Day 355…
Michael had a reaction to being inoculated.
I wouldn’t say that it knocked him on his butt so much as it kicked him in the shins. He’s fine now but he didn’t feel all that great this weekend. My arm ached a little for a bit but that was the extent of it for me.
He got vaccinated on Friday, so I’m a day behind him. Last March, when both of us actually had COVID, he had it worse than I did, then, too.
The Golden Globe Awards were on last night. We didn’t watch. There was something about the whole idea of them, this year, that just seemed… off.
In normal times, watching television, going to a movie, or seeing a live performance are all completely different experiences.
Over 96% of American households have television sets. It is an expected appliance in the same way that a sink, stove a refrigerator are. Some people leave their sets on all day and some never watch, but the set is sitting there.
Going out to see a movie is a treat. It’s an event. You meet up with friends or go on a date. You gather together with a bunch of strangers and sit in a large dark room together and eat like pigs.
In recent years, theatres have gotten more and more comfortable. As more and more people have just opted to stay home and watch TV, theatre owners have had to up their games. Theatres near us have very large reclining seats that always make me search for a seatbelt as I sit down. D-Box seats offer individual motion and other additions like individual speakers that further enhance the experience.
I have only seen the last Star Wars movie in a D-Box seat. During it, the seats tilted back when the Millennium Falcon took off and when there was a battle, the buzzing hum of the lightsabers seemed to be right next to you. Air is puffed onto the back of your head when a projectile whizzes past. Watching a movie from a D-Box seat makes movie watching feel like being on a virtual ride in Disneyland.
A live performance takes storytelling to a whole different level. It unfolds a few feet away from you. The audience is in the room where it happens. You hear and sometimes even feel the vibrations from a dancer’s feet on the floor. The power behind an opera singer’s voice is evident with their every controlled breath.
During a performance of a play or a musical, you can often see the droplets of moisture coming out of an actor’s mouth caught in the beams of light. Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hanson was a veritable fountain.
I remember when I was still in High School seeing a production of Once in a Lifetime at the Circle in the Square Theater and sitting in the front row. John Lithgow, who was in it, is an impressive spitter, himself. I remember actually having to move my head to avoid it when he was standing near me.
He was right there.
At a live performance, the audience becomes a character in and of itself. Unlike watching a movie, the audience’s reactions influence the performance. A responsive house can ignite the evening and one that isn’t can flatten it.
Part of the actor’s job is to reach out to the audience and guide them in the right direction. A good director will design the performance to train the audience to react the way they want them to.
In Jersey Boys, there are moments when Des, the director, will keep the action moving forward and not allow the audience to applaud something so that the applause that happens after a later moment ends up being that much bigger. You can store it up. He will also keep the audience from responding in some places when he wants to change the emotional temperature onstage and make it darker and more somber.
A movie can’t do that. Sure, a director can try through careful editing, but the action is fixed. Movie actors can’t adjust what they are doing to either reign in an audience or set them free. Their performances have been captured and they are what they are regardless of who is watching.
This year the storytelling that we have been witness to, has been very different. Instead of a multiple array of experiences open to us, everything, and I mean everything, that we have seen this year has come from our television sets. Whether it was a dance performance, an opera, a Broadway play, a lecture or a movie or TV show, all of them have been filtered through our individual television or computer screens.
The Broadway musical Hamilton was converted into being just another television presentation. Even our personal social interactions are televised, albeit as interactionable events, on Zoom. Whatever it once was, everything is now just a television show. Movies, performing arts, politics, zoom interactions with our friends - all of it.
The Golden Globes, however, were treating everything as if they were all still different. This year, the only difference between a movie and a television show was its length. Did we watch it on one sitting or several?
As human beings, we have a need to gather together in the same place and participate in and create shared experiences.
Award shows are like industry conventions. It’s a chance for the entire community to gather together and celebrate what it is that they do. It’s always fun to see performers from all manner of different mediums sitting together in an auditorium. Last night, of course, they couldn’t. Some people were in the same location, distanced of course, but many were just at home.
I only watched a couple of clips and, those, after the fact. Weirdly, the celebs had all dressed and made up as if they were going out, but instead sat on their own couches.
Jane Fonda gave a wonderfully moving speech about the power of storytelling, but during it, Jodi Foster’s dog jumped up and tried to find a place to sit between Jodi and her wife on their sofa. As interested as I was in what Jane Fonda was saying, I couldn’t help but watch the dog.
We can’t do everything that we did before. Maybe we will be able to again, but we can’t now. I found the Golden Globes trying to pretend that we could somewhat depressing. By all means try and figure out a way to honor achievement in the industry, but figure out a new way, at least for this year, that works.
The Tony Awards that honor achievement on Broadway have been indefinitely delayed, I am sure, because nobody can really figure out how to do them. How do people vote for one performance over another if they can’t actually see the performance? We shut down before the voters could get to them.
In addition to being a chance for industry members to celebrate together, award shows exist because they serve as advertisements for whatever it is that they are honoring. Going through the effort of creating a Tony Awards presentation without Broadway tickets to sell, doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
I am guessing that whatever the Tony Awards end up being, they will be scheduled to herald the return of us being able to watch live shows together again. The problem, of course, is that many of the shows being honored will no longer exist.
Maybe, instead of announcing a winner, all of the nominees should just be acknowledged and given some sort of Tony honor. Then the creative teams could recreate moments from their shows and celebrate the season that was so cruelly cut short.
At the moment we really have only one medium that reaches broad audiences. But we do have that one medium. As we begin to be able to sit in the same place with strangers again, the others will start to come back.
We’ve all gotten used to getting our stories from our television sets, but we’ve also glutted ourselves on them. At this point in my watching of Supernatural I have spent the equivalent of over 17 full 16-hour days watching that show with several more ahead of me.
“What are you watching?” has become the most important question of every zoom call. As we blast through various series and movies, we are always on the lookout for more.
Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but that doesn’t mean that those measures necessarily need to be less than. Let go of what we did and focus on what we can do.
We can do a lot.
Our politics have become yet another series and it seems to have jumped the shark.
The episodes that recently took place in Orlando at the CPAC convention were completely over the top. Watching some of them, as an audience, I marvel how the creators could possibly imagine that their audience would buy it, and yet many have. Golden cow idol, lies and conspiracy theories, jokes about those who are truly suffering are not anything that I want to watch.
Neither is watching the Governor of New York get his comeuppance.
Had Governor Cuomo come out in front of his various scandals, owned them, apologized for them and done everything he could to make them right, then there would be a chance that his much-needed leadership in other areas could continue.
At the time he made the decision to send COVID patients back to nursing facilities, we didn’t know a lot about the virus yet. It was early in the battle, and it was a battle. It was a hasty and unthought out action to take, but who knows if anyone else would have, at that time, taken a different path.
What on earth is wrong with just coming out and saying that? There is enormous strength in that kind of honesty. Even saying that he hid it from the federal government for fear of reprisals from the monster in charge is something that I could buy.
Governor Cuomo, however, did not do any of that. Instead, he tried to cover it up and threatened those who were going to expose him.
Similarly, his response to the two women who have come forward with allegations of impropriety on his part has been truly wanting. Thankfully, he has given up his insistence that he appoint his own commission to look into what happened.
His avoidance of both of these issues have only made matters that much worse. This morning Speaker Pelosi said, “The women who have come forward with serious and credible charges against Governor Cuomo deserve to be heard and to be treated with dignity.”
She is, of course, right.
All of this is likely to be his undoing. If he leaves office, though, the person who will replace him is his Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul. She is in no way his equal politically.
For better or for worse, I am convinced that New York State came through this even as well as we did because of his probably too strong leadership. His daily briefings filled a vacuum left by the, then, White House, who offered no leadership at all.
A bully is fine in an emergency, in fact one might even be grateful for it. Now at the time that the crisis may be starting to abate, is exactly when we need strong experienced leadership the most.
I’m not sure how much more of this particular show I can watch.
Nobody is a saint. Even actual saints were probably not very saintly in their everyday lives. Certainly, no politician is one. Would I do anything different in that position? I don’t know for sure. I wish I did. I fear I’d be just as bad.
Of course, nothing that the Governor has done even comes close to the most minor of the ex-President’s transgressions. I am not for a moment dismissing anything being said against Governor Cuomo. Sadly, I do believe that where there’s this much smoke, there is probably actually some fire. People died in nursing homes and those two women likely truly suffered in their interactions with him.
Part of what makes me so angry about watching the news unfold, though, is that Democrats are completely willing to sacrifice some of their strongest leaders by holding them to a high moral standard that the Republicans seem completely willing to ignore in theirs. Yes, when they go low, we go high is noble, but does it win the war?
Until this is done, we need Governor Cuomo’s leadership warts and all. Afterwards? Well, that’s a different story. Own it, apologize for it, and do everything in your power to try to rectify it but please let’s get back to the matter at hand.
Sadly, I am starting to think that there are only two kinds of politicians - those who are guilty and those who haven’t been caught yet.
Our televisions and computer screens are both the only things that are keeping us all together as well as being the medium through which we are being separated. Finding the balance between engaging too much and not engaging at all is not easy.
Instead of the shows featuring our politicians, I much prefer the shows that feature our friends. Zooming with them and interacting beats a passive taking in of the horror show every time.
For now, though, the screens are off and after Michael works with a few students and I take my walk we are going to get down to the business of actually living during a pandemic. Food shopping, laundry and taxes are on the docket for today.
And no, we still haven’t clipped the cat’s claws yet.
It’s on the list.
💞clip those claws...💕 I don’t have a TV / do everything on my iphone, Zoom readings, plays, meetings/ watch films, meditation sessions...Loved that you wrote what we can do together
I am needing to focus on what I have, am, do, give and how I can.
Alot of “subterfuge” out there...derailing us from what we need to, can do and must do. Or else I focus on all the questions, debates, opinions that add up to fear and exhaustion.
Sending hugs for healing from the vaccines. Bravo for taking care of yourselves. and what I don’t know, I’ll admit and what I did “wrong” I’ll make amends for...alot easier than keeping a lie alive...eventually it kills...especially hope which I need to keep my dreams alive