Introducing myself
♉️🎼🪻🕊️✨🦕🍄🌿🦌🎨🎹🏳️🌈
Hello! I'm Emma (birth name Emily, but Emma is a nickname I've had since I was 15 and what I go by now to most of my friends).
Basic information about me above the cut, deeper lore under it. The iceberg of my existence, if you will. Enjoy!
PS. my username is a reference to a popular greeting for the Roman festival of Saturnalia, celebrated on December 17 and thought to be a direct predecessor to the Feast of Fools in medieval times. I'm a big history nerd and the director of an early music singing group, which plays into my fervent interest in worldbuilding & historical fantasy!
💜 pronouns: they/them 🤍 gender: too complex to put into a label so let's just say "queer" 💚 sexuality: bi w/sapphic-achillean & intellectually slutty flavors ⭐ age: 29 years old and milking my last year of "young adulthood" for all it's worth ⭐ stars: taurus sun, cap moon, leo rising, gemini venus (those four aspects will give you a v accurate sense of my personality)
💞 in a relationship since 2021 👨👩👧👧 eldest sibling syndrome 🐈 four cats: zoey, pixie, caesar, and miss penny 🎭 career: musician, educator, vocal coach, actor, composer 🎨 hobbies: art, writing, paleontology, linguistics, ecology 🌹 politics: anarcho-socialist, anti-imperialist, humanist, pacifist 🙏 religion: ancestrally episcopal (see below), vaguely pagan?? 🧬 68% british/irish, 23% french/german, 9% other euro (lmao) 🦌 fav animals (extant): cats, deer, musteloids, raptors, corvids 🦖 fav animals (extinct): irish elk, velociraptor, coelurosauravus 🍨 fav ice cream flavors: mint moose tracks & matcha 🌈 fav colors: most shades of green and purple, burgundy, gold
Family History
Disclaimer: On both my dad's side and my mom's dad's side, I can trace my family back to the US colonial period and beyond; on my mom's mom's side, I can only trace it about six generations max - those are the relatively "recent" immigrant lines from Germany and Ireland. As someone whose politics revolve around decolonization, I recognize that having these family records and the knowledge of exactly who my ancestors were is a privilege. But I still think it's neat and I want to share!
My maternal grandmother, for whom I am named, was one of the first female priests in the Episcopal church, and the youngest of the four daughters of one of Los Angeles' first bishops, who was a badass in his own right (he personally visited folks during the Great Depression and advocated for the wellbeing of Japanese Angelenos during WWII). Unfortunately, my grandmother died before I was born, but my spiritual connection to her is STRONG and folks around town often tell me that they see her in my face, my voice, and my personality.
Another direct ancestors who had a role in making history was my greatx4-grandfather Charles, who was sent by Abraham Lincoln to convince the English to stop recognizing the Confederacy because he apparently had a TON of rizz with the English aristocracy. He was the son of Joseph MacIlvaine and the son-in-law of the Revolutionary War colonel Bowes Reed (who was in turn of brother of Joseph Reed, who was George Washington's aide-du-camp and actually the person that "Right Hand Man" from Hamilton would be about).
Now here's where it gets really fun: my childhood home is a registered historic landmark built in probably the 1870s.
My hometown of Ojai was an ancestral and spiritual center for the Chumash people before they were all but exterminated by Spanish colonial rule. The land was bought up in the 1800s for the oil reserves coming out of Sulphur Mountain and was settled by a number of German immigrants; one of these immigrants was Henry Hess, who owned an orchard of apricots, almonds, and grapes. My grandfather K.B., who moved to Ojai in 1947 for his work in geology, befriended Henry and bought up the orchard when he died in 1955. He had seven sons - my dad is the youngest. The grapes and almonds all died off in the decades since, but to this day we still maintain one of the only apricot orchards left in the area.
(The most heartwrenching family story I can share is that of my grandfather's experience during the Battle of the Bulge. My grandmother had just given birth to her only daughter, Jane, who died only a short time afterwards of illness. The story goes that my grandfather received both of these pieces of news at the exact same time. UGHHHHHHHHHH. I've been contemplating for years how I would commemorate this into a song or theatre piece.)
Personal History
The fact that I grew up on a farm informed all of my experiences as a child; my parents were strict about not overusing technology, so I didn't really grow up with video games, and so from a young age I learned how to entertain myself by writing songs, drawing, LARPing with classmates on the playground, and putting on little plays with my sister for our parents. I had a strong inner fantasy life, which has ultimately culminated in me writing what very well could be a Wikipedia page on my tumblr blog.
Music has always been my great love; I started learning to sing and play piano at age 6 and flute at age 8, was always part of choir, wind ensemble, jazz band, and orchestra, and was so proficient at music theory that I was tutoring college students in it by age 16. My greatest accomplishment during high school was getting to sing with every honor choir possible, all the way up to all-national honor choir at the Kennedy Center.
At 18, I was a Classical Voice winner of the YoungArts Los Angeles division (watch my performance here, which I criticize now but was pretty damn impressive for a teenager). The summer after that, I traveled to Vienna, Austria to study opera and lieder with the IES study abroad program, which was amazing and something I wish I could go back and do over and over again.
I had come out as pansexual (and then bisexual) at age 14, but even before that I spent a lot of time thinking about my gender, even going so far as to create a "male" alter-ego of myself and dress in my dad's clothes to go out with friends. But it wasn't until several years later that I actually came out as non-binary and then trans, going by the name of Johannes for my senior year of college. The support I received was mostly surface-level; professors took care to remember my new name but not my pronouns or the way I wanted to be addressed, and my parents' lack of understanding and dismissal of my identity broke my heart.
I graduated college at age 19 as a burnt-out, not-yet undiagnosed ADHDer and spent almost a year in the throes of depression because I couldn't book a single audition in LA. Then I finally got a job in Skagway, Alaska, doing everything from leading a historical tour through town to performing a bartending dinner show, and it was the most psychedelic five months of my life.
I came back to start substitute teaching at the music studio where I'd first learned piano, and that was the year our community was devastated by the Thomas Fire. I was in the middle of visiting my then-partner up north and was stranded, terrified for my family - luckily, the half of our property that contained our house was spared, due to my parents and three uncles personally fighting off the fire.
(Fire has unfortunately become a recurring theme in my life, as the recent Palisades Fire destroyed my current partner's home and our beloved neighborhood, and among other things I lost all of the artwork and gifts I had ever made for him.)
Within the last eight years, I've been building up my music teaching career at that same music studio (I've literally watched some of my students grow up and I can't even describe how proud I am of them) as well as other schools and theatres in the area, as well as becoming a somewhat well-known actor in the local theatre circles. I also have a sick soloist gig with a very progressive church in LA - and in a full-circle moment, that church is currently the temporary home of a church in the Palisades which burned down and is currently rebuilding.
I'll finish this up by telling the story of how I met my current partner:
It was early 2020, and I'd just caught the Shakespeare bug full-on. When the pandemic started and I wasn't able to do live theatre anymore, I dove headfirst into a Zoom production of MIdsummer as Titania and then got involved with a group of mostly Los Angeles actors who were performing one Shakespeare play per week. So, for over a year, I met with that group and did more Shakespeare than any one person needs to do, falling in love with the history and language even more.
The first scene I did with my now-partner, back when he was just a mysteriously attractive face on Zoom, was Act 4, Scene 5 of Coriolanus (which, if you know, is one of the hottest, most violently homoerotic scenes in the entire history of theatre), with myself as Aufidius and him as Coriolanus. It took us another nine months of doing intense homoerotic history plays, never speaking in private because we were both too nervous, before we were cast as Kate and Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew (which has an equally hot and violent scene, and anyone who has played Kate or Petruchio knows that it's an unspoken rule that you have to hook up with your scene partner afterwards).
If you don't play Taming of the Shrew sufficiently BDSM-y, it comes off as merely a portrayal of obnoxious spousal abuse, and so I was nervous about how my Petruchio would approach it. Lo and behold, we're sitting there discussing the characters, having our first private conversation ever, and he comes out to me as a subby bisexual and says he wants to play it as two characters falling madly in love and playing out a power struggle to annoy everyone else. This was exactly what I had wanted.
We met in person a few months later and our relationship began very quickly after that, and today we're closer than ever and he inspires me in the way that I write romantic fiction.
(Note: All of these Shakespeare performances are on Youtube and some of my friends love this story so much that they've written fanfiction about it, so let me know if you wanna get those links lmao.)
