Singer’s other job: Nursing
As performer and EMT, Shawn Holmes faces up to COVID-19.
Shawn Holmes straddles two worlds that have been rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic:
He’s a musical theater performer as well as an Aurora Sinai Medical Center emergency department technician and nursing student.
But in these stressful days, whether he’s singing a song by Louis Jordan or Alan Menken, or racing toward an incoming patient on a gurney, he does it with love, and “feels blessed to be in this position.”
Milwaukee audiences have seen and heard Holmes in multiple Skylight Music Theatre shows, including his memorable turn as Jacob, the flamboyant maid in “La Cage aux Folles.”
Last March, Holmes was playing Mitch, the “comfort counselor” and excon in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” when the pandemic came to town. The coronavirus shut down his next scheduled role, in Skylight’s “Candide,” and other public performances he had planned.
Taking his voice online
“I was able to take care of her by bonding with something that she loves to do, and something that I love to do.” Shawn Holmes musical theater performer, Aurora Sinai Medical Center emergency department technician and nursing student
Like everyone else in local show biz, Holmes has adapted to doing things virtually, he said in an interview over Zoom. In “Skylight Sings: A Holiday Special,” which streams online through Jan. 10, he sings “The Christmas Song” and joins friends Kevin James Sievert, Raven Dockery and Krystal Drake in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Kwanzaa song, “Seven Principles.”
With multiple collaborators, Holmes has been recording “Singing From Holmes,” a virtual cabaret show, which he plans to stream on Valentine’s Day through social media platforms. For more instant gratification, he posts occasional songs on his social media accounts.
The Milwaukee native sang his first solo at age 6 at Grace Pentecostal Church. Congregation members charitably assumed his tears came from being caught up in the spirit, Holmes said, but it actually was because he was terrified.
Music became his passion, but Holmes didn’t see singing or actor as a potential career until his friend Anne Van Deusen encouraged him to audition for Skylight’s 2013 production of the opera “Porgy & Bess.” Being part of an all-Black cast, seeing people who looked like him doing something they loved, and getting paid for it, boggled his mind.
Since then, theater has become “a part-time job that I love,” he said.
Singer’s other job: Nursing
Then there’s his other job. After graduating from Oak Creek High School, Holmes earned his bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise science from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2007, intending to work in sports medicine. He later trained as an emergency medical technician, working for a Milwaukee ambulance company, and then as a firefighter / EMT, working in Menomonee Falls and Thiensville.
During his EMT training, his instructor noticed Holmes’ ease at talking with patients, and encouraged him to consider nursing. Initially loath to go back to school, his parents “gave me the great push.” In 2018 he began working on his associate degree in nursing through Bryant & Stratton College.
His long-range goal is to become a nurse practitioner working in emergency medicine.
At Aurora Sinai, Holmes takes shifts both as a health unit coordinator and as a nursing extern. If you’re coming into the hospital in crisis, “I’m literally the one running to you,” he said.
Since March, he’s been racing down those halls wearing a mask and other protective gear. One unfortunate side effect of sweating under a mask for “6-78-12 hours” a day was the return of “the acne phase of Shawn,” which he’d hoped had disappeared in high school.
Even at hospital, ‘always singing’
He has seen death during the pandemic. A co-worker with more than 20 years of experience told him that more people have died during the past 9 months than in any year she’s worked before. “And the sad part is, is that they have to do it without family being there,” he said, due to safety protocols to avoid spreading the virus.
What do theater and emergency medicine have in common? “You never know what could happen,” Holmes said. In both fields, he has to react quickly to what’s going on around him.
As he goes about his work, “I’m always singing at the hospital,” Holmes said.
He remembers a day when he used his voice therapeutically. He went into the room of a 6-year-old girl who was “a little terrified of being in the hospital.” After introducing himself, he asked her what she liked to do. She told Holmes she liked to sing.
“Oh, you lucked out because I like to sing, too,” he said, and asked what her favorite song was.
“She started singing it and I joined in with her naturally. And she looked, her eyes got super big.”
Later, her mom sought Holmes out to thank him, telling him that she doesn’t really open up to people like that. “I was able to take care of her by bonding with something that she loves to do, and something that I love to do,” he said.