Early in the morning on the day before Valentine’s Day in New York City, it finally snowed.
We had been long overdue for it. When it’s blanketed in drifts, the city turns magical. I look forward to being trapped warmly inside while a storm rages outside. For the second winter in a row, however, we’ve had relatively mild weather. Whatever snow we’ve gotten has been thin and short-lived. This time the weather apps couldn’t agree whether it was really coming, but then it started and came down quickly.
By the time I woke up, the ground was covered. The snow was wet and thick, and it stuck to everything. Central Park indeed looked like a wonderland. For about an hour.
Even as I was out walking through the park, the temperature rose, and large soupy clumps began falling around me from the tree branches. Outside on the street slushy puddles accumulated around the storm drains and soon everything that had been gloriously white started turning grey. By the time I got home, my sneakers were soaked through, and I couldn’t feel my toes from the cold.
The next day, I flew to Arizona to do a couple of concerts with Mandy Patinkin. We had one scheduled in Mesa and another one after a day off in Tucson. I flew out a day early so that I could drive up to Page before doing the first one and finally see Antelope Canyon for myself after years of looking at pictures of it.
In the mid-90s, I spent several months in Tempe while I was on The Phantom of the Opera tour. I loved it. My friend Mark and I went hiking somewhere different during every day off. I was certain that I hadn’t been back since then, but a quick search through my email yielded the fact that I indeed had been in Scottsdale for another concert with Patti LuPone in 2019. I googled the theatre to look at pictures and some tiny fragments of memory resurfaced. They are, however, almost microscopic, and incoherently strung together in the dim recesses of my brain.
One of the main conversations that we all have when we arrive in a venue, both with Mandy and with Patti, is whether we’ve played there before or not. I had only been out with Mandy for a short time before the pandemic, but I started touring with Patti about two years after I left the Phantom tour. She and I and the rest of the team have been out there for nearly three decades. We were… somewhere… a couple of months ago, talking about this very thing. Patti was adamant that she’d never been to the theatre or the town before. “Who signed your name on the wall then?” I asked. It was right behind her where we were standing in the hallway. We all laughed because none of us had any memory of it at all.
When I was in Tempe in 1995, it was a college town. The theatre we played in, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, was on the campus of ASU. I would never have guessed that where I was this past week was the same place.
Phoenix is a city made up of any number of smaller cities that used to be separate but have now been gobbled up into a greater metropolitan area. Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale, and a few others have all lost whatever individuality they might once have had. These days, they are all crammed to the hilt with towering sterile skyscrapers. You can’t really tell where one town ends and the other begins. That’s not at all what it was like back in my Phantom days. There were a couple of tall buildings in Tempe but nothing like what is there now. It all looks brand new and, honestly sterile and soulless. The Grady Gamage theatre where we once played. which used to be out in the open, is now hemmed in on all sides.
It used to feel like Arizona and now it feels like nowhere.
It was a five or six-hour drive out of Phoenix and up north to Page where I spent the night before my morning tour. It took about two of those hours to get past the urban sprawl. Once I’d cleared it, though, I was back in the Arizona I remembered. Scrubby dusty desert plains stretched out into the distance where they met up with mountains of every color in the Crayola box. The further north I went, the deeper into Navajo land I went. Home-made roadside stalls with hand-painted signs hawking jewelry, pottery, and fry-bread started popping up everywhere.
I kept pulling over to take pictures because it was all so unlike anything I had just left behind in New York. Around every corner was a new breathtaking vista.
On the way, I stopped in Sedona which I remembered as a sleepy little hippie town nestled in the middle of Red Rock country. No more. These days, there are throngs of hotels and busloads of tourists. Building has raged unchecked and once stunning vistas are now marred by ugly spiraling housing developments. Anything unique about the place has been destroyed. I was so sad to see what had happened to it. Oak Creek Canyon, through which you drive to head north, is still, happily, just as I remember it. There isn’t enough usable real estate along its length to build on. Thank goodness. The road still winds through some stunning unblemished scenery.
David Bailey, one of the enfant terrible British portrait photographers of the sixties, used to love traveling to India because he found it so utterly different from London.
Having visited there briefly, myself, I know exactly what he means. Cows stand in the middle of crowded streets. Monkeys use the dense webbing of electrical wiring overhead to travel between buildings in even the largest cities. It’s dusty beyond imagination. And loud. It’s so amazingly busy, that you need to hide inside your hotel room every few hours just to recharge. Women, doing the lowest most menial jobs there are, like sorting dried camel dung to use as cooking fuel, wear beautiful brightly colored silk saris. Even in the grime and the dirt, they shine and stand out as if they are above it all. How they keep themselves looking so pristine is beyond me. Ten minutes out on the street and I am covered in dirt. I look as if I’d been doing their job. It is truly another world over there from the one we live in here.
I read a quote from David Bailey in which he says that when he arrives in India, he starts taking pictures right away because, after a day or two, it all starts looking so normal that he can’t see it anymore. He’s right.
It was that way for me just now in Arizona. The first giant Saguaro cactus I saw, I pulled over and took about ten pictures of it as if it were at a movie premier standing on a red carpet. Five days later, as I drove to the airport to fly home to New York, I went through whole forests of them outside of Tucson and barely gave them a second look. I was used to them.
We adapt to change very quickly. It is probably why, as a species, we have been so successful in spreading ourselves across the entire breadth of the planet. We can live in houses made of ice and in huts made of mud and thatch. The first keeps us warm and the second, cool. We inhabit jungles, and forests, and plains, and coastal areas. We can live underground or on stilts out over the water. We can live in cement towers that stretch up into the sky. We will eat just about anything with even a hint of nutritional value. When faced with the unthinkable, rather than succumbing to it, we figure out how to live around it and just get on with it.
During the pandemic, all we talked about was our “new normal.” We suddenly had to wear masks, keep away from each other, eat together outside in the snow, and not travel anywhere. Paper towels and disinfectants became scarce and once found were hoarded. When packages were delivered, we wiped them down before opening them. We learned to video conference. Our prisons and mental institutions were emptied, and their inhabitants were placed inside our city’s hotels.
Four years later, while we have dropped some of the new behaviors we learned, some of them have certainly become “normal.” People still choose to wear masks occasionally and doing so doesn’t raise an eyebrow. Some restaurants’ outdoor eating areas have become permanent. While the virus raged, we learned to work at home and now many of us still do that. Our urban real estate markets have not yet figured out what to do with all the now-empty office space available for rent.
A few years before all that, when I went to Russia before the pandemic to talk to some theatre students, what struck me was how little difference there was between them and the people I knew back home.
Russia went from being ruled by the Czar, to a period of almost anarchy following his abdication after World War I. A few years later, the Communists took power and installed Joseph Stalin, and he began consolidating outlying areas under his central control. He stayed in power for decades. After World War II, the now USSR eventually became the “evil empire” we all had nightmares about. In 1991, the whole thing collapsed. The Soviet Union was dissolved, and Russia became a smaller independent state governed by an elected president. In 2012, Putin was elected to office and has never ceded his power back to the masses. Elections are now a sham, and he rules over the country as a dictator.
The students I talked to, even given all that, were still just interested in talking about theatre. They’d woken up that morning in the places they lived, gotten dressed in clothes that looked identical to mine, eaten breakfast, and either walked or took public transportation downtown to where we met. We all wonder what it must be like to live under a monster like Putin, having met my counterparts there, all I can say is that it doesn’t feel all that different.
These days, here in the United States, we are facing the very real possibility that we are going to elect our own political strongman who once he takes power will not give it up. It’s what he tried to do when last in office and there is every indication that he will do it again if he gets in. This time, however, he will know what to do to ensure that he succeeds.
If that happens, what will happen to us?
The short answer seems to be, in terms of the way we go through our lives, not all that much. Our 45th President was resolutely isolationist. If he gets into power, you can be sure he will keep pushing us in that direction. International trade will be thrown off. Imported commodities that are now readily available, may become scarce. We may find ourselves hoarding strange things or trying to buy them on the black market.
We may see some of our freedoms curtailed. The LGBTQ community has only just gotten used to being able to live out in the open. If the Christian fundamentalists get into power, that could change, and we’d have to go back into hiding. That’s something that my generation and those older than me already understand how to do. The younger folks will need to learn how to live that way.
A whole bunch of people will be silenced or simply disappear. Have I written enough to annoy anyone who might come to power? Who knows.
The divide between the rich on the top and everyone else below will grow wider. We could end up with the overwhelming majority of the population being little more than serfs. Potentially, the United States could start to look very much like Czarist Russia.
I am not advocating for any of this to happen, but if it does, we will figure out how to live our lives under it. We will mourn the murdered, stand in lines to buy computer parts, and go about our lives in that futuristic “new normal.” We will still be late for meetings and find ourselves in need of a snack at about 4 pm.
We should all stop being afraid of things changing. Losing sleep over what may or may not happen is a pointless activity. Whatever eventually happens is going to be different from what we might be feverishly dreaming about. Giving into fear, terror, and anxiety only makes us less capable of stopping it all from happening in the first place. There is little I can guarantee, but one of the things I do know is that things will change. How? Who knows.
One of the possibilities following this year’s upcoming election is that the country will devolve into a civil war which will displace millions of us and force us to live in camps far from our present homes. Another possibility is that nothing will change at all. My prediction is that what eventually happens will be neither, but it will be far closer to the latter possibility than the former.
We should all stop losing sleep over it and, instead, work to make the future we want to happen unfold. Whatever does end up happening, no matter how dark, we will adapt to it. How do I know that? We always have.
There’s not a trace of snow left in New York. There might be some spots in the park with a few stubborn piles left under trees and along some walls, but peering out my window it looks to me like last week’s storm never happened.
I loved visiting Arizona, but five days was enough. It’s a remarkably dry place and I was finding it very difficult to keep hydrated. At the beginning of the day in Tucson, we uncovered the black Yamaha grand piano to focus the lights around it on stage. Within an hour, the shiny, pristine surface was completely covered with fine red sand. The air was suffused with it. I can still feel it in the back of my throat.
I ignored it while we were there, but now that we’re back, I can’t imagine how anyone could live with that all the time.
I guess they just get used to it.
If you get the chance, Prescott is worth the visit. There's good hiking on and around Thumb Butte and Granite Mountain. The latter goes up around 7,000 ft, so be sure to pack lots of water. The area in general is "Upper Sonoran" also called "Pinyon-Juniper" biome. In the town itself, be sure to visit the palace saloon. The bar dates from the 1880's and brags having the elbows of the Earp brothers and Doc Holiday leaning on it. (Funny story about how they saved the bar during the 1900 fire that otherwise leveled the town.)