempting something breathtaking.

Patrick decided to try to communicate during the pandemic with the international Space Station and its astronauts.

After so much boredom, it was amazing to hear of such vision and desire to communicate well beyond our normal channels while being stuck at home.

Meet Patrick Gonzales in his pandemic project, communicating with the International Space Station.

Alpha Delta Tango Doing pretty good band conditions not so favorable today.

But I've been trying to make it work.

I've I've got a gentleman from the university here today with me just shooting some film footage.

He's doing a short film on.

Has anyone thought you were sort of crazy for trying to do this?

Oh, my wife and my kids.

Yeah, they've thought of crazy for for quite some time.

I've I've been dabbling in, you know, electronics and other little things.

Whatever strikes my fancy, you know, I'll I'll go buy stuff and, you know, the wife watching me crawl around on the house and build antennas and go to Lowe's and buy more wire and, you know, build antennas and test them and play with him and then tear them all back down and build new ones.

That's been going on since 2018, turn the amplifier on and.

So, you know, I first saw you attempting to communicate with the international space station during the initial pandemic.

And I know very little to nothing about radios and communication and that type of science.

I found it fascinating.

Has anyone else approached you about this?

Or are curious about this?

I've only had a I've only had a few people that I know through the university from the Space Science Center make comments and kind of applaud, you know, my my childhood by childlike curiosity, you know, in doing this thing, you know, on a budget and and trying to, you know, manage to do what they do, probably on a regular basis from just, you know, commodity off the shelf parts, so to speak.

Alpha Delta 4 whiskey, golf is frequency in use to normal level is we'll check, you know, to make sure that nobody is on the frequency using it that I can't hear.

And so I'll throw that out and if anybody responds to me, you know, normally I'll say yes, frequency is in use and all this, we want to try to find another spot.

So if you ever do make contact, what are you going to say have you thought about this and rehearsed this?

I hope to just be able to do the bare minimum of an exchange.

If I get any more time.

I'm hoping I don't get tongue tied.

But I mean, generally speaking, you know, you throw your call, sign out, you know, in my case, you know, alpha delta 4 whiskey golf, you know, you wait on them to reply and acknowledge your call and then you exchange signal reports, you know, based on, you know, the quality of the signal, how you hear them, how they hear you.

And that's generally the end of the exchange.

And that's that's all you need to officially put something in your logbook.

And if I can get that, I'll be happy if I get any extra, extra time with them at all.

You know, hopefully I can I can think of something good to say also for the whiskey golf.

Roger that.

Roger that.

Seven.

I try to determine when the ISS is going to pass directly overhead of my location or close enough to where it's above the horizon by at least 1880 degrees because of the trees in the hills in the mountains here in eastern Kentucky, 18 degrees is about the minimum which I can acquire, signal and maintain a signal as as the ISS goes by.

So I look for those rare instances where it passes directly overhead and I try to schedule work life and everything around, getting everything set up and being ready to acquire it at the horizon and track it above, up and over my location.

I try to be patient, you know, I try to adhere to etiquette.

You know, I wait my turn to throw my call, sign out and you know, I try to be courteous radio operator and you know, hopefully someday there'll be just enough of a pause when, you know, the sound of my voice will come through and I'll be the one that gets acknowledged out of the cacophony of voices coming from earth.

Build an antenna put an antenna up and, you know, with 100 watts with less than the power, you know, that you use to, you know, power a light bulb.

You know, I'm able to communicate all around the world.

With the pandemic happening so fast and sudden, so many of us were almost at a point of stasis.

So many areas of the arts were just simply stalled.

One area that was hit very hard was live musical performances.

I was very inspired to learn and know that my friend Mason Colby used the pandemic and COVID social distancing to learn new musical notations, instrumentations and record a new album that came from the heart and from back home in Cajun country, while many felt stuck and standing in place.

Mason used the time to broaden his artistic horizons and learn more about himself and his own musical heritage.

I have a strange, I think, sometimes relationship with music in that it's very hard to do well.

So sometimes it's hard to love and I think, yes, that I've done it enough now that some of it is effortless, the more I understand it, the deeper understanding I have of it, and the more I try to get inside of it, the more I appreciate it and love it.

I've come to Kentucky and in some ways we're here because of Katrina.

We had planned to move back to Louisiana after Ginny got done with grad school, and that's right when Katrina hit.

So I kind of feel like the fact that I play old time music and, uh, and have worked in elements of, of my upbringing in Louisiana, you know, is the beginning.

It was a way to connect with people here.

And, you know, it's not the old time music isn't the stuff that I grew up with.

You know, I did grow up more with the Cajun music.

And so that's why I've tried to bridge that, to singing those Cajun songs to me feels like I'm singing the songs from my childhood.

The Appalachian music doesn't as much, but now that, I've been doing it for 15 years.

It does.

I mean, out here I hear Appalachian String Band music and it feels a part of me now in a way that it didn't when I started out.

The COVID thing has made it really stop and start.

Hurry up and wait.

You couldn't play out.

There were no jams and so they just kind of devoted that year to trying to get better at instruments, trying to improve my my writing and, and because there wasn't a whole lot going on, it gave me the opportunity to, uh, to practice, just continually work on, on those lessons.

Maybe the nicest moment is when you get those little gifts, when you're writing, and then something comes through you and you're able to express an idea that is honest and l and marries itself to a melody in a way that is just really satisfying.

And then, yeah, I love sharing that with people.

I think one way of approaching music would be to take a model, someone who you want to emulate and try to write in that style until you until you make it your own or you break out into your own style.

I think I've done kind of the opposite in trying to just start with very small building blocks, start with things that I know, add things that I learn and so try to build towards something that feels like a really personal expression that is not derived from trying to emulate, you know, one particular style or genre.

It's definitely acoustic, mostly acoustic.

Uh, you know, roots music and with, with heavy influences of old time and Cajun and Americana stuff.

You know, I can only play as well as I can play.

And, and I've tried to surround myself with, with other people who play really well and hopefully improve what I've written and make something that's, that's presentable for people.

(mason singing and performing in french) Baking isn't something we often think about when it comes to the arts.

So many of us think of baking or confectionery creation as joyful surprises to our gatherings.

This is not the case for Stephanie Duckworth.

Stephanie an award winning pie baker who was furloughed during the pandemic.

In those tough times, stephanie, who could not bake for competitions or friends, used the time off to research new patterns and styles of baking to emerge from the pandemic even more prepared to compete with new elaborate weaving patterns.

Stephanie Duckworth is making something sweet and what has been such sour times with COVID 19.

So shortly after I moved to Lexington, Kentucky, I saw a sign on my lunch break at a restaurant for the 4th of July contest in downtown.

And there is a pie baking contest associated with the 4th of July festival.

And I had already made my apple pie and a couple of other little pies, and it's like, why not?

It'd be fun to enter this contest and to see how this pie does.

So I entered my apple pie and I had gone and picked some fresh black raspberries at a coworker's farm and had a really nice black Raspberry Pie that I made and so I took both of those pies to the contest.

And the black Raspberry Pie got first place and the apple pie got second place.

And I was like, Maybe this is something I can be good at.

I never thought about it before, but I kept working on my pies and tweaking my recipes and getting more creative with how I was designing the pie, making that a craft.

And I would like to think it's an art, at least a craft for me at this point.

My name is Stephanie Duckworth and I've been in Lexington, Kentucky since 2012, so about ten years.

And I moved here from East Tennessee after spending a few years in New York City.

I got into pie baking about 12 years ago, about a year before I moved up here, I had started playing old time music and there's something about the music and, you know, the people I was around, I just was really yearning and wanting authenticity in my life and some genuine, real experiences in my twenties.

I don't think I knew how to make anything or make anything from scratch.

I was making everything from a box or nicks, and I wanted to learn how to make something real from scratch.

So I started with the apple pie to seem very American, just very basic and quintessential dessert to make.

So I wish I could say that I had learned how to bake from my grandmother or some family member.

I always I had a really great story about that, but I learned it on the Internet, got some recipes and pieced together a few different apple pie recipes based on people's comments and feedback so that what works and what didn't work.

So the pandemic shut down all the pie contests.

There were no contests to be had.

People aren't gathering people that want to eat anything made in some ice kitchen.

So a lot of the events too, that I would bake pies for music jams and things like that, people just weren't gathering and I didn't want to bake a pie for myself, so I was baking fewer pies.

But I got inspired by a trip to the Little Loom House in Louisville, and at the Little Loom House they have just a room full of looms and they have different exhibits and talked about weaving patterns.

And I never realized what an art that textiles can be and the way that fabrics come together so intricate and people put so much thought behind it and I was looking at some of these designs and I thought, what a great way to make a lattice on top of a pie.

You know, use some of these weaving patterns, Bronson Lace, just any, any kind of placemat or tablecloth I could find that had a cool weaving pattern.

I dissected this and blew it up to the top of the pie crust.

The pandemic definitely left me with more time on my hands and so many of my friends that Bake were doing these wonderful things on social media, putting out YouTube videos, publishing pie books and recipe books, and just the amount of even music that was being put out there with a Facebook Live concerts and things like that.

Everybody that I seemed to be friends with, I wasn't visiting with them in person, but online I was following them and they were putting out so much new stuff and they their creativity was fueling my creativity.

And so when I where I was baking fewer pies was trying to make each pie count.

You can follow my pies on Instagram and Facebook, honey shine pies.

You can look up the empty bottle string bands on all social media as well.

I was hired as a college instructor in 2008 from 2008 until March of 2020.

My colleague, mentor, and most importantly, my good friend John Modaff served as a guidepost for me in my career.

John was always there for advice, creative ideas and friendship.

John and I hosted a series of TV programs called Art This and the Major Minute we were taping the final season of Art this the week the world shut down in March of 2020.

All of this occurred, of course, in John's final semester before his scheduled retirement in May of 2020.

John never got the sendoff that I felt was much deserved because of COVID 19, but has used the time to reflect, write, produce, record and host podcast.

Never a dull moment.

Despite a worldwide pandemic.

Well, I knew I was retiring.

It was no surprise.

And so I started writing the previous summer about my last year, my last 12 months as a teacher.

And I had hoped that I would make the exit as the leaves were turning green and the buds of May were falling and so forth.

And those people who cared too would, you know, get together with me and I'd shake some hands and hug a few necks and that would be it.

But right about early March I was on a Sunday, I was having a phone call with my daughter, who is a doctor of physical therapy out in Louisville.

And we started talking about this virus and she talked about the people who were most at risk and I checked several of the boxes for those people who might be most vulnerable to this thing and so arranged to start teaching online entirely.

But that became unnecessary because three days after I discussed that plan with my supervisor, the university stopped teaching classes on campus.

So I was just about three days ahead of the administration.

As far as extracting myself from the danger zone, it was very quiet, very dark, because it was about 9:00 at night on March 13th of 2020, I emptied my office and I had never been back and it was just not the way I wanted to go out.

But in a way was nice because I didn't have to pretend and do all the silly social foolishness I taught in the area that was known at the time as speech communication, which is a redundancy to some people because speech should be communicative and communication is by nature speech.

But anyway, I'll say it again, we love redundancy.

And so it was called speech communications for decades and decades prior to my starting in many, many decades after.

But now it's called Strategic Communication at Morehead State.

And that was the area that I closed on my career teaching in.

The main thing that I noticed was a tremendous sense of relief and not having to accommodate and cope with how teaching in the classroom changed for you guys when when the virus was at full tilt.

I didn't have to do any of that adaptation.

I just managed to get through the last eight weeks of my career before the new regime fell like a 16 ton weight on top of higher ed.

And I'm very happy for that.

It wasn't planned.

It was one of those serendipitous, good turns of luck that I got out just before the meteor hit.

So I'm thankful for that, regardless of what was lost.

Everyone I started with at MSU in 1991 was either deceased or retired when I retired, so I was the last one of my academy.

And so consequently I'm not missed and I don't expect to be missed because most of the people who know me or who knew me will either have graduated in two years or don't work there anymore.

And the new people, I didn't really get a chance to know them and wasn't close to them.

So it was a very quiet and anticlimactic.

And so I continued writing my memoir of my last year through COVID and reflected back on 40 years as a teacher and then my decades as a student and talked about my teachers and my teaching and how those two things hooked up with each other.

And I learned that I got a great example from all of my teachers of one of two extremes one, what to do and also what not to do.

So in any case, every one of the teachers contributed to whatever kind of a teacher I became.

I published a couple of poems and a publication that's done in Albuquerque, New Mexico, called A, B, Q in print.

And those where, thanks to my colleague Lynn Miller, who I do a podcast with every month, and she included me on the invitation that, well, I've got a couple ideas for poems, and they liked them enough to publish them.

And through working with Lynn and reading her prose and performing her prose on the show, that I think got my prose brain spun up.

And so I started a novel, which it was based on a short story that I had already completed.

But I thought this short story actually has a world around it.

So I put that in the middle, and then I wrote the opening and the closing, and that became a novel But yes, I do fix bikes.

I'm known as the bike guy and I've met a lot of really interesting people coming by with all sorts of problems, some coming by wanting me to buy their junk off of them.

Others need a spoke nipple or a ball bearing.

You know, I couldn't even know what to say.

$0.50, just so they feel like I didn't give it to them.

Tell me their life story.

You know how it is.

You got that sign on your head.

This is Tell me your problems.

Met some nice folks that have called.

Just check on me, you know, every now and then and it's just been really interesting with my and I've been doing that longer than any other job.

I first started getting paid for that in 1974, and I've kept doing it either for somebody else or on my own behalf in five states since that time, retirement is the existential encounter with nothingness, and that's something we all think we escaped when we made it through our teens alive.

And you do escape it for a while because your career how your job, whichever you want to call it, organizes your life.

Well, as my dad said when I told him, you know, I intend I think I might retire.

He'd been retired about 15, 20 years.

He said in his bold, vociferous and lengthy way.

You better have something to do.

And if you can answer that question, not what happens or what's going to happen, what happens next, you will never look at a blank page.

What could happen next?

And then you worry about what should happen next.

What could happen next.

Yes.

And so I know that I have a limited amount.

I don't know how much time I have.

I have a limited amount of time to do this.

And so every day I don't do it really is a waste for me.

And possibly, you know, that something someone might enjoy is not created so that, you know, knowing that the sand is heavier in the bottom of the hourglass is motivation and urgency to write a but also a nice thing about retirement is that you're not stealing time from something else.

Isolated, lost and then found these terms all describe what we all felt through the first days of the pandemic.

And even up to today, with over 1 million and growing deaths from COVID 19, one person took the idea of life and death to a level of healing and comfort.

Meet Lauren Bluegrass Death Doula.

I was laid off during the pandemic and that was also a factor.

I just had this moment where I didn't want to have to rely on other people for employment.

So Finding a way to do that for myself was kind of an empowering thing to do, but I also had a personal loss during COVID and you know, there was no advance care directive.

There is no you know, you don't want to be cremated if you want to be buried.

No one knew anything about what she wanted and she was in her eighties.

So, you know, but it was something that we should have talked about was no like, oh, we've really honored our loved one.

It was miserable.

And then that sort of led me to this being a death doula.

All the opportunities we can do better, not just for our loved ones who are dying, but for the people who are grieving.

Like just like we were talking about in the car, digging that grave, you know, there's a catharsis in doing that.

There's there's a grief release that happens.

There's this physical release when you're doing it that we deprive ourselves of in our modern death care, just like spending time with the body, those type of things.

We just don't do it at all and we just ship it away.

It's medicalized.

We're not to look at it.

We're not even allowed to really talk about it.

I think when people call in a death dula they're at a certain level anyway.

Like there's a certain level of acceptance that's already occurred that like the person is dying, we do need help.

Those things have already happened.

So that can be a lot easier to talk about.

But a lot of the time I'm just this third party who allows people to ask questions that they would otherwise be too uncomfortable to ask.

And that's really my role as a Dula like we're kind of the party planner, the space provider, the keepers of what people want in their death.

But, you know, for our culture, death is taboo and at the same time, we're responsible for our loved ones.

So you're not allowed to talk about something that you're responsible for and having a death dula allows people to do that.

And what I consistently find, I don't want to say shocking.

That's maybe an overstatement, but trying to be interesting is a lot of time.

It's people my age who just want to have their wishes documented somewhere.

My consultations are always free.

We sit down, we figure out what you actually need, but it always starts with an advanced care directive that's always top tier.

First thing we're going to do.

The pandemic brought death to the forefront of everything.

And, you know, like, I don't know about you, but we would sit and watch Governor Beshear every single night and you would watch, you know, how many people were sick, what the death toll was.

It was something we watched every day.

And I don't think there's ever been another period in my lifetime where anything was even comparable to that, where we were like acknowledging this many people passed away today.

I think a lot of people also had a moment where they were like, Oh, I can be entirely healthy.

And something can happen and I'm not.

And you know, these provisions need to happen before I'm dying because we need to put these things in place before we actually need them or they're not particularly useful.

Part of my deal is I'm working towards being certified as a green burial master, and so I work with the cemetery in Cincinnati, Heritage Acres, that offers green burial.

And one of the coolest burials I've been to since I've been doing this occurred there a few weeks ago.

And a woman passed.

She was had a huge group of female friends.

They all went and raided her closet, had on her while this stuff you know sequined hats cost a lot they was burning sage before we lower the body they did like the race car thing with champagne where they shook the bottles, sprayed her body with it.

And it just happened that just happened to be that day that the fill well not the fill team, but 80% of the fill team was female.

And so we had the super strong matriarch, her group of female friends, and then a group of women who came to fill that grave.

And that was just a really cool, cathartic experience where it felt like her mourners got what they needed.

I have a website, it's bgdeathdoula.com.

I fully encourage anybody to email me any time I try to be as open as I can just because when I was coming up, when I was learning to be a death doula, the other death feelings I encountered weren't so much like that.

So if you have a question, just ask me and I'm going to help you as much as I can.

And that might mean, you know, you need to go talk to this person.

But I'm always here.

I'm always happy to help.

We can do so much better.

We just have to talk about it.

While I don't think death is something to be afraid of, it's a natural part of life.

It's a once in a lifetime event.

And I do think it's something that we celebrate.

We acknowledge we care for our own dead.

We take care of each other.

And that makes us feel differently about how we live our lives.

Time lost, time gained, time stood still.

So many things happened to us as a culture through 2020, until the present day because of the pandemic.

We yelled at each other, we cried in anger.

And then, in agony we saw both the best part of our culture, then the worst.

If we didn't learn a little something about ourselves since the pandemic, that we all still have a long way to go in understanding empathy featured in this film were 8 people that found themselves in a curious place after being sent home from school, furloughed, jobless and removed from all social life.

Instead of giving up, blaming others and stuck inside social media, these individuals made a difference not just in their lives and the lives of everyone around them.

Inspiration comes in a variety of forms.

Inspiration is fueled by boldness and a raging fire of escapism to those who were so far removed from normalcy of our lives before COVID 19.

Necessity is the creator of all invention, and this really shines through with the participants in this film, since those days in March of 2020, we have all experienced stages in waves when it came to our own lives.

Stages and waves represents the ebb and flow of time, aging and understanding that we all think, create, invent and give the best of each other back to be something larger than just our own ego.

Like the waters flowing on the mighty Ohio River, time reminded us of what we lost.

But if you listen closely to the flowing of the water, you knew we had so much to gain.

As we all go through stages and waves, the human condition will always find a way to slow us down and process all the changes.

Let us have this as the ultimate reminder.

In that that we are always working through stages, and waves and we have within ourselves to always make a difference.

Even though that difference might not affect many it might just affect the person who most needs to hear it.

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