Post 182 - September 9, 2020

Day 182…

The sky is filled with clouds this morning. While temperatures are hitting record highs out west, it has actually gotten somewhat cool here.

I don’t have anything with me to wear besides shorts and t-shirts. There may be a little shopping in my future later today.

For the first time in two days, I am actually watching the news on TV. There’s a level of anxiety from the newscasters that is absent from everybody walking around town. Two days away from it and I can feel it creeping back into my chest.

The President is still trying to counter the nasty revelations about how he really feels about the armed forces of the country. A couple of news cycles later and it hasn’t gone away. Good.

In a move that should chill everyone, the United States Department of Justice is trying to take over the defense of the President against E. Jean Carroll, who is accusing him of having raped her in the 1990’s.

Having raped her.

It is yet another indication that Attorney General William Barr is more the President’s personal lawyer than he is ours. If that move is successful, it will mean that all of us are going to be billed for those hours.

Having RAPED her.

The Russians are moving into phase three of trials for a vaccine that they claim to have developed. 40,000 of their citizens are scheduled to be inoculated with it beginning today.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

In a rally in North Carolina yesterday, the President continued to sow discord and foment unrest in regard to mail-in-voting. Yesterday, he seemed to be encouraging private militias to monitor polling stations. He is effectively encouraging his base to illegally try to vote twice by mailing in their ballots, then going to polling stations to confirm that they’ve been received - something unlikely to have happened within that time frame.

And all of this while, we are now approaching 190,000 people dead from the effects of this global pandemic. No masks at the President’s rally yesterday. No distancing. No clear path forward out of this.

Argh! TV off. That’s better.

A grassroots movement has come into being called Be an Arts Hero. 5.1 million Arts workers, including me, are currently unemployed with little chance of that changing anytime soon. They are calling on the Senate to pass a $43.85 billion relief package to help both artists and cultural institutions through this crisis.

It is estimated that before the arrival of COVID-19, the Arts generated $877 billion in revenue, or 4.5% of the United States gross domestic product, to our nation’s economy.

This figure being asked for was arrived at by calculating, proportionately, what the US airlines add to the GDP and what they have already been given, which is $50 billion.

There is still $120 billion unallocated in the CAREs Act. The Senate is being urged to assign some of that already approved money to the arts sector. Not for any airy-fairy reason but rather that the economic numbers clearly dictate the need for it.

Those of us unemployed in the Arts sector account for more than 10% of the total number of unemployed currently in the country.

This ask of the Senate is well thought out and fully based on the numbers. The argument is that the Arts are not at all a luxury, but rather a key factor in the return of the economy.

In 1935, under the New Deal program, the Federal Art project was begun as a way to employ artists and artisans during the Great Depression. Sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, it employed artists to create murals, paintings, sculpture, posters, graphic art, photography, arts and crafts and theatre design. In the eight years that it operated more than 100 community arts centers were established around the country. More than 200,000 individual pieces of art were created, and about 10,000 artists and craftsmen were sustained during one of the worst economic crises this country had ever experienced.

In return, the country has a treasure trove of art worth far more now than what it spent on it then. The morale boost at the time, as this artwork started to proliferate, was incalculable.

The reopening of Broadway this spring has been the dangling carrot pulling us all forward. That is the thing that many of us have been holding onto.

Unfortunately, that’s not in any way guaranteed. Nobody REALLY knows how it’s going to happen. Spring is a goal that was set to be far enough ahead of us, so that it could be achieved. If what is happening now is still happening around the end of the year, I’m pretty sure that that goal is going to be pushed off.

Whenever it finally does happen, it’s not like somebody’s just going to say “Go!” and all thirty or so Broadway shows are suddenly going to be able to start up again one weekend.

None of them have any advance ticket sales. That’s usually the barometer that producers use to be able to judge how well a show is doing.

If you have a lousy week but you know that the next couple of weeks are well sold, you suck up the loss and move forward. Some shows, like Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen can be completely sold out for weeks or months in advance.

At the moment, the Broadway League is saying that Broadway will remain closed until January 3. That doesn’t mean that anything will be open on the 4th, it just means that you can get refunds for tickets you already have for performances between now and January 3rd.  At some point in the next few weeks, they will push that date back. All that they are doing is trying to control the amount of people getting refunds at any one time.

Broadway is far more likely to reopen in dribs and drabs. One or two shows at a time.

But before even that happens, there will need to be a huge campaign to convince people that it is safe to come back to New York and safe to come back to the theatre.

Before THAT happens, it is going to actually need to BE safe to come back to New York and safe to come back to the theatre.

Broadway is not going to be able to operate the way the drag shows and concerts are operating out here on the Cape. Broadway will only be able to operate when shows can play to packed houses again. And only then.

It seems to me that Broadway is going to be able to reopen long before touring shows are going to be able to resume. How do you plan a route through a country that has widely divergent pockets of infection? How can you predict where those pockets are going to be?  You can’t just sit back and say, oh look, San Francisco looks good, let’s go there now. You have to know several months in advance that San Francisco is going to be OK so that you can advertise and sell tickets.

What happens if you are touring through some cities and suddenly there’s an outbreak and your next couple of cities shut down. What do you do with the company? Do you pay them during the three-week break? Where does that money come from if you aren’t getting money coming in from ticket sales for those weeks?

There’s another interesting wrinkle to getting people back and that is that most everyone's who's been working has been working from home. Many theatre goers aren’t even in the city these days. Grabbing a bite after work before going to a show is not going to be quite the same thing.

In six months, we have radically changed how we work. While some of what we once did may revert back to pre-pandemic norms, some of it may be permanently changed.

And we need the tourists back. Our borders need to reopen. We can’t reopen Broadway without the tourists, but until Broadway reopens, what will lure the tourists here?

March, remember, is still another six months away. A lot can and will change between now and then.

While all of us in the Arts are navigating through this, so are all of the restaurant owners and other small business owners who rely on the theatre functioning to work themselves.

The letter that was sent out to the US Senate from Be an Arts Hero was written by a playwright named Matthew-Lee Erlbach. In it, he says this:

“We are over 675,000 small businesses and organizations in every town, city, and state, employing 5.1 million hard-working Americans who are now desperately struggling to stay above water. Our influence reaches across every sector because the Arts Economy is a jobs multiplier, creating millions of sustainable jobs in collateral arts-adjacent economies. Our very humanity—and the Humanities—teeter at the edge of a fiscal and existential cliff. If we fall, so does the identity of America itself, for we are the very expression of this nation. And right now, we are crying out for your action.”

We need our government to pay attention to us.

This isn’t a selfish request. We need some of the energy being directed towards our sports teams directed towards us. Why? Because the Arts sector is a larger part of the economy than the Sports sector is.

Our economy NEEDS the Arts to get back to work.

Until we are able to do that, we require the government’s assistance to help take care of us.

The Senators needs to get back from their vacations and actually start to work towards getting something accomplished.

We elected them to work.

We elected them to protect us.

We elected them to maintain our economy and general well-being.

They are currently doing none of that. They need to get back and start doing their f&*#ing jobs.

Let’s be clear, we’re not asking.

We’re demanding.

I am demanding.

I am an Arts Worker.