Day 230…
These are the days when it is wonderful to be inside and curled up with the cat.
Outside, it’s grey and cold and damp.
We are meant to have rain for the next few days that is forecast to start much later tonight. With all due respect to my phone app, I think that it’s going to come sooner than that. At some point, I’ll bundle up and go out for a walk. I don’t think that standing in line to vote yesterday counts as exercise.
Michael left early this morning to go down to the Law and Order set to get tested. He is shooting an episode that includes his recurring role as Judge Serani at some point in the next couple of days. Everyone on set has to get tested 72 hours before they arrive as well as on the day of.
Judge Serani is kind of the perfect role in times of COVID. He sits by himself on a bench. He’s already socially distanced.
Judge Serani’s first initial has floated around a bit. The first time or two that Michael was on the show, the nameplate on his bench had one initial and then, at some point, it changed to something else.
He will invariably have a line about Riker’s Island. Riker’s Island is a big island in the middle of the East River which runs between the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx here in New York. The main prison in New York City is located there.
During the last decade, Michael has remanded all sorts of famous people to Riker’s - Franco Nero who played Lancelot in the movie version of the Broadway musical Camelot, Brad Garrett from Everybody Loves Raymond, and Whoopi Goldberg come to mind.
Each episode he does has been directed by a different person. Melissa Leo, who won an acting Oscar for The Fighter ten years ago directed one and told Michael that Judge Serani suffered from hemorrhoids. He’s used that ever since. We keep hoping that they will eventually devote a whole episode to Judge Serani and that we will find out more about him, but for now, that’s kind of it. I have no doubt, though, that Michael has created a fully developed backstory on the guy on his own.
Last night, as we went to sleep, he was muttering his lines to himself as I drifted off. Par for the course when you live with an actor.
Very early on in our relationship, Michael got cast as one of the Dads in Mamma Mia on Broadway. He had to sing Our Last Summer while accompanying himself on the guitar. He doesn’t play the guitar, so he had to learn the chords to the song and practice them over and over again. They gave him a beat-up instrument to rehearse with at home. Often, he’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d hear him softly pick out the tune a couple of times in the dark before he came back to bed.
I don’t know that anyone who ever saw him do that ever realized just how many countless hours he had to spend practicing so that he could make it look easy onstage. I certainly did.
We are now a week before the national election. As much as the President is trying to push the narrative off of his complete failure to deal with the coronavirus on any level, it continues to be the main, most pressing issue confronting Americans. Most every other issue that you can point to, has been caused or has been made worse by the pandemic.
After the White House chief of staff admitted that the Administration not only was not planning on ever trying to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, but also had never tried, Republicans have had to scramble to clean up the mess. It’s too late. It’s been said.
The truth is out there.
As of today, there have been 8,706,456 cases of COVID-19 in the country. 225,765 people have died.
These numbers don’t really have any impact anymore. They are too big.
For me, there are several in among those numbers that I can put faces to. Some of the people in those enormous figures are or were very real people to me. They are people who lived and loved and dreamt. Each time those numbers go up, somebody else, somewhere in the world, can then put a face and a relationship to a person among the millions, too.
Here’s another way to put our 225,765 deaths in perspective. If you add up the entire populations of Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Vietnam, it more or less equals the population of the United States. The total deaths, all together, in those countries come to 13,076.
New Zealand has had 25 deaths from the virus since this started. Taiwan has had 7. We have had 225,765 people die and we don’t even have today’s deaths added in yet.
So, one week before the election, this Administration has now stated unambiguously that they aren’t even going to try and save anyone else from becoming infected.
One week before the election and there is no stimulus deal yet.
The official unemployment rate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reported as being 7.9% last month which is about 12.6 million people. That number is extremely misleading. It only accounts for people who are on temporary furlough or who out of work, available to work, and have actively looked for work in the four weeks preceding. It does not take into account people who are not working because they are staying home to look after their kids or people like me, who did not have regular jobs and whose industries have closed down, so we aren’t actively looking. Adding all of those people in, brings the total unemployed up to over 30 million people.
In nine weeks, the unemployment benefits extension will expire. In theory I have more weeks than that left on the 20-week extension, but it will still end as of December 27, regardless. After that? Who knows.
The Democrats are unwilling to compromise on a stimulus deal beyond what they have already compromised on. The Republicans have also dug in their heels.
An inadequate stimulus deal passing is almost worse than one not passing at all.
Speaker Pelosi is coming under fire for not caving in, but she’s right. A bad deal does nothing for anyone except giving the Republicans a “win” going into the election. Passing a bad deal will not be a “win” for anyone else who actually needs what’s contained in the Democrats’ bill. Sending out another round of $1200 checks will do nothing. Michael and I had to split the last check which was much reduced and endlessly delayed. It did almost nothing to shore up our finances.
What we need, is for the leadership of our country to create a coherent and effective plan to battle the pandemic. We need to follow the lead of many other countries on the globe who have effectively flattened their curves.
Frankly, we need to follow the lead of Governor Cuomo, here in New York, who managed to lead us properly. Under his leadership, we brought our rates down to a place where parts of our lives could safely resume.
The President has said that New York was a “ghost town” but, like everything else out of his mouth, that is a complete lie. New York is far from being a ghost town. One walk along the streets of the city is all you need to realize that. Even on a dreary day like this.
Effective leadership, in terms of the virus, gets more of our economy reopened. That’s what will get us our jobs back.
In the meantime, we are all going to need help to get by. Once we have gotten past mere basic survival, then and only then can we begin to address all of the other issues that we are facing.
One week before the election, and we are already breaking records in terms of early voting. We are already up to 66 million early votes. As of today, nearly half of ALL registered voters in North Carolina have already voted.
My one job since everything shut down in March was this past Saturday. We put together the concert that Patti LuPone has been touring the country with and performed it live at New World Stages in midtown Manhattan.
While it was done live, there were only about 5 or 6 people in the audience. The rest were in their homes all around the country (and around the world) watching it being streamed online.
Before the concert, Patti asked the people in the theatre not to respond - not to clap and not to laugh. What she was hoping to avoid was the occasional smattering of response that we have all gotten used to listening to comedians and performers who broadcast from home. No sound, we thought, would be better than that.
During rehearsals, there was even some humor to be mined from the silence. Patti belting out Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina and being met with complete crickets at the end of it actually made us all laugh during the afternoon sound check.
When I first met Patti, I was the Production Stage Manager of a play by David Mamet called The Old Neighborhood. We rehearsed in Boston because the director, was teaching up there. Between him and David Mamet and the other actors in the play, there was a LOT of testosterone floating around. I immediately gravitated to Patti. At the time, I joked with somebody that she was the only other gay man in the room.
Once we had opened and were running in New York, Patti had to take off a show because she had a long-standing commitment to perform her concert somewhere. In the days before, she would run through some of the songs in her dressing room.
I was (and still am) a HUGE fan. When I was still in high school, I saw the original production of Working which was a musical bomb that I, nonetheless, LOVED. Patti was in it, although she didn’t have a song.
Then I saw Evita with the original cast. It is still, today, one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen. I did not only not want it to end, I wanted to DO it.
Afterwards, I went to the stage door to see if I could get Patti’s autograph and the doorman actually let me go up to her dressing room.
That would NEVER happen now.
I knocked on her door and she opened it. Mandy Patinkin and a couple of other people were in there with her. She smiled and graciously signed my playbill and handed it to Mandy to sign as well. To say that I was over the moon, would be a complete understatement. I floated out of there.
So, fast-forward to The Old Neighborhood, and I am now actually working with her. Sadly, she wasn’t singing in the play, but still. On the Saturday before she took off for her concert, she told me that she was going to sing in her dressing room between shows and to let everyone know to leave her alone. I went out and picked up some food and came back and sat on the stairs outside of her room while she sang.
She went through several songs and then it happened, she started singing Argentina. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Patti LuPone was singing Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina and I was the only person listening to it.
More than twenty years have passed since that day and I have now heard her sing it a lot. It doesn’t matter. It never fails to bring me back to what it felt like sitting in that stairwell eating my sandwich.
This weekend, we ran through the concert twice before we streamed it. Patti sung full out in some places and held back in others. When the time came for the actual performance, the energy changed. Nothing was marked. She was fully committed.
The complete lack of response during our rehearsals was not only usual but, as I said, also somewhat humorous. That same lack of response during the actual concert when Patti was giving it her remarkable all was heartbreaking. There was nothing funny about it at all.
The Performing Arts require an audience. Yes, there was an audience watching our stream, and yes, I know that they were responding well because I saw all of the text comments flying past when I watched part of it later on. Even so, the direct dialogue between the audience and the performer is where the real electricity happens. That was missing. That's the reason we will always crave being part of a live audience.
Listening to Patti sing through a closed door is one of my favorite memories, but it pales in comparison to watching her sing onstage up on the balcony in Hal Prince’s spectacular Broadway production. She shot energy at us and we all shot it right back at her.
I want that back. I NEED to get that back. We all do. Yes, I freely admit it, I’m an addict.
There is one week left until the election. There is plenty of time left to vote. If you haven’t already, please, for all of our sakes, do it.
For all of my fellow New Yorkers, I have but one piece of advice. Whatever your phone says, bring an umbrella.
❤️Patti LuPone with no audience giving back what she gives...yes broke my heart just reading it
But
You Were Her Audiance ❤️
just like being in the Met Museum
standing
in front of
Degas
Ballet Class
....all by myself
I was so overwhelmed
I burst into tears
We need the audience of each other
❤️