Sat, Apr 18, 2020
Read in 3 minutes
Washington, DC Hub, USA Originally from California, USA
We love our rituals. By now, almost all of us have felt the pain of some event dear to us wiped off the calendar. A graduation party, a wedding, a friend’s birthday bash, a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Japan. We grieved these losses. But we are resilient and we miss feeling whole, and from these ashes digital surrogates arise.
Today, two friends, Majo and Pepe, held a virtual baby shower. Friends and family arrived from the US, Colombia and Spain to the reserved Zoom venue. The two parents-to-be sat in frame in their kitchen, greeting guests as they teleported into the party in identical rectangles.
The hostess kicked off the party with a game with audience participation. Technical difficulties arose and after a few minutes of laughter–some audible, some muted–and call and response with thirty guests (“can you see this?” “No!”), we got off the ground. The hostess prompted a question, “who will be the ‘fun’ parent?”, and we voted, entering our opinion via our phones while viewing the hostess’s shared screen and the other guests’ reactions on our laptop. If Pepe and Majo answered differently, Pepe drank. If Pepe and Majo answered the same, but the audience answered differently, Pepe also drank. Pretty much Pepe drank a lot. We belly laughed as we watched the votes stream in on a dashboard displayed by the hostess and Pepe in his tiny rectangle inevitably took another swig of wine.
Pretty soon it was noon and time to hop off for another Zoom engagement, this time a toga-themed celebration for a friend’s promotion. We quickly said our goodbyes, sending best wishes into living rooms across three countries, and in a blip we were out. We returned to the physical world to don togas with the help of a few DIY toga Youtube videos, then jumped into our next Zoom meeting.
Friends chimed in from DC, Addis and Amsterdam in their varied toga fashion. We quickly realized a regular wall wouldn’t do as a backdrop and virtual backgrounds met the imagination of the moment. Our robes were featured in the acropolis, in outer space, in a room full of giant toilet paper rolls. Why not dream? We attempted a virtual karaoke, with scrambled audio quality and overlapping delays, but lots of passionate singing. We ventured further into escapism. We each pulled up a photo from a favorite past trip as our background and we guessed where it was taken, dreaming of a time we could seek out new landscapes, foods and people again.
After an hour and a half, we signed off with a click of ‘Leave Meeting’ and went to pick up lunch from a favorite neighborhood restaurant that recently reopened for take-out. We both tugged on our masks, but for me the toga stayed on. We stopped by our neighbor’s window on the way back and danced with my toga on full display to solicit some laughs. When everything feels like a gloomy fantasy right now, why not bring cheery fantasy to the outside world too?