Day 352…
We are waking up.
The time will soon come when I will pack away the LED candles that we keep in the windows during the winter. They go up for Christmas but leaving them lit during the cold long dark evenings adds an element of comfort to the apartment. As the days get longer and warmer, though, I don’t know that I am still going to want to curl up and cocoon every night.
Lincoln Center just announced that it is planning on creating 10 different outdoor performances spaces on its property. They are looking to start presenting dance pieces and chamber concerts outside beginning in April. In conjunction with the New York Public Library, they are also going to build an open-air reading room.
A new play called Thoughts of a Colored Man installed its marquee at the Golden Theatre yesterday even though they haven’t set a firm opening date.
It’s the first new marquee of the season. It’s impossible not to feel a butterfly or two of excitement.
We lost a towering Broadway figure this past year in Howell Binkley, the Tony-award winning lighting designer, but his talented associate Ryan O’Gara is going to be designing the lights for this play which I think will be his Broadway debut on his own. Ryan designed the lights for the Norwegian Cruise Line version of Jersey Boys. He is more than ready for this.
Every end is, in turn, a beginning. For all the people that we’ve lost, someone new will step into the spaces they’ve left, expand and build on their work, and carry their legacies forward.
As I walked through Central Park yesterday, I looked for signs of spring.
The ice covering the reservoir has melted. There is still some snow, but it won’t be there for long. Temperatures will be high enough this week that I think the rain that we are forecast to have this weekend may melt most of what’s left.
I didn’t see any sign of spring bulbs yet, but if this weather continues, they will start to shoot up soon. If I can feel the coming spring, then so can they.
14% of Americans have gotten their first jab of the COVID-19 vaccine. 50% of people over 65 have now at least gotten their first shots. That’s important because that group accounts for about 80% of all hospital cases.
Moderna has begun clinical trials for a booster shot that will specifically target the South African variant (also called 351) of the virus that has shown some resistance to the vaccine. The current vaccines, so far though, seem to protect against the other variants that have cropped up. The more people who get vaccinated, the harder it will be for the virus to travel and, therefore, the harder it will be for further mutations to develop.
It looks like the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may be authorized and available for distribution as soon as next week. While it may offer a somewhat lower rate of protection than some of the others, it is still far better than most ordinary flu vaccines have been in recent years. My doctor said that last year’s flu shot was only about 20% effective. At 65% efficacy, the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine is far better than that.
It will be important for us to keep ramping up testing so that the paths of these various strains can be tracked. Knowing where and what they are, whatever adjustments to the vaccines that may be needed for specific populations can be made. Just this week, two new variants have been detected - one in California and the other, here, in New York. It would be a mistake to think that the virus is going to give up without a fight.
The danger ahead of us, of course, is that as the weather starts to improve and things start to open back up that we will all rush to get back to our full lives too quickly.
According to Dr. Fauci, two fully inoculated people should be able to gather together with minimal risk. Not with no risk, but, instead, with greatly reduced risk.
I can already see those boundaries getting blurry. If there are four friends who want to hang out and three of them are fully vaccinated and one isn’t, I can see people making the rationalization that it SHOULD be safe for all of them to meet.
The vaccine isn’t a wall, it’s just a really sturdy fence. The more fences in place the harder it is for it to freely travel. Harder, but not impossible.
If you want any sort of proof about how effective our current social distancing and mask wearing protocols have been, all I would say is, how many of us have gotten sick with our usual winter colds and flus this winter? During my annual exam on Tuesday, my doctor told me that ordinary flu cases have dropped by 90% this year.
Moving forward, if we adopt the same habits that many of our Asian neighbors have done and wear masks when we feel unwell, regardless of what we’re sick with, we could keep those numbers much lower than what we have gotten used to.
How many of us who have been through this will ever again be able to sit comfortably next to a person on the subway who is sneezing and coughing? In the past I might have stayed where I was and just been annoyed. Now, I would get up and move away.
These weeks ahead are going to be hard. It’s going to get warmer and the days are going to get longer.
There is, finally, a light at the end of the tunnel but it’s hard to tell just how far away it really is. We are so used to being in complete darkness that even a pinprick of light seems monumentally bright. We can’t just rush towards it because it may still be much further away than it appears. Slow and steady wins the race.
Yes, we are, I think, starting to wake up. I am cautiously excited about some of the new performance ideas being developed. Broadway may not reopen for a while, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t tell our stories in other ways.
All the world’s a stage, or can be, with a little effort and ingenuity. My fellow theatre professionals are nothing if not ingenious. This spring should bring some very interesting performances.
There is an immersive Van Gogh experience coming to New York this summer that I would urge everyone who is starved for entertainment to get tickets to. I experienced it in Singapore some years ago in a large series of exhibition spaces. I also saw the same company’s Kilmt experience in an abandoned gypsum mine in Provence a while ago.
Whatever space they use, they project the work of the artist on the walls, ceilings and floors. It is essentially a sound and light show. Fully scored, it makes you feel that you are in the middle of the paintings. There is no seating, you walk through the space in your own time and experience it all as you wish.
It is a perfect thing to produce as an entrée back to normal performances because participants can be limited, and social distancing can easily be maintained. Because it is all digital, it can be presented all day with timed entries.
There are two competing presentations by two different companies coming into the city and I am not at all sure which one is the one that I saw. Rather than worry about it, I just got us tickets to both of them a month apart.
We didn’t quite get to the clipping of the cat’s claws yesterday.
It got dark. And cold. We started watching TV. I had a glass of wine. In short, we chickened out. If we are smart, we will do it before breakfast today and just get it over with. We just have to commit.
We all have to commit to just getting through the final major part of this pandemic without sinking any further into it. It would be a shame to swim all the way across the Atlantic only to drown in the surf on the other side.
Spring is on the way, but it isn’t here yet. That I can feel it starting is going to have to be enough for now. I’ll take it.
I’ll be keeping my eyes open for those first new green shoots poking up from the dirt.
It won’t be long now. So, after breakfast, I’ll put on my mask and go out and have a good look.
Here are the links to the two different Van Gogh presentations in case anyone is interested in seeing them:
https://vangoghexpo.com/new-york/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=96017_nyc&gclid=CjwKCAiA1eKBBhBZEiwAX3gql7H8THIz96PpR_4j4CzWqTbjlZTXzUb_KuXNnusKT12s8FmfL_IdQhoCEhAQAvD_BwE
https://feverup.com/m/96017?utm_source=google&utm_medium=rmkt_search&utm_campaign=96017_nyc&gclid=CjwKCAiA1eKBBhBZEiwAX3gql2TvGKxGjsbuPbsm92a5Aslmw4rQaTMUMKMmZGP2yYaB7P6y6YmLFBoCBVwQAvD_BwE
💞For now, for me...All the Worlds a Zoom 🙏💞💫
The Vaccine Pod Dance: I am working to keep what is left of my adolescent, risk taking brain grounded for awhile longer. It is so hard not to rationalize the risk. My grandmother was fond of saying “If you see a light at the end of the tunnel, make sure is it isn’t a train.”. It sure applies to coming months of risk assessment required! Happy Spring all the same. 💐