Thank you for visiting my portfolio website. The samples here run the gamut from travel journalism, to a political editorial, to the two most significant examples of paid, web content writing that I've been involved with. I also have included a direct link to my original, one-hour dramatic teleplay. I was educated in journalism, film production and screenwriting, and worked as a content and creative strategist and writer for 8 years in NYC advertising agencies. This portfolio is non-comprehensive. If you've been directed here, I hope you find something compelling, and please feel free to reach out any time at the information below!

brandonvescovo@gmail.com
(646) 924-9715

The following entries come from a personal travel blog that I was keeping up with several years ago. I highlight them here because they exemplify the narrative voice and tone that I specialize in for all the rest of my work. 

https://www.communitybrands.co...

https://www.truthaboutweight.c...

In the five days between holding his hand while he slipped away - and now sitting in my quiet, tiny New York City room, the night before his burial, 1,000 miles away, trying to think of what to write about my father….the only starting framework I can think of is the monsters we fear and the many different ways we say goodbye. 

The monster under the bed for me, when I was a small child, was an image of death - the cloaked reaper, with his indifferent scythe, coming to take my daddy away. I knew from an early age that there were a number of ways that death could take my father from me too young, and that consequences to some of his lifestyle choices were most likely going to play a part.

I remember coming home one day from the 1st grade crying, after an exhibit called the Body Walk had been set up in the school gymnasium. It was that day that I first saw what a smoker’s lungs can look like. I knew my dad smoked, and my child’s mind connected those two terrible dots. From that point on I was sensitive to stories or depictions in media of fathers dying, and songs written about the grief of losing a loved one frequently hit me as if I were hearing them about my dad. It was a fear as primal and untamed as they come, capable of overwhelming me with even the slightest provocation.

In this context, it’s fair to say that last Wednesday was the day I have dreaded the most for these first 34 and a half years of my life. Right now, I reckon I’ll have to live another 35, and many more beyond, before the reality of his death feels as much a bedfellow to me as the fear of it.

There are many ways that humans say goodbye, and cope with shifting realities, whether it's expressed publicly or personally. While nothing can prepare you for being at a parent’s bedside as they pass away, I’ll say that in recent years, as the health scares began accumulating, I was already whispering a thousand smaller and quieter goodbyes to my father. These goodbyes were meant to soothe the little boy inside me that loved his dad unconditionally, but worried about him all the time. I said a thousand quiet, personal goodbyes to more vibrant eras of my father’s life, and to different chapters of life when our relationship had been closer. 

Years after he seemed to lose his own interest in the artistic pursuits, hobbies, friendships and other things that bring sustainable joy and vibrancy to our lives, I was only starting to come to terms with the disappearance of that man. It was not an easy process, and it’s ongoing to this day - but in place of idealism and setting unrealistic expectations, I learned to let go, piece by piece, and allow room to accept the man standing before me with all of his beautiful, human complexity. 

Because, when all is said and done, his story was a very human one, and he was as valuable, unique and precious as all of us. To remember a man, you must be willing to fully see them. To see my father was to get to know a man with incredible talent, intelligence, humor, and a bottomless well of love and wisdom that he shared freely with so many people in his life, unafraid of the resulting vulnerability. Nobody is perfect, and to fully see him I have to also acknowledge how deeply he was weighed down by feelings of grief, depression and guilt, and how he struggled with the self-defeating patterns and behaviors these feelings lead a person into. 

I regret he never seemed able to reach a point where he could show himself the love, forgiveness and tolerance that he always showed to me. Whenever I could, on our phone calls in later years, I would gently find ways to remind of him of these things, remind him of his creativity and curiosity, and make clear that happiness is what I wanted for him, more than anything. That’s all I could do. It’s all any of us can do for another person, is to let them know we’re here, and we care. 

It’s especially complicated and bittersweet when it concerns our parents. We don’t get a say in who the people are that bring us into the world - naked, helpless, and screaming for love and nourishment. We don’t have a choice in how those people live up to the responsibility of taking the soft clay of our untamed, childhood id, and sculpting us into the shape of a human being, citizen, friend and neighbor. 

But through all the difficult years, and days I thought I might drive myself crazy wishing certain things could be different, Joe Vescovo was a natural sculptor. He always found ways to guide and nurture me, show me he cared even if it had been months since we last really spoke. He reminded me of the fundamental responsibilities we have to ourselves and our fellow man, principles we must use to light our way even when it involves difficult sacrifice.

That Joe Vescovo is who I choose to remember and carry forward, and, on his last lucid day of life, it’s what I chose to tell him, eye to tear-streaked eye. As the tears fell, he acknowledged them with one of his last full sentences to me: “Cry when you gotta cry…it’s going to be okay, son.” So cry I will, whenever I need to, as well as carry the lessons and memories with me. 

Dad, I’ll remember middle school weekend mornings in Parkville spent with the smell of sizzling sausage patties and the sound of John Mayer and James Taylor records, or Eric Clapton, playing over your killer speakers. I’ll remember kicking your ass in Mario Kart, and having long conversations about everything and nothing in garages, station wagons and on porches. I’ll remember your infectious laughter, always summoned easily by clever wordplay or a ribald joke. I’ll remember your gentle voice and greetings of “Hey, Brandon Joe,” and I’ll remember the emotional and courageous spirit you displayed to the world so openly, a spirit that I feel lives on through me, in how I try to approach my music work and relationships.

I carry you with me everywhere I go, in all of these ways and so many more than I could ever describe. I love you always and forever, daddy. May you finally be at perfect peace.

Despite months of predictions and code-cracking by adherents of the Trump-supporting conspiracy theory QAnon, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as president and vice president of the United States at noon on Wednesday, January 20th, as our constitution stipulates.

Shortly beforehand, Donald Trump flew away to Florida on Air Force One. On his way out, he made a stirring four-word exit speech - “we’ll be back somehow” - to an adoring crowd of several tens of supporters, and that was that. After standard procedures, the long-promised unmasking of Q, leading to a declaration of martial law and the live television executions of most prominent Democrats and other elitist, pedophilic Satan worshipers, did not happen.

So. What now? Has everybody who spent the last few years fantasizing about Trump being installed as president for life, under a shower of "swamp" creature blood, been shaken back to reality? Did they see the peaceful transfer of power take place and think “hey, maybe I’ve been a gullible, dangerous loon, and I should reconnect with the family and friends I’ve been isolating?”

Surely, they have. Right?

…Right?

To be totally fair, a few believers actually **did** take the red pill and rejoin the rest of us in the real world. A quick trip to the subreddit “r/leopardsatemyface” -- which is dedicated to people who vote for the “Leopards will eat your face” party, and then are SHOCKED when the leopards turn out to eat their faces -- reveals a number of schadenfreude-fueled discussions of screencaps showing QAnonists losing their minds on Telegram, WhatsApp, Xanga, LiveJournal, MySpace, AskJeeves…whatever sites haven’t banned them yet.

Other QAnonists, meanwhile, are now twisting themselves into pretzels by declaring that Joe Biden must be a part of the master plan as well, because - I am not making this up - he walked down a hallway flanked by 17 American flags during inauguration, and ‘Q’ is the 17th letter of the alphabet.

For the most part, though, it seems that even devoted QAnonists are struggling to read the tea leaves on this latest development. In fact, it was Ron Watkins, a thought leader in the conspiracy so prominent that many suspect he is himself ‘Q,’ who gave the theory its most notable sendoff:

“We gave it our all, now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able,” he said in a message board post. “We have a new president sworn in and it is our responsibility to respect the Constitution. As we enter into the next administration, please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”

....So, “the real QAnon is the friends we made along the way?”

Politics is tribal, more so now than ever before. What little comity still existed between the parties, or between friends, family and neighbors of different political persuasions, has been irreversibly broken by the past administration. It is also true that people who get swept up in conspiracy theories and cults, like QAnon, are often lonely, insecure and confused. They find the meaning that their lives are lacking in communities of likeminded strangers that are similarly suffering. 

No matter how absurd QAnon looks to the vast majority of rational adults, for most supporters it isn’t actually about belief in the truth. Deep down, it’s about the security of groupthink, the identity that’s afforded them by shared fears and hatreds, and the intoxicating comfort of a revenge fantasy against the people that don't think like them. In this case, it's the Clintons and the rest of the Democrats, and all those snooty Hollywood celebrities and monied coastal liberals.

Yet this only explains the psychology of QAnon – the morals are a trickier beast. It’s harder to come to grips with the moral bankruptcy of finding hope in the idea of a violent strongman taking over control of the government and executing people you don’t understand. No matter who QAnonists might be to their families and friends, no matter what they might aspire to be, or how often they attend church, what jobs they hold, etc...there is one fact about them that is irrefutable:

In the end, they are disappointed and disillusioned because their fevered daydreams of political violence and retribution did not come true. They feel cheated, betrayed, because they didn’t get to see extrajudicial executions, and rivers of liberal blood.

They are despondent, and left without any hope for the future, over the fact that our republic was just able to complete a peaceful transfer of power like it has for nearly a quarter of a millennium, even in the midst of literal civil war. Adam Serwer, a staff writer with The Atlantic, said in a memorable opinion piece in 2018 that “the cruelty is the point” regarding Trump's strongest supporters. QAnonists will, no doubt, remember the friends they made along the way. 

Maybe, for at least the next four years, the rest of the people, upon whose necks the Trump administration knelt, will get to relish in THEIR friendships, THEIR lives, THEIR hopes and dreams, without the happy memories of QAnonists coming back around for too many nostalgia trips.