narrator
Mara Levi was born February 17, 1977 in Oberlin, OH, and grew up in Oberlin and Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. They attended Amherst College and graduated in 1999 with a BA in Music, then received an MA in Music Education from New York University in 2012. After forming the band Kid Sampson with their friend Jeremy Sosenko in college, Levi worked as a touring musician, primarily performing their solo work, from 1999 through 2012. They were most active in the Northampton music scene from 2000 to 2004, during which time they played at such venues as Fire and Water, PACE, the Iron Horse, and Flywheel. After moving to Washington, D.C. in 2004, Levi formed the band The Pushovers with Nancy Eddy and Liz DeRoche. While in D.C., Levi helped to organize the annual Dyke March for a number of years, as well as collaborating with Phase One, one of the longest running lesbian bars in the United States, to put on Phase Fest, a queer music festival which ran for several years until the closure of Phase One. Levi then moved to Brooklyn and then back to Northampton, working as a music teacher. Now self employed, they channel their passion for music into the Queer Joy Chorus, a subgroup within the Queer Joy Collaborative, an organization whose mission is to build community through art, music, and fun.
abstract
In this interview, Mara Levi reflects on their childhood growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. They discuss the discomfort they felt with their gender and sexual identity before coming to college, where they began to become more comfortable with their queerness. They talk about what the music and dating scenes were like in Northampton in the early 2000s and compare that experience to what it was like working and living in Washington D.C. They also talk about their current life, what it’s like to be a queer person and parent living during the Trump administration and what their experience was like with the COVID 19 pandemic.