Post 66 - May 16, 2020
Day 66…
Last night, Michael and I were watching TV.
Our usual practice is to watch two episodes of something before we get ready for bed.
Last night, we watched the first half of the series UNORTHODOX.
(no spoilers please!)
We clicked out of Netflix at the end of the second episode and the COVID-19 news came on.
It was like a punch in the face.
For the first time in two months, I had truly forgotten all about the coronavirus.
Watching the show was enough of a distraction that it took me completely out of this strange new world we are living in.
The news clicking back in like that, pulled me immediately and painfully back.
It was like waking up from a dream into a nightmare.
Yesterday was like a summer day in New York.
It was 82 degrees and, like many days recently, crystal clear.
I took my usual long walk down to Times Square and back and for the first time in two months had to stop at several corners and wait for traffic.
There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but enough that it felt like a usual very chill Sunday.
Ambient noise has started back.
Construction noise, though not at the level it was, is back.
Air handling systems in the tall buildings of Manhattan are back with the noise of their exhaust systems blanketing the sound scape of the city.
It felt like a fairly normal day as I walked downtown.
People were out - for the most part responsibly distant and masked - walking and shopping.
As well as writing each day, I’ve been trying to take pictures of the city that reflect what I see happening during all of this.
It is always easy to pick out what is different, but much harder to pick out what’s become normal.
Masks seem normal now.
Emptiness in the city, while still compelling, has become normal enough that actually seeing people out yesterday seemed notable.
As I walked, I watched other people.
Families navigating through the streets with their kids - some masked, some not.
Older New Yorkers pushing grocery carts.
Younger New Yorkers, excited to be together, walking and laughing.
Homeless New Yorkers finally having a shot at getting something from people passing by.
After being distracted by them all for a few blocks, I started noticing what was happening behind them.
We’ve all gotten used to our stores being closed.
We’ve looked at the same dusty window displays for seasonal clothes and products that have long since passed their sell-by dates for weeks.
What I really noticed yesterday, though, is that a lot of stores are now available for rent.
Those stores are closed for good.
If you were ever interested in opening a small boutique of some sort, there is now plenty of available real estate to do it in.
All up and down Madison Avenue, there are empty storefronts, some boarded up with “for lease” signs on them.
Some just sitting there, vacant.
Those barren storefronts are now cropping up all over Manhattan.
The stores that were once in them are simply not coming back.
Even the large chains like Duane Reade/Walgreens are closing branches.
I have never really understood how Duane Reade could support so many separate branches, but, nonetheless, they have been a ubiquitous sight in Manhattan for years.
I would say that in the last two months, about 50% of the branches between here on the Upper West Side, where we live, and Times Square are either closing or have already closed.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com is on track to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
During these two months at home, online ordering and delivery has skyrocketed.
It is going to take far longer for people to get used to going back into stores to shop than it took for them to stop doing it.
Fear stopped us, hope will restart us.
Fear is an immediate reaction.
Hope is a slow, tentative process.
Disney just announced that when it reopens their Broadway shows, FROZEN will not be among them.
They are betting that as people start coming back to theatre that it will be in trickles, not in waves.
Better to concentrate those few early theatre goers in a smaller amount of shows than to allow them to spread thinly across many different shows.
If you have 1,000 people a day going to the theatre and you have 10 shows open, you potentially get 100 people in each show. You can’t operate at that level.
If you have one show open, you get 1,000 people in the audience and you can cover your costs for that show and possibly even turn a small profit.
The national tour of SUMMER also just announced that it will close for good.
You cannot tour a show through a country where some states are open, and some are closed.
Rural areas without theatres are going to reopen before more crowded urban areas with theatres do.
If the government shuts down a theatre, insurance covers the producer.
If say, for what they believe are safety reasons, the producer declines to bring their show to a theatre that is technically open somewhere then the producer is in breach of contract.
Not the theatre.
Insurance won’t cover that.
As we start to reopen, the landscape of our country is going to look very different.
As much as the victims of this virus often have a glacially slow painful recovery, so will we as a city have.
Reopening won’t be like just diving into a heated pool.
It will be much more like slowly creeping into a cold swimming pool - one tentative step at a time.
The President is saying, “vaccine or no vaccine, we are back!”
He can say that all he wants but it’s not going to make most of us get into that freezing pool any faster.
A vaccine is going to take time for very good reason.
It has to safe and it has to be effective.
How is that safety determined?
Time.
Operation Warp Speed is going to move slowly whatever the White House chooses to call it.
Some of our pre-Covid-19 life is gone for good.
Some of it will be back but look and act in a very different way.
A lot of it will be brand new.
A lot of what our life will be will grow out of what we are doing now.
Jeff Bezos is probably going to become a trillionaire.
Michael and I have now worked our way through all of HOMELAND, BERLIN BABYLON and HOLLYWOOD.
UNORTHODOX, which we are watching now is remarkable and well worth it. (Again, no spoilers please!)
We’ve also watched and loved the leftie documentaries HILLARY, CIRCUS OF BOOKS and BECOMING.
Before all of this, I will admit that I rolled my eyes at everyone who’s loved THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF.
Cooking shows are not my thing.
Or so I thought.
One of the things that COVID-19 has oddly brought to the Hester/Mastro household is THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF.
We are OBSESSED.
We are going to come back.
Calling this a pause, though, is not accurate or even helpful.
This strange coronavirus time we are all living through now is actually life.
What we usually DO might be paused, but who we ARE is still moving forward full throttle.
Yes, we’ve got a long road back to being able to live in what we consider a normal fashion.,
And yes, those we’ve lost will forever remain lost.
Our lives, though, won’t just magically resume at some mythical point in the future.
They won’t need to resume because they never stopped.