Day 543…
When I was in fifth grade there was a teacher named Mrs. Bickle who died.
She wasn’t one of my teachers, but it was a small school, so I knew who she was. I remember being sent to help her with the mimeograph machine in the office once. That glorious, sweet alcohol aroma of the newly printed pages is still one of the best smells I have ever experienced. After she died, I thought of her every time I smelled it.
I was ten or eleven and Mrs. Bickle was the first person that I knew who had passed away. At the time, I was playing the viola in the school orchestra. My poor family, I should say that I was trying to play the viola in the school orchestra. One afternoon I was sitting on the end of my bed practicing, and I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t live forever either. Everybody dies. That moment is one of the most vivid memories I have. I was sawing away through the melody line of the theme from the television show The Rockford Files and somehow, I made the connection that I was going to eventually end up the same way as Mrs. Bickle.
I’m not certain when it started, but it might have been around the time that Texas Instruments released a new pocket calculator that did just about everything, that I thought, “I wonder what Mrs. Bickle would make of that?” She would never know a world in which you could hold something in your hand that could do every kind of calculation imaginable, instantly. Since then, even now, a half century after the fact, every time some new product gets released into the market or there’s a major disaster or change to our world, I always think about the fact that Mrs. Bickle will never see it.
It hasn’t been very pleasant walking through the city this week because of the high temperatures and astronomically high levels of humidity, but I’ve been doing it. All these months into the pandemic, it gets harder and harder to see the changes that have taken place in the way that we are all living our lives.
There are COVID testing tents all over the city. You can’t go more than a few blocks without running into one. Often, they are connected to a van that has been parked in a trafficked area. There are so many of them that it’s easy not to see them anymore. There are fewer people with tables selling masks out on the streets because you can now buy masks in almost any store. From grocery stores to high end designer clothing boutiques, they are readily available.
On Saturday, Michael and I went to the Eagles concert at Madison Square Garden. We hadn’t planned on it, but a friend of Michael’s had the tickets and when it got rescheduled because of the imminent arrival of Hurricane Henri, they couldn’t use them and offered them to us. We decided that the arena was so enormous, and you had to be vaccinated to get in that we would risk going.
Our vaccine cards were checked along with our IDs at the entrance, and we were then allowed in. We kept our masks on throughout the concert unless we were eating, but we were in the decided minority. I would say that 90-95% of the people there did not wear masks at all. It wasn’t until just before the band started that the seats really filled up. Nobody was sitting in front of us, and I had an empty seat to my left. Air was circulating. We felt OK. At first.
It was a long concert - well over three and a half hours. Given that it was the Eagles, the median age of the crowd was skewed older. Madison Square Garden has a seating capacity of over 20,000 people. There were not that many empty seats. We all knew their songs, so we all sang along with them. As the concert progressed, I started wondering if being there was a good idea.
Two years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. The risk of getting just about anything from anyone was just as prevalent then as it is now. Chicken pox, meningitis, the flu, you name it, it’s out there. What we’ve all recently learned about how viruses are transmitted is information now that we will never not know. Like realizing you’re going to die someday, that knowledge stays with you forever. The vaccine, however, is meant to give us a firewall against serious illness. Yes, we might get sick, but hopefully we won’t end up in the hospital. How different is that from what we are doing before? The difference is that we are now aware of the swamp of infection that we wade through every single day of our lives when we go out into the world. The swamp hasn’t changed all that much, our perception of it has. Now we can see it.
New York City is starting to mandate that you must show proof of vaccination to dine inside, go to the gym or go into a theatre. Those are being phased in over this month and will continue into next month. There are still people who will not eat inside so the outdoor areas are becoming permanent. I am sometimes comfortable eating inside these days and sometimes not. I am relying on my reaction to seeing the inside space to make up my mind, but I know that I have no idea at all about what makes one space safer than another. I read something in the last few days that suggested that the plexiglass dividers between tables can cut down on air circulation and might help in virus transmission rather than prevent it. Whether or not that’s true, it’s now an extra piece of information lodged in my mind.
The six weeks that I spent in Cleveland rehearsing and filming JERSEY BOYS last month was the first time that I was back at work since the pandemic started. That was true of many of the people there. There was a lot of confusion and anxiety about how things would work at the beginning that dissipated as the shoot went on. We all got used to the constant testing and protocols that we had to follow. I’m starting a new project in a week or two that will have different protocols around it, but having gone through the JERSEY BOYS shoot, I am confident that we will figure it out. Like Cleveland, everyone involved will be required to be vaccinated.
After all these months, I finally went to the dentist and the eye doctor this week. They’ve both been sending me postcard reminders for months, but I finally felt comfortable enough to go. Everyone in both places were fully masked. I obviously had to take mine off during the dental exam, but it stayed on for the eye exam.
Michael and I are going to a wedding this evening. I am not certain whether everybody there will be vaccinated. The bride and groom work in a theatre so they are far more likely to be vaccinated than not. Their families? We’ll see.
Mrs. Bickle died nearly fifty years ago. She missed the fall of Hanoi when the Vietnam War ended. Those who didn’t miss it are seeing something very similar happening in Kabul as we withdraw our troops. She missed the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, and she missed the painfully slow process of us incorporating the realities of that disease into our daily behavior. Those who didn’t miss it are starting the process of learning to live with COVID-19 in an equally slow and anxiety-ridden process.
The most pressing threat to my immediate survival at age ten was the Vietnam War. We were in the middle of it, and I was sure that I was going to be drafted. It would be another three years before we conceded and pulled out in defeat. In my twenties, it was AIDS. As a gay man, the AIDS virus was likely far more terrifying a prospect for me than it might have been for my straight and female friends. Having been through that crisis in the early 1980’s, I can truly say that I was far more anxious about that then, than I have ever been about this, now. I have come to realize that there will always be something in the great “out there” to fear.
We are figuring out how to live with this coronavirus. We might never be safe from it, but there are plenty of ways to make ourselves safER from it. Like with AIDS, making ourselves safer requires a concerted amount of personal responsibility. Mistakes will be made. What we think is safe now, is going to be found to be riskier than we thought later. What we thought was risky may turn out to be fine.
At some point in the early 1600’s, the theatres reopened in London after the plague wanned and William Shakespeare could finally put on the plays he had written during the shutdown, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, and King Lear. How many people stayed away from watching them out of lingering fears of getting sick?
Should Michael and I have gone to the concert? I don’t know. There are certainly a couple of guys I slept with in the 80’s that I probably should have said no to. I can’t tell you the number of conversations I have had with men my age about how young gay men have no idea what they are doing and what are they thinking raving like that? How different is that from my dad sitting around with his friends complaining about how young people are spending their money these days. Don’t they remember the Depression?
We are slowly and surely reopening. Mistakes are going to be made. We are each going to test our new boundaries to find out where they are. Sometimes we will over-step, learn the lesson, and hopefully be able to try again.
Mrs. Bickle may not have experienced AIDS or COVID, but she was probably alive for the Spanish flu. People had to start going back out and interacting after that, too.
It was a great concert. I’m glad we went. I’m not necessarily ready to go and see something else right away, but I’m glad we got our toes wet with that one. I’m not so worried about this evening’s wedding that I’m not going to go, but I am going to think about it.
Wherever Mrs. Bickle is, I’m sure she’s looking at everything that’s happening and thinking, “same old, same old.” This is the most I have consciously thought about her since she died.
Someone should set up a mimeograph machine somewhere just so that those of us who remember them could go in and smell the printed paper. I’m sure that whatever chemicals were used were lethal, but until somebody tells me otherwise, I will remain in ignorant bliss about it.
Wonderful, babe. Dancing back into the water is definitely tricky. We'll go slowly Looking forward to full on swimming! Meantime, here's to Mrs. Bickle and the intoxicating smell of freshly printed "dittos"!!!!!!
Wonderful! It’s been such a rollercoaster ride here—I’ve decided to love my life no matter what! It’s working.❤️❤️❤️Annie