management

Viral

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: So in the week that was, Deitch Studio finally fell prey to Covid. Not surprisingly, despite being an avid mask wearer and careful in general, I of course was the one who brought it home. Our return to office has had me in most days in the prior week or so, traveling on the subway and all – although in reality I have been matriculating through the world for a long time for work. The office, our club for dinner, breakfast meetings, lunches with donors.

Mom had it a few weeks back despite our extraordinary efforts to protect her. With her existing health problems that was very scary. She was sick and sicker at various times and I am grateful that she pulled through and now even her cough has receded. I am also deeply grateful to her caretakers who stayed throughout despite personal risk to them and their families.

Anyway, when we least expected it I woke up with full-on symptoms after a day in the office and an evening out for work. I tested negative, but began isolating. I was six days from a dinner for 85 people, our first of its kind since January of ’20. Of course in a one-room apartment there really isn’t much isolating to do, let’s be honest.

We’ve all heard varying levels of sickness from friends and family. I would say for me day one was more or less like being hit by a two by four. Blinding headache, sore throat, laryngitis and a deep rattling cough developed nicely through Day One. I didn’t test positive until the evening of Day Three. As others have said, it was strange to see a positive test after literally years of negative ones. It was definitive too, not a wishy washy second line but a dark one.

The good news is that I progressed rapidly toward better daily. That Friday night I missed the last concert of our season and the festive closing receptions which my staff executed nicely. They sent photos.

This machine beeped loudly the whole time I was there. Battery seemed to be dying.

On Monday morning, Day Four, I called both my GP and my rheumatologist (I have written a bit about my psoriatic arthritis and exercising in spite of it and that post can be found here) and true to form, the rheumatologist got back to me within the hour. He had me off to the ER for a monoclonal infusion immediately. (My GP was to get back to me around 5:30 PM. Not sure she agreed with the decision of the other doc, but seemed to have the sense to realize that arguing about it now was too late.)

I ate something and grabbed an extra layer of clothing despite the heat. We all know that any trip to the ER is not fast and once in their clutches you stay and will wait what seems to be endlessly before being spit back out. (And they keep it freezing cold – is that really to kill germs as someone suggested?) I was there almost exactly a year ago when I broke two fingers running. (A post about that misadventure can be found here.) Kim walked me over the ten or so blocks; I felt up to it and figured even with a mask on and an open window no one had it coming to them to have me in their cab.

As expected, folks keep a healthy distance from you in a hospital when you tell them you are Covid positive. (The admitting guard put on gloves to take my paperwork from me.) However, the doc who saw me cheerfully informed me that he had just gotten over it so feared my germs not. I was quickly approved for the infusion and sent to wait in a closet room which was at least twice as big as the tiny one I sat in for four hours with my hand, but they were storing furniture in this one. Kim went off to work some once I was ingested by the bowels of Lenox Hill Hospital.

My room doubled as storage. If the bed had been a tad more tempting I might have napped a bit but ick.

I sat with a port in my arm, waiting, while sitting in on two seating meetings for the dinner and helping to make some plans for it to happen without me, while I continued to sit in my closet. Some of you have read of my staffing woes and in addition to an entirely depleted staff those on the job are entirely new and have never seen an event in our hall. (A post can be found here.) There was no question about going to the dinner, even if I was better I would still be contagious. Other guests were dropping out, staff too, as the virus eddied around; my boss went down with it within days of me.

While I was sick and working from home I read an article in the NYT discussing how the sick day has disappeared and also how stupid it is to keep working while you are sick. I had time to ponder that, but I was leaving my colleagues in enough of a lurch by not being able to be there for this dinner. The least I could do is what I could manage from home, the seating and all the preliminary work could be done. (In addition my beloved Executive Assistant fell and broke her kneecap this week! Definitely worse.) Eventually my meetings ended, read my e-book for awhile, I got the infusion, was observed for another hour and eventually sent home.

I continued to improve over the next days although there was no dramatic change from the infusion that I could tell. By Wednesday I might have gone to the dinner if it wasn’t Covid, although that probably would have been a mistake, but I was feeling that much better. The dinner went off without a hitch and thanks to the miracle of cell phones and real time video it was almost like being there, even allowing me to double check seating and sight lines for our guests.

On of the snaps of the set up for the dinner last Wednesday. We used Facetime and stand-ins to do last minute seating.

Thursday allowed me to collapse a bit, although I tuned in for some follow up from the evening before, sent some emails to guests who had texted or emailed their well wishes for my recovery. I sent love and thanks to my colleagues for carrying it all off so brilliantly.

I had lost much of my sense of taste and smell by then. Then Kim began coughing and round two began. He had the good sense to test positive immediately. We spent yesterday trying to reach his doc even though he also seemed to improve. In the absence of his doctor getting back to him and it being Saturday we are wandering over to Urgent Care later today.

I am eyeing the good weather and wondering if I might try my first run as well. New running shoes showed up yesterday.

Tempting, right?

There is a lot of divisiveness around this illness, the vaccines etc. I can only say both that I was extremely grateful during the worst of this that I had gotten vaccinated and gotten the booster. (I wouldn’t have gotten the booster if it hadn’t been required for work to be really honest.) Man, I don’t want to think about this being that much worse than it was. The first wave of it must have been truly horrifying, but for me it wasn’t reduced to a few days of a common cold either.

Weirdly there is a lot of guilt attached to Covid. Who gave it to me? Who did I end up giving it to during a contagious period without symptoms? Just plain disappointment at getting it after avoiding it so long. It’s all wrong headed, but I still felt that way. Also, I found it oddly depressing as well. I almost wonder if it is a chemical aspect of the illness, an overwhelming sort of hopelessness and despair in the first few days. Others have agreed. I mention it in case others experience it.

For now that is our tale of illness and hopefully now recovery. With any luck, this will be the last you hear about it and we can be back to photos, toys or maybe a nice new jewelry acquisition starting tomorrow.

Interviewing

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It is another sub-genre post, musings on my work life. Today I am deeply in thought about the week that was and will share a few thoughts about it as my mulling about it is occupying my brain this morning.

To start I will mention that we are back in our office on a hybrid schedule and because it is early days there is a certain amount of confusion and new patterns to be built. We recently had a staff meeting with half the office on Zoom and only my cell phone to tie them in.

Meanwhile, my office computer chose yesterday to flat out die – only a red flashing light came on. (My liaison in Technology emailed me red=dead in response to my hopeful inquiry about resuscitation.) I guess sadly the long days of disuse still counted against its useful life. I’m glad that my laptop continues to chug along at home, taped together and challenged at charging though it is. The current lean state of the staff is more evident with the new schedule and there are some days when it still feels like when I would go in during the height of the pandemic, largely alone.

Like many folks these days, over the waning days of the extended pandemic period, a number of my colleagues have migrated to other states, different careers and new paths – Etsy businesses were formed and consulting gigs found. Therefore, like so many others, I have been looking to build a new team and in the process start to reimagine who we are and what we will be. I have gone down blind alleys that didn’t pan out and cost me time and energy as my own group becomes understandably impatient with the attenuated process. Ghosts of former colleagues inhabit the space as we forget we won’t see them at those desks any longer.

An ongoing need to test as I spend more time out in the world has made me a regular at the LabQ tent.

Nonetheless, I am determined to be as thoughtful about each role as I would be if it was the only one I was filling this year and with several to fill, I am working hard to find the right combinations of skills and personalities to complement the existing team. Several months of groundwork is beginning to culminate in a tsunami of finalists and I find myself across the table (quite literally as most of my final in-person interviews are being done in an array of eating establishments across the city), from a long line of great people who are interviewing me as much as I am interviewing them.

If it wasn’t already a period of reflection on where we’ve been and where we want to go their probing questions have me considering it with determined frequency. Frankly these folks have mostly already vetted me, my management style and approach beforehand so our conversations go deeper. How has the team managed during these rough years and how are we pulling out of it? Where will we head now? How much travel do we anticipate?

I have some answers but my crystal ball falls short at others – yes to a hybrid office schedule, no idea on how much travel but probably some whereas it had been a lot. (Some of my tales of work related travel around the country and the world can be found here, here and here.) What are my goals and what keeps me at my job? The conversations focus me and rededicate me in an unexpected way. I am rebuilding and reimagining as we speak. The candidates are all savvy and have researched the organization and its finances online. People are looking to make the right move.

Flowers on my desk back in ’18. It had been my practice to buy new ones each Monday for the week.

Small kindnesses extended to people over the course of my career have come back to me more than tenfold. Perhaps it is where I am in my own career or the comparably large number of people I need to hire, but it is almost overwhelming.

For every informational interview I extended, sympathetic ear I lent, each hand up or a place at the table I might have been able to provide, all these years later candidates tell me that they are sitting across from me now because they or someone they respect remembered it. I am touched by the number of people who are willing to vouch for me in this way and am grateful that my career at the Met gave me the opportunities it did. (I wrote about working at the Metropolitan Museum in a post that can be found here and a recent post dedicated to an early mentor of mine can be found here.)

Our Essentially Ellington competition alumni band performing earlier this week. A stunningly talented group of young musicians who have competed in the 27 years of this educational program.

I am pleased to report that the first senior position was filled yesterday. I am so excited about the new team member and the new partner he will be! Building on his skills gives me a benchmark for the others now as I move forward.

Therefore, as you try to balance long work days against those requests that always seem to come at the wrong moment, I encourage you to take a deep breath and find the time to sit on that panel or committee, or talk to that person. Whatever area you work in I am sure it too has a community with a long memory like mine and, like all aspects of life, what we put out in the world comes back to us in many ways. As I sit across from these talented folks and talk to them about their careers and hopes for the future I am refueled and very grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Time

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I found myself thinking about time during a particularly hard won five mile run yesterday at lunchtime here in Manhattan. It seems my body is more willing to do my bidding in the early mornings and by late morning and early afternoon it balks some at the request. Luckily this is where habit kicks in though and after working the kinks out I’m good until some point at about mile four where I have to apply some discipline to make it through. The fifth mile was added recently and time doesn’t always allow for it, so I am still negotiating it each time.

Being a fairly compulsive gatherer of data I have recently started using an app (Strava) to record distance. My phone was somewhat mercurial in its recording of distance, same exact run different reads, but now I get not only distance, but speed and performance such as tracking time on inclines. It’s a bit dangerous to start feeding me this sort of information because I immediately become competitive with myself and have an urge to go faster and further.

Recent Strava read from a run.

I have written before about the fact that I run slowly (some of those running posts can be found here and here), but even in the realm of slow jogging I find myself increasing my speed incrementally now that I see it. So I am thinking about time in various ways while I run, either in small literal ways or in a larger sense. Seasonal change happens in almost daily increments as demanded by the weather, always reminding me that regardless of what I think time marches forward inexorably.

Winter ’20 view from Carl Schurz Park during my first winter running.

I maintain a photo journal of my runs on Instagram (mostly posted as stories and can be found on the four or so days a week I run @deitchstudio) and those snapshots remain on my phone to remind me of the seasons of my runs over the last eighteen months since I started in November of ’20. Running in the cold gives way to spring and then the heat of summer and back again to fleece leggings. I am excited to see the progress of the magnolia and cherry trees in New Jersey as spring burgeons and when I am back this week.

East River view spring of ’21.

Time and the perception of it passing is somewhat subjective in my opinion. Certain activities elongate time, not stopping but slowing. Meditation, printing photos, lifting weights and now running are among the activities that produce this effect for me. My work days, always crazy busy, tend to speed time up in a reversal. I have always needed to find activities to balance that frenetic work energy lest I just burn out completely.

Time with my mother in New Jersey passes at a different pace too. I find myself examining that time which also slows it down. Morning coffee with her is a good time and I savor it. Running in her suburban neighborhood takes on a somewhat magical quality and the same five miles seems more epic there than my trot up and down my also beloved East River at home.

Magnolia tree near mom’s which inspired the purchase of one for her yard.

Meanwhile, I have just passed the five year anniversary of my current job. Like everyone else, I have conducted the past two years during the pandemic and am now in a liminal phase of partial re-entry as we commence year three. I have frequently said that I learned more about my job (fundraising for a performing arts organization) during the past two years than I learned in the previous three decades. That is an exaggeration of course and it is the first thirty years that made success (defined in large part as survival) possible. I have drawn on experience, but also the leadership that I worked with and learned from in my nascent decades working at the Metropolitan Museum. (I wrote about my time there and my departure here.)

Me at Dizzy’s post Gala in ’18! Wearing the same dress this year!

As I prepare to usher my somewhat tattered troop into a new work world with weekly time back in an office, I am reminded that despite an illusion otherwise, time has not stood still. The roadmap of our work remains intact, another annual Gala (the first in-person in two years) is on the immediate horizon. However, the issues we face for interaction together, such as mask and vaccination protocol, possible infection and negotiating our in-person time and space together are entirely new and I don’t begin to know how to answer all their questions. We are all older and we have spent the past two years intensively together and yet very much apart. So I stand on the threshold of my fifth year entirely unclear about what it will bring, but time will tell.

Hamantaschen

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today I am pausing to post about one of my mentors who died earlier this month at the age of 89. Her name was Judy and although it saddened me deeply to hear of her passing I know the past few years have not been good to her, pandemic even not withstanding, and she must have hated that.

She had left her beloved Manhattan, whose sidewalks she had pounded for years and whose museums, theaters and concert halls she had frequented, for a retirement community out of state and near one of her daughters more than ten years ago. I saw her subsequently but her health during the years of her retirement has not been great in general despite having been a very robust senior. We had kept in touch through cards and occasional calls until my calls seemed to confuse her about 18 months ago.

As long-standing Pictorama readers may know, I worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty years before taking my current position about five years ago. (My post dedicated to leaving the Met can be found here.) For several decades of that time I worked under Judy until, after her semi-retirement, she spent another several years working for me in one of those twists which I use as an example of management challenges I have faced when asked. As it happens, she did not actually hire me, but inherited me when she took up her position at the Met. My previous assignment was winding down and she was coming to start a new program. I remember thinking I would stay long enough to give it a try and see if I liked it which we joked about decades later.

How I remember her best, at an undated Met event.

There are many things I could say about her wit, intellect and elegance. Always ready to discuss politics or the latest production of a play, she was a remarkable woman and an enormous influence on me. Her voice continues in my head today pertaining to certain things and we were so close for so many years that an avalanche of condolences have come my way since news of her death was made known.

An attorney turned fundraiser, Judy had exacting standards which fit well into an organization which prized itself on world excellence. It created a high bar that I in particular as the person working most closely with her, assumed quickly. Whether it was a point of grammar (it was an office where grammatical discussions ensued on a regular basis and worn copies of Chicago Style would cross reference with a book of Met style and occasionally someone would site The New Times) or where page numbers should appear in a document, she had definite opinions. Pre-computer I sat with a thesaurus and a dictionary on a shelf over my desk which I would refer to continuously. (They remain there although mostly ceremonial at this point and of course inaccessible there over the past two years of working from home.)

More less the edition she would have kept on her shelf.

It should be noted that a graduate of Smith college she had worked at different jobs (I believe she wrote for the early television show Omnibus), but was newly enrolled in law school when she was unexpectedly widowed. She was left with two young daughters and chose the difficult path of completing law school to support them. When I met her, Judy had left the practice of law and found her way into the newly developing area of fundraising called planned giving which focused on the tax advantages of philanthropy and estate planning.

Ours were careers that would span the dawn of the computer age and my early office eventually boasted one of the two fax machines for the Museum (that thing was loud and it used strange heat activated paper), followed by and a series of nascent computers and early attempts at email where I think we all had AOL accounts briefly. (I also transitioned from messages taken on note pads for that purpose to voice mail over the years!) We worked through a period where she hand wrote documents (on lined legal pads of paper) and I typed them on a word processor before we graduated to all having personal computers. Her handwriting was unbelievably neat or this would have been more of a chore. I rarely if ever had to ask what she had written, even when she was editing a document.

Within a few years our work and systems burgeoned and I was ambitious and took on all opportunities to turn my hand to additional areas. Therefore, in addition to my work with her I was running a growing annual giving program and special events such as dinners and receptions for exhibition openings, while we continued to work together on estate giving, creating complex contract templates and proposals. She was somewhat proprietary over my time and well, me. However she understood and applauded my ambition, and Judy knew that the best way to keep someone like me was to give me a lot of variety to learn from and keep me busy. I continued to work with her because I did learn from her and understood how valuable that was.

Judith Hozore in an undated photo from an obit. I remember this dress so well!

It wasn’t long before Judy evolved into den mom and chief confessor extraordinaire to the entire office and even a swath of the Museum. Given the closeness of my relationship (I used to quip that I spent many more waking hours a day with her weekly than with my now husband Kim) I would be tempted to say that she was a second mom to me, but she understood that I already had a wonderful mom who I am very close and our relationship was very close but definitely different.

When she retired I accepted the mantle of office good cop and chief sympathizer to a large degree although not a mom myself, never quite rising to the level of den mother. (Running my own office now I am keenly aware that I don’t get to be that person any longer as I am now required to be bad cop as well and keep the show running. I do miss my primarily good cop role at times.)

Me in a somewhat combative looking photo from right before I left the Museum.

Judy was a fairly observant Jew and working with her pulled me closer to my (half) Jewish roots, reminding me of or teaching me about, aspects of the religion. She is, perhaps, the only person I know well who kept kosher. She taught me about the lesser celebrated holidays and some of the details of the better known

Every year at this time Judy would bake endless batches of hamantaschen for Purim. These are butter cookie pockets filled with thick jam in flavors like apricot, prune and poppyseed. Judy had a few recipes up her sleeve (we disagreed on the specifics of making matzoh brie as I remember and sadly I never tasted her potato latke that I understand were excellent), but by her own account didn’t love cooking.

Her hamantaschen production was her annual contribution and she made enough that tins of it would appear in the office each spring and soon it was legendary. In early March people would start to wander by the office with a weather eye for the day they would appear. She always secured a special tin of them just for me, heavy on apricot, and upon her retirement I ended up with it. I cannot see them in stores without thinking of hers. (The tin stayed with me and is the photo at the top of the post. I opened it today and discovered I had squirreled all sorts of Met related bits in it including several tin types and a nice plastic elephant that used to grace my desk.)

These are fairly close to the way I remember hers, thinner crust than on the commercial ones you see frequently.

She guarded me like a momma bear over the years and I joked with one of her daughters via email that they must have felt like they had a third sister during those decades. I witnessed the wedding of her younger daughter (where I met a friend of hers who is a minister, Liz Wheeler, who ultimately married me and Kim) and waited with anticipation the birth of numerous grandchildren. Family always came first for her and her daughters and grandchildren were truly her proudest accomplishments. In turn, over time, she met my father and sister when they made their way to the Museum periodically and she knew the inner workings of my family and friends intimately as well. She was among those who saw me through the death of my sister toward the end of our time working together.

In addition to being exacting, Judy also had a hot temper and although never in all those years did she lose her temper with me, I did witness a number of remarkable skirmishes over time. Those who know me well understand that I have a hard and fast rule that I will not work for anyone who yells at me. I worked in kitchens early in my career and decided that I had had enough yelling for a working lifetime. There was one occasion, at the end when she was part time and working for me, when she came to me very angry about something and I told her that I thought she was being unfair and why, and maybe it wasn’t really me she was angry at. To her credit she accepted that; it was the closest we ever came to a real argument and I suspect was mostly about the shifting sands of time she was experiencing.

When after her retirement I had taken on a large part of the management and administration for that office and then eventually was lured away from the Met to run my own office, she marveled openly at my ambition. She had never wanted to leave her area of fundraising and was shocked but very proud of my subsequent accomplishments, such as they were.

I got a call last Sunday from a former Museum colleague while out running errands telling me of the paid notice in the New York Times announcing her death. Shortly after the call ended, I looked in a window as I continued on 86th Street and these trays of hamantaschen were on display. I thought to myself that it was like a wink from Judy as she went on her way.