Day 505…
Life does go on hold when I’m working. As much as I enjoy what I do, I am aware that outside of the little project bubble that I’m operating in, Michael and our friends are still living the life that I am on a temporary vacation from. I’ll be back there with them in two weeks, but until then, I am sleeping in a strange hotel bed, eating somewhat questionable catered food, and all my attention is focused in on the job at hand. At the end of the day, there isn’t much left to do except go to sleep.
There is a routine to this existence. For our whole careers, all of us who do this have figured out how to adjust to living away from home. At the peak of my pre-pandemic existence, I typically was away from home for at least 150 days out of every year if not more. This is the first time I’ve been employed away from New York since everything shut down. Cleveland is not New York, but it also isn’t Elmira. Cleveland has a lot to offer. There’s a world-class art museum and some beautiful historic neighborhoods. A good grocery store is just down the street as well as a CVS. Both are open early and late on most days. The work agreement doesn’t allow us to eat indoors at restaurants but there are several very good places not far from us with outdoor seating. None of them are covered, however, and we have had a lot of rain recently.
I missed the laundry pick up at the hotel this morning by about 10 minutes so now I will have to wait until Wednesday, which means my cleaned clothes won’t come back until Friday. A quick look at my clothing supply this morning and I realized I’m not going to make it. A couple of weeks ago, I found this thing on Amazon that is like a laundry Roomba. You fill up the sink with water and detergent, put in some clothes and this thing agitates the water, sends out sonic waves and bubbles and turns your sink into a mini washing machine. After you finish the cycle and rinse out the clothes, however, they then need to air dry which is slightly problematic here in very damp Cleveland.
Having identified how to take care of the necessities, almost all my attention has been on the show. It is a very big production with countless moving parts. This is an environment that I thrive in. I like the pressure. I like the responsibility. I like navigating through the personalities, the eccentricities, the complexities, the insecurities - I like all of it. The satisfaction at the end of the day of getting something accomplished despite all those things (or in some cases because of all those things) is considerable. It’s nice when somebody notices, but the real feeling of accomplishment comes when nobody notices, and it looks to them as if it all just happened. Things always go wrong. Getting past the mistakes and accidents with some sort of grace is part of the gig. I like that too.
All of it is good. I feel lucky to be here and lucky to be a part of it, but…
There’s a firm called Ladders that analyzes employment data from over 50,000 American companies. Typically, the highest paying jobs in the country are in cities like San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and New York. For the first time in our history, there are more six-figure salaried jobs available in those cities that will expect people to work remotely than there are for on site, in-person positions.
There is something to be said for meeting in the same space and sharing ideas, but there is also something to be said for being at home with your family and having all those hours available during the day that would have been taken up with commuting. We had well over half a year of having to do that and now that there is a choice, companies are seriously reconsidering the need to operate from a central location. This trend is going to have an enormous impact on commercial real estate. So many companies have realized that what they need these high-level people to do does not require expensive office space for them to do it in. Because of that, the nearly 200,000 people who are going to be filling these available well-paying jobs are going to be toiling at home and not in the giant office towers in the downtown areas of places like those four cities. That’s exactly what’s happening here in Cleveland. It may not be as big as some of those other places, but it has more than its fair share of glass and concrete towers. There is nobody in them here. There’s nobody downtown unless they’ve come in from elsewhere to eat and drink. The corporate skyscrapers up and down the avenue outside our hotel are completely silent and empty. Lined up the way they are, they look like a painted backdrop for a scene in a show. Only one of the many theatres downtown has anything playing in it, the rest are just sitting there, mute. Their lights are on, but nobody’s home. It’s very clean, almost pristine, but also depressingly desolate.
I’ve watched New York City get back up and running over the course of this past spring, but up until I left to come to Cleveland, I had yet to see a single suited office worker in mid-town. What is going to be done with all that real estate? More importantly, what is going to happen to all the businesses - restaurants and stores - that rely on all those people? I remember what New York was like in the 1970’s and early 1980’s after everybody fled to the suburbs. Are in we in for a replay of that? Smaller cities, like Cleveland, have invested billions of dollars over the past decades to draw businesses and people back into their downtowns. Higher paying jobs across the country became concentrated in limited built up geographical areas. Lower paying jobs followed as all manner of support businesses sprang up to accommodate all those office workers during their days. With those higher paying jobs no longer there, the lower paying jobs are going to evaporate, if they aren’t already gone.
The theatrical project that I am working on is going to be streamed. There will be no run with audiences. Cleveland won’t benefit from the influx of all those theatre patrons desperate for parking, hotel rooms and food. For the time that we’ve been here local stores have gotten used to having our company of about 120 people or so as customers. If this were a typical theatrical production, we would be just about at the point where preview audiences would be showing up and some of our people would be leaving. Instead, audiences will watch what we are making at home at some point in the future and in a few days all of us will all return to our homes and downtown Cleveland will be on its own again.
In some ways, how we are working here is the theatrical equivalent of what is happening in office buildings. The work is getting done, but people aren’t gathering to do it. Countless jobs have been rendered unnecessary by this new paradigm. The local crew will be out of work at the same time all of us disperse. This theatre won’t ever have needed ushers or box office staff for this project. The cleaning crews that take care of the audience spaces never needed to be hired. All of us are certainly making a mess, but it will only need to be cleaned up once over the course of one marathon day rather than every day for weeks on end. Playbills won’t be printed, nor will posters. Advertising space won’t be bought in local papers or on TV or radio stations. The list of unneeded services is endless and every single one of those services represent jobs that aren’t going to happen.
Theatres are poised to try to reopen all around the country and that will put everyone back to work. But there are obstacles still ahead before that unfolds. The delta variant of the coronavirus is chief among them. Fully vaccinated people are getting sick.
We have a vaccine for the flu that some people get each year, and some don’t. Plenty of people get the flu and a few hundred thousand of them even die from it, but we don’t honestly give it much thought. The flu is a normal part of our lives. While there is a similar feeling with COVID now, we aren’t fully there yet. A big difference is that there is still so much that we don’t know about the potential COVID long-haul complications. While it seems clear that the virus isn’t killing the vaccinated, it could be giving them life-long health issues to deal with.
Until we know more about it, will enough people be comfortable enough with the risks to sit in a crowded theatre? We don’t think twice about catching the flu from fellow audience members but COVID? I know of several die-hard Springsteen fans who have turned down tickets to see him at the St. James out of precisely that fear. Clearly the unvaccinated don’t care and they would go, but we aren’t going to allow the unvaccinated in.
Another obstacle goes right back to the issue of working from home. When you are already in the city and working until 6, grabbing a bite after work and going to a show is a much easier proposition than driving all the way in from wherever it is you live. Businesses won’t buy tickets for out-of-town clients because those clients will be zooming with them from home in other places rather than flying in. Filling thirty-some-odd Broadway theatres every night to capacity becomes that much more challenging without those sectors of the population and, of course, without throngs of tourists.
I was looking forward to getting back to work with mixed feelings. Now that I am back at work, my feelings are still mixed. This is a great experience, but I think that I miss what I was doing before as much if not more than I missed doing this. If this was a purely theatrical venture, what I am doing now would potentially be the beginning of an extremely long commitment. Because it’s being filmed, my involvement with it is completely over in two weeks and I am more than fine with that.
The worker part of me likes the short-term intensity of being here. The audience-member part of me, however, has no desire whatsoever to watch the final product. Not that I have anything against what I am working on at all, quite the contrary. I think we are making something that people will genuinely love. Streamed theatrical presentations in general, though, leave me a bit cold. I find them to be a pale echo of what that experience can and should be and, as a result, they make me feel a bit unsatisfied. I am more than happy to watch a movie or a television show that was designed for the medium, but usually not a theatrical event.
What I really want is to have my cake and eat it too. I want to work in intense short burst like this and then have time off to be at home to live my life and follow my own creative impulses. On the other hand, I also want other people to keep working full time so that I can go and be a part of their audiences and experience that sense of community with a roomful of like-minded strangers. But maybe not just yet.
Perhaps I would be feeling this way anyway, even if the pandemic hadn’t happened. While I’m not old enough to retire, I am certainly old enough to be thinking about it. The time at home during the shut-down made me reconsider how I wanted to fill my days. I want to get on the hamster wheel when I want to get on it and get off it when I want to, too. As I write this, I am watching a whole group of kids being lit onstage while the cast they are standing in for rehearses elsewhere. Despite the long, grueling hours they are very excited to be here. While I am thinking about how to limit and yet still control my involvement in this industry, they are eagerly trying to figure out how to maximize theirs in any way they can. They are every bit as wriggly and inattentive as their professional counterparts are. Truth be told, it’s thrilling to watch.
While they’re thinking about their futures, I’m thinking about my laundry Roomba back at the hotel. I figure I have two days of clean clothes left so if I wash two more days-worth tonight, they should be dry in time. It’s going to be close, though. I’m also running out of coffee and toothpaste so I’m going to need to go to the CVS over our dinner break.
I know how to live this weird nomadic life. Thanks to the shut-down, though, I also now know how to live a different one. I didn’t really think that I had a choice. In the past, I gave up my time at home every single time an offer came in, without a second thought. I kissed Michael goodbye and scratched the cat’s head and hopped on a plane to wherever. I firmly believe in saying yes rather than saying no, so moving forward I am going to be saying yes to being at home far more often than I ever have before. It took a global pandemic to teach me that being with my husband and cat and working on my own projects from the comfort of our couch is far more than just the absence of work. It’s just about everything. As much as I enjoy my job, its purpose is to bankroll that life at home, not to replace it.
So, back to work.
For now.
Enjoyed our brief little FaceTime last night. Why didn't I see a clothes line in your room lol?
Glad you’re enjoying your work for the moment. You’re missing our week with no elevator again…
As much as I’ve missed live theater, I’m not ready to go to a show yet! Especially if it isn’t guaranteed that everyone is vaccinated.