Cereal & Pandemic Choice Making

I’m old fashioned. And by old fashioned, I mean I am full of nostalgia for my 90s childhood. It was great. Food wise, we had it so good in the 90s- we didn’t know sugar was that bad for us, we loved the convenience of everything being in packages, and most food items definitely tasted better when they were shaped like animals.

Thus, I present this week’s blog, which is an ode to my childhood as well as a metaphoric attempt at answering the question currently on the tip of many of my clients’ tongues:

What do I do when everything I’ve worked for up until this moment is closed?

What do I do when I know I should pivot my artistic energy and don’t know how?

Consider this average Friday night in NYC scenario:

It’s officially the weekend, and you’ve arrived to your couch. You’re getting a little pang of post-dinner hunger, and you’re feeling naughty. You’re craving cereal. You’re saying screw it to Michael Pollan and Mark Sisson: you’ve got a mission to find a sugary treat in a bag in a box. You want the holy grail: you want Cinnamon Toast Crunch. So, hauling your monochromatic grey sweat suited self off of the couch, you grab your keys, your wallet, and leave your NYC apartment in search of the good stuff. 

You walk the five, ten, fifteen, TWENTY minutes to the nearest open bodega or Key Foods ready and willing to pay the ridiculous price of at least $7+ for a box of heaven. Treacherous things appear on your journey to foodie freedom- a jagged sidewalk (“Careful! Don’t trip!”), yappy frou frou dogs on leashes, people committing the crime of “text walking” upsetting your stride, an uncharged pair of air pods. Nevertheless, you have a mission, and you shall persist!

You walk into the grocery store and hit the milk aisle first. Scanning the shelves until you come across your creamy substance of choice- be it regular, oat, almond, cashew, hemp, or soy, you successfully retrieve the item and tuck it carefully away under your arm.

Dodging other shoppers- post-happy hour tipsy corporate bros, an elderly grandma doing her weekly shopping trip, a neighborhood Karen demanding the store clerk refund her most recent unsatisfactory purchase, you finally arrive to the holy land: the aisle of cereal.

 Scanning the shelves, you can practically taste the cinnamon sugar on your lips. Drool starts forming in your mouth as you imagine that delicious blend of semi firm and semi mushy bites that are moments away from being part of your reality. You’re really feeling scandalous tonight, and you know you’re going to drink that sugary milk afterward. Yes, yes, yes, you are.

You’re looking, looking, specifically looking for that magic white box. Your eyes pass over yellow boxes of pops, red boxes of loops, blue boxes of flakes, NONE OF THAT MATTERS. Suddenly, your hands start sweating, your heart starts beating, you can’t find it. You come to the dark realization: there is NO Cinnamon Toast Crunch to be found! THEY ARE OUT OF STOCK.

You run back to find the clerk who had just been Karened to calmly, and politely, inquire about the possible status of more boxes in the back of the store. Two words say it all, “We’re out.”

At this point, you have a choice: you can either leave the store empty handed. Put the milk back where you found it and walk home with your $7 and busted air pods.

Or…you can choose another cereal. Now look, it may not be the CTC of your dreams, so you have to acknowledge the loss. You’re right- it sucks. Nothing is the same. AND yet, there might be another cereal available on that shelf that will still be able to satisfy the need for sugar. It might still be able to satisfy that balanced bite of crunch-mush, that drink-worthy milk. It might even surprise you how much you enjoy the CTC replacement.

To quote another 90s show: What Would You Do?

This is the scenario many of us theatre professionals are in right now. Replace cereal with musicals. Replace that jagged sidewalk with BFA graduates in nude LaDucas. Replace that five, ten, fifteen, TWENTY minute walk to the bodega with five, ten, fifteen, TWENTY years of voice lessons, dance classes, and subway fare.

The grocery store is out of CTC. They are out of your dream scenario. The shelves will be restocked, but the clerk doesn’t know when.

So what do you do?

What other cereals might be tasty enough to satisfy your craving while we wait?

 Or do you suddenly remember Michael Pollan and decide instead to go home and bake up a batch of this incredible paleo granola?  

Or do you save a few dollars and buy some plain ass oatmeal and dress that bad boy up with some nut butter, some fruit, and some choco chips??

We all have to make a choice. There’s no wrong choice. The only unhelpful choice you can make is deciding to wait and not make a choice, which unfortunately, you can’t do because the grocery store is closing in ten minutes.