Day 457…
With each passing day, we seem to inch just a little bit closer back to our former lives. Our old normal.
I’m working now. Officially, I am still in pre-production on a project that won’t start for another two weeks, but I am, nonetheless, gearing back up.
At 5am on Saturday, for the first time in well over a year, I woke up to the alarm from a deep sleep so that I could get to the airport. The first flight I took after fourteen months on the ground, was out of LaGuardia to get to an in-person meeting in Cleveland. While I was prepared for anything, aside from mask-wearing, there was nothing much out of the ordinary that happened to me at the airport. My frequent-flier status, much to my surprise, was still intact even without there having had any activity on it during the pandemic, so I got through security easily. Even without it, there were not very many people waiting on the lines.
Had I not been specifically looking for things that were different from the last time I was in an airport, I probably would not have noticed all the signs about mask-wearing. The have become so much an expected part of our lives in New York, that they don’t really register anymore.
Even though I am almost certain that everybody else present at the Cleveland meeting had been vaccinated, we were still required to take a specific COVID test prior to arriving. The project has hired a COVID-compliance officer whose sole job is to maintain protocols. They arranged for my test in New York and then required me to fill out an online questionnaire that morning. The meeting was conducted in masks. I knew some people there and was introduced to some others for the first time that day. Later, the director and I joked about how surprised we were by what some people really looked like when they took off their masks to eat lunch.
After the meeting, we headed back to the airport and continued to Los Angeles, to do some more preliminary work for a few days before we eventually head home. We had to take a puddle-jumper to Detroit before getting to our flight onward to Los Angeles. The experience before both of those flights was much the same as the first one- normal, except for mask-wearing. The flight to LA was completely full. The flight attendants paid a lot of attention to the mask mandate and throughout the trip asked people to make sure that their mouths and noses were always covered.
As of the middle of the month, federal employees who have been vaccinated no longer need to wear masks in federal buildings. The mask mandate on interstate public transportation, however, has been extended into September. In New York City, the limits on how many fully vaccinated people can be present inside an establishment have been removed on a state level along with social distancing guidelines, but businesses, themselves, can still choose how they want to operate in that regard. Stores still have signs requiring people to wear masks and many smaller stores still have capacity limits.
So far, I have never once been asked about my vaccination status by anybody. Ever. It has had no impact at all on work-place safety that I can see. There are reports that the entertainment unions are working towards easing and updating their protocols based on vaccinations, but for the moment, everything is operating as if the vaccines don’t exist.
Over the last fourteen months, I have watched New York shift and change daily. Here in LA, I am seeing the city for the first time after the fact. I walked down Hollywood Boulevard yesterday. The Farmer’s Market was in full swing. Plenty of people were out and about buying produce and homemade food. Along the Boulevard, itself, though, many stores were shuttered and dark. There were far more homeless people camped out than I ever remember seeing before. Up near Grauman’s (now TCL) Chinese Theatre, there were many tourists out and walking, but most of them seemed American. I heard a lot of English and Spanish, but not much of anything else.
Later, I met up with some friends at the Grove, a high-end shopping mall to the south, and aside from mask-wearing, everything there seemed to be as I remembered it the last time I was in town. I ate lunch at the Farmer’s Market adjacent to it and it was as crowded as it usually is. People wore masks but there was no distancing.
Until new guidelines are developed, we are going to be working under very strict COVID rules. There are, however, issues other than the virus that are going to potentially change what this upcoming job looks like. The realignment of our society in terms of race and gender and simple, basic, appropriate behavior is likely to have a huge impact on our day to day working habits. Until we start doing it, though, I can’t say that I have any idea what that specifically means. Beyond trying to be more sensitive to what people are feeling and experiencing, I’m not sure what to expect or how to prepare for any of it.
I heard that I may not get a job that I was approached about doing next year because the theatre in question is hoping to hire somebody of color for the position. Part of what theatres are up against in their attempts to diversify is that there are a limited number of people of color with the experience necessary to be able to do the job at the level required. It is going to take a few years of concentrated effort on everybody’s part to bring others forward to the place where they can fill these positions. My being a white man gave me an advantage that many did not have. As result of that, my subsequent level of experience has now given me a further advantage that not a lot of other people share. I don’t have a problem with letting go of those advantages in favor of someone who doesn’t have them. If the theatre can find someone who can do it, then they should. There is a huge difference between getting fired from a position and just not getting hired in the first place. It’s not my job until it is my job. It’s not something that I might lose, it’s just something that I might not get.
I am looking forward to getting into the job I am currently preparing for. Mostly. It has a beginning, middle and an end. It’s not a show that is going to run. The whole experience will be about six weeks and then I’ll be unemployed again. I am fine with that. One of the projects that I am supposed to be doing later in the year might end up as a show that runs, but certainly for the next year or two most of my work is going to be on exploratory and developmental workshops that are finite stretches of time. I am fine with that too.
I have friends who are starting back up in shows that are going to resume their runs from where they left off. From fourteen months off back to eight shows a week almost overnight seems daunting to me. There have been times in my life where I could do many push-ups and sit-ups at one time, but it would take me a few weeks to be able to get back to that point now. (Truth be told, I should get back to that.) If I tried to do that now, without building up to it, I would hurt myself. It takes longer to build up to where you can do something like that than it does to lose it. I know that I could build back up to eight times a week given some time. What I am asking myself, though, is, do I want to?
In the movie Tootsie, when Dustin Hoffman’s character Dorothy starts working on the soap opera, the producer of the show says that she’d like to make her look a bit more attractive and how far can the cameraman pull the camera back. He answers, “How about Cleveland?” Poor Cleveland is the undeserving butt of many jokes. Still, it does seem like a punchline that after 14 months of not being on a plane that the first place I end up flying to is, indeed, Cleveland.
It feels like the circle of this last fourteen months is starting to come back around to itself. We are well on our way to picking back up where we left off. By the time I got onto my third flight on Saturday, it already felt completely normal to be flying again. After the first few minutes of our production meeting, the fact that we were together, in-person, albeit wearing masks, seemed normal, too. I was acutely aware of how abnormal the feeling of feeling normal felt.
It was not until several months into the shutdown that the overall tension in my body that had accumulated over my professional life started to dissipate. This was tension that I wasn’t even aware was there. As excited as I am to be working on something, I do not want to let that tension start to creep back in again.
The very fact that I am even questioning our return to normalcy rather than just embracing it, is a further indication of my extreme level of advantage. I am wallowing in the luxury of making life decisions when there are countless others who are not in any position to do that.
After working today in Los Angeles, I admit that I find myself becoming excited about the project that we are about to begin. I like the people involved. I like what we are doing. It’s something new and interesting. Am I letting myself get dragged back onto the hamster wheel?
I used to think that I knew what I wanted, but these last fourteen months have thrown that all into question. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, I was ready to chuck it all and do something different. The job that I am about to embark on is not going to be easy and I have more than a little trepidation about what lies ahead but I have had the same feeling at the beginning of everything good I have ever done. If you know you can succeed at something, then why bother doing it?
The last thing that I want to do is teach, but I am more than ready to start passing on a lot of what I know to help give somebody else a chance up at bat. I’m not ready to give it all up, mind you, but I might be ready to start thinking about it.
Our new normal is hopefully going to be our old normal with some much-needed improvements. Some will be easier to instigate than others. Some will succeed and some will fail. Yesterday was a good day. They won’t always be like that. There will be some days ahead where I will rue the day that I ever agreed to be a part of this project. If I am very lucky, though, there will be more days that are good ones than there will be bad ones.
What will today be like? I don’t have the slightest idea. It’s when you can answer that question that life becomes boring and predictable. When that happens, I will stop. But until then, I guess I’m going back to work.
Any news about Jersey Boys tour? Will you still be “involved”?
❤️How I loved reading this post!
“work is love made visible” Gibran
xoxo