Post 161 - August 19, 2020

Day 161…

This morning I am sitting by the harbor right next to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

It is almost completely empty out here. When I drove into the city during what should have been the height of rush hour, there was almost no traffic.

I spent last night in Youngstown, Ohio at their Downtown Hilton. Pennsylvania is an endlessly wide state and it takes forever to drive through it. Youngstown is just a few miles over the border, but I didn’t want to wake up today and still be in Pennsylvania, so I pushed through to get there.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike basically barrels through the center of the state. On the eastern side it cuts through rolling hills and lots of farmland. As you head west, and the hills get steeper, the farms become fewer and further between. What you then get is a lot of trees. Don’t get me wrong, I love trees, but four hours of them and very little else gets a little tedious.

I did stop at Valley Forge National Historical Park for a bit which was right off the highway.

In September of 1777, the British took Philadelphia, which was then the capital of the colonies. Congress fled to safety elsewhere. After General Washington failed to recapture it, he led his 12,000 men to Valley Forge to weather the winter. They stayed there for six long brutal months. As many as 2,000 men died from disease and malnutrition.

The Park has a beautiful drive through the area where they stayed. Some of the original buildings that Washington and his men occupied are still standing.

I’ve played in many places throughout Pennsylvania over the years. Each time I’ve played somewhere there, I have flown or driven in specifically to that place and then out again.  It was interesting seeing all those places in relation to each other as I passed signs for them on the turnpike.

The West Side Story tour I was on actually played in the theatre in Valley Forge. Last year I did a concert with Patti LuPone in Erie and the only way that we could reasonably get there, given all of our schedules, was to charter a small plane to fly us all in and out. 

I’ve done concerts with both Patti and Mandy Patinkin in Philadelphia, and we teched the second national tour of Jersey Boys there too. I’ve checked up on Jersey Boys over the years in Shippensberg, Hershey, Pittsburgh and maybe even State College. I’m sure there have been others.

I’ve also played all over Ohio countless times - Columbus, Springfield, Cincinnati, and, yes, here in Cleveland. The night of my 50th birthday was spent in a drag bar in Dayton with a bunch of Jersey Boys. It was a perfect way to finish out a half-century.

I chose to stay in Youngstown because I had never been there before. Jersey Boys played a two-night stand in the theatre there in April of last year, but I wasn’t there with them.

In the mid 1890’s a Jewish immigrant family from Poland settled in Youngstown. The father opened a meat market and a shoe repair shop. His three sons went to school and worked in his businesses in the afternoons and evenings.

In 1905, the brothers pooled their resources and bought a projector. They opened a small theatre, the first of several, and started becoming successful. The three brothers - Albert, Sam and Jack - eventually moved to New York and then to Hollywood. They founded their company, Warner Brothers, in 1925.

In 1931, the family gathered again in Youngstown to open a movie palace in honor of their brother Sam who had passed away a few years before, but also to thank the town for giving them their start. The theatre, now called the DeYor Performing Arts Center, is where Jersey Boys played.

When I got to the hotel in Youngstown last night, there were very few people there. The person in reception was behind a plexiglass partition and wearing a mask. I got my bag with two water bottles and my freshly baked cookie and headed up.

The room’s door had been sealed with a sticker that said, “Hilton Clear Stay” and a had link to learn more about the measures that were taken to sanitize it. They also included the Lysol logo on it.

Inside the room, the TV remote had a cover saying that it, too, had been sanitized. In the bathroom on the mirror was another blue sticker that said that nobody would come into the room to clean during my stay unless I requested it. I came into and left the hotel without ever running into another person.

Last night was the second night of the Democratic Convention.

The roll call of each state and territory announcing their delegate counts was particularly moving. Each state and territory chose their own people to represent them.

Together, they represented the true diversity of the people of this nation. Black, White, Native American, Latinx and Polynesian citizens created a true rainbow montage of people. In maybe the most moving moment of it, the parents of Matthew Sheppard, the gay University of Wyoming student who brutally tortured and left to die on a fence in Laramie in 1998, read out Wyoming’s delegate votes.

The way that the roll call unfolded virtually and directly from all of those places is something that should always happen, in my opinion, from here on in - pandemic or no. It reflected “We the People” in a way that was so powerfully simple and said so much about who we all really are.

As expected, former Vice President Joe Biden secured the nomination.

His wife, Dr. Jill Biden, who worked as an English professor all throughout the years when her husband was serving in the Obama administration, spoke eloquently to the issues facing us all as our kids go back to school.

It’s interesting to me that with all that’s going on that the issue of kids going back to school is the one that is taking up most of the radio airtime these days. It makes perfect sense, however. It is the thing that is happening that is having the most direct impact on many people. Unlike some of the other pressing political issues, there is nothing existential about it. It’s real and it’s happening.

The school discussion is not new. It happened during the 1918 pandemic too. Just like now, schools all closed down all across the country. Not all of them, though. New Haven, Chicago and New York chose to keep them open.

The choice of those three cities to go ahead was not a reckless one. At the time, New York City had a million kids of school age. 75% of them lived in tenements.

Health officials at the time felt that in light of the crowded and often unsanitary conditions where a lot of these kids lived, that they would actually be safer in schools. At least in the schools, hygiene could be better regulated. The classrooms were bigger and airier than the cramped quarters of their homes.

The students weren’t allowed to gather after school. Teachers checked them daily for signs of the flu. If a student showed any symptoms, they’d be taken home by a teacher who would assess the living conditions there. If those conditions weren’t ideal, the kids would then be sent to a hospital. Even with that, there was so much fear about the flu, that absenteeism skyrocketed.

Research has shown that cities that shut their schools completely did fare the best. That said, many of those cities did not have the same crowded conditions that the three who stayed open had. They all eventually got through it.

Dr. Biden’s speech last night directly addressed parent’s fears and concerns over just this issue. I am sure that just hearing somebody talking about children as individuals and not numbers was a relief. It’s hard not to get lost in the statistics when what they really represent is actually all of us.

Multiple nights of the convention seemed too much to me a few days ago, but I have changed my mind. We could do worse than listen to people talk about all of the issues that are affecting us these days in a thoughtful and considered way. We aren’t getting much of that these days.

I have a timed ticket to go into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a few minutes. I am going to pay my respects to the Four Seasons and to Donna Summer whose lives have been the basis for two of my more recent jobs.

I am interested to see how they deal with social distancing and everything else that we are figuring out how to adjust these days. More than that, I am looking forward to a trip through a museum.

And then? Back on the road.

Heading west.