This Family Makes Distance Social with Their Video Parodies

“I wanna play and hang out with my friends, but we gotta practice social distance,” the 12-year-old girl sings to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” “Go read a book, please don’t give me that look, we gotta practice social distance,” the mom replies. The next shot cuts to a family of five — six feet apart, of course — on the front lawn for a dance break.

Welcome to the fledgling, quarantine-time YouTube presence of the Nickerson family, helmed by writer-mom Julia Dosik Nickerson and Wilshire Boulevard Temple rabbi-dad Joel Nickerson and featuring their daughters, Ella (12), Kayla (10) and Rebecca (6 ¾). To date, the family has released three music videos, featuring quarantine-related parodies of pop songs “U Can’t Touch This” (MC Hammer), Gaga’s “Bad Romance” and “My House” (Flo Rida). And others are coming.

The parents brainstorm which songs to choose and tackle the parody lyric. After they lay down the track and mix the music, the kids help shape the look of the video when they shoot it. Ella also helps her father edit.“They help come up with ideas,” Nickerson said. “It’s been a good way of keeping them engaged.”

The Nickerson parents already had a weekly video tradition, “Date Day,” where they grab a few minutes to walk and talk with each other (with the camera).

“This was a way to make it a whole family affair,” Nickerson said. “They get featured and it’s not just us doing our thing.”

“There’s a lesson in finding laughter even when things are challenging,” Dosik Nickerson said, a lesson she learned from her Holocaust survivor grandparents, especially her grandmother. “[She] always said ‘think about the good things.’ She said we had to find the light in the darkness and the goodness. That lesson has helped me throughout my entire life. This is where you can find the cracks for the light to come in.”

In “Date Night (in Quarantine),” the parents prep for a special night out. “Wish we could dress real nice and see a show, but the driveway is as far as we’ll go,” Mom laments, as she and Dad head toward the open back of their minivan, where two small chairs and a table await them for their date.

Because this video featured the adults, Ella filmed most of it on her iPhone, while the song played on the computer so everyone could sing along. “They become part of the process once we’re filming,” Dosik Nickerson said. “That’s the exciting part for them. The nice thing is that we’re not so worried about the quality in terms of our technical abilities. The joy is the experience of it.”

Although the videos aren’t specifically Jewish, one of the Nickersons’ goals is to raise awareness of important quarantine-related information, like adhering to social distancing, not touching one’s face and that adults “don’t have to give up romantic time,” as Nickerson put it. “Just pop open the SUV,” said Dosik Nickerson.

“I do think our videos are fun but we’re trying to raise awareness for our children that you can take your situation and make something creative from it, and collaborate,” Nickerson said.

Both parents identify themselves as social people and admit that they have to “build a different muscle” in learning to communicate solely through technology. The pair anticipates that Zoom and other technologies may be the subject of a future video.

Their family video projects are an opportunity to find some positivity in what Dosik Nickerson called “a barrage of negativity. Some people tend to go toward the dark especially when all we’re seeing are these negative images and upsetting newscasts,” she said. “Friends and family are having a difficult time. For someone who’s lost someone or someone who is ill, it’s difficult to find some positivity. Every family has a different version of what finding something positive from their day is. Our version is doing videos. Finding positivity in small things is where we have to be right now.”

“It has to be intentional,” Nickerson added. “People aren’t spending as much time as they could being reflective. For us the videos are one element in trying to be intentional in how we are spending our time.”

For the rabbi, who only started at Wilshire Boulevard Temple this past summer, these videos,which he called “a nice bonding time with the family,” help in balancing work life and home life. However, he anticipates that it is “going to get harder to do as time goes on. “We’re going to see a dip in people’s levels of optimism and willingness to think bigger is going to get harder,” he said. “We need to think about how to create, in professional and personal life, triggers of accountability to keep doing that. Julia and I are good at helping each other keep that momentum going.”

For now, the personal momentum continues. The couple reports that their older daughters are writing their own parodies, while the youngest said she wants to be a part of it “because we all do it together,” Dosik Nickerson said.

“For both of us,” Nickerson said, “[we’re thinking about] how can we take this time, bond and be creative in a fun way?”

“You have to find some laughter,” Dosik Nickerson said. “We’ll probably finish Netflix by the time this is over.”

UPDATE: This story has been updated to include their latest “Wear a Mask” video.