Post 251 - November 17, 2020

Day 251…

As I was walking around yesterday, I was starting to get annoyed at all of the Christmas decorations going up.

Even though it gets progressively harder, I try not to pay any conscious attention to Christmas or Hanukkah until at least Thanksgiving. When Santa arrives at the end of the Macy’s Day Parade, then I’m fine. Christmas can start. Before that, we have the harvest to celebrate.

My feeling has always been that things should be celebrated one at a time. This year, I was willing to give a little on the start date, but it still seemed much too early to begin. To my enormous surprise, however, as I was going over our schedules with Michael after breakfast, I discovered that Thanksgiving is actually next week.

How did that happen?

Responsible officials and health care professionals have been warning people against getting together for holiday meals for weeks. I thought that they were being proactive and giving everyone plenty of time to come up with other ideas. It makes sense that the discussions are happening now, because the day is almost upon us. It isn’t months away as I somehow thought.

During my walk downtown, I stopped in at the post office and at the bank both of which have some decorations up. Not all of them, just the beginnings.

Pottery Barn has covered the plywood that they put up to protect the store windows from post-election rioting and looting with painted pictures of gnomes and Christmas trees.

The big tree has been put in place at Rockefeller Center and there is scaffolding up all around it for workers to be able to install all of the lights.

This year the lighting of the tree event is going to be virtual. Usually, on the day of the lighting, you can’t get anywhere near the place. Nor would you want to.

The structural foundation of the light show that plays across the front of Saks Fifth Avenue has been in place since before the election. Their windows are covered with plywood, too, and I am sure that behind that, the famous displays are being created.

Maybe this year, with the tourists staying at home, New Yorkers will venture out to see all of it for themselves. Usually we stay home and leave it for the out-of-town visitors.

Unless we have out-of-town visitors in which case, we get sent into the middle of it as ambassadors. We then reach out to our fellow city-dwellers for pity and they are always happy to comply.

There have been Christmas supplies on the shelves in stores for weeks, but they’ve been behind other things.

On Halloween, I went into store after store looking for a simple orange plastic pumpkin. I never found one, but had I been willing, I could have picked up some assorted Christmas paraphernalia that had already replaced the spooky plastic stuff on the shelves.

Up until today, I just tuned it all out. Yesterday was the day that I decided that I could start seeing it all.

New York at Christmas time, I have to say, can actually be quite wonderful.

Even when it gets cold and snowy, there’s an anticipation for the holidays that, despite the horrendous crowds, gives the city an exciting energy. Like anything, of course, too much of it makes you want to scream, but a little of it is great.

Some of my friends posted back in March that, to cheer themselves us, they had put their Christmas things back up when everything shut down. I never heard whether they then ever took it all back down again. If they left everything up all this time, then they are already well prepared.

It will be interesting to see what happens here this year without the tourists. We seemed to be going towards things starting to open up until a couple of weeks ago when states all around the country started to spike up again alarmingly. The numbers are now so bad and only climbing higher, that I would be surprised if a lot of people from the hard-hit heartland make the trip to the east coast. Given their self-perpetuating high infection rates, we should all hope that they just choose to stay away this season.

Throughout December lousy weather makes people think about Rudolph. After the holidays, lousy weather just makes people think about getting out.

November and December are typically among the most lucrative months in the theatre. Everybody wants to see a show.

Each year, Radio City Music Hall puts together its Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes. In an ordinary year, it would be just about to start performing. This year, though, it’s been cancelled. They have already put up tickets on sale for the show next year on their website.

Broadway shows which might be struggling, try to hold on for this season where they have the potential to make up some of their summer losses. June, July and August can be a brutal time for the theatre. So is the period after New Year’s. Many shows post their notices and close in the first week of the new year.

As great as these current two months usually are is as awful as January and February can be. Producers will try and quit while they are ahead - or at least less far behind.

On a normal year, Producers would have announced the holiday performance schedule over the summer so that out of town ticket buyers could plan their trips.

The cast and crew would have then tried to figure out their own plans. A huge amount of creativity is involved. Can you get a flight out after the last matinee, spend the day in whatever state your family is in and get back in time the morning afterwards?

Actors and stage managers working under a union contract are entitled to two weeks of vacation a year. That’s it. Some shows will not allow people to take those weeks consecutively and some, to avoid infighting, won’t allow anyone to put in for a vacation over Thanksgiving or the last week of December.

If you are on a new musical show and you are a hit, you may even end up performing in the Macys Day Parade. That means that instead of sleeping in on Thanksgiving morning and lazily turning on the TV to watch the parade, you are up before the sun and down in Herald Square rehearsing in the dark.

In 1999, when we were doing Annie Get Your Gun, it was freezing. It had been raining and the ground was wet and icy. Nobody in the cast - men or women - were wearing all that much. The women put on several layers of pantyhose over their bare legs to try and keep warm but after a split or two on the slippery wet ground, they were soaked through. The men were in open leather vests - not much warmth there either.

We were there for Jersey Boys as well, but it was a much nicer day.

Then there is often an actual performance of the show on Thanksgiving Day. Civilians will have had their meals and be looking for entertainment.

For Christmas, there is usually either a performance on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day. It is extremely rare to get both off.

You plan as best you can - a grabbed meal here, a little get together there. Sometimes there’s a potluck dinner at the theatre with the entire company - onstage and off - in the alley outside.

Then there is New Year’s Eve.

Annie Get Your Gun was at the Marriot Marquis hotel right on Times Square. We had a matinee that day and needed police escorts to get out of the theatre to go home through the crowds who many hours before midnight had already made the area impassable.

One year, the Toronto company of Jersey Boys performed outside on New Year’s Eve. We all gathered around a fire burning in a metal barrel to warm up while we waited as if we were living in a dystopian future.

I thought I’d understood what cold was. It turned out that I didn’t. And I wasn’t in one of the ultra-short white sequined finale dresses.

Nothing like that is going to happen this year.

People are going to walk through the plaza to see the famous tree, but if it gets too crowded, I guarantee that the city will block it off.

The Thanksgiving parade this year will have 75% fewer participants and it will only be viewable online. There will be no crowds lining the parade route.

The blowing up of the giant balloons that takes place on the streets alongside the American Museum of Natural History a few blocks downtown from where I live won’t happen this year. The balloons will be inflated but they will be tethered to vehicles rather than to the usual score of handlers. I’m not sure where they will actually be, or where they are going to go, but they will only be shown on television.

The performances will all be pre-taped.

Many of us are going to do most of our gift shopping online.

For New Year’s there will be some sort of televised dropping of the ball in Times Square, but they will try to keep the crowds away from it.

Walking around the city today and looking at the lights going up was bittersweet.

For the first time, many of us have nothing scheduled that will conflict with any celebration this season. Most of the people who will be performing are taping those things now. They’ll be able to sleep in and turn on the TV to watch along with the rest of us.

There is nothing to stop us from getting together this year except for the virus.

A few weeks ago, we had started to discuss maybe getting together with Michael’s family up in Albany for Thanksgiving, but recently we abandoned that idea. It just isn’t safe, and it seems like an unnecessary risk to gather this year. All the reputable health care experts are warning against it, so we are heeding them.

Much better safe than sorry. There’s nobody in either of our families that I am willing to see go. The whole family, as far as I know, feels the same.

Instead, we are all going to gather together in our own homes and hold a big Zoom meeting while we eat. People can cook, eat, and come and go as they please. No driving.

The next few weeks are not going to be what we are used to, but that doesn’t mean that they are going to be bad. Quite the contrary, I am very much looking forward to them.

By the time we get through New Year’s Eve we will only be a couple of weeks away from the beginning of a new Administration. This new Administration has already started to mobilize against the virus and plan their attack. They will need to start funding the states so that they will be able to get whatever vaccine gets approved distributed.

Because they are being continually delayed by the outgoing President, they will have to scramble to make up the time. There is an enormous amount of work to do and an enormous amount that needs to be cleaned up. If we do it all properly then maybe next year, the holidays might look a bit more normal.

I am not so sure, however, that we here in New York won’t look back at these this year with a little fondness in the years to come.

This year’s holidays will be like no others in our memories. That won’t make them bad, necessarily, but it will make them different. We may find that some parts are even better.

There are things to celebrate. And loved ones to spend time with, if even just on a screen.

So, start thinking about dragging out those lights. We only have a few weeks to decorate an entire city.

Let’s make it great.