Heroes of the pandemic: How this introverted-extrovert from Ontario won an international pandemic 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 because of COVID-19, 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 having had a formal graduation. No cap. No gown. No big send-off, no tearful goodbyes, no nothing, except for 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 in mid-June, 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.
Judd can’t name any comedians off-hand, Canadian or otherwise. She is aware, as a people, that Canadians are regarded in some corners as being funny (see: Catherine O’Hara, Russell Peters, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Bob and Doug, Lorne Michaels, SCTV, Kids in the Hall, This Hour Has 22 Minutes etc.).
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; as 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 thousand dollar 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 water-colour 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.
Patricia Cogley, the San Francisco Bay area-based director of Girls Voices, is aware of some funny Canadians. She knew, upon watching Judd’s almost four-minute clip, that the kid from the dairy farm west of Ottawa was deploying the national weapon.
“In times like these, it is really more advanced to use humour to address things,” Cogley says. “All of us thought it was really refreshing, and relatable, having April talk about the pandemic from a humorous perspective.”
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The video isn’t all guffaws. What has been lost to Judd, to each of us, is real. The pandemic happened, still is happening, and yet it won’t last forever. Judd will head off to university, in person, eventually. Life will move on, although maybe not in a way anyone could have foreseen.
“I don’t want to leave this global pause and go back to the way things were,” Judd says, toward the video’s conclusion. “I want to leave, and have a heightened appreciation for all the things that make life full.
“From me, to me – to you — graduates and non-graduates, and anyone who is struggling to adjust or overcoming loss, both big and small: we got this.
“Or at least we will, eventually.”
Hear, hear.
National Post
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