Day 209
Quarantine - Day 9
Today looks like one of those perfect New York days that make all of us who choose to live in the city want to stay here. The sun is shining through some fluffy white clouds scattered across a bright blue arcing sky.
The trees that I can see from our windows are still green, but you can sense that they are straining to keep that up. The yellows, oranges and reds are building up and waiting to burst.
If I were going outside today, I think that I would wear long jeans and a light hoodie. I haven’t worn anything but shorts for many months. My closet door has stayed firmly shut. Throughout the entire summer I’ve worn a steady series of the same polo shirts and t-shirts over and over again in a seemingly endless cycle.
When we first closed everything down in early March, my work email inbox had well over 20,000 emails in it.
Before the days of email, discussions happened on the phone or in person. Nothing tangible was left behind after they happened. Maybe you took some written notes, maybe you didn’t. Twenty-five years after that, all of our conversations, no matter how mundane, now have the potential to accumulate and haunt us forever.
Over the first few months of the shut-down, I managed to get rid of about 5,000 of those emails - either by filing them in a virtual folder or deleting them.
After every single performance of a professional production, the stage manager issues a performance report. They are for everybody connected with the show who is not actually in the building to be able to see what happened that day. They also become part of the show’s record.
That means, on a commercial show, that you typically get eight reports a week with two separate reports coming in on each of the matinee days. At one point at Jersey Boy’s peak, we had seven productions running here and internationally at the same time. That meant thirty-two reports coming in every single week. The weekends with two shows on Saturday and two shows on Sunday were particularly brutal. Because all of the shows were in different time zones, there wasn’t an hour of the day when they didn’t arrive.
At the point that we shut down, we had three productions of Jersey Boys running - Off-Broadway in New York, the US Tour and the Norwegian Cruise Line installation. There was also the national tour of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.
I tried to read all of the reports as they came in - at least to just quickly check if anything horrific had happened - but there were days when they just piled up. I had arranged with individual stage managers to alert me of anything really important that happened by texting me so that I would be sure not to miss anything, but it was still a continual unending effort to keep up. Even when I was on vacation, I needed to keep my eyes on them.
In addition to the reports themselves, there were then the discussions about the problems, issues, observations and various crisis that had been reported in them. To give you an idea of how many emails were generated by all of that, I had already gotten rid of most of the actual performance reports by the time I really started to clear out my inbox just now.
This past week, I worked through all of the remaining 15,000 plus emails left in my inbox. As of this morning, I am proud to report that there are zero work emails currently in my work inbox.
The main thing that I felt as I worked through them all was a profound disassociation from the work that all of us used to do.
I found email arguments between people. Sometimes they were between others that I was only cc’d on and sometimes they were arguments that I participated in. Some of them stretched over a whole slew of passionate and emotional back and forths. There were discussions about technical issues and how they were being fixed. Then there were the endless scheduling discussions.
Nearly seven months later, all of it just looks like so much ancient history.
Thousands of instances of communication that seemed vitally important at the time, but looking back on, seem ridiculous, are now consigned to the same ether where old phone conversations and in-person meeting go.
As satisfying as that feels, and it feels incredibly satisfying, it all makes me feel like I’ve moved even further away from the life I was leading earlier this year. I can see how busy I was, but I am starting to forget about how that actually felt.
The travesty of the circus the President has created around his stay at Walter Reed Medical Center is overshadowing the fact that many of us still have no work to go back to.
It’s one thing to be unemployed. For those of us in show business, unemployment is a normal part of our working lives.
This unemployment is different, however, because our industry is largely shut down. We aren’t all trying to get work because there is no work to get. There is no work to get largely because of how this President and his Administration have mishandled this pandemic.
While we are all being diverted by, well, all of the diversions, there is a lot happening that is slipping by without our noticing.
Many of our National Parks are becoming more and more imperiled with each passing day.
According to a National Park Conservation Association study, 96% of our nation’s more than 400 parks are plagued by ever-increasing air pollution problems. This Republican-led Administration continues to weaken clean-air legislation in favor of allowing corporations to operate as they please.
This Republican-led Administration dismantled Obama-era clean water regulations allowing corporations more freedom to pollute our rivers and streams. More than half of our nation’s wetlands, rivers and streams have had their protections eliminated. That move threatens not only endangered wildlife, but it also endangers our own drinking water.
An area of public lands in the Great Basin, the size of the state of Indiana, that has long been protected, has been offered for oil and gas leasing since this President took office. Some of that land has been leased for as little as $2 an acre.
The state of Alaska is pushing forward a proposal to allow private industrial mining concerns to construct a road through Gates of the Arctic National Preserve which will impede caribou migration and threaten the livelihood of Native Alaskan communities.
The ill-conceived and absurd border wall construction has already resulted in the bulldozing of hundred-year old saguaro cactuses in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona. Land has also been cleared for it above Native American graves.
Parts of the Endangered Species Act that preserves ecosystems for imperiled species have been repealed.
Environmental laws that ensure that people have a say in how public lands are used and that governmental agencies consider public and environmental health before permitting projects on federal lands have been gutted.
As all of our attention is focused on the melee surrounding this President leaving the Walter Reed Medical center after only three nights, the Republican-led Senate continues to try and push through their ultra-conservative right-wing nominee to the Supreme Court. Should that nomination go through, the future of many of the protections still in place in our society will become imperiled.
Republican-appointed Justices Alito and Thomas yesterday signaled their desire to overrule the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that allowed same-sex marriage. The new nominee agrees with them. Her stance against Roe v. Wade is also very clear.
This President, yesterday, got off the Marine One helicopter and walked up the steps to the Truman balcony at the White House and took off his mask. Photographers and videographers recorded the moment as he stood there so that it could be used in the propaganda that they released this morning.
No symptoms, not lasting effects, COVID-19 is no worse than the common flu. He claims, that against every guideline currently in place, that he intends to debate next week.
Either he has lied about getting the virus or, more likely, he is on a high from the Dexamethazone steroid that he is STILL being given. He hasn’t finished the 5-day course of Remdesevir either. Unless, of course, again, he’s lying.
All of the environmental and social advances that have been made in this country took years or decades or sometimes centuries to achieve. Supreme Court decisions can affect what happens in our society for a whole generations to come.
Once our protected lands are invaded and plundered, there is nothing left. The places in our country of pristine beauty and natural majesty disappear forever once they have been mined or fracked or drilled.
COVID-19 will, indeed, eventually go,or we will figure out how to live with it. The results of what is happening in our country behind all of it will remain.
Those protected and cherished lands are OURS.
The hard-won rights that this Administration is trying to undermine and overturn, are OURS.
The traveling carnival that this Administration sets up everywhere it goes is what this Administration uses to distract us from what it’s really doing.
It’s never good when the two lead guys on Supernatural come across a carnival. Never. There is always some evil malignant spirit wreaking havoc and mayhem inside it.
It’s no different here. The President is their living and breathing three-ring circus and this Administration continually uses him as their smokescreen.
No tax refund can possibly be worth all of this.
Voting has started in some places and is about to start in others.
That’s how this all stops.
Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.
Vote.
making room for 5,000 more emails of abundance...
yes
can’t wait to
V❤️TE