Becca Evans is a lifestyle and entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. With a background in communications, film, copywriting and editorial writing, Becca loves telling stories about everything from sports and personality tests to local history and travel.
Games have always been a form of distraction for us, a positive place to put our energy and escape the everyday. Sometimes it can be such a relief to spend a moment solving a puzzle, celebrating a small accomplishment, or visiting a different world. Computer and mobile games can be a great way to have a little fun but some can be too complicated, demanding, frustrating or even just stressful! When you’re trying to find escape, feeling irritated or confused defeats the whole purpose. So here are six calming games that are nothing but peaceful, bringing you a moment of positivity and pure joy.
All of the games on this list are calming, but for Happify this isn’t just a side effect; it’s the whole point. Happify is a mobile app designed to help improve your mental health every day in a way that never feels like work. Happify has a variety of games that help brighten your perspective while giving you a moment of peace and tranquility in your daily life. Mental health can be a hard thing to prioritize if you don’t have access to resources like therapy. As Carrie Ann has written about in the past, Happify can provide little fun ways to put your happiness back in your control.
If you’re a cat lover like me, you’re going to want to download Neko Atsume to your phone. It’s a fun app that’s low maintenance; you start with a yard and get to choose what toys, beds and treats to stock it with. Next, you put out food and simply wait for the cats to come! Different items bring different cats to your yard and you can keep meeting neighborhood cats while your yard expands and grows. The best part about this app, other than the inherent cuteness, is that this isn’t a virtual pet game where you can feel guilty about neglecting or forgetting to feed your cats. Whenever the cats finish the food you set out they leave and whenever you set new food out they come back.
Whether you’ve killed one too many plants and have sworn off gardening or are just looking for your daily dose of Zen, Viridi is the perfect calming game for you. Viridi is a virtual succulent garden that plays out in (something close to) real time. You check in on your succulents every so often to tend , water and even sing to them and over time they grow. Whether you stick to checking in once a week for a new free seedling or want to customize your garden with options from the store, taking a break from the daily grind to visit this little virtual corner of the world will give you a chance to breathe
In Stardew Valley, you play a character who inherits, refurbishes and revitalizes their grandfather’s old farm. In a super satisfying mixture of peaceful surroundings, low-stakes decisions and charming characters, you get to spruce up and tend to your farm while finding adventure and forging relationships along the way. This calming game lets you take a retreat into your own little world for a few moments as you develop your own rhythm and decide what you want your game to look like. The best part? It’s available to play on Mac, PC, iPhone and Android so you can play however suits you the best.
Untitled Goose Game has become one of my favorite computer games to return to when I want a bit of calm with a dash of humor. The conceit of the game is simple: you play the role of a goose who terrorizes a small village by honking, flapping and swimming around causing chaos. The game isn’t mean-spirited; you can’t hurt anyone or cause too much trouble, just make off with someone’s gardening hat or a piece of mail. There are enough objectives to give you direction while still allowing you to enjoy the game’s simple premise and the stakes are never high: the worst thing that can happen to your goose is getting chased off of a patio or out of someone’s yard.
If you’re a fan of puzzles or I-Spy style games, you’ll love Hidden Folks as a creative and interesting expansion of the genre. Hidden Folks doesn’t just have captivating puzzles with stimulating clues but it creates such an interesting world with its visual style and vocalized soundscape that you’ll never want to leave.
Playing games might seem like a frivolous pastime, but the truth is that having fun, taking a break from chores and responsibilities and prioritizing happiness are all important for a happy and balanced life. Sometimes we need a healthy dose of distraction and levity, a chance to give ourselves permission to not take life so seriously. Whether you love puzzles, want to sharpen your attention to detail or just build a little world all your own, adding one of these games to your go-to calming routine could be the perfect way to brighten your day.
It seems like every time I’m on Twitter these days, or catching up with a friend, the same concept comes up. The idea of “hitting the wall,” reaching a point where really, truly, the reality of the pandemic has become too much for us to handle. As far as I can tell, most of my friends and I have been hitting a new wall every week for months.
The first time I ran a marathon, I felt fantastic until mile 20 when I could barely advance. I suddenly understood the meaning of the expression “hitting the wall”.
I may have hit the pandemic wall this week. But hoping for a second wind soon.
Obviously, you wouldn’t expect people’s overall mental state to be perfect during an unprecedented pandemic, and that’s definitely part of this phenomenon. But that’s not the full picture. I think that the wall hits especially hard because all around us the world is acting like it can’t see it. The social, recreational and many of the “fun” parts of life came to a screeching halt almost a year ago— some of it has come limping back in the form of Zoom happy hours and outdoor walks and Netflix with friends, but it’s not hard to see that many of our usual outlets for release, entertainment, balance and support have almost ceased to exist around us.
Meanwhile, all the most “hard” parts of our normal life, like work (for some of us), job search (for the rest of us), chores, paying bills, childcare logistics, and, tragically, death and mourning, have carried on into this new era with us. These parts of our life demand that we keep functioning as we once did, working and paying bills and trying to take care of each other with donations and GoFundMes and petitions and support, only we no longer have the friend dinners, family visits or other little vacations from daily life that we used to have to provide balance and relief. These hard parts of our life go on, seeming to deny that there is anything unprecedented or insurmountable about our current reality. What’s more, working from home means, more often than not, that the only consistent part of our life bleeds over into the rest of it; for some of us it would be more accurate to say we’re living at work.
When the systems of our world insist we carry on while our bodies and minds simply can’t— that’s what I think the pandemic wall is. I think it’s important to recognize that hitting this wall isn’t a personal failure for any one of us. It’s a failure of our systems to recognize and make space for the absolute truth of an event we were never prepared for: the inability to focus, the constant stress and worry, the mourning. Simply recognizing this fact doesn’t solve everything, especially for those of us who have to keep going to keep our bills paid and food on the table no matter what. But I think that taking just a moment to shed light on where this feeling, this never-ending series of walls, comes from is worth it.
I don’t have a perfect solution for what to do when you hit one of these walls. That would be like saying I had a cure-all fix for recovering from a death in the family. What we’re experiencing in the pandemic is a form of grief; we’ve had to say goodbye to huge beloved swaths of our life and we feel like the world expects us to just go on like nothing happened. Just like with any form of grief, the best treatments usually involve patience and a lot of grace, both for others and for ourselves. That being said, here are a few lessons I’ve learned that have helped make the process of hitting these walls more bearable.
It’s Ok To Not Be Ok.
I think one of the things that makes the pandemic so challenging is just how long it’s been happening to us. We’ve been in these conditions for so long now that part of us might expect ourselves to be used to it by now, to have gotten over it and learned how to adapt. Usually difficult things are finite and we get a chance to move past them but this pandemic is still actively influencing everyday for us. It’s not fair to expect yourself to function perfectly all the time; this wouldn’t be fair even in a normal year and it certainly isn’t in 2021. When you hit a wall, try to remember all the circumstances that are surrounding you and don’t judge yourself for needing a minute (or a day!) to cope. Many of us are in uncharted territory which means it’s crucial to pay attention to your needs as they arise without judging yourself for having them.
Focus On The Smaller Picture
The pandemic has given me a… complicated relationship with the internet. On one hand, I’m so thankful that it provides me with the ability to stay in touch with my friends and family while we’re all separated. On the other hand, I hate how it constantly urges me to learn about every horrible thing that is happening anywhere in the world at any given moment. Our worlds are so small right now: mine is comprised of my apartment, my local CVS, and the neighborhood walks in between. But in another way our worlds are still globalized, giving us access to endless information and news, and it’s not always great for our brains.
One thing that I’ve found to be helpful is going outside without my phone or any distractions and really looking at the things around me. I really love to watch birds fly from branch to branch and listen to their calls. And squirrels— when was the last time you really, actually looked at a squirrel? They are almost constantly doing wildly entertaining things up there in the trees if you take the time to watch them. Make note of your favorite plants and flowers and how they smell, find a new corner of your neighborhood you didn’t know was there, really absorb the little microcosm of life that’s moving around you right now. Finding a few grounding details, especially in nature, really helps me feel present, alive and thankful.
Find The Light
It’s not very original of me to suggest looking for good news as a solution to dark times, but I don’t care because of how important it is. I keep a running list of things that give me hope about the world, whether it’s the Arctic Refuge being saved or baseball season starting soon. We get hit with so much information every hour of every day and our negativity bias means we’re more likely to hold onto the bad news, so making an effort to hold space for good news can be really powerful.
I’ve found it’s also helpful to collect the light at the end of the tunnel as it comes to you. It might not feel like it, but this pandemic is temporary and there are good signs that we are getting closer to the end of it every day. I’ve started keeping a list of friends and family members who have received the vaccine and are now safe— every time I get to write a name down the perennial weight on my chest feels a bit lighter. I also make a note anytime I see good pandemic news- rising vaccination percentages in my neighborhood, falling COVID cases, anything that shows that, even if it’s hard to see, change is happening and there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful.
Be Gentle With Yourself
While our work schedules have stayed the same, it can be tempting to hold tight to our personal goals as well. While structure and direction can be great solutions to feelings of aimlessness in the pandemic, they can also quickly become a way to feel disappointed in ourselves when we can’t do everything we promised we would. You might be upset about not finishing a personal project or doing as much creative work on the side or gaining weight in quarantine. There’s a quote from my mom that always bubbles up when I start to feel disappointed in myself for snacking too much or not reading enough during the pandemic: “A person only has a finite amount of self control.” What it means is that you really can’t devote unlimited energy to everything, and so much of our energy right now is going towards staying alive. If this means that sometimes you need a night (or week!) off from your reading list, or you think Postmating a treat for yourself will make your day a little better, I think you’ve more than earned it. If one of your friends called you, ashamed at themselves for failing to be perfect right now, you’d urge them to have compassion for themselves. Make sure you’re doing the same for yourself.
Hitting a wall in the pandemic can be draining, frustrating, exhausting and difficult. There are no easy solutions in an unprecedented situation, and all of us are feeling the weight of a year in quarantine. A change in perspective might not fix everything, but it might be enough to help you see a path forward, to better, easier and happier times. If you’ve hit your wall, know that you’re not alone; so many of us are feeling this way right now. But a little thing like remembering to have grace for yourself or spending a moment reflecting on even a small piece of good news can make a big difference when you need it the most.
Spring is the perfect season to make a change and embrace the new. After coming out of winter, bundling up against the cold and inclement weather and running short on activities and inspiration, it’s always a breath of fresh air to come into a season with new warmth and fresh growth. Spring provides us with some of the best scents of the year and that’s why it’s one of our favorite seasons to stock up on candles. Whether you’re looking forward to bringing out traditional spring favorites like florals and citrus or are looking to try something new, there are so many wonderful spring scents to help draw us out of drab winter and help us celebrate and embrace every day of spring for its rejuvenating energy.
Read below to see our favorite spring candles that you should consider stocking up this season to keep the good vibes coming.
If you’re looking for a comfort food in candle form, you need to check out Voluspa’s Rose Petal Ice Cream candle. Whenever you light it, a gorgeous scent of sweet roses and vanilla cream will waft through your space. It’s the perfect candle for anyone with a sweet tooth or anyone in love with the color pink.
Perfectly sweet and light, the cactus flower scent is a great one to bring some spring warmth and brightness into the season. This candle is such a unique blend and it can boost the energy in any space as sweet matcha undertones waft from this gorgeous opaque jar.
To me, the smell of coconut always signals that it’s time for vacation; it’s the smell of sun, sand, and relaxation. Tiki Beach adds hints of vanilla and orchid for a more rounded out, tropical scent that summons images of piña coladas and daiquiris. If you’re trying to bring a tropical vacation into your home, Tiki Beach is the perfect candle for you.
If the first hints of spring always have you craving a peach iced tea or a fresh fruit smoothie, Fresh Peach & Nectarine is the perfect candle to break out. It’s all bright notes of juicy fruits, sweet without being overpowering or fake. This delicious peachy blend will bring on the nostalgia and make you feel right at home.
Voluspa’s Santiago Huckleberry is a unique scent that I felt lucky to find; it’s a charming blend of berries that perfectly matches its dark magenta casing. If you’re looking for a luscious, fruity smell that’s deep but not overwhelming or if your ultimate warm-weather treat is fresh blackberries, this candle is a must-have.
One of the most welcome changes that comes with spring is the refreshment of a rain shower that leaves the air feeling clear and fresh. This candle has the same effect, smelling of cool, deep clarity with hints of greens and mint. It really does capture the cleansing smell of the air after a heavy rain; if you’re looking for a spring scent that is calming and not sweet or fruity you’ll love this candle.
Lavender is one of the all-time best scents for inviting relaxation and calm. Lavender Tea smells just like its name; a perfect, freshly brewed cup of tea with lavender buds. This mild but delicious scent will float through the room, perfect for afternoons and evenings when you need to wind down.
In the Love WEN candle, a delightful blend of tropical flowers provide the perfect escape. If you like florals but don’t want to be overwhelmed by dense flower scents, this light atmospheric candle will perfectly diffuse into your environment. It perfectly recreates the soft floral scents you’d encounter at a spa, brightened with notes of grapefruit and acai berries.
You can’t have a spring scent roundup without including fresh oranges. The smell of citrus always summons visions of cleanliness and fresh starts, perfect for kitchens, bathrooms, or any other spaces where you need an energy switch or a mood boost. Brooklyn Candle Company’s Japanese Citrus combines all the boost of a citrus scent while deepening it with bergamot and jasmine, creating the effect of an escape to an orange orchard on a faraway mountain.
Vanilla Rosa from Paddywax is a really unique blend of scents; a swirling combination of spices combined with darker, musky undertones of sandalwood and patchouli create the effect of a sultry evening on the coast. As a bonus, Paddywax’s entire La Playa line comes in gorgeous glass containers that summon up imagery of margaritas on the beach and each one is one-of-a-kind!
If you’re seeking a tropical freshness that has lighter notes, Panjore Lychee has a gentle waft of fresh pear and lychee that adds a refined scent to any space without overpowering it. This candle summons up a tropical feel with an unexpected combination of delicious scents.
Sandalwood Rose is a different kind of floral scent. It’s darker, dryer and has a muskiness to it that other rose scents don’t have, summoning up visions of a Southern California desert night. This dry floral is perfect if you’re looking to break from the usual flowery candles but still want a chance to stop and smell the roses.
If your favorite part of spring is getting the chance to walk through a field of bright wildflowers, Peony Bloom is a great choice. It combines blends of soft but distinct blooms, helping to create a lovely bouquet of smells in your home.
From the fresh flowers wafting through the air and tantalizing scents of more tropical climates, the natural smells of springtime can provide so much inspiration to the home. No matter what your favorite part of spring is, a candle on this list is sure to brighten up your day and remind you that it’s the season of change and new growth.
Intuition, gut feelings, hunches— we all have terms for the messages that come from within, telling us things without logic or observations to support them. How is it that sometimes we just “know” things without being able to explain how? What is intuition, and how much should we trust it?
It turns out, intuition isn’t as mysterious as we might think. A lot of what we consider to be intuition is subconscious knowledge and memory, the things we don’t even know we know. Our brains access that unspoken information to help us, giving us a better ability to understand our world and make decisions than we could just using our conscious minds and logic.
“We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations,” Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, told LiveScience. Using intuition, our minds can access memories and other details we don’t even remember collecting. We might think of our intuition simply as a gut feeling, but the truth is that it’s its own kind of knowledge and can be just as helpful as we journey through life.
Intuition in Business
You may have heard that in your professional life, the only way to succeed is to put your feelings aside. While staying in control of your emotions is important, suppressing them can be dangerous. Think about it: not only are you invalidating your own responses to things, but you’re ignoring information that could be helpful to you!
Studies say that the emotional parts of our brains might be able to respond faster to stimuli than the cognitive side can; in other words, your feelings can bring you some information faster than your rational thoughts can. When you’re more in touch with your emotions, it can give you greater insight into your intuition.
A study by Harvard Business Review of 36 CEOs found that 85% of them relied on their intuition (in the form of rules of thumb) to make decisions. These rules of thumb were various forms of shorthands for all the knowledge that their experience had given them, put into a form that was useful and accessible for them. Instead of trying to discount or suppress their intuition, some of our culture’s most successful people know to value and prioritize it as an asset. Your intuition can be a skill that can help you accomplish your goals if you learn to pay attention to it.
When you’re following your intuition in business, it means listening to the side of your brain that sees things you can’t. Body language, past experience, and so many other things could be informing the gut feeling that’s nagging at the back of your mind. When you’re dealing with other people, or even just comparing a current situation to something that you’ve experienced before, your intuition can help bridge the gap between your conscious and your subconscious and carry you even further towards your goals.
Intuition and Creativity
Every day, you experience far more than you’re able to consciously process. Sights, feelings, interactions: your unconscious mind stores so much of it away. This subliminal knowledge can give so much power to your creativity. It’s important to listen to your heart when you’re creating— it has so much of value to offer!
Creative efforts are a space you can, and should, trust yourself the most. You have nothing to lose from leaning into your intuition and following it wherever it leads you. Leaning into your deeper spirit will yield truer results; not only will trusting your intuition help you produce creative works but it can help you know yourself better.
We know that our hearts speak in more ways than just logic and thoughts. How else can you explain the way certain songs, paintings, or other works of art speak to us? Letting our intuition guide our creativity will produce results we would never see otherwise. Your intuition can point you towards a wound that needs healing or an issue you weren’t aware of because it sees things that our conscious selves are blind to. Making it a priority to listen to and trust your intuition can give new life to your creative process.
Ways To Strengthen Your Intuition
Studies have shown that just like any other skill or muscle, your intuition gets stronger the more often you use it. Intuition is a superpower and we have a lot to gain from learning how to trust and rely on it more fully. Here are a few ways you can work to make your intuition stronger and start relying on it more:
Keep A Journal. Journaling is a great way to let your inner self out and start to familiarize yourself with your deeper thoughts and feelings. If you want to sharpen your intuition, use the journal to trace moments you had particularly strong feelings about choices and keep track of how situations turned out when you followed your intuition.
Meditate. One of the many benefits of meditation is that it can help you strengthen your inner voice, creating a quiet place where your intuition can speak up and be heard.
Pay Attention To Your Dreams. Have you ever noticed how after a particularly vivid dream, the emotions of it stay with your far longer than any specific details? Dreaming is one of the ways your brain processes the information it spends all day taking in. Taking care to write down and remember your dreams, specifically the feelings associated with them, can help you understand what your subconscious is trying to tell you.
Try New Things. One of the ways to gain more intuition is simply to experience more things. It might not sound pleasant, but even failing at things can teach you something new and add to your intuition’s ability to recognize patterns and predict what could happen next.
Whether you tend to go with their gut or you have trouble trusting your instincts, it can be helpful to learn the true power that your intuition can hold for you. Rather than being a thing of mystery, intuition can be a real asset and skill that can help you navigate life if you work to strengthen, sharpen, and trust it. The next time you have a nagging feeling about something, consider listening closer to what your intuition is trying to tell you— it might know something you don’t!
Hello! My name is Becca. I’m the digital editor for Carrie Ann Conversations; I work to edit all the articles that appear here and write some of them myself. If you’ve spent a lot of time on here, you’ve probably read some of my words and read even more that I’ve edited. It’s wonderful to meet you!
This morning I looked at the calendar and, like many of us have probably been doing lately, I thought about what I was doing a year ago just before everything changed forever. What I was doing a year ago was receiving word that I had gotten this job.
Let me give you a little background. All I’ve ever wanted to was write and I figured if I could get someone to pay me to do it, then I’d be set for life. I went to a liberal arts college that emphasized independence and ambition and creativity and introduced us to all these incredible alumni who held jobs in publishing houses and writers’ rooms and all sorts of places and maybe gave me the impression that following your dreams can’t be really all that hard otherwise my college wouldn’t keep telling me to do it all the time. This meant that my post-grad move out to Los Angeles set me on a direct collision course with a pretty serious learning curve. Did you know, for instance, that actually a lot of people would like to make their living writing TV shows and therefore it’s kind of a hard thing to get a job in?
I started working freelance jobs in TV production, working in offices and onset and still feeling invigorated to be near all of the famous stuff even if I wasn’t getting to “world build” so much as I was getting to “answer phones” and “wash dishes” and, one time, “buy out three Ralph’s produce aisles’ worth of lettuce and transport it all to the Staples Center downtown in rush hour traffic.” All the time, I would be writing my own scripts and essays and newsletters on the side and applying for jobs and grants and creative fellowships. Over the years it got harder and harder to believe that I was actually good enough at writing to do it professionally. Creative fields are really challenging this way because it gets very hard to know whether the reason nobody is interested in your work is because it’s a competitive industry or because, maybe, you are actually very bad and nobody thought to tell you. Eventually I got to start writing for a lifestyle magazine on the side but every year, around February or March, I would have to go back into production (with all of its phones and boxes and heads of lettuce) to actually pay my bills.
I have a very vivid memory of a conversation I had with my therapist my first year in LA. I was feeling exhausted and talentless and worn down and isolated and was having a hard time remembering why I had even moved so far from home in the first place. After maybe her fiftieth attempt to tell me that things that are worth it often take time, she said it in a way that clicked. “What if I told you that you were going to have a career in writing, but it was going to take five years?” she asked. “Would you be able to see it through?” At the time I probably said something petulant like “how do you know that in five years I won’t still be terrible but also older?” but it did stick with me. Something I’ve learned from therapy in general is that you are very rarely able to see the big changes while they’re happening. Growth, development and sometimes even just waiting for the things that are on the horizon require time, and as much as I still resent this at times, there’s no way to cheat that process. I think humans have a hard time thinking about the future because we are only used to speaking the language of the present and past. We can see the things that have already happened and try to use them to make sense of what’s going to happen later. The problem with that, of course, is that if you’re just looking at the things that have already happened it gets very hard to picture the future containing something entirely new.
For a while, nothing very new happened for me. I kept writing a little for money, a lot not for money, picking up crew dinner from Panda Express and getting rejected from every digital publication I read/love/respect/enjoy. And then about a year ago, a friend that I had made working on a TV show that never aired told me she was looking for someone to take over her job helping manage a website for Carrie Ann Inaba. I thought it sounded like the perfect opportunity, I wore my favorite blazer to the interview, I thought it went well and then I went home and quietly waited for the email telling me it wasn’t going to work out.
Except, and you’ll have probably guessed this part already, it did work out! This last year, while everything got so difficult and volatile for everyone, myself included, I was also getting to talk about directions for this website, hear Carrie Ann’s visions and humor and thoughts about what Carrie Ann Conversations should be and get to do my part to help them come to life. I got the chance to write for a living (full time!), and not just write but write honestly about the challenges we’re all facing in the pandemic and try to help readers feel that they’re never alone. I get the chance to work alongside Carrie Ann, who really is as kind and thoughtful and special in real life as she is on TV. Sometimes I still can’t believe that this amazing job that I didn’t even know existed was just waiting to find its way to me. And while it’s not all fun and games and candle roundups all the time, I really can’t help but be thankful, every day, that I’ve made it here.
I’m still a long way from accomplishing some of my dreams and goals, and sometimes this can really stress me out, especially in a year where you can almost viscerally feel time passing you by. But whenever I start to worry about what I haven’t accomplished yet, I think about going back in time to visit the version of myself that was restocking chip bins and trying to jam a full-sized clothing rack into my little hatchback under threat of being yelled at. I think about what she would say if I told her that our therapist was right about the five years thing and how relieved she would feel knowing it was going to work out. I’d like to think there’s a version of me in the future who feels the same way about me now.
I want to thank our CAC community for an amazing year; the only reason Carrie Ann and I work so hard on every story we publish is because of you. Your support, stories and feedback mean the world to us and I couldn’t have asked for a better community in a year where we could all use more reminders that we’re in this together. Thank you for your honesty, vulnerability and kindness and the trust, warmth and love that you extend to us every day. I’m so looking forward to seeing where the next year takes us.
For over 10 years, Rhonda Spies has worked with celebrities and notable figures as a stylist, preparing and equipping them with the perfect look for every occasion, event, and red carpet appearance. Rhonda has worked with Carrie Ann Inaba for the past 3 years and is responsible for making sure that every piece Carrie Ann wears reflects her personality and makes her truly shine. We had the chance to catch up with Rhonda and learn more about the work she does every day with Carrie Ann.
CAC: How did you get into styling as a career? What drew you to it and what are your favorite things about it?
Rhonda: I have loved fashion for as long as I can remember. I love the way it tells a story and reflects a person’s individuality and I love how it can instantly boost a person’s confidence simply by transforming how they feel when they’re comfortable in their own skin. I also love to see beautiful clothing come to life.
CAC:Can you give a quick definition for what a celebrity stylist does? Can you walk us through your average week working with Carrie Ann?
Rhonda: A celebrity stylist collaborates with their talent to dress them for various events. A lot of times you’re working with someone who’s building a career and the way that you’re dressing them is going to impact that career.
An average week with Carrie Ann on The Talk begins with selecting looks for the upcoming week. Often there will be various details about each show that we have to take into account: What color the background will be, whether Carrie Ann is sitting, standing or moving, who the guests are, etc. With those details in mind, together we work to set the looks. On show days I’m there to bring the looks to life by helping her get dressed, foreseeing any problems that may arise and adjusting accordingly, accessorizing and making sure she is comfortable before the show goes live.
CAC: How long have you been working with Carrie Ann? Has your process for styling her or her style itself evolved over your time together, and if so how?
Rhonda: I have been working with Carrie Ann since 2017. My process is constantly evolving as Carrie Ann’s career evolves and changes. I pay attention to current trends and classic styles. I bring her pieces that will complement her while keeping her looking fresh and new at the same time.
CAC: What parts of Carrie Ann’s personality, style, identity or look do you take into account when styling her?
Rhonda: When you’re dressing someone, you have to take all of the components of their personality into consideration while at the same time executing your vision and taking into account the feel of each specific event or appearance you’re dressing them for. As each year passes I get to know Carrie Ann better and better and as a stylist I like to gently nudge her out of her comfort zone. I think if you look back over the years we’ve worked together you can see how her style has changed and grown. I always tease her that I have to nourish her inner fly girl so I try to add a certain flair that speaks to her aesthetic. At the same time staying aware of the little nuances of Carrie Ann’s taste helps push me out of my comfort level as well. She is very intuitive so I feel like we have a mutual level of trust that allows us to take fun fashion risks.
CAC: When you need to style Carrie Ann for a theme episode of Dancing With The Stars or The Talk, what’s your process for deciding on a concept and then making it a reality?
Rhonda: With The Talk, I start with the creative notes and direction from the executive producers. From there I research looks, swatch fabrics and collaborate with my wardrobe department for a cohesive direction. Then a costume will come to life. Most recently for Halloween 2020 we created magic for Carrie Ann as Willy Wonka.
Courtesy of CBS
CAC: What’s been your favorite theme episode look to design for Carrie Ann?
Rhonda: For Dancing With The Stars , I love the theme weeks when we get to experiment and build a costume from the ground up. This past season my favorite week was “Villains Week” when Carrie Ann was a glamorous version of Pennywise from IT.
CAC: Could you walk us through picking the inspiration, deciding on and finding the specific pieces, and putting it all together?
Rhonda: I started by researching past images of Pennywise from the movie and what existing costumes available on the market looked like. From there I took a few of my favorite images to the brilliant costume maker Maggie Barry and together we sketched our vision. Then we sourced fabric and started to put together the look. I ordered the accoutrements such as the neck ruffle, the red pom poms and striped tights. The next step was the first fitting which is where I can really see what is working and what tweaks need to be made. Then it’s back to the costume maker for the final touches. The process is a lot of work, but so much fun and was so rewarding to see her in our creation on show day.
Courtesy of ABC
CAC: Is there anything you particularly love about working with Carrie Ann or about working on Dancing With The Stars?
Rhonda: I love Carrie Ann’s willingness to experiment and try new things. She is the most fun to dress up and truly loves to collaborate. We have become very close and I’m so grateful that she’s always up for trying new things and experimenting with new looks. It’s always rewarding to watch her own look after look. Dancing With The Stars is the absolute best because she gets to wear a beautiful gown every week and I enjoy the process of finding new designers to bring to her and redefining her style every season. It’s truly hard for me to pick a favorite. One look from this past season that was memorable was her gown from Disney week. It was very feminine and ethereal. Paired with dreamy make up and a blush colored wig the look really came together.
Carrie Ann’s team is made up of Rhonda Spies (Stylist), Marylin Lee Spiegel ( Makeup) and Glenn Nutley ( Hair) for Dancing with the Stars and and Rhonda Spies (Stylist), Marylin Lee Spiegel ( Makeup) andSteve Berg (Hair) for The Talk. Watch for more articles from her incredibly talented team.
Back when Carrie Ann and I were working on her first piece on advice for creating a vision board, I was impressed by her love for the process and her investment in the meaning of creating a board like this. She said it wasn’t an attempt to magically manifest things out of thin air, but rather an exercise to make yourself focus on what you want out of life, and create a reminder for yourself. We thought it would be an interesting experiment if I took what I learned from her and used it to make my own vision board.
I’ve never done a vision board before. A lot of the time I feel like I’m allergic to spending time deeply reflecting on myself, and I’m terrible at knowing what I want. I’m still trying to work myself out of a long-ingrained mindset that time spent only on myself is time wasted; I’ve also had a career path that has rarely, if ever, gone the way I planned. Because I’ve never been great at visual design, I have to admit I was also honestly afraid it was going to turn out ugly. I knew this was going to be an interesting exercise, and despite these potential challenges I was excited to see what the process would teach me.
In general I’ve never been much of a visual processor and I’m much more likely to write things down in bulleted lists when I’m trying to figure them out. The closest thing to a vision board I’ve ever made is some collages, so I tried to approach the board the same way. When I collage, I flip through a lot of magazines and cut out any images or words I find interesting or even funny and keep them in a box. Anytime I create a new collage I go to the box and that’s where connections between the random words and images start to arise.
One of my collages.
With this project, though, I knew my approach had to be different because intentionality is the whole point of a vision board. I would have to decide what kind of themes were going to be a part of it before I started hunting for images. I sat down and thought about what I wanted from this year. In past years I think this would have looked a lot more external; thinking about the kind of relationships I wanted, a new apartment, a career I enjoy, but this year my biggest desires were all internal. I wanted to be stronger, happier, more at ease with myself, more confident in my passions and choices. “Strength” was a word that I kept repeating as I looked for images, as well as “happiness” and “confidence.” As I began my search, I kept a lot of Carrie Ann’s advice in mind: look for more vibes than specifics when perusing images, remember to make space for the things in life you’re already grateful for, and above all do whatever feels right to you.
My clippings box.
As I started flipping through magazines, images of strong women kept catching my eye. “Ideally, I would be like this,” I thought. A photograph of Georgia O’Keefe photographing wilderness struck me. “I want to pursue my creative ventures like this.” Jane Fonda brandishing a pistol in her role as a cowgirl in an old movie. Lauren Bacall refusing to shave her armpits back in the 50s. Emma Stone portraying Billie Jean King who fought every day to be no less than exactly who she was. Each one has something I find aspirational and it became clear they were going to be a big part of my vision board. I even found a big photo of a local politician whose campaign had inspired me and reminded me the difference that individuals can make even in the face of huge systemic issues.
While I had planned a good bit before diving in, there were things I hadn’t planned to look for that also started making it into the clippings box. Almost every photo of a scenic hotel view or a sunny beach or a European skyline also called to me. I don’t think I realized how much I missed travel this past year and it’s something I hope for more than anything in the coming year. I printed out a photo I took at the Joshua Tree Airbnb I worked out of for a few weeks last summer as a reminder that just because I can’t book a trip to Rome yet doesn’t mean I can’t keep finding little adventures wherever I am.
In general I’m more of a detail-oriented person than a big picture thinker which means, especially this past year, I’ve often found myself preoccupied with a constant to-do list and bogged down with a never ending bevy of worries. As I started putting together my vision board, I realized how nice it was to take a break from the worries of the present and put all my focus and energy into visualizing an ideal future.
Putting it together.
I found myself collecting little blocks of words or quotes that I thought were powerful and eventually realized that they would make an entire section. Finally, I saved one corner of my vision board just for things that make me happy. A photo of a hairless cat I follow on Instagram, a sketch of Dodger Stadium, a picture I took at my favorite plant shop, Tony Shalhoub at the Golden Globes. I thought it was important to remember how many little things a day bring a smile to my face. Just because they’re little doesn’t make them less important to me.
Final product.
I really liked my finished vision board. When I look at it it gives me the impression of strength, confidence, spontaneity, humor— all things I find in myself at my best times. I think coming out of a different year where we hadn’t all lost so much I might have been looking for different things than simple open skies and a sense of resilience, but here and now I think it represents exactly what I need from (and hope for) myself and the world in the coming year.
If you’ve never done a vision board because you, like me, don’t consider yourself a big picture visionary or a visual processor or you’re unsure about the benefits it could bring, I’d encourage you to try it out. As someone who usually works with words it was freeing to not feel like I had to come up with a verbal explanation for every image I chose; I could focus more on creating a little world out of visuals and vibes and see new connections and themes emerging that would never have occurred to me outright. It was great to get access to a new outlet and spend some time thinking deeply about my own wants and needs for the coming year as well as the parts of myself that I want to encourage and grow. If you’re ever feeling stuck, stagnant, or unsure where to put your energy, creating a vision board might be a great low-stress way to start answering some of those questions for yourself.
When COVID-19 began spreading, daily life changed for all of us. But for some people, this adjustment didn’t just mean social distancing and working from home. For some, it meant coming to terms with the fact that one of the biggest days of their lives wouldn’t be going according to plan or schedule. We spoke to three people who had their wedding plans go out the window when the pandemic began about how they adjusted, whether it meant postponing or changing everything.
Jami
Courtesy of Jami Baker
Jami and her then-fiancé Bryson decided to plan their wedding and a whole weekend full of fun activities in San Francisco, one of their favorite cities. The late-May festivities would include the couple’s favorite breweries and restaurants and top off with a Sunday brunch. In March when COVID-19 began spreading in the US, the couple quickly saw that their original plans had become impossible to follow through on. “As we kept watching the COVID numbers get worse and worse, we knew what we needed to do,” Jami says. “There were so many more important things to worry about at that time, like our health and our loved ones, that being upset about having to cancel our party weekend felt trivial. We were both working from home, hustling to make sure we were delivering results for our companies and clients, checking in on family, and drinking a lot of wine! Cancelling our wedding was hard and we wish we could have celebrated with all of our friends, but ultimately there was no other choice.” They drafted and sent out an update to their 70-person guest list, letting them know about the cancellation and assuring them that they’d be kept in the loop on future plans. “We want you to know that this does not cancel the love we have for each other or the love we have for you,” the note read. “We hope and plan to still have a celebration with our friends and family when the time comes, and we look forward to seeing and hugging you all soon.”
With their initial plans cancelled, the couple had to decide on their alternative. Jami says that after tossing out one whole set of plans, she wasn’t in a rush to make new ones, especially in such a volatile set of circumstances. “I couldn’t fathom planning another wedding or picking a new date. Planning a wedding is a lot of work no matter how big or small, so at the time I was just disappointed and exhausted.” After some thought, they decided to keep their original wedding date. “We didn’t want to let COVID ruin all of our plans,” Jami says, “so it was important to us to stick with our date.” They drove an hour north to Jami’s parents’ house and Facetimed Bryson’s Massachusetts-based parents and decided that was all the company they needed. “We both had ‘Zoom fatigue’ from all the video chatting we did when quarantine started (and still do for work) so we just wanted it to feel intimate and close,” Jami says.
“As long as you’re with the right person, it all works out in the end— and make sure you have good pizza.”
They took photos in the back yard surrounded by her mom’s beautiful orchids and picked up a box of their favorite pizza. “We decided to write vows to one another and we read each other’s out loud,” Jami says. They ended up congregating in the kitchen to read their vows and later it occurred to them how perfect it was that her last name was Cook and his was Baker. “Only afterwards did we realize a Baker and a Cook got married in a kitchen!” she says. “I have to admit, I went into the day a little cranky, disappointed and defeated, feelings that are definitely prevalent during this time. But we laughed, ate good pizza, had a dance party just me and my husband and ended up having a great night.”
Courtesy of Jami Baker
Jami hopes to celebrate the occasion with their larger group of friends and family once it’s safe to travel and gather again. “We need to be realistic and put the safety of our loved ones first,” she says. “Hopefully we can have a party by the end of next year, or maybe we’ll just celebrate our 3-year anniversary with everyone instead! I haven’t worn my dress yet, so hopefully that will still fit. It definitely won’t be the full weekend of events that we had originally planned, but I’m sure it will be fabulous.” The biggest lesson Jami learned through this journey? “As long as you’re with the right person, it all works out in the end— and make sure you have good pizza.”
Jenn
At the beginning of 2020, Jenn was looking forward to her wedding in May. It would be a springtime garden wedding in New York, at the perfect time of year for their friends with children or careers in academia to come and celebrate their union. Jen and her fiancé had started planning their wedding in 2018 (“We gave ourselves a leisurely amount of time to plan,” Jenn says), giving them plenty of time to make sure every detail reflected their personalities and relationship. Jenn collects vintage pulp fiction novels, so it only made sense to commission an artist friend to design a wedding invitation that resembled a pulp fiction cover featuring herself and her fiancé as protagonists. “I wrote really funny copy on it” Jenn says. “The tagline is ‘a shocking tale of a quiet musician, a mouthy writer, and their life of scandalous equality.'” A blurb on the bottom reads, “She doesn’t cook! She doesn’t clean! She doesn’t even understand C++! What compels this handsome talented programmer to marry… The Feminist Bride!”
The rest of the theme fell into place from there with a thousand thoughtful details: tables decked out with vintage glass bowls and cake stands stacked with pulp novels, a purple wedding dress, a Heroes and Villains motif for members of the bridal party, a twist on the bouquet and garter tosses where the couple would throw plush carnival prizes to the crowd with gifts attached that were symbolic to each of them. Their registry included non profits they’re passionate about and their reception would have opportunities for matched donations as well. “We wanted to make everything we could have meaning for our community and our values,” Jenn says.
Just two months away from the big day, the world started to change forever. On March 6th, Jenn went to try on her wedding dress. On March 7th, she and her fiancé started quarantining to do their part to stop the spread in New York, one of the places hit first by the pandemic in the US. The next few weeks were difficult as the couple tried to predict what the coming months would bring. “That whole first week we were feeling so guilty about the potential of postponing— what about other people who had nonrefundable airfare or had taken time off from work?” Initially, many were still convinced the world would be back to normal in plenty of time for a May ceremony and it put Jenn in a quandary. “There were so many unknowns. Do we postpone and lose a lot of money and all this work and time and effort? If we don’t postpone are we endangering people?” By March 15th, they made the decision to postpone their wedding by a year. “It was a huge relief once we made that decision but it was still very emotional.”
Now after a year in quarantine, the circumstances are different. Jenn and her fiancé are now postponing their wedding, which they had rescheduled to May 2021, by a whole additional year. Because they’ve already paid for their garden venue, it only leaves them with so many options. “We live in New York and have a garden wedding so there’s only so many times that makes weather sense. We can say maybe it’ll be safe by January of next year, but who wants to go to a garden wedding in January?”Jenn says there’s no way they’d do a ceremony without their community, and they aren’t willing to gather their community while there’s still any chance of endangering a loved one. She and her fiancé are already domestic partners and enjoy the legal benefits of marriage; the entire point of the wedding, to them, is to involve their chosen family in an important milestone. “For us,” she says, “the wedding isn’t just about marrying our life partners, but it’s also about having this bonding experience with our community of chosen family. The wedding is an investment in our friends and community.” Because of this, they’re holding all their fun wedding plans until they’re able to safely involve their community. “We didn’t just want to have a legal ceremony and have a party later, because we’ve already done the legal thing. We went down to city hall a couple of years ago, signed some papers and all of a sudden, bing bang boom, we’re domestic partners, so it was kind of anticlimactic. It wasn’t a particularly romantic experience, it was for legal reasons. We were committed to each other but we wanted the wedding to be the emotional thing, and we wanted the emotional thing to be a part of our community.”
“After this much isolation for this long, it’s going to take a buffer period to bounce back and feel more like ourselves.”
Jenn says a big hurdle in thinking about a future wedding now is the emotional disconnect. She says that even if they were somehow able to safely make their second date, she’s not sure she or her partner would be emotionally prepared after such a hard year. “We were in the 4th hardest hit neighborhood in Brooklyn. We lived in the absolute heart of the pandemic. The reddest of the red spots. There was a two month period where you’d wake up in the morning, you’d hear an ambulance siren, you’d go to sleep, you’d hear an ambulance siren, and you’d never stop hearing them between. So I don’t really have the heart to be thinking about, ‘Let’s go for a dress fitting, it’ll be so fun.’ It’s hard to be a person who’s committed to community and making the world a better place while trying to plan a life-changing event event that’s supposed to be emotionally gratifying and fun and ‘yay.’ Who has the heart for ‘yay’ right now?” She and her partner haven’t left their apartment since that day they started quarantining on March 7th. “If somebody said that in mid-April someone would snap their fingers and everyone would be immune to COVID, would we even be ready emotionally to have this joyful moment of connection with ourselves and our community when we haven’t been out of the house? After this much isolation for this long, it’s going to take a buffer period to bounce back and feel more like ourselves.”
On top of the strain of isolating, Jenn was also exhausted from her experiences trying to educate online circles about COVID safety and precautions. When planning her wedding, Jenn had connected with several wedding planning groups online and grew concerned when she saw that many circles weren’t taking the virus seriously. She hoped to use her experiences, and the example of her city who hadn’t responded to the threat in time and was overwhelmed, to appeal to others who could still take steps to protect themselves and their communities. “Everyone in my circle was taking it seriously but I had access to all these strangers who were going on like nothing had changed. I spent so much time arguing for social responsibility and basic viral containment and basic care for others that could help keep people alive.” She said having these kinds of conversations online took a toll. “The pushback I got from those folks… I had a breakdown. I’m still working my way back from that.”
Ultimately, Jenn and her fiancé know that postponing their wedding, for however long, is the right thing to do because neither of them can imagine having a ceremony without their community there to celebrate with them. Neither Jenn nor her partner has much family, and because of that their bonds with friends are even more significant. “For us a wedding is much much more than decor and venue and all the details that people seem to care so much about on Instagram. Don’t get me wrong, I have a really fun set of things planned, but it wasn’t about that for us. We’re older. I’ve been fiercely independent and waited until I really wanted to marry the person whom I’m marrying. We’re not in our early 20s and we don’t care as much about the trends or trappings as much as we care about a community-centered bonding experience. We’re both people with very small families and this is the kind of rite of passage that people usually experience with their families and we can’t really do that in the way most people do so our chosen families are it for us, in addition to the few relatives that we have.”
Amory
Courtesy of Amory Davis
In early March 2020, Amory and her then-fiancé Woody were feeling victorious after finally finishing their seating charts for the wedding reception they had planned on March 28th. “I was actually really excited about having fit that puzzle together. It made it a little more tangible that we literally had our seating chart and we knew everybody who was going to be there and where they’d be sitting.” What they didn’t realize was that in just one week, everything would be different.
On Wednesday March 11th, the NBA cancelling their season was the first big sign that their wedding was in danger. Amory and Woody decided to fly to North Carolina from New York as quickly as possible— they used that Thursday to borrow a friend’s car and move Woody’s belongings into the Brooklyn apartment they’d be sharing after the wedding and on Saturday morning flew into Raleigh. Later that day they sent out an email to their guests recognizing that some might not be comfortable traveling for the wedding and included an updated RSVP form. On Sunday they got news that the Governor of North Carolina had banned any events over 100 people and by Sunday night the CDC had recommended banning any event over 50. “That was the final straw,” Amory says. “It felt like the rug was being pulled out from under us bit by bit and that was the final bit that left us with no other option besides cancelling our wedding as we had planned it.”
On Monday morning, they emailed their guests to notify them that the wedding was officially cancelled. “That day we had to call all of our vendors and cancel everything. So Monday was our ‘cancel our wedding’ day, Tuesday was our ‘plan our new wedding’ day, and Wednesday we got married.” Their new date was based solely around the small number of the couple’s family that would be able to attend: ultimately the party was made up of their parents, Woody’s brother and Amory’s sister. The idea of postponing was floated, but ultimately they decided they didn’t want to wait. “We were so close to our wedding anyway, we just wanted to get married. It was pretty clear it wasn’t going to clear up anytime soon so it seemed like no matter what, unless we waited potentially a very long time, it was going to be a small family wedding. So we just tried to schedule it around our family.”
Courtesy of Amory Davis
After running the gauntlet of cancellation emails to friends and vendors, Woody, Amory and their parents got to work planning a wedding in a day. They called a local florist and were told they could have some bouquets and flowers for the bridal party by noon the next day. Amory’s mom decided to pick up a fancy strawberry cream bundt cake in lieu of one she had planned to bake herself. “That was the most delicious cake I’d ever had, so that ended up being a really fun decision.”
Amory says that, for all the stress and disappointment, the new wedding plans did offer her one thing: freedom, and hugely reduced pressure. “Once we adapted to the situation, it really was an extremely low-pressure wedding. I had been really nervous about walking down the aisle and being the center of attention with so many people and I really didn’t have a single thing to be nervous about on the day of our wedding. It was a really comfortable time. I think my mother-in-law called it ‘the freedom wedding,’ just because it was free of all pressure and we could kind of do whatever we wanted.” Another nickname, “Our Guerilla Wedding,” arose when it came time to lock down a new location. When the couple called their favorite park about making a reservation to have their new ceremony, they were told reservations had been halted due to the lockdown. Thankfully, one helpful employee told them that if they showed up, nobody would kick them out. “We ended up getting a ‘wink wink’ from a park that couldn’t give us an official reservation.”
It felt like the rug was being pulled out from under us bit by bit.”
Hours before the wedding, one thing was still weighing on Amory: the potential absence of her older sister and maid of honor, who wasn’t sure she could get off work to make the six hour drive for the new ceremony. Amory had already accepted that her brother and sister-in-law, who live in Texas, wouldn’t be able to be there in person and were Skyping in. “I had already adjusted to a lot of disappointment and already adjusted to my brother not being able to come, but my sister who was my maid of honor and the only non-parental family or friends who would be able to come besides my parents… When it looked like she wasn’t going to be able to come either I think that was the hardest part of the entire ordeal.” The thought that Amory wouldn’t have anyone to stand beside her at her own wedding was almost too much to bear. “I woke up on my wedding day very sad, which was my biggest fear all along.” Luckily, a few hours later Amory’s sister called her from the road, telling her she was able to make it after all. “I got a call from her the next morning crying and saying that she couldn’t miss it and she would be there, and that kind of redeemed the day.”
Amory was thankful to have such a beautiful, if unexpected, venue for her new special day. One significant blessing of the new wedding was that Amory’s father was able to walk her down the aisle. “My dad has limited mobility, and at the bigger event and at the outdoor venue on the grass as we had originally planned he didn’t think he’d be able to walk me down the aisle. When our plans changed and there were so few of us and it was a really short, even pathway he was able to walk me down the aisle. That was a really precious thing to come out of all of this.” Amory says she and Woody discussed live streaming their ceremony to all their initial invitees, but Amory decided to embrace the opportunity to have a low-stress, intimate day. “I felt very strongly after such an emotional week that if we were going to have a small intimate ceremony, I just wanted to have that small intimate ceremony and not have to worry about anything else. I still feel really good about that decision for myself.”
Courtesy of Amory Davis
Amory and Woody always planned on having a celebration with friends and family whenever it was safe to do so, but the timeline for it has shifted as COVID continues to sweep through the country. “We’ve started holding that plan a little looser. I would still like to have some sort of wedding celebration with our extended family and friends but I no longer have a time limit on it. I definitely want to have a celebration but I really don’t want to be stressed out about planning it. So I’m in no particular rush at this point. We’re already past the immediacy.”
When she looks back at her wedding day and holds it against her plans, Amory feels a mix of gratitude and grief. “It’s definitely a mixture because there’s part of me that thinks that as the world gets more normal again, if I go to other people’s big weddings I have a feeling that I’ll be a little sad if we don’t ever get to have that sort of gathering. But at the same time the actual memories of that day are really sweet.”
I think, like many of us, I have a tendency to feel overwhelmed by the worries and troubles of the present. These challenges always loom large in my mind and seem easier to notice than the blessings and unexpected good moments of any given day. I’m not so much a “glass half full” person as I am a “waiting for the other shoe to drop” person, and I find that I’m often so preoccupied with anticipating setbacks that I forget to look around at the good things that I have. Lately, I’ve realized that when I look back at old phases in my life, even ones that were difficult, I always feel overwhelmed by nostalgia for the good parts of life that I now miss rather than remembering the challenges or pain.
As someone who’s freelanced most of my adult life, I’ve had more of these transitional phases than you might expect of someone my age. The company I worked full time for my first year out of college often left me feeling drained and stagnant; at the time I was in a deep depression and wasn’t finding anything fulfilling about my new adult life after making the monumental move from North Carolina to Los Angeles. Now when I look back on that era I remember the friends I had at that office, the free catered lunches, and the trendy neighborhood and adorable 200-year-old house I called home for that year.
Since then I often found myself either working long hours in television production roles or scrambling to find writing work. I would find that whichever position I was in, I would yearn for the one that had come before. When I was sending out dozens of copywriting applications a day I would miss the financial security and structure of my TV jobs and when I was working 12 hour days on set I would miss the freedom and autonomy of my gig work. Now that my production days are more distant, I don’t tend to linger on the difficulty of the work, the long hours or the fast-paced demands. I feel genuinely lucky to have worked in entertainment as I’d dreamed for years, even if it wasn’t in the TV writer role I had envisioned for myself. I’m thankful for the days I was able to traipse around real movie studios for my job and I’m grateful for all the friends I have now that I met while working various freelance jobs. Any time I find myself near an old apartment or old workplace all I feel is nostalgia for the good times and remembrance of the things I miss, not resentment over my struggles and difficulties. It’s been so helpful in learning that there are always good things in life you shouldn’t take for granted, no matter what your circumstances look like.
This lesson, that it’s important to appreciate the positive things in life while you have them, only became more urgent as our world changed forever in the wake of COVID-19. How many days did I spend feeling bored or dissatisfied where I would now be thankful just to go to a movie theater or museum or get coffee with a friend? If this time has taught me anything it’s the true breadth of experiences I was taking for granted, and how many tiny things there were, and still are, to be thankful for. If I can look back on even the harder parts of my history and find memories that I want to hold onto, I can be sure that there are still things to be thankful for even in this time that has been so painful and challenging.
What things will I miss from this era when it has passed? There will be so much to rejoice when the quarantine ends and when even our most vulnerable are protected from this virus, but are there things I will grow more appreciation for after we all move on? I might miss the dedication my friends and I have had to stay in touch with consistent video chats. I might become thankful for the reduced pressure to always be productive. My anxiety often tells me that if I ever slow down or stop moving that I won’t be as valuable to the world and having the world itself force me to come to a stop, sit inside and focus on small accomplishments might be a lesson I’m better off for having learned. I’ve been around more silence and loneliness than ever before and even though I’ll enjoy becoming more social again I don’t think I’ll ever shake the love for being alone that I’ve cultivated in the past year.
I know I will feel so much relief when I no longer have to go to bed worrying for the safety of each of my friends and family, when even the most trivial distractions like movie matinees and theme parks are safe and open once again, when I can travel to see loved ones without the fear that I’ll be putting them in danger. I hope in that next stage of life that this one stays with me and reminds me of the time when small parts of life I’d always overlooked were no longer guaranteed. I hope I’m able to take whatever stressors, setbacks or frustrations come and measure them with the thought: “at least I can hug my friends again.” I hope that this consistent feeling of nostalgia for the past can guide me into gratitude for the present and future as well.
The Wildlife Learning Center, a zoological park based in Sylmar California, has always been about education and wildlife conservation. It all started when founder David Riherd and his co-founder Paul Hahn started bringing animals into kindergarten classrooms to explain simple biology concepts to children. What began with just a tortoise, a frog, and a few other rescues blossomed into a contract with Los Angeles United School District, one of the biggest districts in the country. As the desire for their programs grew, the partners were able to take in more and more wildlife until they bought the old olive grove that now serves as the WLC’s center of operations.
Many of the animals who live at the Wildlife Learning Center were born in the wild but can’t return to their habitats due to injury or socialization, or they were bred and raised as pets. In one of the enclosures lives a raven named Ophelia who has two broken wings that prevent her from flying. Before coming to the WLC, her home was in a caring vet tech’s chicken coop where she picked up a habit of clucking. In another enclosure nearby, a coterie of prairie dogs finds their new home after the field in Texas where they once lived was developed into a Wal-Mart and a rehabilitator with a passion came to the rescue. “They developed a way to vacuum them out of the tunnels,” David says. Often, prairie dogs are seen as pests and nuisances and can be exterminated without a thought. Now, this colony can live a full life at the WLC. “They’re so interesting,” he says. “They have different vocalizations for different predators. They can even distinguish between a person with a gun and a person without a gun.”
The center has been running at its current site since 2007, with a little help from a few generous patrons like Betty White and Pauley Perrette who are passionate about the work they do for wildlife conservation.
Not Every Animal Is A Pet
One of the first enclosures visitors see upon entering the center is a found family of vibrant, playful squirrel monkeys that each represent the backgrounds of many WLC animals. Two were “dropped,” or abandoned, by their mothers, one was a rescue from the zoo at the iconic Playboy Mansion, one came from a shuttered ophthalmology lab, and the last was a surrendered pet from Oregon.
Sid the Sloth, Photo by Daniel Spiller
The laws for owning exotic animals differ wildly state-to-state, but several states like Oregon allow for the import and ownership of wild animals like monkeys, small cats, foxes and even sloths as pets. Several of the animals now in the WLC’s care were former “pets” of celebrities and influencers who only realized too late that they were in over their heads. David says keeping wild animals in a home isn’t a good idea for either the animal or the owner. He cites so many cases where buyers surrendered their “pets” after constant screeching, destruction, urination, and everything else you would imagine a wild animal would do to a home. Meanwhile, domestic vets are often not equipped to treat these more exotic animals and can easily make a mistake that can cost the animal its health or even its life. “My wife is board certified in zoo medicine,” David says. “The amount of experience she has to have to treat all these animals [is immense], and she still has to research things all the time because there could be exceptions. For example, there’s a de-wormer that’s completely safe for reptiles except for one species of snake it could kill. You’ve got to know that there’s the possibility that something could be harmful and you don’t just jump into it.”
He says diet is another crucial aspect that can be easily overlooked by collectors or buyers. The WLC utilizes a zoo nutritionist specially trained in exotic animal nutrition who designs every animal’s diet. He says sloths are particularly tricky to keep well fed, but other animals like monkeys can also quickly face problems if they aren’t fed properly. “There’s a really high incidence of diabetes in pet monkeys. [Owners] may have read that monkeys eat fruit and feed them fruit, but the sugar content in our fruit versus wild fruit is so different.”
One of the Wildlife Learning Center’s missions is teaching an appreciation for these wild animals and educating about wildlife conservation while highlighting the reasons they don’t make good pets. David says this is very intentional; he doesn’t want any visitor seeing a member of staff interacting with one of their animals and getting a false impression. “They see that we have a relationship with them and a lot of people want that, so it’s something we really have to make a point of discouraging.” He wants to show people that he and his staff care about and respect these animals deeply while still emphasizing that they are never pets. “What I like to tell people when they’re presenting animals is, ‘be specific about why it wouldn’t make a good pet when people ask.'” For instance, a visitor might be charmed by a fennec fox’s beautiful fur, giant ears and cute face but find their perspective widened when they also learn that the animals can smell, screech, and have a passion for digging. This education could help lessen the appeal of exotic pets, thus reducing demand that leads to animals being surrendered to centers like the WLC in the first place. David says many countries have banned the exportation of wildlife, but there are still places where baby sloths are pulled from their mothers. “I’ve seen sloths in the wild and I can’t imagine someone going up there and tearing it off a tree.”
See the Animals, Love the Animals.
One of Wildlife Learning Center’s favorite tools for education is their ambassador animals. David says these animals, who have temperaments that allow them to participate in classes or interactions, can help people connect to nature, and understand the need for wildlife conservation, in a new way. He says these interactions can show visitors why these animals are so special. “You can get people to want them to continue to exist. Just for that reason alone, just because you think it’s beautiful or interesting.” He says that the WLC’s two sloths, Sid and Pauley, are the crowd favorites. “Sloths are just a beloved animal,” he says. “People will come in and meet the sloth and they’ll cry.” He shares that the center recently hosted a virtual meeting with the sloths and one of the attendees commented afterward that it made her want to save them. “That’s exactly what I’ve always wanted to hear,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder, are we really making an impression with people? That comment was everything we could have hoped for from someone meeting one of the animals.”
Prairie Dog, Photo by Daniel Spiller
David says they’re careful about the animals that become ambassadors; the choice is made for each animal’s temperament rather than by species. He says the WLC’s armadillos, hedgehogs, hawks and owls have all excelled in ambassador roles. His staff always asks whether it would cause the animal any stress to do an interaction, prioritizing their animals’ wellness above any other factor. For instance, one of the WLC’s grey foxes, Kina, is naturally tame and friendly. She was brought into an animal rehabilitation center as a baby with plans to return her to the wild. “But despite all their efforts, like not letting her associate food with people or even see people at all, she was still too tame!” In Kina’s case, being an ambassador animal means “going to classrooms, being in programs, and she can come out and sit on a table while we do a talk about her, as opposed to just being an exhibit animal.”
The WLC and Wildlife Conservation
In addition to helping guests get passionate about the fight for wildlife conservation, the WLC also actively contributes to helping certain species survive. The Wildlife Learning Center participates in several SSPs, or Species Survival Plans, which help ensure that certain at-risk species are able to live on through selective breeding programs. “Probably the best known SSP in California is the Condor Recovery Effort,” David says. “That one was highly successful because not only do they have a zoological population but they were able to return them to the wild.” The LA Zoo, the Santa Barbara Zoo and the San Diego Zoo all contributed to bringing back condors from the brink of extinction. He says the program was so successful because it didn’t just breed condors for zoo exhibition, but began reintroducing them to the wild and providing treatment to chicks in the field. He also points to the mountain yellow legged frog, a species native to California that has been critically endangered. Just this past year, while it was closed due to COVID-19, the LA Zoo was able to release 1,000 tadpoles into the wild from the insurance colony they were tasked with creating in 2014.
Ralph the Tortoise, Photo by Daniel Spiller
One of the WLC’s own SSP animals, a North American Porcupine named Barbara, is headed to the North Carolina Zoo in Asheville to further preservation efforts there. “We’ve been a significant part of the porcupine SSP because we’ve been really successful in breeding them.” He says he’d love to work to bring back the porcupine population in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where their numbers have been declining. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the Sierras hiking and I’ve always wanted to see [a porcupine] and never have. I would love to be a part of bringing their numbers back up and repopulating them.” He says it’s an honor to be a part of wildlife conservation on a larger scale. “Yes, it’s great to provide a home for an individual animal, but if you can be a part of protecting a species as opposed to an individual, that to me is more meaningful work, especially to a small organization like ours.” He says that breeding isn’t always the endgame for SSPs; a geneticist will make recommendations for diversity and make pairing suggestions, sort of like a dating service for zoo animals, but sometimes participating is as simple as holding a place for endangered animals. “No one institution can maintain a whole population, but if you have a lot of organizations participating you can grow the population.” Sometimes it can even be a temporary arrangement; David says sometimes institutions will reach out seeking placement for animals while they’re renovating enclosures or doing construction.
Get Involved
If centers like the Wildlife Learning Center give you a passion for wildlife conservation, it doesn’t have to end at the door. There are always ways to help the local native species living in your own backyard; you just have to know where to look. For instance, David talks about the mountain lions in the Santa Monica mountains. Locally, California just signed a bill to ban anticoagulant rodenticides that are poisoning rodents and therefore the mountain lions that eat them. “It needed a lot of support to pass. If people realize or really appreciate our biodiversity then it can lead to protections like that.” He points to another effort in Los Angeles to build a wildlife overpass over the 101 Freeway to help mountain lions access a greater stretch of wild land. Trapped on what is essentially an island surrounded by highways, aggressively territorial mountain lions push out newer males into potentially fatal traffic. “To find its own territory it’s going to have to cross one of these major highways. That’s what happened to P-22.” He references the locally famous mountain lion sometimes spotted in the Hollywood Hills. “What makes him so remarkable is that he survived crossing the 405 and then the 101, crossed through Sherman Oaks, the Hollywood Hills, and ending up in Griffith Park. Most don’t successfully cross. I think for male mountain lions the two biggest causes for mortality are getting struck by cars or other males. They’re in a quandary. They have to risk moving somewhere that’s dangerous or being killed by another male.” The bridge would help connect this population to the Simi Hills and the Los Padres, a huge wilderness area with plenty of new territory for ousted males. The big cats would be freer to disperse and it would give them more genetic variability to avoid dangerous levels of inbreeding. Fighting for measures like the bridge can be a huge step in allowing animals like the mountain lions to exist peacefully and reduce conflict and unnecessary death.
Jake and Catcher the Macaws, Photo by Daniel Spiller
Get Passionate
For David, the act of wildlife conservation and education comes from the purest place. “Our main goal is to have people walk away with a greater appreciation for wildlife and our biodiversity. I think that’s the biggest thing we can do— these animals are so interesting. There are so many fascinating animals that we share our planet with. If you can value them that much more because of your time spent here then I think we’ve achieved a significant goal. It’s because of my exposure to nature that I really care about it.”
He describes his trip to the Amazon where the rainforest is being threatened by oil drilling. “To me, there’s always all this talk that we have to save it because what affects the environment and affects animals eventually affects people.” While he says this is totally valid, he thinks that saving animals doesn’t always need additional motivation. “I see these as treasures, as historic buildings or famous paintings or music. These are living treasures that should be maintained for that reason alone. You don’t get it back. Sure, if we destroy the earth and its inhabitants it’s going to affect us, yes, but I think it can be more than that. The biodiversity of this planet is extraordinary. It’s an incredible thing and we should value it for that reason alone.”
He says he hopes that places like the Wildlife Learning Center can be a bridge to people who can’t see animals like this in the wild, helping them get engaged in the fight for wildlife conservation. “If you’re not lucky enough to go out into wilderness and see it, you can gain that appreciation that people that work here have. Why would you ever want to lose sloths? You don’t want to look at it in a book and say. ‘This used to exist,’ like the dodo or the Tasmanian tiger.”
Looking around at what the Wildlife Learning Center has become, it’s not hard to see that it all started with a passion for animals, and a drive to share that passion with others. “I just like to talk about it,” David says, looking around the center. “I think this is cool. Don’t you think this is cool?”
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