Post 595 - April 9, 2024

Last night Patti LuPone sold out Carnegie Hall.

It was our string player’s debut. His family and many of his friends flew in from Michigan to witness it. The rest of us had all played there before but even so, Michael came and a few of my friends did too. It was a special night. We play in concert halls all over the world, but none of them are quite like Carnegie Hall.

During the last song of the show, a children’s choir joined Patti onstage along with Bridget Everett. Bridget is a comedian and a cabaret performer. She starred in a TV series last year called Somebody Somewhere. Somehow, someway, she and Patti have become friends and they’ve appeared several times over the years in concerts together. Patti’s tiny and Bridget’s huge. They’re hilarious together.

In the afternoon, just a few minutes before the choir was due to rehearse, the moon passed in front of the sun.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the eclipse was not a surprise. Human beings have been able to predict them for thousands of years. Solar and lunar eclipses occur on a steady cycle alternating every 9 years and five and a half days. 6585.3211 days from now the earth, moon, and sun will be in the same relative positions to each other and we will experience the same thing visible from more or less the same geographical areas.

This pattern is called the Saros Series. It was given that name by Edmund Halley in 1691. While the next total eclipse visible in the United States won’t happen for another twenty years, other places in the world will see them before that. The confluences of the sun and the moon are so predictable that you can plan on taking trips to the places to witness them happening firsthand years in advance.

Several religious groups were convinced that yesterday’s celestial event would herald the beginning of the Rapture. Christian Evangelicals believe that during the Rapture, true believers – both the living and the dead – will ascend to heaven to meet Jesus. The moon briefly blotting out the light from the sun was apparently looked upon by some as a portent of Judgement Day.

Yesterday’s eclipse was only visible to the people in a rather narrow band stretching diagonally across North America. My question to these Evangelical believers would be to ask whether they thought only the faithful in that tiny sliver of our country would be raptured, or would everybody the world over?  Were they thinking about everyone or only about themselves?

This past weekend we did a concert out on Long Island, so I drove out there the day before. On one of the highways taking me out of the city, I passed a billboard with a picture of Jesus with the words, “Jesus loves you.” The Jesus on that billboard was maybe the whitest man I have ever seen.

To whom was that message aimed, I wonder? Only people of Northern European descent? The people living in the region where the historical Jesus was born were mostly ethnically Semitic. They would have far more melanin in their skin than the white guy I saw looming over the Bronx.

If the group who posted the sign pictured someone who looked closer to what the historical record indicates he would look like we would be able to take the message at face value. Since that’s not what they did, and instead choose to depict the man as something else, a different message creeps into what they are advertising. It becomes supremely racist.

What that sign really says is that Jesus loves everyone, in this group’s opinion, whose ancestors were Vikings, and hates everyone else. Depict him as he probably was, and it sends a universal message. Depict him as being from a specific other ethnicity, that group becomes the one for whom the message is intended. For the white people who would scoff at this, I would ask them what their response would be looking at a picture of a Chinese Jesus. Would they feel that the message was for them, too, or only for Chinese people?

If this were forty years ago, I would say that the racism inherent in that billboard arose from the casual White supremacy of the day and that nobody had really given it any thought. In 2024, after all the discussion we, as a country, have had around the issue of discrimination, that sign reads to me as a proud and defiant advocacy of White superiority. That the sign hovers above an ethnically diverse neighborhood on a major artery in and out of the city only drives home that hateful message more powerfully.

To nobody’s surprise yesterday, at least among those in my immediate circle, there were no reports of people floating up into the sky as the moon followed its expected path between us and the sun.

Were any of the people predicting the Rapture shocked to find themselves still here on Earth, perhaps a quick look inward would help to clear things up. I’m not sure belief in and of itself is quite enough to get you a ticket up. I have a feeling it might be limited to the righteous. Certainly, the good people who went to all that effort to put Exclusionary Jesus up over the highway aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

About two minutes before what was going to be the moon’s peak coverage of the sun – in New York that meant that about 90% of the sun would be hidden for a few moments – A massive cloud moved in and covered up the whole thing. Oh well. Next time.

The concert last night was an extraordinary experience. Carnegie Hall has remarkable acoustics. Nobody is sure why. There are architectural elements you can point to and say that they contribute to the overall quality but that’s mostly conjecture. If people definitively knew the reasons for it, they’d replicate the room everywhere. They don’t know for sure, so Carnegie remains unique.

Interestingly, while the hall is perfect for acoustic music, the second you add electronic amplification, as we did, the sound gets muddied. It’s still better than almost anywhere else, but it isn’t pristine. Stand onstage alone and talk in a normal voice, however, and a person in the last row of the balcony will hear you clearly.

Like every other science, the study of acoustics is a work in progress. Eventually, we will be able to identify and replicate all the factors that contribute to a room like the Isaac Stern Auditorium. We just aren’t there yet. Sound, like the moon, behaves predictably so I know we will eventually figure it out.

Outside the stage door on 56^th Street yesterday afternoon, I borrowed someone’s glasses for a second. I looked up and was able to see the thin crescent of the sun peeping out from behind the moon. After I gave them back to their owner, I looked around at everyone else standing nearby. That was an even more amazing sight to see.

For those few minutes, most of New York looked like it was out on the street, together, gazing up into the sky in wonder. They were, dare I say it, enraptured.

Last night, the same was true of the people inside the theatre. Two thousand people were held in thrall by a five-foot two-inch-tall woman who knows exactly what she’s doing onstage.

We can predict the moon’s trajectory, and we can posit theories about how sound waves travel. What we get from experiencing the power and artistry of a performer like Patti LuPone, though, defies scientific explanation. There are, of course, people who don’t care for her, but for her countless fans, me included, she can quicken the heartbeat and take us out of ourselves in a second.

So many people seem to be in such a hurry to leave this planet. There might be something beyond this mortal coil, but there also might not be a thing. Why, then, waste a minute of this life in case this is all we get? Why spend so much time worrying about other people and judging what they are doing?

There is plenty here on earth to enrapture us. It only comes in short bursts so that we can recognize how truly precious it is. Any more than that and we’d get used to it and not be able to experience it anymore.

Watching the moon cross in front of the sun was entertaining because it happens so rarely. For me, watching Patti LuPone perform is what I am paid for.  I’d be lying, though, if I said that the first few notes of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina still don’t send a shiver down my gay 14-year-old musical theatre-obsessed spine. Even when the lights screw up, and it’s been a rough day putting it all together, I can still let myself be transported for a few minutes while she’s singing.

During those songs, I can forget that I am going to have to tell her that the car’s going to be late and one of the suitcases hasn’t been delivered.

There’s always plenty of time for that later. While I can, though, I always let myself float up into the air. There’s nothing like it.