OBRA: The Art of Work

Alysia Gadson

General manager at Kannabis Works

I’ve been in and around cannabis at different times during my life and I decided that it was time to get back into the cannabis industry, especially with it being legal now. I had worked in cannabis when it was under Prop. 215, which was the caregiver act, which meant that you could grow up to 99 plants legally if you had people as members of your organization; there were a lot of loopholes to make it work, and I did, so I’ve been a cannabis cultivator professionally. My idea was to work here at Kannabis Works for maybe a year and then go back to Australia and really kick things off there. But Australia has been really slow to legalize. I thought we’d be a lot further along over there by now. I approached the friend that I used to grow cannabis with ten years ago and said, “Hey, I’d like a job if you’ve got one in the dispensary, I just want to work on the floor, learn the products, meet people, and go back to Australia.” They said yes and...

Diane

Thacker Berry Farm strawberry stand sales associate

This is my first season. I was a personal assistant to the elderly and I was doing that for years. Not medical stuff, but I household managed when they had hospice, that kind of thing. I suffered so much loss… I lost so many people within an eight-year period, that it was really taking a toll on me. Then my own mother fell and broke her hip and when she died, I cared for her in all regards. Then I was like, “I have to do something different.” I saw an ad for this and I thought, I’m very social, I used to always be outside rather than just one-on-one with someone in their house, so that’s how I wound up here. I applied for this job just to get a change.

Unfortunately, the season’s going to end in a few weeks; I’m not quite sure of the date yet. But they normally do a pumpkin patch, Pa’s Pumpkin Patch, and then Snow Pines, so we’re waiting to hear on that because of everything going on with COVID. I’m hoping to work the pumpkin patch...

Alise Arato
Food stylist

alisearato.com

I grew up in Toronto, my husband as well, and we both went to school for visual arts. I was always on a visual arts path all through school, including high school and then I went to University as a major in drawing and painting and hit a point when I realized that fine art wasn’t the right direction. As much as I loved the visual arts, I didn’t see myself making a living quite in that way and I wasn’t certain what I was going to do. I had regret that I didn’t pursue art in a more graphic arts way.

During that time I had always loved food and cooking and I started making desserts, elaborate wedding cakes and birthday cakes, etc. Somehow I went down that avenue of food and I started catering, and that snowballed. My husband and I then moved to Los Angeles for him to do his graduate studies in visual arts at USC and we ended up staying here. I was still kind of trying to find my way and he was going to school and I started teaching children’s cooking c...

Sari Cohen

TV host/journalist

hollywoodfirstlookfeatures.com | inlovemag.com

When I first started and I was looking for writing jobs and I first locked onto this editorial gig, they were looking for a lifestyle writer and political writer and I wanted to write about politics. I wanted to follow Bernie Sanders around. I pitched them six different articles, three about lifestyle and three about politics and that’s when they wrote back to me and they were like, “We want to give you a column and we want it to be about L.A. fashion trends.” The weird thing was I didn’t know about fashion trends, I didn’t know about brands, but I went with the idea of what inspires somebody to wear what they’re wearing and who they are underneath and what that represents. And that’s how AXS found me, because I started interviewing more people.

So things have gotten crazier! Basically what happened was things magnified a million times over since that last interview when it was like the Wild West out there… I real...

Genevieve Anders

Genevieve Elaine Photography | https://genevieveelaine.com/

I used to take a ton of pictures of my dogs. This was before I had kids. I had a Canon PowerShot and I’d go get all the Halloween costumes and I would dress them up and take pictures of them. My boyfriend at the time bought me my first camera, and I didn’t even know how to turn it on. It was so intimidating that I was like, “I just want to use my PowerShot… I don’t want that.” But then I learned how to turn it on and that’s what I did: I took pictures of my dogs. I had friends that were on Flickr and they were in a photography group – it was 365 Project. They give you a prompt, like “hot or cold” or it could be literally anything, and you have to be creative and it was every single day. So I did that for the year with my camera and my dogs and I posted everything on Flickr. Getty images contacted me and wanted to use the photos of my dogs. So they did; they used the photos of my dogs and they own the pictures st...

Hannah Quinn

Bartender/server

I was 16 and I wanted a job. I remember I was sitting at Norm’s restaurant and somebody told me I would love working there, like, “You would be really good as a waitress.” I was 16, working at Target, did not like it, and then kind of wiggled my way in to Norm’s that was right down the street. It was a 24-hour one and I was able to start out as a host. I liked being a host, but I wanted to serve. I was determined to make that cash money! I thankfully was only a host for six months and then started serving, so maybe I think I was closer to 18 when I became a server. I fell in love with it. There’s a super addicting weird high that I get when I’m in the weeds and really busy. I love having to do like 13 little things all at once because I think it helps me feel like I’m checking off a list. And I was 18 years old and having money in my pocket every single day, which was really rad.

I think I lasted at Norm’s for a few years. I was ready to move on and my mom fo...

Aileen Del Riego

Director of Operations

I’m the director of operations of a privately owned dental practice. I had a really nontraditional journey to getting to my job. Before I started managing a dental practice I was teaching preschool, which actually is not very much different, as it turns out, than managing a dental practice. And then I was the director on the board of Wagging Dog Rescue, and that’s a volunteer position but it was a lot of dealing with different people and personalities and things that people are really passionate about. You just have to play into what people need, in that position. Same thing with the preschool that I worked at. It was kind of interesting because it’s a parent co-op preschool so I was the only teacher in the room and then I’d be working with three volunteer parents every day. It was the same 15 parents, because I had 15 kids, so it wasn’t like new people every day but it was on a rotating schedule and so managing all of that was a lot. I ran parent...

Regina DeMoville | Owner, Heart Captioning, Inc.

https://heartcaptioning.com/

A lot of people know court reporting as the lady sitting in the court with the little machine. A normal keyboard, the average is like 40, 50, 60 words per minute. On this, our average is 200 words per minute. In school, we start out in the beginning with theory and that’s where they teach you the keyboard. So, you notice that there’s no letters on the keys. The first thing that they teach you is which keys are what. They give you a little card stock picture of the keyboard that has the keys on it.

This is the left bank. This is the right bank. And then down here are the vowels. How it works is it’s phonetic, so the beginning sound of a word would be on the left side and then you have the vowel which would be like the middle part of the word. And then the right part would be the end. On here [regular keyboard], we would type cat, C-A-T. But there is no C on our keyboard. It’s K because it’s phonetic: it would be...

Christine Catipon
Clinical psychologist

I am a licensed psychologist, with a doctorate in clinical psychology. What that means is I provide talk therapy to people who want emotional support. I’m called Dr. Christine or Dr. Catipon or sometimes just Christine, because I don’t like emphasizing any power differential when I’m working with my clients. Some clients like to use “Doctor” in addressing me because of their cultural background or their respect for elders or professionals, so I’m comfortable with however they want to address me.

I’m a second-generation Filipino-American, and from a really early age, there was a lot of pressure to become a doctor. To my immigrant parents and extended family, it was all about coming here to the U.S. to give their kids a “better life.” What that looks like is financial success and being very affluent. So from kindergarten, I was told I was going to be a doctor. A medical doctor — that’s the only kind of doctor that they could acknowledge existed. But...

Maria Morris

Hypnotherapist | Embody Excellence Hypnotherapy

Both my parents are ministers. My dad is much more orthodox; my mother is unorthodox. Both Christian, two totally different perspectives on religion! My mother was the type that studied Eastern medicine, meditation, she took college classes for communication. My mother and dad have a 14-year age gap, so whereas my dad is very educated also, he was educated later. My dad’s the young one. So, she always taught us about the power of our thoughts, about healing, and I used to see her pray for people, lay hands on people… You know, the falling out, the stereotypical stuff of people falling all over the place and “You need a healing?” — that type of stuff. But you know what, I’ve seen people actually get healed in situations like that, as crazy and theatrical as it is — and looks — I realized that it’s all about the person who’s receiving and believing and that it can be any religion, as long as you have a belief system. The mind is...