Post 35 - April 15, 2020
Day 35…
Every morning right when I wake up, I do a kind of inventory.
Throat’s a little scratchy.
Allergies or is it IT?
Sniffles…? Blow my nose. No.
Aches? No, not really.
OK - today, I’m OK.
At the best of times, New York can be a nightmare for people who suffer from allergies. There are many different kinds of trees and they all shed their pollen at different times.
The pollen comes like a continual wave all the way through until summer.
I consider myself lucky that I’m not really allergic, but every year there is SOMETHNG that blooms that seems to nail me.
Yesterday, several health experts said that they thought that Social Distancing guidelines might need to remain in place in some form until 2022.
That took my breath away for a minute.
Governor Newsome of California in his daily briefing described what that might look like.
As some businesses reopen, masks and gloves would become ubiquitous.
You’d walk into a restaurant and your server would be wearing a mask and gloves. There would be fewer tables and they would be further apart from each other so the six-foot limits could be observed.
The menus would be disposable.
Will people really do that?
Will people feel comfortable eating in a room full of strangers with their masks off?
How would that affect my business, theatre?
If you sold fewer seats - say every third one - and staggered the rows, would people come?
What would that be like?
I took a lot of survey classes in College and one of the things that really stuck with me from my Philosophy classes was a concept put forth by a Sociologist named Émile Durkheim called Collective Effervescence. This is what happens when a group or a society comes together to experience the same thing together. The physically closer we are to each other, the more the group “effervesces”. As our emotions are shared, the experience becomes exponentially greater.
It’s what happens at a game when everybody rooting for the same team sits tightly together and starts to react as one.
It’s what happens in a church or a synagogue or a mosque or a temple or a meeting house when people join together to worship.
It’s what happens at the theatre when we all sit tightly together and start to experience the roller coaster ride of emotions together.
The experience effervesces - it bubbles up. We feel it more deeply and more profoundly together - the energy transfers between us and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
That’s what we are all hungry for.
That’s one of the reasons why every day at 7pm we all lean out of our windows and scream and clap together for our brave health care workers.
We are social creatures.
We NEED each other.
We need that collective experience - that rush - that only comes when we are together.
Yesterday, I went for my long bi-weekly walk.
It was a beautiful day.
New York seemed somewhat crowded.
Not like a month ago, by any stretch of the imagination, but more people were out than had been out during my last walk three days ago.
I would say about 80% of the people walking around had masks on and were honoring social distancing.
That left 20% who were not.
Mothers with babies in carriages were talking to each other.
Young men and women were walking down the street together chatting without masks on and well within six feet of each other.
It was much harder to find empty streets to walk down than it has been over these last few strange weeks.
This is where we are going to get into trouble.
The weather is going to continue to get better.
It is impossible not to notice just how incredibly blue and clean the skies above New York are these days. It’s truly astounding.
It’s going to draw us out towards each other.
As much as we want it and as much as we need it, we HAVE to keep staying away from each other.
This will not stop if we don’t.
Our numbers are plateauing ONLY because we are doing this.
We stop doing this, those numbers go right back up and people die.
It’s honestly as simple as that.
The game changer will be a vaccine.
It’s coming.
When? No way to tell. An effective vaccine requires an enormous amount of research and testing, and it also requires something somewhat unquantifiable - luck.
Researchers say 6-18 months. Maybe more, maybe less.
That’s where the luck comes in.
Our President’s decision to stop funding the World Health Organization yesterday in his pathetic attempt to find a scapegoat that isn’t him, couldn’t come at a worse time.
Whatever mistakes WHO may have made in the past, we need their guidance moving forward. We need their international reach because re-opening the United Sates without coordinating with our sisters and brothers across this planet is going to be impossible.
For f&%$ sake.
Until then, we all have to help stop this spread ourselves.
We all have to adjust our behavior and help create this new normal.
And we have to keep at it.
I don’t really want to go to a restaurant and sit at an isolated table and I don’t really want to watch a Broadway show sitting by myself, isolated from everyone else.
But if that’s the only way we can even approximate getting together for the next while, then I’ll do it.
We will all do it.
We will adjust.
We have to.
It’s just for now.
This will pass.
But for now, we all have to be open to change.