Laura and Jonathan Mehl slide through the crowded streets on Washington Square Place. Laura, standing about five feet tall, has wrapped herself in a blue jacket, shielding herself from the rain, dodging between people, buildings and poles and finally seeking food and shelter from the rain in a salad shop in Greenwich Village. Jonathan walks in calmly behind her.
It’s an oddly cool day, giving New York City a tiny taste of fall even though it’s been 90 degrees all week long. This makes Laura nervous. When the weather changes dramatically, she believes it brings sickness. She can’t afford to get sick this week, not opening week.
She’s in NYU’s performance of Guys and Dolls this weekend, and between both Jonathan and Laura teaching classes, Laura taking classes and running to tech-week rehearsals, the Mehls simply don’t have time for any type of cold.
“These past couple of weeks have been so crazy,” says Jonathan, as he takes a bite of avocado toast. “We go through these times of just complete chaos and then have a week or so doing nothing.”
Laura’s red hair reflects her spunky attitude, though today she has a quieter demeanor only because she must speak in a higher, softer voice. It’s especially tired after she has used it all day taking her pedagogy course and teaching other vocal classes at the university. Under that wet, blue jacket, she has on a Milligan fleece jacket. Something that reminds them both of where they came from.
Laura and Jonathan met during their time at Milligan. They became friends and after awhile began dating. Neither of them remember how. They both sang and were in Heritage, Milligan’s a cappella group.
In April of their senior year, they got engaged. Laura was trying to figure out where she wanted to go to school and got accepted into NYU’s graduate program.
“I certainly did not want to move to New York without Jonathan. I’m so glad I didn’t,” Laura said.
They got married in August and despite their intense planning and preparedness, their first lease fell through in a New York fashion, and they were rushed to find another one.
Instead, they moved into a fourth floor walk-up building in Midtown.
It was sweltering on Laura’s father’s birthday as he helped Laura and Jonathan move in. New York City in August is the worst kind of concrete jungle, especially when you rent a U-Haul to move into a tiny apartment in the busiest part of the city. Sweat poured down the newly-wed Mehls’ family and friends who made the trek to move them in. Getting their couch up four flights of stairs in the sweltering heat is a memory stuck in Laura’s mind. Everyone was grumpy and no one enjoyed moving Jonathan and Laura into their very first apartment.
To this very day, Laura will remind her father of how he spent his birthday two years ago.
“We never moved ourselves ever again. That experience was so horrible and so far removed from what we knew. This go around, we used movers, and it was the best decision we ever made,” said Laura. Jonathan agreed.
Southern hospitality runs through the veins of Laura and Jonathan, who both claim Tennessee as their home. Everyone they meet loves them. In the salad shop in Greenwich Village, a fashionable man in all black sees them and his face lights up. They are friends from Jonathan’s work as an accompanist. He plays and teaches as well.
They have another friend who regularly comes over. They bake bread and watch Queer Eye. Their Facebook pages are filled with people who remind them how loved they are and how much they mean to people. They dog-sit for co-workers who have become friends on their own opening weekends, regardless of the chaos level.
Laura spent last summer working with the Broadway Artist Alliance, an intensive program that allows emerging, young people to work with Tony Award winners, top coaches and top musical theater directors. Outside of her normal job as a vocal coach, Laura has been chosen to help coach these kids and pour into their life.
“It’s so funny. Some of my kids have been invited to final call-backs for roles in the Sound of Music and Kinky Boots,” Laura said. “You just never really know where these kids will end up.”
That’s also what Jonathan, a professional accompanist, thinks, “I’m playing at NYU, one of the best musical theater programs in the U.S. While I’m playing, I can’t help but think that some of these (students) are going to be famous.”
Not that they haven’t already met some famous people. Tony nominee Taylor Louderman, Regina George in Broadway’s Mean Girls, knows Laura by name. But it’s no big deal.
“So many Broadway stars are down to earth. They’ve gone through hell and back to get where they are,” Laura says.
Laura meets Jonathan in a dark bar on another cool evening near Washington Square Park. She talks slowly and softly, forcing herself to speak after her week of constant rehearsals. Instead of a Milligan fleece, though, she’s wearing a long sleeve shirt from one of her young students who was heading to a call back. It has a picture of Tennessee on it. The word “home” is written on the southwest side.
“Her mom apologized for having the ‘home’ in the wrong place. Honestly, it’s close enough,” Laura said.
For the Mehls, “home” is back at Milligan.
“It was a good place for what we needed it to be,” Jonathan said. “I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for that school. It has its faults, but everything does.”
Laura was a big fish in a small pond at Milligan. Everyone knew her voice and her friendly attitude. She knew she was good, but she was still down-to-earth.
“New York is obviously different for a lot of reasons. One of them being that now I’m a small fish in a big pond,” said Laura.
Normally, they’d be hanging around the school or heading back home this evening, but instead they sit at their table, a bit hunched, while ordering their food. Their eyes droop and they banter back and forth.
Then Laura mentions yoga.
Yoga never stood out to Laura as something she strived to do before she came to New York. But with all the lights, the chaos, the complete lack of trees in the city and the need to just simply breathe, Laura just picked it up one morning in a studio on the Upper West Side.
Now, she’s an instructor and uses yoga as a coping mechanism. Sometimes during really busy times, she heads to the studio at 5 a.m.
It can be really challenging going to one extreme to the other. The Mehls are still getting used to the people filled streets and the constant movement. It’s nothing like the mountains of East Tennessee.
Evening jazz is playing in Washington Square Park. Laura stops to watch a man balancing a unicycle on his head. Again, it’s a nice day, but the weather and the pandemonium have caught up to Laura. There is one day until opening night, and Laura has a cold. Normally, she’d be practicing or resting before rehearsal. Not today. She’s going to get some cheese curds down the street with Jonathan.
They don’t know if they’ll be here in the city for one more year or 15 more. They just know that they’re living their chaotic, mountainless dream.