Day 191…
I am a little late today because I am sitting in Lafayette Park across from the White House.
Yes, I am on another road trip. Florida is where I am ultimately heading, to visit my Mom. Then, on my way back, I am going to swing by North Carolina to visit my sister.
As opposed to my last trip to North Dakota, this one has been a bit more difficult to plan. On my previous trip, I didn’t stay anywhere for longer than a couple of hours. On this one, I am going to be in two states on the New York’s restricted list for a few days each so that means a two-week quarantine for me when I return.
Because I am visiting my Mom, Michael and I have been especially careful since returning from Provincetown. Yesterday, Michael went to visit friends outside of the city and last night slept in a friend’s apartment away from me, also just in case.
We are trying to keep Michael available to shoot film or TV. When I get back, he’s going to move into another couple’s currently empty apartment for the two weeks just in case. That’s why he’s not coming down with me on this trip. I have some work coming up next month so that’s why I am doing this now. I’ll be finished quarantine long before I need to start working with other people.
That took me about ten minutes to write but we’ve been working on the logistics for well over a week. In days past, I would have just gone on Cheaptickets and gotten a flight to Orlando and rented a car. So much for days past.
I wasn’t sure what to expect here in Washington. The fact that Lafayette Park is open surprised me. It’s open, but there is fencing everywhere. There are only a couple of ways to get in where before it was completely open.
The statue of Andrew Jackson on his horse has a circle of concrete barriers around it and then beyond that, a circle of high black fence.
St. John’s Church, where the President pulled that ridiculous stunt with the Bible is also surrounded by fencing. Three blocks of 16th Street north of the park have been renamed Black Lives Plaza. That’s where the gigantic Black Lives Matter street painting is. There are other Black Lives Matter signs all over the buildings along both sides of the plaza.
The last time I was here was in December, I think. I did a concert with Mandy Patinkin at the National Theatre. It may have been November, but the National Christmas tree was definitely up and lit. I did some Christmas shopping back then.
Each year the White House releases a special Christmas ornament. Last year’s ornament was, I swear, a combat helicopter with little wreaths on it. I bought some older Obama-era ones that were less militaristic.
At the time, they were in the process of building a much higher fence around the White House. There were construction barricades that almost completely blocked the view. The fence now appears complete and the barricades are down. The new fence actually looks much like the old one, only a few feet taller. You still can’t get near it, but now you can see through it. The closest you can approach it, is across the street in the park.
I’ve been visiting Washington since I was a little kid. I remember being here with my family and going to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I also remember seeing the cursed Hope diamond which, for some reason, I was a bit obsessed with for a while.
In 1998, we did an out of town pre-Broadway tryout of the revival of Annie Get Your Gun starring Bernadette Peters at the Kennedy Center. During that, I lived somewhere up around Dupont Circle. At some point I needed a new book to read. During a walk I took through Georgetown, I stopped in a bookstore and ended up taking a chance on something called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It had just come out and looked right up my alley.
Al and Tipper Gore came to see one of our performances while we were there. The security detail came in earlier in the day and set up metal detectors off stage right and off stage left. Several bomb-sniffing dogs were taken through every part of the theatre, in front and behind the curtain.
The only thing that we were really worried about was that Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, not to mention the entire male chorus, all had rifles. They were obviously fake. Our director Graciela Daniele had wanted to make sure that the audience was never worried about them, so they were simple wood cut outs. Even so, during Anything You Can Do, I Can do Better, both Bernadette and Tom Wopat had to aim their fake guns right out front to the back of the house. In the theatre we were in, that meant they were pointing them directly at the Presidential box where the Gores would be sitting.
Obviously, nothing happened or else you would have heard about it. Every single time we had to cross over to the other side of the stage or go downstairs, we had to pass through the metal detectors. The Secret Service guys were pretty relaxed and, actually rather fun. The Gores seemed to enjoy themselves. Presidents going to the theatre doesn’t always end that well.
There are three guys wearing MAGA hats sitting opposite me a few benches down. They are making a point of raising their voices so that I can hear what they are saying. I was in a souvenir store before coming here and they were in there as well. One of them bought their red hat in there and they took in that I was looking at the Democratic swag. They honestly just sound like idiots, prattling on about nonexistent nightly scenes of violence and carnage across the country. They are from Alabama.
The White House seems to take on the character of the President occupying it. It felt like a symbol of hope during the Obama years. Now, sitting here looking at it, it feels like I am writing this post from Mordor.
Two days ago, CDC Director Robert Redfield completely broke with the President and said that it was unlikely that the majority of people in the US would be able to get a vaccine until the middle of next year - maybe not until the third quarter.
He said it was likely that should the vaccine become available in November or December, supply constraints would mean that it would need to be prioritized for people like front line workers over the general population.
Any vaccine, he said, would likely require two doses, administered a month apart. There would need to be an effective communications network set up between health facilities to accommodate people who would need to get those shots in different locations for whatever reason.
Redfield outlined the phases that they are planning to use to roll it out.
First, after FDA approval, the limited available doses would be prioritized using some still to be determined criteria.
Second, as more doses become available, they would be distributed with two objectives in mind - to achieve the widest possible coverage and to ensure that a high percentage of the most vulnerable receive them.
Third, acknowledging that this would likely not be enough to stop the spread of COVID-19, the vaccine would then be made universally available.
Then he said something truly contrary to anything the President has been putting forth.
“I might even go so far as to say this face mask is more guarantee to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine because the immunogenicity may be 70% and if I don’t get an immune response then the vaccine’s not going to protect me. This face mask will.”
When the report about all of this broke on Wednesday, Michael and I were just about to sit down to eat. It kind of stopped us in our tracks.
“How long do you think it will be before the President carves him a new a&%hole?”
“Oh, about five minutes.”
Sure enough, the President completely contradicted him not long after.
“Okay, number one, it’s (masks are) not more effective, by any means, than a vaccine, and I called him about that. And I believe that if you ask him, he would probably say that he didn’t understand the question… He made a mistake when he said that. It's just incorrect information, and I called him, and he didn't tell me that, and I think he got the message maybe confused.”
A few hours later Redfield issued a kind of retraction but then a few hours after that, the retraction was, itself, retracted. Dr. Fauci then weighed in and said that they were both right.
The whole thing was a pretty great lesson in how to sift through what seems to be fairly pure science and what ends up being science corrupted and distorted by politics. The closer you get to the initial announcement, the purer it is. The further away you get, the more distorted and compromised.
Helicopters have been flying back and forth overhead as I have been sitting here. They look like they may be coming and going from the south lawn of the White House. The police have just cleared out the park and me with it. I wonder if the President is heading to a rally somewhere today.
It would be nice to be able to look upon the White House with the pride I had during the two Presidential terms that preceded this one. It looks different to me now both because of who is living in it at the moment, but also how it came to be in the first place.
According to a White House history website, the building of it began in 1792. Washington D.C commissioners initially intended to bring in workers from Europe, but the recruitment response was so meagre that they turned, instead, to both free and enslaved African Americans. Enslaved men were trained in the work at the stone quarry in Aquia, Virginia where much of the stone for the walls came from. They quarried and cut the stone that was then shaped and laid by Scottish stonemasons.
So much of what we all enjoy in our lives only came into being because of the blood and sweat of people who were denied the opportunity to share in it themselves.
We must acknowledge that.
The more I read, these days, the more I realize that very little is really what it seems. “History is written by the victors” is more apt than we know. Those who conquer get to frame the story. They slowly erase the stories of those they have conquered to legitimize their right to occupy somebody else’s land.
That’s why we need to keep saying the names of those who have lost. We can’t let their blood just seep into the ground and fade from view.
Our nation’s ground is so very bloody already.
All the white house paint in the world can’t fully cover up those stains.
❤️🙏❤️