Some of you may know I’ve been a rideshare driver since 2017. I’ve given my share of rides since then (over 5500 if you’re counting), which all came to a halt in March of 2020 with the pandemic lockdown. Before then, I had been working on Dashcam Festival, ostensibly a media-arts showcase which was to have featured drivers like myself who also made art. At the time, I had envisioned a series of live performance held around the city in bars, cafes, and other neighborhood venues. All that came to a halt with COVID.
It’s now July of 2021, and society is quickly coming out of its 14 month isolation period. My neighborhood bar has begun booking live music acts with abandon. Large concert venues like Ravinia just kicked off their summer concert series. As a lapsed Uber driver, the temptation to service riders who need a ride up to the north suburbs for an evening under the stars serenaded by big name acts might be too great to pass up. Post-concert surges were my bread-and-butter pre-pandemic. I’ll probably resist the urge - my car interior has been made dirty to the point where I’ll need professional detailing before accepting any paying customers. And anyway, I need that extra time to figure out what, if anything to do with Dashcam Festival.
So imagine my surprise and delight to find two new artists who were formerly rideshare drivers show up in inbox with new works of art. First up, Ride Share, a hybrid of film and theater written by Reginald Edmund, based upon his days as a driver. Edmund, now a playwright, developed this piece originally performed via Zoom. It has since been converted into a streamed digital offering by Writers Theatre here in the Chicago area. Next is another local artist, Nestor (the Boss) Gomez, a poet and award-winning storyteller, with Your Driver Has Arrived, a collection of stories from his former career as a driver. I’m pleased to see two local artists gain some exposure from our shared profession, having worked on similar ideas a while back. Jobs like being a taxi driver, Lyft driver, or a bartender lend themselves to meeting people from many walks of life, in often unguarded moments. I actually interviewed a former taxi driver who had written a memoir of his best passenger stories. I do wonder if this is a trend - stories about essential workers caught up in the middle of a pandemic, hustling to make a buck in a precarious environment. I should know - I lived this life for three years - way longer than I expected when I first switched my app on in May of 2017, shortly after buying a new car. 100,000 miles later, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back, but I do look forward to reading and watching these recounts of a professional life lived “on the edge”.
As far as Dashcam Festival, it’s still a work-in-progress. I have hopes of converting it into more of a hybrid or virtual event. The gig economy kept on rolling, through the pandemic and beyond. The stories of the artists and hustlers keeping it real and documenting their experiences along the way keep me going.