Day 268…
Michael has a live Zoom audition this morning, so I left the apartment and let him have at it. I am now sitting outside having a chilly breakfast on Madison Avenue.
Partially enclosed dining huts have become ubiquitous on the city’s streets. Even when offered the opportunity to eat indoors on these cold gray days, most everyone is choosing to stay outside. It really feels uncomfortable to be inside - even just to order.
For New Yorker’s all of this outdoor dining is almost a treat. I’m not sure, though, that my suburban friends would feel the same way.
There are translucent plastic panels on the street side of the enclosure that I am eating in and the sidewalk side is completely open. On the street side, trucks and busses and cars drive past at breakneck speeds, flapping the plastic with a crack of thunder as each of them passes. When the lights are red, they stop and idle about six feet away.
On the sidewalk, local people wander by yelling into their phones. Friends run into each other and stop to have animated personal conversations right next to tables where people are sitting. Neither group even remotely aware of the other.
I don’t notice it, myself. It’s just blocked out. Just now I had to stop writing and listen and look for a minute to be able to hear what was going on around me so I could describe it. Somewhat hilariously, when I pay attention to it, I realize that it’s deafening.
Bad weather doesn’t seem to be a deterrent to some of our heartier residents, but it is, unfortunately, to most. I don’t know that enough people eat outside on the bad days to keep some of these restaurants afloat, but here’s hoping.
The November employment numbers are out and, unsurprisingly, they are a bit bleak. The number of new jobs fell for the fifth straight month.
More than half of the people who lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic have been rehired, but there are still 10 million more people unemployed than there were in February. If the level that jobs are being added remains constant it will take us about two and a half years to get back to where we were at the beginning of this year.
What is most worrisome is that the number of long-term unemployed has dramatically risen. Some have given up looking.
There were some hard lessons learned after the 2008 recession which was the last time in US history where there was a comparable rise in long term joblessness.
The longer someone is away from what they do, the rustier their skills get. Advancements and developments within an industry can mean that where once they were skilled, now they maybe aren’t.
Then there are the psychological implications. By 2010, after the 2008 financial crisis, there was a marked rise in opioid addictions. The despair that many felt led to all manner of mental health issues. Then, the longer people remained away from the work force, the harder it became for them to rejoin it.
COVID-19 vaccines could radically change that depressing picture. If they really do what they are supposed to do and if they become readily available, there could be a dramatic rise in the reopening of businesses and the rehiring of workers. The long-term effects after only a year, would not necessarily be as bad as they were a decade ago.
But.
People are going to have to be able to get the vaccine. And they are going to have to WANT to.
Yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci somewhat stepped in it.
He suggested that the people in the UK who approved the Pfizer vaccine may have rushed their job.
In the UK, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency uses the data and conclusions that they receive from the drug-makers to decide whether or not to grant approval for the use of their products.
Here in the US, the FDA goes back a step further and analyzes the raw data that the drug companies us to come to their conclusions. They see if by using the same data that they then get the same results.
Well, unsurprisingly, the Brits fired back.
The British Minister of Education said, “We’ve obviously got the best medical regulators, much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the American’s have. That doesn’t surprise me at all because we’re a much better country than every single one of them.”
A far more rational English voice, the Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford got past hurt national pride to the real problem. “The allegation (from Fauci) is extremely damaging to public confidence when we already know (vaccine hesitancy) is high.”
And that really is the problem. That’s the problem there and that’s going to be the problem here.
Fauci had to immediately start apologizing. He went on British TV and backtracked like mad.
Having spent a great deal of time staging Jersey Boys in the UK, I can tell you that they don’t do things there the same way that we do them here. It took me YEARS to stop trying to change how they worked and just accept it and, instead, change how I worked over there.
Conversely, I’ve worked with British directors such as Nick Hytner and Sam Mendes who get frustrated over here having to work under our system.
Here, on a normal rehearsal day, you are allowed to work seven out of eight and a half hours. You can shorten the day to eight hours if the cast agrees to take an hour lunch break instead of an hour and a half. In New York, it’s easy to get somewhere, eat and back in an hour. Elsewhere, not necessarily.
You can put the lunch break wherever you like but you cannot go more than five hours before you take it. I like to go four hours, take lunch and come back and do three so that the longer session happens when everyone is fresh and awake. Within those work periods you must take a five-minute break after 55 minutes or a ten-minute break after an hour and 20 minutes.
The Stage Manager tells the director when they are coming up on a five and they can decide to take it or keep going the extra twenty-five minutes. You have to announce when the lunch break is the day before, but the little breaks can adjust to whenever the director wants it as long as they don’t ever go over.
On every show there is at least one Equity Deputy chosen from the cast to be the person who reports to the union. On some shows I have worked on, that person will actually set a stopwatch and the second a break is due will insist that it happens.
In England, the day is much the same except that there is only one fifteen-minute tea break in the middle of each session pre and post lunch and it can happen whenever. It is, frankly, a much better rule than ours.
In the US endless time is taken and pointless conversations happen about seconds here and seconds there in regard to breaks that were or weren’t taken precisely on time. In England, I don’t think I’ve had a single discussion about it. We work, we break, we work again.
You can’t accomplish a blessed thing in five minutes except for a quick pee. In fifteen, you can boil the water for tea, pour it, let the bag steep then drink it and eat a biscuit easily.
I have worked under the American rules for so long, that my body is completely ready to take a break after an hour and 20 minutes. If you take the tea break too early in England, then you have an extremely long session following to get through. When I’m staging, I end up having to push through and work longer than I might want, but it makes the break just that much more welcome.
For the British directors here, they are usually just getting on a roll when we have to break. They can’t bear being told that they have to do it.
It makes them insane.
I mean, INSANE.
If these vaccines are going to be effective, a massive and coordinated public relations campaign is going to need to happen. Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton, have already said that if it is approved that they will be vaccinated publicly to help show that it’s safe. That won’t be enough. There are going to have to be public service announcements with beloved performers and ordinary people all getting jabbed flooding the airwaves.
After 9/11, people were terrified to come to New York.
All of Broadway joined together and did a massive commercial in Times Square to assure the rest of America and the world that New York was safe to visit. I was doing the musical Cabaret at the time with Brooke Shields. Brooke was constantly being called upon to make public appearances to promote New York and she was more than game for it.
Ultimately, the campaign worked. Tourists started coming back.
President-elect Biden has already reached out to Dr. Fauci to stay on in the same role he has now. In an interview he said that he asked Fauci to, “be a chief medical advisor for me, as well, and be a part of the COVID team.” Fauci said that he accepted, “right on the spot.”
While the full and coordinated science-based messaging about the vaccine is likely not to be able to get underway for another seven weeks, it should be starting right now. Unfortunately, the President, when he isn’t calling the election a fraud, he’s calling the virus a hoax. He has to be silenced, but I fear he’s not going to be.
No matter where you take your breaks in a rehearsal period, the show gets up and running. It truly doesn’t matter.
It isn’t up to us to tell the Brits what to do any more than it is up to them to tell us what to do.
To overcome the noise and damage the President and his enablers are creating, we have to reach out and work with our neighbors around the globe to coordinate what the messaging is. We have to make that messaging LOUD.
We have to accept that all of our friends are going to do it their way. It simply doesn’t matter how they do it. What matters is THAT they do it.
There are going to be missteps and mistakes. Fauci made a mistake by speaking out of turn. There will be others made down the line.
We are in uncharted territory - it is going to happen.
If we were being led by anyone other than the man who is currently holding the job, we would be fully focused on what the Brits are doing now and trying to learn from what they are doing. They are already coming up against distribution and storage problems. We should be copying the best of what they are doing and avoiding the worst.
That they got there “first” is utterly immaterial. This isn’t a race. Bragging rights shouldn’t be about the first jab, they should be about the last.
We all need to get there eventually and we all need to get there in our own way.
Together.
❤️agreed, we are on uncharted territory
I sense we are sailing
together...I once heard “ God is in the unknown”
so wonderful reading your stories as a stage director, just so wonderful
Ahhh culture clashes - just ask my mum and Bruce about that! I get so annoyed when any country brags or carries on like this is a race. Yes, we’re all in these uncharted waters together