Heroes of the pandemic
Ontario woman wins international challenge
April Judd could not sleep. Her mind was crackling, poring over the list of all the things in life that she had missed out on and all the things that “sucked,” because of COVID-19, and how devastating the pandemic was for the global collective. People everywhere were struggling.
Nineteen-year-olds, like Judd, fresh out of John Abbott College on the island of Montreal, were graduates without a formal graduation. No cap. No gown. No big send-off, no tearful goodbyes, no nothing, except an abrupt move home to Mom and Dad’s place in mid-March and, by mid-May, another restless night mulling stuff over, batting away anxieties, finding the silver linings.
“I was lying in bed thinking about everything I had missed, but also about all the opportunities I’d been given because of COVID-19,” Judd said from her family’s dairy farm/winery an hour west of
Ottawa.
“Seeing peoples’ resilience throughout the pandemic, it just got me thinking these deep thoughts, and then my cat jumped on my bed and sat on my face. It was hilarious, because it was symbolic of what life is: a big collage of good, bad, beautiful, chaotic – and hilarious — and I wanted to try and show that.”
Judd, a self-described “introverted-extrovert,” is also a ham. She is a fan of musicals and a theatre kid, and she was set to play the role of Mrs. Banks in a school production of Mary Poppins before all productions and everything else ceased. Her father, Scott, is known to break into spontaneous jigs. Younger brothers, Isaac and Sam, and older sister, Emma, view ribbing one another as family sport. Around the Judd homestead, nourishment involves drinking deep from the well of laughter.
“I always think of the other people in my family as being far funnier than I am,” Judd says.
But she never thought of herself as one of the funny ones. Be that as it may, Girls’ Voices at Home, a program of the Seattle-based American non-profit, GreaterGood.org, felt Judd was indeed a funny one, and selected her as the winner of its “Class of 2020 Challenge.” The international challenge, open to female high school seniors and college grads worldwide, was to submit a video answering the question: How did the coronavirus change your senior year?
Hundreds of entries rolled in from 49 countries — smart, achingly honest videos, typically several minutes in length. The idea was to present all the videos as a virtual yearbook; a record of young women’s voices, from all over, during a shared moment in time.
There was Audrey, from Maryland, crafting a message of spiritual uplift; Katherine, from Texas, sounding earnest and true; Alicia, from Georgia, unspooling a mesmerizing blast of spoken-word poetry. In short: the Canadian faced serious competition in a challenge she resolved to accept only after Smudge (the cat) had pounced on her head, and the $1,000 cash scholarship prize loomed on her computer screen while she was researching ways to help pay for university starting September.
“I wasn’t really expecting anything to come out of it, to be honest, except to be part of the virtual yearbook,” Judd says.
Judd’s video starts like every other contest entry, with an introduction. But it soon shifts, cutting away from a bright, warm, bubbly kid speaking from her bedroom to Judd practicing ventriloquism in front of the bathroom mirror while speaking of discovering new aspects of the self. There are new hobbies (screeching on a violin, painting a watercolour happy face); improved multi-tasking (texting while reading a novel); and learning to exhale (screaming beneath a tree).
It is not spoken-word, but it is poetic: Judd makes you laugh.