Day 585…
And I am back on the couch.
Last job over, next job yet to start.
The Eagles concert that Michael and I went to a month or so ago apparently contributed to a rash of new COVID cases. This is all hearsay because I can’t see anything about it on the news. The Broadway production of Aladdin had to close again for two weeks after reopening because they had too many breakthrough cases in their company. The actors’ union mandates that any more than four cases in a company makes it too dangerous to proceed. It could have only been four or it could have been more than that, nobody’s releasing the numbers. There’s still a risk out there. The lack of transparency is troubling but then if they were fully transparent would that just scare everyone off?
We got through the last four weeks of the developmental workshop I was working on without any reported cases cropping up. We were tested twice a week and remained masked until right near the end when we started doing run-thrus. With each passing test, the anxiety rose. “Please don’t let it be me who shuts this down,” was all I was thinking each time that swab went up my nose.
A million years ago, I was working on a play outside of New York and flirting with one of the guys in the company. He flirted back and sure enough, after a party one night we ended up together in his room. Afterwards, he said to me, “I thought you’d have a better body than that.” Oof. He had imagined what I might look like out of my clothes and clearly what he saw didn’t match that.
When I worked on the Jersey Boys film in July and August, I already knew most of the people involved so seeing them unmasked was not a surprise. On this recent project, though, I knew very few of the people I was working with, so I got to know them without ever seeing their full faces. We saw each other’s eyes and foreheads and that was it. When the cast finally took their masks off for the first time through the whole show, I felt like I was looking at a group of strangers. In my mind, I had completed how their faces looked and that was how I knew them. I think that some of them reminded me of other people from the eyes up and I filled in the missing pieces with that information. Of course, they all looked completely different when we finally saw them in flagrante. We had all been wearing the same masks that were the same shape. Some of those masks covered very full lower faces and some of those masks covered narrow faces with sharper chins. Nobody, it turned out, had a lower face that was the shape of the mask.
There were three guys in the company who looked so similar from the eyes up, that it was very difficult at first to tell them apart. To make matters worse, they all had the same haircuts. Masks off, they looked nothing alike at all. Once I got to know their actual faces, they became easy to distinguish when they were wearing their masks. Before that I often had to resort to picking out things like earrings and stubble to identify them. One of the assistants on the show looked so different from the imaginary him that I had filled in, that I was startled every single time I saw him with his mask off. I never saw our music director’s face until we were at dinner together after the final performance and he happened to be sitting opposite me. This person that I had spent the previous four weeks working closely with suddenly seemed like a total stranger.
What must it be like for conservative Arabic people when women wear niqab that cover everything on their heads except their eyes? In that case, other people must create an entirely fictional construct of what that person must look like.
As I start to finally meet people that I have only known via Zoom, I am finding I am having the same response albeit on a less extreme level. On Zoom we only see people head on - we don’t see them in profile, so we are getting a strange sort of 2-dimensional impression of them. People I imagined as being tall turn out to be very short and the people I imagined to be short sometimes tower over me in person.
Twenty some-odd years ago, I was out on the road, touring with The Phantom of the Opera. The makeup for the Phantom is very complex, involving several latex prosthesis and hours in the makeup chair. A makeup assistant needed to practice doing it, so I volunteered to be his victim. It was a painstaking process that took about two hours from start to finish. I wasn’t looking in the mirror so I couldn’t see what he was doing. The prosthetics are very light and are separated into pieces so that they don’t at all restrict the movement of the face - most importantly the mouth. The person playing the Phantom does needs to sing so restricting facial movement would be a disaster.
When we were done, I couldn’t really feel anything on my face aside from a little tightness. When I looked in the mirror, though, I didn’t recognize myself at all. Who was that? I couldn’t stop staring at this new self. Sometimes, when I am in the middle of directing a bunch of twenty-somethings, I forget that I’m not twenty-something myself. I’ll turn around and look into the wall of mirrors and wonder who that old guy is in the studio for a second before I realize that it’s me. Looking out, I feel like me - at whatever age.
We don’t know how long we are going to need to wear masks. However long that is, the people who are refusing to wear masks now, are just going to make it longer. While the peak of the Delta variant infections may either be passed or approaching, we are still quite a way away from it being gone. Much of the official guidance around mask wearing revolves around individual choice. There is language on the CDC site that says things like, “you might choose to…”, which falls far short of a mandate and basically lets people do what they want. There are plenty of people who do not believe that there’s a problem at all and are taking no precautions - either masks or vaccinations - and then conversely there are a lot of people taking every precaution possible. Given that almost all the COVID dying these days is among the former, I am somewhat nearer to the latter on the precaution spectrum.
I find myself, while walking down the street, reaching for my mask when I get to a crowded place on the sidewalk. I don’t even think about it. As I am walking through the group of people, I have the weird feeling that the mask makes me invisible. I find that people tend to gravitate towards the people without masks and ignore those with masks. I’ve tried walking through crowds both with and without and more people make eye contact with me when I am without than they do when I am wearing one. We use the expressions on strangers’ whole faces to access whether they are people we feel comfortable connecting with - even just in passing. Hide that expression and it makes us uneasy.
Michael and I are watching our school-age nieces and nephews navigate through this time and they are all facing challenges that we never had to even consider. Part of learning who we are is figuring out where we stand with others. How does certain behavior illicit a positive response and other behavior a negative? Childhood friendships are often deep and tumultuous. We vow to be friends forever, then hate each other and never want to speak to each other again, and then back again. We take those learned lessons into our adult lives, and they help us forge new relationships - both personal and professional. Our nieces and nephews, right at the time when all of this really starts to explode, are being kept from properly experiencing being with other people and learning all of this. They are often only getting part of the story.
When this pandemic passes, and it will pass, how is this going to change us as a society? I think that some sort of mask wearing is going to remain with us. Like the Japanese and Chinese, I think that we will be seeing people who might not feel well, wearing masks when they go outside. That barrier is going to seem more the norm than the exception at least in urban areas. We are probably going to maintain a great deal of the virtual interaction that we have developed over these past eighteen months because it is cheaper and easier to do. Not seeing each other without the masks of Zoom or social media is going to be rarer than it was pre-pandemic. We are heading towards becoming even more isolated from each other and more insular than we already are.
I’m happy to be back on the couch. I have another short gig next week and then… we will see. We’ve already had our COVID safety pre-rehearsal zoom meeting for it. The COVID-compliance officers that I have been working with on the two other gigs I’ve done were fantastic. They were thorough but at the same time mindful of how the safety measures were impacting the work. I started my first job back with a bit of an eye-roll attitude about the whole COVID safety thing, but then I came to realize how necessary and integral they were. It is as important to get someone good in that position as it is to get a good stage manager or a technical director. Someone who’s lax or possibly worse, a martinet, could probably sink a production in nothing flat. I’ve been lucky with excellent people in place for the two jobs I’ve had, and it seems like the person on next week’s reading is just as good.
It’s really all about taking care of each other. Wearing a mask protects the other person more than it protects you. Wearing a mask, though, means that we need to try just a little harder to make sure that we are connecting with each other. I do look forward to the day when we can be back inside a rehearsal room without wearing a mask. It’s coming. It may take a while, but we will get there.
❤️🎈Lovely to read you words and be a part of your journey and experiences. Love the Phantom of the Opera one! Yes still with masks. Choose not to go to an opening night party....held in a bar, although we showed our vacination cars w/ ID....the packed bar were all maskless?!
Instincts at work at all times!
❤️💕good luck with the next gig you dance through
Ahhh, your observations are priceless!