Remembering Megan
She never was a cornflake girl.
She was a raisin girl.
A sweet, bright, burst of joy in the montanty of life. Never afraid to speak her mind, to be herself, to pave her own path.
I met Megan in the sixth grade at Roosevelt Middle School for the Arts. We played in the orchestra together, sang in choirs, performed poetry, made collages, and took French class together. Our time in middle school was magical. Not just for Megan and I, but for our whole group of friends. Spread out across the greater Milwaukee area, all coming to the inner city for an arts education, introducing each other to different ways of living. We came of age pre-internet, pre-cell phones, with lots of flannel and floral dresses, big bangs and scrunchies, Seventeen magazine and mixtapes. Megan’s mom’s house was a common place for sleepovers. It was within walking distance to Michelangelo’s pizza and the PickN’Save where we would buy grenadine to make kiddie cocktails thinking we were grown up. We’d listen to Tori Amos and They Might Be Giants. Many nights were spent with groups of us on the plaid couches in the brown carpeted living room gathered in sleeping bags watching movies. Megan always loved the scary ones, I always hid my eyes. She loved jokes. She loved impressions. She (very randomly) taught me that you could buy only 1 banana from a bunch if all you wanted was 1, you just take it off the bunch. She introduced me to political canvasing — occasionally spending weekends at her dad’s house putting out voting information and door hangers for local democratic candidates.
When the school board threatened to cut funding for the arts in the district, our school made black armbands with a white tear and wore them in protest. We persisted, the arts were saved. And we certainly took advantage — knowingly or not, we all found ourselves deeply immersed — photography club, artist in residence projects, the environmentally concerned students, dance recitals, dinner theater, singing groups, forensics, debate, plays, concerts, art shows, and apparently academics were in there. Megan loved theater, she loved performing. She loved dressing up, doing voices, singing, becoming characters, telling stories. From the moment I met her I can remember seeing she had a passion in her, a dream she was unafraid to chase, and it made me want to be part of the journey. I saw her passion, I saw her pain, I saw her persistence.
We went on to go to the same high school. While each of us took our own paths creating new friends, new interests, new outlets, we remained friends. We sat next to each other in French class and I’d try to help catch her up when she missed school to perform day time shows with First Stage or the Milwaukee Rep. In a similar way to finding all the art clubs to get out of class at Roosevelt, we both found ourselves in Catholic Leadership in high school, which by most accounts, was just an excuse to skip class that no one questioned. Ironically, we both actively questioned the church and would later no longer consider ourselves Catholic, but I’d like to believe there was something in the leadership and organizing aspect that stuck with us both. We weren’t as close in high school, yet there was a depth in our friendship where we were able to see past the surface on each other. I don’t remember what I knew, or how I knew things, but slowly I started to understand there was more pain masked by her passion.
I remember a time in our senior year we went to hang out on the east side, reliving middle school gatherings at the Coffee Trader on Downer. We went to a small boutique and she tried on a soft blue dress. As she came out of the dressing room, I could see the bones beneath her skin. She smiled brightly and twirled in the mirror. She always loved a good dress. Later I made a drawing about this day that would end up in my portfolio application for art school, although I don’t think I ever told anyone it was her in the blue dress. I saw her passion, I saw her pain, I saw her persistence.
After high school we lost touch. Occasionally hearing about each other through mutual friends. With the invention of social media we “connected” and “friended” loosely keeping track of each other’s whereabouts until I had stopped using social media altogether.
In 2016, days after the presidential election, as protests began to form, I kept thinking back to my first protest — the black armbands in middle school fighting against budget cuts for the arts. Having not been on facebook for years prior, I decided to log back in and see where people were. There was Megan, post after post passionately working on the Clinton campaign and out front in whatever would come next. It didn’t surprise me at all. I had reached out to Megan and a few other of our close middle school friends. At that moment, we were pulled back together. It was 22 years since graduating middle school — we’d all ventured into adult lives with marriages, kids, careers, scattered across the country — yet the bond we made in middle school was still there. Later that year, a group of us reunited in person. Over brunch we retold the stories of sleepovers and crushes, performances and recitals. Our conversation was filled with both contextualising our time in inner city Milwaukee Public Schools with realizing our racial and economic privileges, and simple pure nostalgia for a time when you needed to make sure you had a quarter to call your parents for a ride home from the mall. Megan told us about working on many political campaigns and filming for her new documentary — Why She Runs. I saw her passion, I saw her pain, I saw her persistence.
The next year Megan was in the Bay Area filming and stopped by my house. The midwestern girl in her didn’t allow her to show up empty handed, she had pink Planned Parenthood pom poms and “She Persisted” stickers for my 1 ½ and 4 year old daughters. I made her an avocado sandwich and we ate in my backyard. We talked more in depth about her work in politics. She explained her freshly dyed hair and manicured nails were done for a campaign she was working on. She knew how to work the system for her advantage, how to stand up, how to stand out. We talked about the sexism in a system working to fight sexism. We shared laughs and reminisced about our paths. In one breath she could rattle off the state assembly candidates voting records and impressions of our middle school teachers. I saw her passion, I saw her pain, I saw her persistence.
She had asked me to make some titles for Whey She Runs. One night I did a quick sketch, using a technique from 7th grade art class — outlining water color with black pen. I sent it to her just as an idea to see if it was the look she wanted, I explained it was only a sketch. But she loved it and the next thing I knew it was in the trailer and promo materials. I always meant to go back and make a more refined version not from a sketch book page. (Someone please tell me her documentary will be finished, I promise I’ll do more than a sketch).
In 2020 when the pandemic hit, we did what everyone did — got on Zoom. We swapped stories of quarantining, zoom school, political campaigns, moves and relationships. We celebrated Megan’s 40th on Zoom — she and Bo Brady had just moved to Miami and had cake with her uncle. The last time we all shared a zoom screen was November 18, 2020. We celebrated Kamala, heard about Megan’s new apartment in Miami, and longed for when COVID would end and we’d finally take a big trip together to celebrate that we’d all turned 40 during a pandemic. She was wearing overalls, and I remember thinking only she would be able to pull off the same outfit from sixth grade now. I saw her passion, I saw her pain, I saw her persistence.
I’ll remember the softness of her black flowy dresses with pastel flowers that she wore in the halls of Roosevelt and the boldness of the costumes and stage makeup that transformed her into so many characters. I’ll remember her sweet voice singing and harmonizing in chorus and her bold silliness of burping loudly from drinking soda too fast and rushing to stick her hand out on her forehead. She is who I think of when I hear Tori Amos, see ads for the Renaissance Fair, Daivd Lynch, or a bright blue Hillary Clinton pantsuit. She was fierce. She was a fighter. She was unafraid. She was a warrior for women’s rights, for Black Lives Matter, for Pride, for so many. She was passion, she was pain, she was persistence.
And now…
She’s a blue canary watching over us,
Who made a birdhouse in so many souls.
Special thanks to my mom for FaceTimeing with me while digging through all my old stuff still in my childhood bedroom to find memories and photos to text me. And to all our mutual friends whom I’ve had many text threads with these past few weeks.
