Day 247…
A man fell to his death, yesterday, from high in the grid above the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre, here in the heart of the city’s theatre district.
When you are sitting in the audience and watching a show and look up and see all of the lights shining down, those lights are all hanging on a latticework of pipes and supports. Motors that can raise and lower props and curtains are also hung from it.
I can probably count the total number of times that I have been up in a grid in a theatre on the fingers of one hand. It’s terrifying to be up there and look down on the stage far below.
At the beginning of June, well into the pandemic shutdown, the producers of Beetlejuice, the musical announced that they were closing for good. The theatre had already been reserved for the incoming revival of The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. While that production has now been pushed off for another year and a half, there was still the remains of the old show to load out of the theatre. This man was working up in the grid removing some of props and supports that had been used in the previous show.
There is no reason why he should have fallen. He had lived high above the stage throughout his working life. That’s what he did.
The news is not releasing his name yet and so neither will I. But I knew him and had worked with him. Always a smile. Never a complaint. And he was amazing in his job. A career stagehand - one of the finest in New York. Just like that, he’s gone.
He was a couple of years younger than me and leaves behind a wife and kids.
Did he do something wrong up there? Did he miscalculate something? Was there a pipe that was improperly installed that he shouldn’t have trusted? Or, did it just happen?
He left his family yesterday morning and did not come home.
The people who are dying from COVID-19 around our country are dying deaths that are just as senseless as this.
Most of them aren’t doing anything dangerous. Quite the contrary, what they are doing should be safe.
They are going to parties. They are hugging their friends on the street then going home and having dinner with their families. They are working out at the gym or taking in a film in a darkened movie theatre surrounded, as usual, by an audience of strangers. They are going to the White House, one of the most secure residences on the planet, and toasting a new Supreme Court nominee outside in a garden party.
Had they been well informed they could have perhaps saved themselves and their loved ones. Had they taken a few simple precautions, many of the well over two hundred thousand people who have perished during this pandemic might still be alive.
They would be going home to their families tonight. They would be starting to think about what to get their grandkids for the holidays. They would be dreaming about the future.
Instead, they are gone.
There will be an investigation into why the stagehand fell. Authorities and his fellow union members will scour that grid to look for a reason for his untimely death.
That will not happen with the army of citizens who have fallen before this virus. We already know why they are gone.
This Administration has already admitted that their strategy for fighting the onslaught of this infection has been to do nothing.
They will claim that they shut down travel from China early on, but they didn’t. Travel continued. It was just Chinese nationals who were prohibited from coming in. Everybody else was allowed to freely come and go through international airports that are just a few-minutes-drive from where I live. Nobody was checked. Nobody’s temperature was taken.
When they belatedly realized that the virus was actually coming in from Europe, they closed down travel from there too. Except that they didn’t. They allowed travel to continue in from places that they liked. Like England. And they didn’t check those people either.
I know this from personal experience, because I flew in from London a week before the lockdown and nobody so much as blinked at me as I went through customs, let alone took my temperature.
And I had it.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I entered this country carrying the virus. I then unwittingly gave it to my husband.
And they knew. The President had been briefed about the dangers of this virus a month and a half before. His response to the information was to ignore it and keep the information from getting out.
Even once the President had contracted the virus himself, he continued to scoff at its dangers. He was hospitalized with potentially serious symptoms and rather than using that moment to educate the rest of us, he, instead, used it to try to show how toothless the virus was. Toothless for him who had access to every single therapy on the planet, but not for anybody else.
Yes, older people are more susceptible, but younger people have succumbed to it as well. A healthy and fit 41-year-old Broadway performer died after fighting it for months and left a wife and baby son behind him. An otherwise healthy five-year-old girl died recently mere days after she started not feeling well.
These deaths, and many of the others, were avoidable. They weren’t accidents. This President could have taken the lead at any point and saved lives. Maybe not all of them - but a lot of them.
As angry and shocked as I am by the death of the man who was working up in the grid, it seems to have been an accident. I’m not ready to accept it - I am sure I am not alone in that by any stretch of the imagination - but I will, eventually. There are things that happen to people in our lives that are beyond anyone’s real control.
The definition of the word accident is, “an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.”
Maybe investigators will find something that was to blame for his fall, but if there is something it is almost impossible to comprehend that it was done intentionally.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not an accident. Perhaps its creation and initial release was, but the resulting response is not. This Administration CHOSE to let people die. They considered the options and this is what they chose.
If you can’t tell, I’m pissed off this morning.
I’m pissed off that we have allowed this inept, unqualified conman to lead us for as long as he has.
I’m pissed off that we are sitting around waiting for him to concede and get out of the way.
I’m pissed off at all of the Republican sycophants and mouthpieces who have gathered around him and continue to support him as he circles the drain.
There are things that can be avoided and things that can’t. I don’t know if there was really anything that could have stopped that man from falling to his death. People are going to look for something, but at the end of the day, it just happened.
He knew what he was doing. He was the exact right person to send up into the air to do the work he was doing. That’s what he did.
The whole theatrical community will grieve, virtually, alongside his family. But how do we mourn the loss of hundreds of thousands of people?
Maybe, as a start, we just put on a mask and stop gathering together. Not forever, just for a bit.
Does it suck that the holidays this year are going to be strange and isolated? Yes, it really sucks. But, if we do that this year, then maybe we can all gather our families around us and celebrate together - next year and hopefully for many years to come.
If we don’t do that this year, then, yes maybe we can see our families and all be together over these next weeks, but then some of them will never be part of a celebration ever again. In the years to come, there will just be an empty place at the table and one less person to buy a gift for.
Election officials have called this election, “the most secure in history.” The President lost. We chose someone else. Let’s move on.
Let’s take up arms against this sea of troubles. And by opposing end them.
Wear a mask.
Really. Just wear a mask and keep your distance.
Not forever, just for now.
Is that really too high a price to pay to keep people around us alive?
Heartfelt condolences Richard for the man you knew and respected in the theatre world. What a tragic accident!
Jx
❤️Oh Richard my heart goes out to you, on the loss of this man, of the theatre community. I am so sorry
Thank you for your light in this day
I read a quote of Descartes:
“Masked, I advance”
xoxo