San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Local theater artists make pandemic pivot
With stages shut down, a singer and dancer turns to baking, while an actor crafts candles
It’s lunchtime at Laura Bueno’s house in El Cajon and her three young children are eager to chow down. “I’m sorry if I seem distracted,” she says, running back and forth between the toaster and kitchen table, the phone in one hand and a slice of crispy bread in the other.
It’s a juggling act parents across the city, country and world are deeply familiar with in the midst of school shutdowns in this pandemic era.
“Right now is my kids’ break from remote schooling, and it’s the only free time I could speak.”
On weekday afternoons, Bueno’s children would normally be in school and she would be occupied elsewhere.
Maybe she’d be in rehearsals for her longtime gig singing with the San Diego Opera (Bueno has lent her lush mezzo soprano voice to its chorus since 2003), or perhaps instructing a class at her ballroom dance company Edudance — Classrooms in Motion, which teaches dances like the waltz, tango and foxtrot to eager adolescents.
There’s also a possibility Bueno would be prepping for an upcoming show with Playground Players Productions, which puts on fully staged musical theater productions for schools, another company the multi-hyphenate runs.
But when the world screeched to a halt a year ago, so did the majority of Bueno’s artistic endeavors, as well as her income.
“I was prepping for a production of ‘Aladdin,’ all ready to go and then, boom! Everything shut,” Bueno recalls. “My schedule completely freed up.”
As a result, like legions of theater and artistic professionals just like her, she promptly dived into what’s been coined as a pandemic pivot. In the wake of the loss of a career, it’s an unofficial replacement
Online:
Online:
Laura Bueno’s Lollypop’s Bake Shoppe
lollypopsbakeshoppe.com
Something Rad Candle Co.
somethingradcandleco.com endeavor to keep the income flowing.
And for Bueno, that meant putting down the microphone and picking up a whisk.
“I had been baking cakes and cookies for about a decade, so when everything happened, I decided to dive in officially,” she says of a sweet new endeavor.
Dubbed Lollypop’s Bake Shoppe — “my nickname has always been Lolly” — in lieu of working with casts and on productions, she’s spending her time on cupcakes and pies.
“Around last Easter is when I decided, ‘Hey, cookie kits are kind of a fun thing.’ Since then, I went from making a couple of cakes or cookies a month for an occasional random person, to now getting orders in from all over the place,” she says of the growth of the venture.
Hawking treats both online and at local farmers markets — including the Pacific Beach Farmers Market — Lollypop’s Bake Shoppe has become a lifeline.
Instagram:
Instagram: @lollypopsbakeshoppe @somethingradcandleco
“When momentum started to pick up, I said, ‘ I can’t do the music stuff, no dancing, I can’t perform and everything’s canceled, so I’m just gonna go gangbusters on this.’ There is always opportunity out there — always.”
It’s a sentiment actor Luke Monday embodies as well. A native of Oceanside, he was a familiar face in the world of San Diego musical theater, starring in past productions at Coronado’s Lamb’s Players Theater, Scripps Ranch Theatre and Oceanside Theatre Company. Last March, he even had a plum standby role as Elder Price in the national touring production of “The Book of Mormon.”
“I was riding high and having the best time,” Monday says while taking a breather on a wicker chair in his yard at home in Orange County. “Then we had a producer’s conference call, which is never good. He told us we were closing permanently.”
While Monday admits he felt dejected in the following weeks, his dour mood began to melt away when his then-partner, nowfiancé gave him a bright idea.
“I’d go to Target and would always come home with a bunch of candles. One day he said, ‘You buy these all the time. Why not try making them?’ At first I thought it was dumb, but with nothing to do, I said, ‘Maybe I will!’ ”
A new hobby lit up, which then flickered into his own career pivot. Monday began making and selling candles by hand using raw materials under the name Something Rad Candle Co.
“Since we launched, I’ve sold at least 500 of them,” says Monday, who was most recently seen, with fiancé JD Dumas in San Diego Musical Theatre’s “Date Night.”
Specializing in pop-culturethemed candles — think Harry Potter and Spongebob Squarepants-inspired scents — Monday still marvels at how a simple thought to take up free time and be financially solvent became a much more rewarding endeavor.
“It turns out, I’m really not qualified to do anything else,” he laughs. “I went to school for theater. All I’ve ever done is act, wait tables and work at Starbucks. But since taking this on, it’s empowering. I feel capable of way more than I ever thought. People are impressed, and they think it’s a huge operation, but it’s just me. Now instead of applause, I get great customer reviews or recommendations.”
While Bueno and Monday are enjoying their respective pandemic pivots, they’re not ready to leave behind the theater world.
“It’d be a shame to stop now after all the work that went into it,” says Monday. “But I can do both, and definitely want to keep making candles, even when I’m back onstage.”
Bueno, meanwhile, is more inspired than ever.
“If you sit and whine and complain, ‘Oh, I can’t do this, so I can’t do anything,’ that’s not true. If you’re able-bodied and you have a brain, you can figure it out. I’ve also learned that people still love cookies, even in a pandemic.”