Post 306 - January 11, 2021
Day 306…
On a zoom call, yesterday, with some friends from various places around the country, I was asked to describe what was going on in New York.
What was it like being in the city? It’s a question that comes up all the time and I haven’t really been able to put my finger on what the difference is.
Certainly, it’s not as crowded here as it has been in recent years. There are far fewer languages being spoken - Spanish and English have become the dominant sounds of the street. Traffic is there, but it’s lighter.
None of that, though, really does what’s happening justice. As I was trying to articulate what’s odd, I suddenly realized what it actually was.
Nobody’s rushing.
Nobody’s late for anything. There isn’t anything to be late for.
Service industry and retail workers get to where they need to go in the morning and stay there. White collar jobs are largely happening from home. There are no midday meetings to not be on time for. Working lunches are eaten in solitude in kitchens and living rooms.
After work, there are no curtains to miss. There’s none of the panic of navigating through midtown traffic to get to a pre-theatre dinner reservation in time to catch a show.
With far fewer people flying, worrying about missing a flight isn’t really a thing anymore. People aren’t fighting over taxis. People aren’t cramming onto subways. People aren’t jostling for space on sidewalks.
The constant incessant blaring of impatient car horns that always dominates the melody of New York City life is no longer there. The music has changed.
Michael and I are somewhat obsessed with how restaurants are adapting to the winter. As we are out walking, we take pictures of places that seem to have it right so that we can remember where they are.
Last night we ate at a restaurant that we haven’t gone to before purely because of their outdoor set up. It’s a Mexican place called Tacombi on Amsterdam Avenue in the 70’s.
They’ve built and decorated an eating shelter on the street that looks solid and clean and permanent. The side facing the actual restaurant is completely open. The individual tables are separated by plexiglass panels. Above each space is a heater.
The top is a low vaulted covering of plexi panels that leaves the impression of being open to the sky while at the same time letting in ambient light from the buildings nearby. The whole structure has been neatly painted light green and white and is lit from within. The glow from the heaters casts an inviting warm orange-reddish cast over everything.
The restaurant workers were all in masks, as were we as we were ordering. It was warm enough for me to take my coat off, but only just. When we next go back, I will bring a sweater or a hoodie to put on while we eat.
The food was good. I wouldn’t say that it was great, but it was fine. It was enough that they had the best physical set up that we’ve seen in the area around where we live. We will go back.
Many more places are not being as smart as Tacombi. They are covering their shelters on all sides which completely undermines the whole reason for setting them up in the first place.
It’s all about air circulation. If you hang plastic on four sides, the air cannot circulate any more than it can inside a brick and mortar space.
Dr. Fauci, in a virtual conference with theatre professionals on Saturday, said that he believed that performing arts venues could reopen as early as the fall if everything went right with the vaccine roll out. If the distribution of the vaccine succeeds, then he saw no reason why theatres with good ventilation couldn’t reopen with minimal restrictions. Audiences could reach near-capacity levels with mask-wearing being the only inside measure needing to be taken.
All of that sounds great and hopeful until you begin to parse it out.
“If” everything goes right with vaccine distribution.
That hasn’t happened yet - at all. The federal government had estimated that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated by the end of last month. They missed that mark by a very wide margin. Two weeks after that deadline, only about 8 million people have received their first shot.
Without any guidance for the rollout, states have had to figure out how they do it themselves. Unsurprisingly, some states have been better at it than others. Without the resources to really accomplish this at the state level, much of the burden of figuring out how to do this effectively has fallen even further down the ladder onto individual counties.
In light of this somewhat catastrophic failure, the White House is now trying to revise history by saying that they only meant that 20 million doses would be AVAILABLE by the end of last year not that they would have been administered.
We have a week and a half of this truly compromised Administration left and all bets are off in terms of what we can expect to happen while their time on the clock runs out.
Assuming that, in terms of the vaccine, nothing at all will change over the next week and a half, it will fall upon the incoming Administration to start from essentially ground zero to begin to make it work on January 21.
Theatres with good ventilation is another flag in what he said.
Our Broadway theatres are not huge open spaces. They were largely built at the beginning of the last century and producers have filled them to bursting with the greatest number of seats possible. It’s even worse in the UK where many theatres are older and even smaller.
The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on 46th Street actually still has the remnants of a mechanism in its roof that, when it was originally built, allowed them to roll it back and expose the audience to the night sky. I have no idea if they ever really used it, but certainly these days, the whole thing has been tarred over and is inoperable.
A team of scientists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg did a study on an indoor concert staged in an arena with 1200 attendees and concluded that the risk of spread from such an event was low.
Dr. Fauci referred to that study in his remarks but the actual study’s conclusion was based on adequate ventilation, strict hygiene protocols and limited capacity.
1200 people seems like a pretty good size theatre audience, but if the guidelines suggested by this study were followed, nowhere near that number of people would be able to be in a Broadway audience. The study took place in an arena with thousands more seats than that.
Near capacity is vague. The economics of Broadway are pretty ruthless.
Shows can survive at 70% capacity for a while but that would mean 70% at every performance. When a show is operating at 70% usually what that means is that the weekends are full, and the weekdays are much emptier. We will need to get the audience to spread itself out over an entire week in a way that they have never done before.
None of that will happen before people begin working downtown again and tourists start returning to the city. Until that happens, one or two shows might be able to reopen but by no means all of them.
A juggernaut like Hamilton will have to lead the way. We will need to begin with a show like that because they will have an almost guaranteed audience. During the early days of restarting, the crowd will probably be made up of more New Yorkers than out-of-towners. A lot of New Yorkers have already seen Hamilton. Will they come again? If Disney reopens The Lion King, will New Yorkers feel safe enough to bring their kids?
Starting everything back up is going to be complicated. I do, indeed, hope that we are able to start the process back up this fall, but it’s not just going to change overnight.
Before that happens, the United States needs to put all of its resources into the vaccination program. The bottom line is that getting people vaccinated is the only way that I think the entertainment industry will get back up and running.
House Democrats have formally introduced a single article of impeachment against the President of the United States of America this morning charging him with “incitement of insurrection”.
They are calling on the Vice President to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the President from office. The sooner the President is removed from office, the better.
The posters in the movie theatre near us on 86th Street are advertising movies set to open in March. Of course, they are from last March, not this one.
Every few days I walk through the Theatre District. I should probably stop torturing myself by doing that.
Mean Girls, the musical that was playing at the August Wilson theatre on 52nd Street announced last week that it would not reopen when Broadway starts up. I don’t know what actually spurred the decision, but I am guessing that they couldn’t see any way forward given what lies ahead. Mean Girls was doing well, but it wasn’t a hit on the level of something like Hamilton or even Dear Evan Hanson. Few were.
We will come back.
It won’t be like a light switch turning back on. It will be slow and uncertain. Some shows will open too early and not survive. Some will get it right. People will start to come back.
How long will that take? I don’t think anyone has any idea. But it will happen.
Make no mistake about it, at some point we will find ourselves sitting in a meeting that’s going too long and fretting about when it will be done. When it’s finally over, we will then rush out of the building to elbow our way into a taxi so that we can get to midtown in time to grab a bite of something from the Deli on 44th Street before showtime.
All the way down, we will sit in the backseat of the cab and urge the driver to go faster, or maybe take another route. More for our benefit than theirs, the driver will honk at all of the other people trying to do exactly the same thing and yell out obscenities at the ones who cut in front. We’ll get within a block or two of where we are going and tell the driver to just let us out there.
If we’re lucky, there’ll be a store open without a line and we’ll grab a protein bar, and rush to the theatre where our companion will be impatiently waiting outside with the tickets.
“Where were you?”
“Sorry, meeting ran late, traffic was hell.”
The usher at the door will then scan them as the bells inside ring. We will get to our seats just as the lights go down, take a deep breath and try and calm our beating hearts.
We will be back in a theatre, with a show about to unfold.
We will be in that moment just before a performance where it feels like anything is possible.
And then the overture will start.