Deborah Kendrick
An observation I made decades ago was that many people with visual impairments needed to take a patchwork approach to employment. Someone who was good with numbers but hadn't yet been successful finding full-time employment, for example, could tutor some high school kids, complete and file income tax returns for people less inclined to do their own, and maybe pick up a part-time assignment doing the pay roll for a small business. They might even pick up a bit of business providing financial planning advice.
This kind of approach is especially common for artists. If your most notable skill is in writing a poem, playing the clarinet, or making a beautiful ceramic pot, piecing together several small jobs might provide a sustainable path to generating income while still doing the work you love.
What happens then, I wondered in late March 2020, if you are one of those self-employed artists with multiple part-time, seasonal, or inconsistent income streams, and the coronavirus pandemic sends everyone scurrying into isolation?
It just happened that I was wondering about these things when I received an email from AccessWorld reader Audrey Joy Levine.
A self-employed musician, Audrey’s schedule is typical of that hodgepodge approach known to so many self-employed artists, blind or sighted. Through a business she and a friend created over a decade ago, Futura Enterprises, she was working with middle school and high school students with an already established talent to fine-tune their skills and enhance their professional options. She was working with seniors in her community, teaching simple chords and scales and music theory. She was a performing artist, playing piano and singing. All of that, as she wrote to me, “came to a screeching halt two weeks ago.”
That marker in time, of course, was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Audrey lives and works in New York City, currently the very hottest of hotbeds of the pandemic.
As she summed it up in her message to me, just prior to the necessity for all of us to isolate ourselves, “I had a job with the Community Center in the complex where I live; I was teaching music to kids, seniors, running sing-alongs. … I had a night gig at a steakhouse, where I took song requests and got folks dancing in the aisle.”
And then, all of it stopped.
Audrey’s message, of course, prompted two questions: First, how does a blind person establish this combination of employment opportunities and, second, what will she do now that she is unable to go to any of the people and places where she worked?
Always Music?
Raised in her earliest years by a single mom, Audrey Joy Levine describes her childhood as idyllic. Her mother loved her and her extended family did, too. Her grandfather noticed her eyes weren’t following a finger movement when she was only six weeks old, and she was diagnosed early as having retinitis pigmentosa. Her mom was dating someone who made braille blocks when Audrey was only two years old, so her braille instruction began. When she was three, her mom introduced her to those little magnets shaped like the letters of the alphabet, so she learned her print letters as well.
When her grandfather asked for Hanukkah gift ideas, Audrey’s mom suggested a toy piano. Thus, even before she was in school, Audrey’s lifelong love of music began. When it was time for school, she was enrolled in a public school, and learned braille and all the other necessary skills a blind child needs from a teacher who traveled from school to school throughout Nassau County. All of those kids, about 20 of them, were assembled from time to time for field trips and celebrations, so Audrey sometimes had exposure to other blind kids. (One of those kids, incidentally, when she was twelve or thirteen and going to Hebrew School in preparation for her bat mitzvah was AccessWorld’s own Jay Leventhal.) When Audrey was in the second grade, her teacher asked all of the kids what special wish they might have. Audrey's leading wish was not for eyesight, but for a daddy and a piano. She wasn’t talking about the toy on which she could play just about anything by ear, but a real piano with 88 keys!
The newspaper picked up on and published that little girl’s request. It just happened that the editor’s brother owned Jack Kahn’s Music, a renowned music store in New York, and Audrey’s mother received a call from Jack himself. “Don’t take anyone else’s crap,” Jack Kahn told her mother, as the family story goes. He himself was selecting the right piano for little Audrey, he informed her mother, and before long, it was delivered. (Audrey also got her other wish, when her mother eventually remarried and gave Audrey a father she adores.)
Music and Business
Eventually, Audrey took piano lessons at the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York. There she added to her already solid foundation in literary braille by becoming fluent in reading and writing braille music notation. When it came time for college, music was an obvious choice. “But in my family,” she explains, “music wasn’t enough. To be prepared for a career, I needed to find a college that emphasized both music and business.”
Her first college was Hofstra University. After so many weekends of traveling with friends to Greenwich Village, however, she eventually transferred to New York University, and graduated from that school in 1981 as a member of their first music business class. In addition to that undergraduate degree, she ultimately earned a master’s degree in performing arts administration.
Teaching and Performing
For the next several years, Audrey taught in a variety of schools and other programs throughout the New York area. Along the way she became licensed to teach and earned a master's in performance (“just by giving a recital”) in 1997. Some of her teaching was in special education and sometimes it was in nonprofit sectors such as at the Boys and Girls Club. Always, it was about sharing the joy of music with young people.
She and her now business partner, Kalvin Stevens, kept running into one another and ultimately formed their business, Futura Enterprises. They work with young professionals, Audrey coaching them to improve and enhance their musical talent and Kalvin guiding them toward a more marketable visual image. Futura Enterprises also organizes parties and events, for which she says Kalvin does the organizational part and she does the schmoozing!
Essential Tools
Although Audrey’s work and routines had come, as she said, “to a screeching halt” when I spoke with her, she was by no means despondent or distressed. She and Kalvin were hunkering down in her New York apartment, strategizing future plans, researching grant possibilities, and staying busy. Semi-retired since 2008, her financial shift is not dire. Audrey has the same baby grand piano she has had since 1975, and works out new songs every day. She is taking a song-writing course and has obtained an agent for marketing herself as a voiceover talent.
Braille music has been at the center of all her work for almost as long as she can remember, and she is proud that she has built personal relationships with NLS Music Section directors and had the opportunity to influence the choices made there about the braille music to be produced. NLS patrons who find Carole King, Broadway musicals, and Motown hits in the musical literature available in braille from NLS might be feeling some reverberation of the vocal opinions stated without hesitation by Audrey Levine to NLS music staff over the years.
In addition to braille music, other essential tools are her Windows-based PC, her HIMS Braille Sense U2 Mini, MAC laptop, APH Refreshabraille display, her iPhone and, of course, her piano. For her restaurant performances, she uses a Casio keyboard with mic input.
Audrey Joy Levine’s love of music has carried her into a wide variety of work experiences and even though she, like the rest of us, is looking at an uncertain length of time of remaining at home, she is using the same skills she always has to keep generating opportunities. She’s wiping down the banister as she walks up and down eleven flights in her building each morning, and then riding her exercise bike “to nowhere and back for a while.” She doesn’t hesitate to call upon people she knows or those who are, as they say, friends of friends. She is outgoing and confident. She says her musical repertoire is currently about 500 songs and that she can play any song in any key. Her best talent, however, and the one to be noted by those blind people aspiring to assemble similar artistic careers, might arguably be her fervent belief in herself.
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
Related articles:
- Employment Matters: David Van Der Molen, Member Services Associate and Audio Book Narrator by Deborah Kendrick
- A Profile of Ron Brooks, Vice President, Transit Market Development, American Logistics by Deborah Kendrick
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