***I wrote this a year ago.***
On Tuesday night in Los Angeles, I found myself in the surreal joy of shaking hands with comedy greats after being part of the guest cast on a long-running sitcom, surrounded by heroes of the genre. It marked the first live taping of the premiere episode, pushing my adrenaline and anxiety to their limits. In less than twenty four hours, my adrenal glands would be taxed for an entirely different reason. Wednesday morning arrived and I needed to renew my fingerprints for my teaching permit as an acting coach to children before I drove home. The nearest option was a gun store offering FBI-level fingerprinting service. As I stood in that store, semi-automatic weapons adorned the walls, and the attendant casually laughed with a customer about which bullet magazines would be most effective and not jam up when needed.
Miles away in Las Vegas, similar weapons would be used in an act of violence on the UNLV campus, where my college age kiddo, whom I affectionately call my Childling (for privacy purposes), invests countless hours studying, working in labs, and attending classes as an honors student. They are my heart outside my body, my reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the Sisyphean industry I fell into as a young mother.
As a single mom with no college degree, I constantly stressed the importance of higher education as they were growing up so that they can have opportunities and economic stability, and hopefully avoid the constant struggle of gig-worker survival mode. I tried to put them in the best schools — making deals for a discounted rate with one of the top artistic schools in San Francisco for their primary education and when I couldn’t afford that anymore, I moved us into a tiny one bedroom studio in a zip code that would get us into the best public school education available. The drive to excel, to secure access to life-changing programs, is ingrained in them and so many others in immigrant families like ours. But my constant reminders may have made them comfortable with overwork and pushing until exhaustion.
Maintaining a 3.94 grade point average is not easy by any means, and on top of that they work without pay in one of the labs at UNLV for the experience and the chance to publish a scientific paper backed by UNLV’s reputation as an R1 research facility. They were in the midst of study week, the moniker given to the week before finals where many students devote any extra time to cramming for the exams. I’ve been encouraging them to not postpone moments of joy and to not feel like a failure for resting, but the hustle culture and the immense pressure they face as a scholarship student is overwhelming. And they watch me grind hypocritically through endless auditions, countless rejections and the elusive nature of “breakthrough projects.”
Do as I say, not as I do.
At around noon, I received a text from my kiddo:
“hey, just wanted to let you know that I’m ok and not on campus, but there’s an active shooter at UNLV right now.”
I’m Ok. Not on campus. Active Shooter. They are ok. Active Shooter. Not On Campus. Active Shooter.
They are Ok. THEY ARE OK. THEY ARE OK. The words scramble in my brain as I look up where they are on my Find My iPhone app. In the recent past while filming on location, I have spent the evenings watching their little dot make their way from end of the city of Las Vegas to another.
Embarrassingly, I have also freaked out when the dot lay unmoving in an abandoned construction site only to find out later that an arcade was later built on that location and Google Earth had an old satellite capture. But now, seeing that little dot at safe at home was the symbol that kept me sane as I began the four hour drive back home.
“some of my friends are still there though,” they texted.
My Childling would have been at the school right outside the Student Union, drinking coffee and
probably participating in a Lego robotics demonstration had they not made the last minute decision to postpone their lab work and get some much-needed rest.
I drove back from LA, intermittently crying at how fleeting life can be and how grateful I am that my kiddo listened to that still small voice. I wanted to hug them so badly — I want them to always know how loved they are. I want to protect them from everything and keep them safe. But I know that I can’t protect them anymore. I need to let go and let them be an adult. But how can I when we still live in a world, nearly twenty years after Columbine where school shootings still happen and people are turn a blind eye to atrocities happening to other children in different countries across the globe? I still see their five year old face in my dreams.
My heart also ached for the students who were still trapped in classrooms, uncertain about their fate.
The shooter, now identified as a 67-year-old Anthony Polito, was a tenured professor who had applied for a job at UNLV. Police reports assure us that he did not target students, but in the heat of the moment, trapped individuals couldn’t know that. Run – Hide – Fight became a haunting mantra, etched into the collective memory of Las Vegas residents since the Mandalay Bay shooting in 2017. I’m thankful for the swift police response, but this incident reignites the conversation on gun control, mental heath programs, and the desperation that drives people to want to harm others. There are reports that when the police searched his home, they found an eviction notice taped to his front door and a list of assumed targets inside.
When I was younger, I testified as a domestic violence survivor in favor of a law in San Mateo preventing abusers or those with restraining orders from obtaining guns – a precursor to the California Red Flag laws. I don’t know if the gunman obtained his firearms illegally or bought them through the proper channels like the store I was in earlier in the day. (*although I would still advocate for a more rigorous approach inspired by countries like Japan, where those who would want access to firearms have to undergo a mental health evaluation and drug tests, as well as pass a background check).
When I got home, I hugged my Childling a little tighter as they texted their friends to see if they were safe and how they were holding up. They opted to sleep on the living room pull-out couch, finding comfort in what reminded me of the makeshift pillow forts that they used to hide in when they really were a child.
