Michael has gone up to his sister’s house for two nights leaving me alone with the cat.
I am still not over whatever this non-COVID nonsense is. I feel better one day, like today, then I slide right back. So many of my friends have experienced the same thing. The cat, of course, is thrilled because it means a warm lap for most of the day.
Luckily, while I do have some work to do, it is all accomplishable from where I am currently sitting. Hilariously, I have three Zoom calls scheduled in quick succession early this afternoon, each with or about a different Broadway legend. First up, there is a Broadway Barks call with Bernadette Peters and the rest of our Barks team, then there’s a call with a theatre in Connecticut about an upcoming Patti LuPone concert and then the final call is with a theatre in Texas about an upcoming Mandy Patinkin concert.
I’ve known Bernadette and Patti much longer than I’ve known Mandy, but I’m still not really used to any of them. There’s always a part of me that is sixteen-years-old standing by the stage door in the cold and the rain waiting for them to sign my playbills.
It was much easier to do that in those days, far fewer people were ever there. I truly marvel at some of the people I approached during those years – Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, Yul Brynner, Carol Channing, Katherine Hepburn, Mary Martin, Helen Hayes, Lauren Bacall, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Poitier, Rex Harrison, Glenda Jackson, Bob Fosse, Alan J. Lerner, Andy Warhol, Angela Lansbury, Gloria Swanson, and even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. There were countless others.
Most people signed either a playbill or my autograph book. Ms. Hepburn wouldn’t sign in person, but when I left her a note and a playbill at the stage door, she very graciously obliged. Mrs. Onassis wouldn’t sign either, but even her turning to me and saying, “No,” is a memory I will cherish.
When I went to see Evita, I knew I was going to go back and try to see the stars. The stage doorman at the Broadway Theatre actually let me come inside and go up to Patti’s dressing room. I nervously knocked on her door and she opened it. Mandy and several other people were in the room with her. They were all laughing and looking like they were enjoying themselves. They all signed my playbill, and I went away as happy as a clam clueless as to what the future would bring.
That was forty-five years ago. Patti was thirty at the time. Mandy was twenty-seven.
Four years later, in 1983, I waited outside the Booth Theatre stage door for Mandy and Bernadette. I was in college by then. Sunday in the Park with George blew me away. I had never seen a story before that was about the creation of art. I spent money I didn’t have to buy tickets to it three separate times.
There are people who argue that while the first act is fantastic, the second feels added on. I disagree. I think the whole thing is perfect. It is still, by far, my favorite musical ever written. It has forever shaped my vision of the world I live and work in. Stephen Sondheim was a genius. He wrote about what he knew, and he certainly understood how that world works.
I will start traveling again in a couple of weeks. Mandy has concerts in Mesa and Tucson that I’ll be covering. Patti starts up again in March, so then I’ll really be all over the place. Until then, all the work I need to do I can do from right here on my place on the couch.
Using the statistics from last year, it seems that 12.7% of our workforce is working solely from home and 28.2% are doing a mixture of spending some days in the office and some days at home. Pre-pandemic, about 7.3% of the United States labor force had jobs that allowed them to stay at home. This is according to Forbes Magazine.
Now, because I have become suspicious about everything, I took a short dive into Forbes.
Forbes Magazine is currently owned by a Hong Kong-based financial company called Integrated Whale Media Investments, Inc. At the end of last year, Austin Russell was all set to buy the company for $800 million when the deal fell through at the last minute after an Indian investor pulled out. Austin Russell is the founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies whose main goal is the creation of self-driving cars. Russell became a billionaire at 25 years old. He is now 28. Because that deal collapsed, Whale Media still owns Forbes.
The Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Magazine is Steve Forbes, the grandson of its founder B.C. Forbes. His dad, Malcolm Forbes, ran it for a good long time before leaving it to his son. Steve Forbes ran for President in both 1996 and 2000 as a Republican only to drop out after losing in most of the primaries. I have no idea how much autonomy he has at Forbes and how much he may be guided by the firm that owns him.
It seems that there is very little around us anymore that is not ultimately owned and controlled by some sort of enormous financial institution.
Anyway, I digress. For the time being, I’ll accept their statistics until something tells me otherwise.
The highest percentage of people working from home are those aged 24 to 35. 39% of all employees work remotely all the time and an additional 25% do it part-time. That says to me that we are in for a permanent shift. Once used to the idea, people aren’t going to willingly give it up. More than half of the people surveyed said that they’d look for another job if their current one stopped being remote.
Education plays a role in this. The top jobs that work remotely are in the computer and IT sectors. Rounding out the top five are marketing, account and finance, project management, and medical and health. Those jobs usually require some sort of advanced degree or training.
At-home workers earn, on average, $19,000 more a year than in-office workers. They also aren’t paying the costs associated with commuting so can keep more of that income. 32% said that they’d be willing to take a pay cut to keep working from home.
Only so much of my job can be accomplished remotely. At some point, I need to get on a plane and go to whichever theatre has hired us to perform.
During the height of the pandemic, Patti did a concert that was live-streamed over the internet. We still had to go somewhere to do it. I wonder if, as this next generation gets used to working on their own in front of a screen that need for gathering to watch something will continue.
The Pew Research Center says that regular in-person religious attendance dropped from 33% of American adults in 2019 to 30% in 2022.
(OK, because it’s going to be a thing for me, now, Pew is a non-partisan, not-for-profit American think-tank based in D.C. They are operated by the Pew Charitable Trust, a conservative-leaning family-run group. Founded in 1948, they went public in 2004 meaning that they could then devote 5% of their revenue to lobbying. They are extremely interested in judicial and prison reform and marine conservation. The biggest controversy touching them so far was their support of the Barnes art collection moving out of its private-home setting into a purpose-built building in downtown Philadelphia. I can live with all that. Moving on.)
Walking around the streets of New York these days, you can see the effects the pandemic has had on the tenor of the city. There are more people out and about than there ever were, but they aren’t always the same people you used to run into in the old days.
Retail businesses along Madison and Fifth Avenues appear to be thriving. There are very few vacant storefronts. There are many American tourists around the city, and these days more European, but still almost no Chinese. There was an exodus of wealthy families from the city during the pandemic and few of them have returned. There are often long lines of people who seem to be from middle America waiting to get into some choice luxury-brand shops.
In the first quarter of 2023, office vacancy rates were at 22.2%. Before the pandemic in 2019, they were under 10%. As a result, commercial rent rates have fallen. Looking at a variety of different articles, it seems to me that nobody really knows what to do about this.
Because office workers are often only required to show up in person a few times a week, they seem to be going to the office, getting their work done, and then going straight home. There are still no throngs of grey-suited employees going to restaurants in midtown for lunch the way there used to be.
Night-time habits in the city have really changed. Gone are the 24-hour diners. Most places seem to start closing at about 9pm. The city that never sleeps is now out for the count by 10:00pm. Office workers aren’t blowing off steam until the wee hours anymore. They’re going home to the suburbs and taking out the trash and streaming Netflix.
As Chance, the Gardner famously says in the movie Being There, I like to watch. We are changing. What we want and what we all expect from life is not the same as it once was.
I think we are losing part of our sense of interconnectedness. At least I think that’s true with us as physical beings. I see that when I’m walking down the street. We are latched onto our phones and not paying attention to where we are going. Our sidewalk traffic patterns would be unrecognizable to a born and bred New Yorker of a decade ago. There are no patterns now. We all careen around oblivious to the presence of other people. We stop and start in utterly unpredictable ways. We are each out there on our own.
Ever more, we seem to be fulfilling our need to socialize, virtually.
Something different is coming. I don’t know what it is, and I can’t imagine it will be something I like, but I don’t think that matters. My generation’s lives are markedly different than those of our parents’ generation let alone our grandparents’. What’s coming now will be equally different. I’m not going to rail against it.
I like my job. I am happy to prep concerts from my living room and then fly out and do them wherever. We will keep doing them as long as people still want to come and watch them. So far, they do. For the people who come, nothing can match the experience of being there, in person, engulfed in the energy of a like-minded audience.
Chita Rivera passed away yesterday. Talk about the end of an era. Like Betty White and the Queen of England, Chita was always supposed to be here.
Chita epitomized live performance. She was a creature of the stage. Film didn’t do her justice. Put her in front of a crowd, though, and she ignited. For all of us lucky enough to have experienced her in person, she will live on as long as we all draw breath. The experience of live performance, however, only truly survives in the memories of the audience. Once we’re all gone, the genius of what that was will go too.
I was lucky enough to stage manage her 80th birthday party concert a decade ago. It’s the only time I ever worked with her. Graciela Danielle, her long-time friend, and collaborator directed it. Gracie directed the Annie Get Your Gun that I stage-managed twenty years ago which is where I met Bernadette. It was a blast!
At some point, while we were rehearsing the concert, I complimented Chita on the bracelet she was wearing. I don’t know why, but it just caught my eye. A short while later, Rosie, her long-time assistant came over and said, “Chita would like you to have this,” and handed me the bracelet.
Everything changes. That is the nature of existence. I’m not going to be the one that stops that from happening, I’m not even going to try. I say bring it on. I may not always want to participate in whatever this new way of living turns out to be, but I will certainly keep my eye on it.
This upcoming election is largely going to be decided by a generation of people that my generation doesn’t fully understand. All I can say is that we’d better start figuring them out and soon.
Rest in peace Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero Anderson and thank you for the bracelet.
I treasure it.
what a lovely ranging post--Yes, onward in experience, and getting older is a great liberation, say I!
i love u RichRd and every word you write!