Catching Up With Emmy-Nominated Costume Designer & Owner of gather here, Virginia B. Johnson
Show Description (Podcast Intro):
Today’s guest is Virginia B. Johnson. Virginia is a costume designer and the owner of gather here in Inman Square, which is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the interview, we dive into her journey from a naval base in the Philippines to Greater Boston, her career in costume design, and the origins of her shop, gather here. We also talk about the importance of community to Virginia and her work, and her recent Emmy nomination. I’m so stoked for you all to tune in today. Enjoy!
Stay in touch:
BOSFilipinos - IG: @bosfilipinos, Email: info@bosfilipinos.com
Virginia B. Johnson - IG: @vee.bee.jay for behind-the-scenes pics, cats, food, gardens // LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/virginiabjohnson
gather here - IG: @gather_here for what's happening at the shop // Threads: @gather_here // https://gatherhereonline.com
Episode Transcript
Trish Fontanilla: All right. So welcome to the podcast, Virginia.
Virginia Johson: I'm so excited to be here. Trish, thank you so much for having me.
Trish: I'm going to have to share a picture. Virginia's one of my icon dressers in Boston. I don't know if you're on lists, but we should start nominating you for lists. If someone's like, What is the one word you would use to describe your clothing?, I would say joy. Inner child Trish and the 40-something Trish are both, “Oh, look at this bundle of joy that's walking towards me right now.“ So I love this. And then, of course, oh, you're in your shop. So there's all these drawings and quotes and being in the shop, too. This is what Virginia is. Or I don't know if there's some collaboration…
Virginia: I would say that that's definitely what Virginia wants to be, and is struggling always with trying not to get down in the dumps. So there's definitely an element of dopamine dressing. Getting up and being, “What is the boldest print and what is the most colorful thing? What things would someone else think clash?”. And then put those things together, because they bring me joy, and I just think we dress for the attitude we want to have. And same with the space gather here is also a reflection of, this is who we are. This is how we feel, even on a bad day.
Trish: Yeah, as I'm looking at my disco ball candle on my desk right now, all my colors are out, and I know some people don't love that. There's millennial gray out there, but that's also not my space.
But yeah, thank you so much for joining us today. We did interview you in 2018 for the blog, which is technically seven years ago, but I think the pandemic adds in an extra 40 to 50 years on all of us, at least mentally, maybe physically. So I'm really excited to catch up with you. But for folks that aren't familiar with you or haven't read our blog in the past. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Virginia: Yeah, I am a Filipina American who moved to Greater Boston twenty-two years ago, and I am a professional costume designer for film and television and occasionally for stage, and I also happen to own a small business, gather here. We're located in Inman Square in Cambridge, and we're a fabric, fiber, all kinds of fiber-related making space and supplies. And it was just a pipe dream back in 2010, and now will be celebrating 15 years in existence come February of next year of 2026 so super excited about that. I just try to balance my time doing costume design, and then being present and available to the shop. But as a small business owner, I'm also in charge of all of the admin stuff that is behind the scenes that no one cares about. But if it doesn't happen, the store doesn't run. So I have the really unglamorous parts of that job still.
Trish: First of all, I love that you highlighted that because, as a business owner myself, you know, there is this romanticism of, oh, you own your own thing. It must be so amazing. And it's like, yeah, to do the percentage of things that we love to do, I have to send out invoices on time, and I have to pay for the software and the hardware and all the supplies that I need to make the thing happen, and if I miss those payments, or if there's a price thing and I don't negotiate it, then things get hairy. And I talk about taxes and health insurance and all this other kind of fun stuff. Yeah, I love that. Like you're doing this costuming stuff, you own the business, but you're like, by the way, here's this other job in addition to the work that you do, because the work that you do for some people is for individual contributors, that is one job. So I love that you mentioned that.
So let's, let's flip it back and talk about where you grew up. How did you come to Boston?
Virginia: So I celebrated 51 years on this planet this past May, and I'm just like, really, and like you said earlier, with the pandemic, I swear to God, I feel like it's been even longer, like solid additional decade.
But I was born in Subic Bay on the naval base in Luzon, and my dad is from the States. My mom is from the Philippines. She's one of 13 children, and like very complicated Filipino colonial story, my grandfather is actually Chinese. He had immigrated to the Philippines. My grandmother and my grandfather met while they were in one of the prison camps during Japanese occupation, and they were liberated by the US. So even though some of my uncles were very anti-American presence in the Philippines in the 70s, my grandmother was very pro-America, was very pro-American military, because in her mind, her life would not have been what it was without that liberation. So we have a really complicated history, which many people do.
My dad being an American naval chief petty officer, my grandmother was like, this is the best, you could not have made a better match. Whereas some of my uncles were like, No way, don't do it. But my mom has always been a very strong matriarch, as was my grandmother, and she was headstrong, and just was going to do her own thing.
So we lived there, and I went to Catholic daycare, and then preschool and kindergarten, because it was a space where English was spoken primarily, and then Tagalog was spoken at home.
And we moved to the States, and when my dad was stationed in Long Beach, California. He made a point of asking to be located there, and they made that decision because they really wanted, by this point, it's me and my sister, us to have more opportunities to not be in a school system where we're being told to only wear dresses, skirts. What does it mean to be feminine? And despite my mom also thinking being pretty was super important, and that is also very complicated, being a pageant girl, all of that just so much to unpack. But they did make the decision to move to Long Beach so and one of the reasons they picked Long Beach is there is a huge Filipino community in that area because of the number of Filipinos that came over post-Vietnam war were married servicemen, service women.
Trish: I don't think I knew all that stuff about your past. I think it's really interesting to hear now, there's a very complicated feeling about the American presence. People forget the colonialism part about the Philippines.
Virginia: Yes, I know. I think it's important to note that there were a lot of people there, even in the 50s and 60s, that weren't Americans yet.
So I spent most of my developmental years, elementary school and junior high, in that area. I actually went to this really cool school in San Pedro called Dodson, and I loved my time at Dodson. It was this magnet school. We got to study all kinds of cool stuff. Also, the teacher strike happened while I was in school, and so I think that was my first real understanding of workers’ rights and the complication of, what are our parents supposed to do with us? Because education is not just about learning, it's also a form of child care. And from a working middle-class place, you know, mom's a nurse, nobody can just call out. They're not in a position. Everybody's just like, What are we supposed to do with these people, and, do we cross the picket line? I just remember being 13 years old, 14 years old, and like, Oh, we're having real conversations. Thinking, this is wild. And I was definitely pro-teacher. In the end, I was like, I stand with my teachers. I know lots of people hate junior high, but I loved junior high. It was really great exploratory time, and it was like a revolutionary public school.
But also during that time, there was definitely a surge in violence in that LA area, and my parents were very concerned about us, and they opted to relocate everyone once it like became clear that my grandfather, on my dad's side, was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and so they picked us all up, and we moved to rural Iowa. I was 16 years old, it was probably one of the most, like, and I had moved like internationally. I had gone from everybody looks like me to most people look like me, and we all speak English, and so I totally lose my ability to speak Tagalog. And then to rural Iowa, where I had gone from a school that had 1000s of students to a school that had literally 400 students in total. Everyone knows everyone. They all grew up together. Their parents knew everyone, and we were really outsiders, and that at the time was incredibly painful, but I do think in the long run helped me develop a voice.
I really needed to learn to articulate who I was as a person, what it meant to have my identity if I wanted to share that identity and talk about my family and stand up for myself, and that was really important. I think it helped me later on as an adult, because I had a very strong sense of self. I didn't want to be part of a clique or the crowd. I couldn't be, I was just so different. I ate different food. I looked different. Nobody knew me. That wasn't an option, so I had to develop a voice, and I spent two years of high school there.
And then in the end, really wanted to be close to home, so I decided to go to college in Des Moines, Iowa, at Drake. One of the reasons that was a great option was that they had tons of financial aid. It was three and a half hours away from home, so I felt like I was far enough away, and again, I felt like I could explore who I wanted to be as fully as possible. And Des Moines was definitely bigger than the small town in eastern Iowa, which had one stoplight. I'm not joking. Small. I grew up in Southern California, and then came to someplace that had a stoplight, and that was so wild. So Des Moines, I was like, there's a lot of stoplights. I felt like a step up to where I wanted to be.
All of that to say, I knew I didn't want to stay there forever. And like many people that go to school at Drake, I ended up going to Chicago and then slowly working my way east, and I ended up in Boston when I finally decided I didn't want to piece together my whole year through these small theater gigs, where I was living out of my car, you'd maybe get a room in some patron’s house, or you'd stay in a cabin or something like that. And I was like, I really would like a little more stability. So I took a job at Tufts University, and that's how I ended up here. After all of that. I didn't even talk about how I was actually a bio pre-med major and ended up in costume.
Trish: I think a lot of Filipinos, you either become a nurse or a doctor, or you have some story growing up in New Jersey. I'm pretty sure I applied to the nursing program at Rutgers, even though I cannot even look at blood and not feel queasy. We all have a story of, oh, we tried it and it just didn't work out.
But so I'd love to dive into the costume design piece of it, you laid some of that groundwork. To me, it sounds like the origins of a costume person is growing up in a place where you have to choose to define yourself, and that's either I'm going to go with everybody else and what everybody else is doing, or I'm really going to go for it. And that decision-making of being thoughtful about what you're going to wear and how you're going to act, I feel like that's the origin story of a costume designer.
But for folks that aren’t in the biz, generally, if someone's like, oh, costume sounder, sounds cool. What does that mean? And then talk a little bit about how you got into that.
Virgina: So you really did sum that up. It's the intention and intentional choices of what you wear and when you choose to wear something, and so my job as a costume designer is really about taking the story, which is something that I'm attracted to. I love storytelling. I've always loved stories, so diving deep into the story, figuring out where we are, what time and place things are happening, and then who are the people in the story, and how do they dress, and how do they transform? And how does the story transform how they dress?
Because sometimes people think that costume designing is fashion, and it's not at all, because I am not creating the seasonal look. I am like doing mini fashion shows for every single person in the story, and sometimes the person in the story never changes their clothes because of the action or their socioeconomic class. And then I love digging into how the action affects how your clothes transform, and it's what I love about doing action films, because you think about what happens to you when you jump through a window, roll on the street, and a car blows up in the parking lot. What has happened to your clothes that if you've survived and you have now caught a train, does everyone on the train look at you, and can they tell what happened to you? Or they just think you had a really rough day. What's the evidence of what that action was? And I have always loved figuring that stuff out.
I actually became interested in costume design because, like I was saying about going to Drake, I had a really great financial aid package, and part of the financial aid package was a work-study job. And my work-study position was in the costume shop. And it was because I knew how to sew and embroider and all these things I learned at like six years old from my grandmother in the Philippines, textiles are incredibly important. We have our own rich textile history of transforming pineapple and coconut into cloth, and then a rich history of embroidery and handcraft, as well as crochet. And so I learned the art of embroidery and crochet from that side of my family, it was really important to staying connected with my family and my grandmother, who loved embellishment and traditional dress. I took traditional dancing classes because of her influence, and we helped make my costumes for that, which is just so intrinsic to who I am, and every stitch holds so much meaning.
Whereas, with my other grandmother she was a daughter of a farmer, and they had survived the Great Depression in the States. So for her, it was all about mending and knitting and making what you want to wear because you can't afford to buy it. So I learned this whole history of her wanting to dress a certain way and having to do it herself. And I love that about Nita. I still have her sewing machine, and by the time I was going to prom, she had invested so much time and care and teaching me to sew that I was like, I can do that. I can make something I want to wear that is reflective of all the parts of me. And no one else will have anything like this. And that was also something that Nita and Christina taught me, was that the act of making it yourself means that it is 100% yours. It is all about your labor and the labor of your family, because everything I make is in tribute and in service of continuing their story.
So it wasn't that big of a leap for me to then go work in a costume shop, learn more about theater. Those jobs were not things we thought about as kids. You know, it would be great if we went to community theater, dinner theater, the high school play. It's not like my parents had a lot of time for other things. And in the Midwest, it's not like we went to Broadway. We didn't, we didn't go to those places. And even in Southern California, what we were doing was typically very specific to the community that we were in, and not necessarily about going and seeing a show. We would go seek traditional dance and things like that. That was what was really important to us, was being in community.
And I think that's also what drew me to costume design, especially for theater. It is community in a collaborative art form. You dive in intensely, and it's always a trust exercise. Are we speaking the same language? Are we seeing the same thing? And when all is said and done, you see it on stage, and that is either proof that you were all in sync with one another, or it shows maybe where the weakness was in your communication, or how everyone was seeing things, and because it's a living work of art, you can continue to grow and make those changes and tweak them. It is absolutely one of the things I love so much about it. It is like the sewing circle. It's like all of these spaces where people rely on one another, it's not solo.
Trish: Thank you so much for walking through the costume design piece.
So you were just nominated for an Emmy, which I think is your first?
Virginia: It's my first ever, my first ever.
Trish: Amazing, congratulations!
Virginia: I'm still in shock. To be nominated by the Television Academy for outstanding period costumes is mind-blowing, because I do get a lot of people who ask me about just how I guess erratic my resume is.
I have done specials for PBS. I have done projects for Happy Madison, which is the Adam Sandler production house, where it's all slapstick and puke jokes. And then I've done super serious things, and then heavy action, and the new Salem's Lot set in the 70s, which is considered a softer period. It's not corsets and things like that, but it's still period, and it's horror. And then I just out of left field, did this show set in 1857, which is incredibly violent, but going back to these, the decisions we make when we get dressed in the morning, every single person that people see on the screen in this six part mini series was a labor of deep consideration.
My research period is nothing compared to people who specialize, who are PhDs in textile history or a certain period. I do my deep dive for a couple of months, I try to pull in as many resources as possible to get to what are the essential parts of dress for this snapshot in time. You know, we don't have iPhones in 1857 so there are daguerreotypes, there are paintings, there are journals, there's these other ways of learning, but we should consider this too. We prioritize in our history the people who are empowered to record that history. And one of the things that's important about this series, and one of the reasons I was drawn to it and why I gave so much of myself to it, is that we also depict various bands of Indigenous peoples who were on the continent from the beginning, and they are literally fighting for survival and fighting for the land that they believe that they are the caretakers of, and they're constantly being displaced and lied to and murdered.
And that dress is not in the history books. That dress is not like the tome of 1850s America, even some of the photographers from the later 1800s they were like, Oh, this is cool. And it may not have been all of the same tribe or the same region, they just were like, that looks good. This makes a really interesting photo. This is how we want to paint the people.
And so we turned to elders. I was so lucky. I reached out to a wonderful consultant, Julie O'Keefe, who had worked with my friend Jacqueline West on Killers of the Flower Moon, and she was able to find elders from the various Native communities to talk to us, because a lot of that is oral history. So they are telling us what they know and showing us how they make the things that we need to make to accurately depict this moment in time. And that was so incredible and also central to telling this in a way that felt authentic, and honored the actual people that were affected by, you know, American expansionism.
So I would like to think that the Television Academy and my peers who decided to nominate the show, that one of the reasons it stuck out to them was that we did put in that time and effort and created things that had not been seen before, and we did it in a way that was caring and very real. So I'll find out September 6th, what everybody…
Trish: Amazing…
Virginia: I am up against like some heavy hitters, but it is, like I said, it's an honor, and I worked with a lot of incredible artists and craftspeople, and just everybody put in so many hours and so much labor to make it possible for it to look the way it did. So it's just, it's pretty cool. I feel pretty cool.
Trish: Love the Filipino humbleness that is coming out. One, will you be in attendance? And two, will you make what you're going to wear on the red carpet?
Virginia: Oh, my God, Trish. I'm so stressed out about what I'm gonna wear, because there's a part of me that, like we started out with, I'm a dopamine dresser. I want a lot of pattern and color, and just to feel like I'm taking up space, because there are so many ways we are made invisible as women of color, children of immigrants, as artists, as creatives, as people who care about other people. I'm also on the East Coast. I'm not an LA person. There are all these things that I don't want to necessarily blend in. I also don't want to make a worst-dressed list. And my show was so dirty and grimy and real that I also want to be very real, but I also want to reflect who I am. So I'm torn.
Part of me is thinking, I'm going to make a set. As you know, I love a set. I love something that is clearly meant to go together. I also love embroidery, and I love big embroidered dresses. So I've been Googling, can I get some Filipino cloth and make myself an over the dress, some pineapple cloth to do an over- I don't know. I do want to honor who I am…
Trish: Barong-style…Yeah, I love the idea of embroidered tapestry. And you can weave so many parts of yourself, your biracial self, your immigrant self, all the many facets of you. But we'll be watching on September 6, everyone go into social media and message all the people interviewing and be like, have you seen Virginia Johnson yet? Just hype you up, because Filipinos love when there's someone in the community. We do love to show up and support.
But to shift, love to talk a little bit about your home base at gather here. So you mentioned what y'all do at the beginning, but how did you decide to open up? And in the location that you decided to open it up in.
Virginia: So when I talk about creating and collaboration, that has always been at the heart of what I want to do with whatever I'm doing, I want to be in community.
And I don't know if you also follow the work of Carl Lorenz Cervantes, a professor, a researcher, and he is always talking about kapwa, which is fellow humans and kindred and community, and how that is definitely part of the Filipino identity of our communities, and that we have been struggling with individualism and capitalism because of being colonized. Because at our heart, we want to be in community, and we want to be supporting one another, And oh, you need this. Let me give it to you. We can make a bigger table. We can grow more food. I will watch your child. Truly, this we are a village, and we will care for one another. And these ideas are constantly struggling with one another, and for me gather here takes that whole, I'm a business, but I also really want to be in community, and tries, sometimes successfully, sometimes I struggle with it, to blend those needs. I wanted to make sure that we were true to ourselves and true to this idea of sustainability, quality tools that don't need to be replaced, which is kind of very anti-capitalist, because we need people to buy things, right? That's how the system works. And so I can pay the rent, but at the same time, I don't want things to end up in the landfill. I want people to take time and put thought into what they invest in, and trust that what they're investing in will last them a very long time, that they are tools that they will be able to pass on.
And that, you know, you will have a place to go that will help you use those tools, that will support you in the use of those tools. And so gather here is that place, and then, because we're here in Greater Boston and space is at a premium, it's like a privilege to have a sewing or craft room in your home that doesn't displace where you cook or sleep or eat. So for us, creating studio spaces where you don't have to clean off your dining table, you can just come and rent an hour in the studio, and you can do your cutting. You can rent the sewing machine. You can steam all your curtains. We have powerful steamers. We have the equipment that you don't need in your home or don't have space for in your home, so that you can actually make things.
And then on top of that, we invest in a team of people that also want to help you. So in our studio, we always have a studio monitor. They're there to help make sure the machine is working correctly. Help you switch out to a zipper foot, wind a new bobbin. We are providing scissors and rotary cutters, and rulers, so that you aren't hauling around stuff or trying to find that stuff in your closet, because it's there. You know it's there, you know it's going to work. And that is kind of at the heart of gather here.
We've always had studio space, and then we've always had workshops, because this knowledge should not be kept to ourselves or only in higher education spaces or relegated to old books in libraries. People want to make things. People want to sew. They want to mend. They want other ways to express themselves and create that isn't at a desk, isn't at a computer or on your phone, that isn't related to work, isn't related to productivity in that way that everything we do seems to be monetized. And I constantly remind people, just because we're good at something and we enjoy making something, doesn't mean it has to become the job. You know, we can just love doing the thing and being with others and do that thing and not suddenly feel like I make bags now all the time. You know, you don't have to.
Trish: You do get that feeling, as someone that did take a sewing class at gather here, after I sewed my first bag, I was like, is this a business? Am I really good at this? Because you do feel this immense sense of pride after you make something. And as someone that generally works at a computer all day but has a creativity streak, it was just lovely to sit and work on something, and I could kind of be on my phone. But also, you can't because you're on the sewing machine, and you're putting stuff together. But to just have this like singular creative focus for however long it took to put together that bag was really amazing. You know, we talk a lot about the absence of third spaces in today's world, and it's such a again, vibrant, beautiful, welcoming space to be in.
To tie, you know, if anyone has listened to anything you've said today, it is no surprise that you would have this community-driven We Care Wednesdays at the store. So we'd love to hear more about that if people aren't familiar with it.
Virginia: So like many people after the 2016 election, I was like, what more can I do? I just don't know how to use this energy in a way that's productive. I just want to help. I have access to community that are also eager to help, but just want to know more. And have that energy go towards something.
And January of 2017, we started hearing about all the different funds that would be cut under a new administration. And we're experiencing that right now as well. where we hear about, my favorite PBS station has had all its funding cut, you know, and I wanted to take this struggle I have with capitalism, and put it to good use, and I put it out there on Facebook of all places, and some of my former students from my time at Tufts, who also were struggling with what they could do in the workplace, or as artists, one of them was like, instead of just me to donate to a cause, why don't you think about this in a more targeted way so that it's not just you, that is giving your money. Let's find a way for you to rally people behind the cause, and also shine a light on a program, you think is essential to living in a sustainable, vibrant community. And I was like, oh, that's great. How do I do that? Oh, I write a blog for my business. I have a robust newsletter that people write back to. Let me figure this out. And by the end of January, we had launched this We Care Wednesday.
Wednesday is probably the day we would be closed if we were not open seven days a week. But we also do kids’ programming on Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening. So okay, well, for us it's kind of the start of the week because weekends are our peak. And then we're recovering, getting in product Wednesday is the restart kind of thing.
So we love alliteration, so We Care Wednesday, all sounded good together, and we started with Food For Free. And food is the nutrients and all of that are human, right? I will die on that hill. And I think at the time, there had been this announcement that funding was being cut from food assistance programs all over the country. And I decided that we'll start here. If you want to fight me, that people shouldn't have access to food. I felt really comfortable being like, then I don't know what's wrong with you. You shouldn't shop here. This is not controversial in my mind. So we started there.
And so every Wednesday, we donate five percent of our sales. Regardless, it could be you signed up for a class, PDF printing, whatever, to that month's recipient. We do a blog post about it. We share it in the newsletter. It's the header on Wednesdays.
And over the course of these years since the launch in 2017, we have donated almost $95,000 dollars.
We're doing twelve programs a year. And obviously November, December are peak. People are already out there doing their holiday shopping, and we definitely think about what are some nonprofits or mutual aid organizations that aren't getting as much attention as others, and we choose those because we know the donation is going to be a little heftier. But every May I do fund-a-thon for the National Abortion Fund, and that's always May. We’re always doing that in May because I'm doing fund-a-thon. It's something that I really care about. And then June, we always do pride organization. And it also just highlights for people, who are coming to the store or learning about us for the first time, or continue to support us, that we are very thoughtful and committed to highlighting a variety of organizations that could do really important work.
Trish: So full disclosure, I did not know that your first organization was Food For Free, and I'm on the board of Food for Free.
So what's next for you, Virginia the costume designer, and then what's happening at gather here?
Virginia: So I just started the prep period for season three of Dead City, which is a Walking Dead spin-off. It's shooting in and around greater Boston, Massachusetts. Lowell. I'm really excited. I've never done zombies before. And yeah, it takes place in-
Trish: Not a common thing you hear in jobs.
Virginia: Yeah. I, as I said, like to keep it eclectic, and just to find ways to ground it in reality.
And then for gather here in August, there will be two community events that we're actually hosting in Vellucci Plaza, which is in Inman Square. It's the park with the big stag sculpture in it, where Hampshire and Cambridge Street converge. And we're doing this community dye bath event, so we will have a variety of dyes. So you can do everything from tie-dyeing to over-dyeing, and just give your clothing or some fabric a new life. You'll have to wring it out and put it in a bag, and take it home with you. But we are doing this, craft in the evening August 13th and August 20th. And we are doing this in conjunction with Cambridge Plays. We received some funding to help support doing this community dye bath.
And then also we've done this collaboration with the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, where we're doing picks and crafts. So we show a movie, you bring your crafting, the lights are at half so that you can still see your work. We did Rocky Horror Picture Show in June, we did Marie Antoinette in July, and we are doing Prêt-à-Porter, the Altman film, in August. And we sold out our first two. I really hope there's great attendance because if this goes well, we'll continue doing it into the fall and winter. It's just really fun to make and be with other people and experience a film in a movie theater. Crafting can be as solitary but as also as communal as you want it to be, and I literally cried at the end of Marie Antoinette one, because I love that movie so much. But two, because I was there with one hundred and sixty other people, and I was just knitting and enjoying a movie and walking out with everyone. It was just such a joy. So please, please, please come to the movies with us. And, you don't have to make things. There are people who didn't even know it was happening, and they're like, what is up? But, it's just a really fun way to be with others. And, it's matinee pricing, so it's thirteen bucks. It's so reasonable. And the Brattle Theatre is a foundation, and they can use your support.
Trish: Amazing. So I'd like to end with, if you could give a shout out to a fellow Filipino creator, artist, chef, someone out there that needs a light shone on them. Who would you give a shout out to?
Virginia: Well, I'm going to shout out a Union Square neighbor, Jen Palacio, who owns Tiny Turns Paperie. Jen has created something incredibly special, has expanded, has really brought the art of the letter and community building to the Bow Market area, and is essential to doing other large-scale gatherings in that area. I'm just happy to call her a friend and to get to see her occasionally. And just so proud of what she's built.
Trish: I think I have a parol Christmas ornament that I got at one of the fairs at gather here that she was tabling at, so she's really awesome. I'm so excited that she opened a storefront. And please, please, please support small business.
But thank you again, Virginia, so much for taking time to share your story, and all the amazing things that you're working on. We'll be rooting for you on September 6th. And just thank you for being an awesome part of our community.
Virginia: Thank you Trish. Thanks for being my friend and for always rooting for me. It's so special, and it's so important to feel seen in part of the Boston Filipino community.
Closing
Trish: This has been The BOSFilipinos Podcast. I'm your host, Trish Fontanilla. Thank you to Virginia for taking time to chat with us today. Let’s all cross our fingers for an Emmy win!
To learn more about Virginia or gather here, we’ll include the website and some socials in the show notes. If you’re looking for a full written transcript of the episode, check out BOSFIlpinos.com.
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