This transcript was exported on May 20, 2021 - view latest version here. Chris Velardi: Hey, it's Chris Velardi. Glad you found the 'Cuse Conversations podcast. Our guest today, Katie Zaffrann, a 2004 grad with a BFA in musical theater from VPA and her audition story, it's a good one. Katie Zaffrann: So, I remember I auditioned across the country for a number of programs. Syracuse was my first audition and it ended up being the standard that I held every other program up to. And I remember so clearly I was singing my song and the auditor who was later one of my professors got up from behind the table and started acting with me. Chris Velardi: What happens next? You'll have to listen to the conversation. She'll finish the story for you. We cover a lot of ground in this 'Cuse conversation, including Katie's time at SU. Her new venture as an instructor with Greenhouse Music, which is an online conservatory, she's teaching a class called The Whole Musician. We also dive deep into the importance of dealing with anxiety and mental health, but we're going to start with the challenges of the last year when you're a performer in a world without performances. So, how are you doing? Katie Zaffrann: I'm hanging in there and I'll be honest. I think I might be doing a little better than some. I wouldn't have said that a year ago, but I actually gave birth about two weeks into lockdown. So, certainly at the time I would not have said, oh, this is beneficial, but now I was never planning to take a year off of work. And I didn't have to really take a year off of work, because the industry took this year off of work. And I ended up getting a whole year with my new daughter that I probably wouldn't have had in such an intense and intimate way. So, she's been an amazing silver lining. Chris Velardi: That really is such an important way to look at whatever your experience has been over the last year plus is to try to find those silver linings and they try to say, this is something I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do under whatever normal is, but normal circumstances. Katie Zaffrann: Yeah. Yeah. And I won't sugar coat it, it was really hard. I wasn't allowed to have a lot of the support that I was expecting and planning to have for my birth, including support afterwards. I think the first person beside, well, there's the pediatrician, but besides my husband and I, my mother was the first person to hold my daughter and that was when she was two months old. So, plenty of other people have harder stories and different stories. It was incredibly difficult. But now I really feel like after this whole incubation time, I really feel like it's just been a blessing on all sides. Chris Velardi: Yeah. It's good to be able to be in that position and have that mindset at this point. But the reality is you work in a field that absolutely was shut down, had to be shut down. As a performer, as somebody who kind of in many ways makes a living by going in front of audiences and doing something. I mean, it seems like an obvious question, but how did that affect you not being able to do that? CC with Katie Zaffronn '04_mixdown (Completed 05/18/21) Page 1 of 11 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on May 20, 2021 - view latest version here. Katie Zaffrann: Hm. What can I say? It's been really hard and even now I feel ready. I'm really ready now to get back to work. If I wasn't, whatever I could say six months ago, okay I'm still here. Now I'm really itching and the door's just starting to sort of peep open. And I think it's a reckoning of sorts in a way, because there are many ways that it feels like our society already sort of devalues or downplays the role of the artist in society. We certainly don't fund artists the way that countries like Ireland or Germany do. And this is of course, it's a very complex issue and a pandemic is different than governmental policy, but it sort of plays into that sense of, okay, well, sports is reopening. Restaurants are reopening. We're doing all these things to reopen all these industries and steps are being taken certainly to reopen Broadway. And they've made announcements about that, but it's been slow going when film is opened in a way that theater is not. Chris Velardi: Yeah, there's no doubt. And one of the things that I've heard along those lines is yeah, it isn't the only industry, but one of the things that the pandemic has done is it has absolutely shone a spotlight on some areas where maybe we didn't quite have it right before [crosstalk 00:05:05] one, right? Katie Zaffrann: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that's very true that shining a spotlight, I think, is a really great way to put it. Chris Velardi: And not just for the theater analogy. Katie Zaffrann: Yes, of course, I'm hopeful though, that now that the lights are on, it's the kind of thing as we're seeing, again, across society in many different ways, how do we move forward from here? It's like people saying, oh, we're going to go back to normal. I don't think we'll ever go back to normal after this time, there has to be a new normal. And so what does that look like? And hopefully we all get to create it in the image that we want. Chris Velardi: Yeah. One of the things that certainly I noticed about watching many of the folks who are performers do is that idea of kind of figuring how to do what I do, but in a different way, using a different venue platform, whatever you want to call it and just kind of somewhat reinventing yourself. Did you find yourself doing that along the way? Katie Zaffrann: Well, for my past year, again, I've been largely in the nursery, so I'll just say, my husband is a classical singer. We've done a lot of harmonizing of lullabies. I've made up whole albums of music based on my daughter. So, I know that's not what you're asking, but I feel like that's been the primary way that I've reinvented myself this year. Chris Velardi: Absolutely, I think about [inaudible 00:06:40] Syracuse alumni and Patti Murin and hearing kind of how she and her husband, who's also a performer, Colin Donnell, have done many of the same things, because they have a young child and I've seen them do a few concerts online together, and those kinds of things. CC with Katie Zaffronn '04_mixdown (Completed 05/18/21) Page 2 of 11 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on May 20, 2021 - view latest version here. I think certainly whatever it is you're doing has to be fit around the fact that you've also got a very small human being in your life. Katie Zaffrann: Yes. In fact, I'm just starting to rehearse for a potential concert this summer. And I was emailing my pianist and I was saying, she said, "Can you meet in the evening?" I said, "Well, no, it's after bedtime. I don't like to make a lot of noise." And she said, "Well, can you meet at noon?" I said, "Well, no, that's her nap time." But I finally just said, "Look, my whole life is her schedule. I don't really have my own schedule." But that's these few years. It's these early years. And then you open up a little bit. Chris Velardi: [crosstalk 00:07:29]. I was a parent of teenagers. I'm not sure [crosstalk 00:07:33] different. It's just different. Obviously music is important in your life. I mean, it's what you do. It's what your husband does. It's, at this rate, what your child will do if she's being sung to every night. But if I ask you where that came from, are you able to identify for you, pinpoint things that led you in that direction? Katie Zaffrann: When you asked that question, the first thing that comes to mind is falling asleep to the sound of my mother practicing hymns on the piano and my dad playing guitar. And we had this silly family band when I was five years old. So it's in my blood. I don't think I could say when I chose it, it kind of chose me. I've been singing and dancing and running around the house, making stuff up since I can remember. And it was always like, there's really no other option. And people used to say, I remember people would ask all the time or say, give this advice to young performers that if you could do anything else you should, because it's such a hard career. And I used to really balk at that and I'm a smart girl.