September 16, 2022 (Day 910… ish)
Last night, Michael and I went to see a play in Brooklyn, and we had to show our vaccine cards to get in. I was annoyed. I hadn’t opened the app on my phone for months and I wasn’t certain that it would still work. Once we were through the inspection gauntlet, we each got a green wristband that, of course, got stuck on the hair on my arm. Then, with our masks on, we went inside to sit down.
It’s now been two and a half years since everything shut down at the beginning of the pandemic. That just doesn’t seem possible. The world has settled into a routine but it’s not remotely the one we left behind when we closed everything up.
During our six weeks in Europe, the only time I remember having to wear a mask was on the train. When the conductor came around and yelled at me for not having one, I was relieved to find that there was an old one still in my pocket. Out of habit, rather than necessity, I usually keep a mask or two in my jeans. It’s just another thing I check for when I get ready to do the laundry. The pharmacy in our little town in Italy is still very strict about limiting the number of people allowed inside at any one time. Given that the people who worked there were constantly at risk during the worst of it, it is hardly surprising that they are still being so cautious. Beyond that, it rarely crossed my mind that the pandemic was still on.
Perhaps annoyed is too strong a word to describe my reaction last night, but I was certainly surprised. When we were doing The Karate Kid in St. Louis earlier in the summer, I thought that a lot of the measures we were taking were already somewhat overblown. Many of us caught COVID during rehearsals and the run which kept us out of the building for five days. If more than five people tested positive during any given seven-day period, then we were meant to shut down completely until everyone had been tested. Sure enough, that happened, and we missed half a day of work while everyone was sent to any available clinic in a ten-mile radius.
I haven’t worked since The Karate Kid closed so I don’t know how the rules have changed. People announcing their positive test results on social media is so common that I don’t even pay attention anymore. If I were working now, I wouldn’t have been so startled last night when I was asked to prove that I’d been vaccinated. Since I’m not, though, I’m out of the loop. There were reports that ten understudies were on the other night at Funny Girl on Broadway. One of them was a friend of mine who had just been hired that morning and went on, book in hand, after driving down to New York from Massachusetts.
The virus isn’t gone, it has just been absorbed into the fabric of our lives. Like the flu, it can still land people in the hospital, but also, like the flu, that seems to be rare. All of this is completely unsurprising given the historical course of the Spanish flu a hundred years ago. It surged and ebbed, just as COVID is doing, until people stopped noticing and forgot all about it - just as we are doing with COVID. Neither one of them is ever going to go away completely.
The audience at the play last night was very elderly and, therefore, even now, at much greater risk than some of us relatively younger folk are. My guess is that the theatre has maintained its vaccination policy to protect them. That is how we should be living our lives. We should be looking out for each other. However fleetingly inconvenient it was to open my vax app; it was a very small price to pay to help keep our fellow audience members safer. I was also so cold inside the theatre for the first time in ages, that I was grateful to have the mask on to keep my face warm.
On my first long walk yesterday, I was interested to see with fresh eyes what changes had happened in New York City while I was away. It was one of those perfect crisp, cool end-of-summer days that only happens a few times a year. Whenever we get one of them, it can cancel out months of nasty mid-summer or mid-winter days. Yesterday almost took care of the entirety of this past sweltering season, all by itself.
New York City, these days, is relatively calm. Judging by the absence of new graffiti, whatever frustrations that people are feeling do not seem to be enough to drive them, paint can in hand, out in the streets. That will change instantly when something new happens, but for now, the cancelation of Roe v. Wade, the climate crisis, the BLM movement, the #metoo movement, and all the rest of the trigger points we’ve experienced recently seem to have been absorbed and accepted by the city. I did see one tag blaming the Russian people for their complicity in their country’s invasion of Ukraine, but that was it.
None of those issues have been fixed, in fact, most are still at the crisis point, but, like COVID, there just doesn’t seem to be the energy and passion we’ve had in the past around any of them.
Tourists are back but not in overwhelming numbers. The city seems to belong to New Yorkers. The curbside eating areas appear to now be a permanent part of the urban landscape. The same was true in all the major cities we visited in Europe – Brussels, Luxembourg, Genoa, Florence, and Rome – but outside café-style eating has been a part of their landscapes since long before the pandemic. Now it is here, too.
I am amazed by how little I miss being on the hamster wheel. For years, I was fully engaged. I never stopped working and I never stopped moving. I look back at that time, now, and it seems like I’m watching a movie. There’s work coming up, to be sure, but at nowhere near the frantic level that it was at before. I look at what people post on social media about new jobs, new tours, and new work trips, and I cannot imagine doing it myself. I am happy for them, but it feels like something in me has just switched off. Don’t get me wrong, my ambition is still very much there, it has just changed direction.
The Jersey Boys tour, which now truly seems like part of another life, is about to close for good in Honolulu. I hope that everyone out there is as proud of what we made as I am. There are people on the tour that I’ve never met, but we will always be connected through our experience of it. Jersey Boys gave so many people the opportunity to grow and experience things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. So many things got checked off my bucket list, that I’m not sure there’s even anything left on it in terms of theatre. I want to watch it, but I’m not nearly as eager to do it. My current list has many other things on it.
Life stops and starts. When you walk out of one room, you walk into another. It’s a cliché because it’s true. I might not have left Jersey Boys when I did if it wasn’t for the pandemic. It’s hard to give something up that’s given you so much, but when you find yourself repeating yourself, then it’s time to go. I’m grateful that, among everything else, it has also given me the resources to be able to take a moment before I dive back into anything,
We won’t ever go back to life before the pandemic, but that’s fine because we already lived it. After a very complicated and not always easy reboot, the great machine seems to be back up and running and chugging ahead. There are still some kinks left in it, but already some of it is already working better than it was. I wonder where it’s taking us.
Wherever. It looks like another spectacular day outside today. I, for one, am going to dive into it.
Weird! I thought I was subscribed, but apparently, I wasn’t, and now I am. So, good!
You paint such an inviting picture of NYC. As you say, it’s not always like that. And I perfectly understand your hamster wheel transition. I went through one of those, too. It’s Italy, of course. She’ll do it to you. And there’s no turning back. Resistance is futile, my friend. Might as well sit down and have another coffee.