Post 682 - November 21, 2024

Finally, some rain. Maybe this will finally stop the fires out in New Jersey.

Today is our friend Harriet’s ninety-sixth birthday. Yesterday, we drove out to the Actors’ Fund Home in Englewood to visit and celebrate with her.

Harriet is an actress and a writer. She and Michael met in the Village years ago and became fast friends. She is a passionate advocate for the theatre. During the first run of Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway, she worked as a personal assistant to Paul Newman and Geraldine Page. She loved Paul but she worships Geraldine Page.

Even at ninety-six, she can still quote long passages from Shakespeare. While she did need to ask us several times how old she was, in most other regards she’s sharp as a tack. She guessed she was going to be ninety-one and was surprised each time we corrected her.  Who wouldn’t be?

Harriet was born in Kansas City in 1928. It was the year before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression. In October of 1929, when she was still an infant, a perfect storm of events put the markets into freefall. Overnight, the world changed.

People who had been born into a world of plenty suddenly found themselves without. Jobs were scarce. Long lines of people waiting outside soup kitchens became a common sight in urban areas. Banks failed. Many people took their own lives in despair.

The next year, in 1930, another disaster struck. Much of the land in our country’s midsection had been over-farmed and the soil depleted. Farmers had cut down the native grasses that had once covered the plains and protected the fertile land. The region fell into drought. Giant dust storms began blowing away what little usable soil was left.

Families starved. Many lost their homes and were forced to move west into California. These were people who had worked the land in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri for a century. They’d taken the land from the people who’d lived there for millennia and now the land was taken from them.

When the migrant farmers arrived in California, nobody there welcomed them. The locals called them Okies and fought to keep them out.

While we were going through this, Hitler was coming to power in Germany. After the elections in 1930, the Nazis won 107 seats in Parliament. They had become the second-largest political party in Germany.

In 1932, the Austrian-born Hitler became a German citizen so he could run for the Presidency. In January of 1933, he became Chancellor. A month later, in February, the Reichstag burned down and while the Nazis most certainly set it themselves, they blamed the communists, and the outcry triggered a general election.

The Nazis won. In March of 1933, they passed what was called The Enabling Act. All legislative powers passed to Hitler’s cabinet away from Parliament. Hitler became a dictator without governmental checks and balances to stop him.

In April of 1933, the Communist Party was banned.

In May of 1933, the Socialist Party was banned. Trade unions were dissolved. Striking became illegal.

In October of 1933, the Germans withdrew from the League of Nations. Hitler began enlarging the Nazi army in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I.

In June of 1934, the following year, during what is now called the Night of the Long Knives, everyone in the Nazi party who was against the actions Hitler was taking was murdered. The next month he proclaimed himself Führer.

In November of 1938, 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked and destroyed. the Synagogues in Germany were torched and looted. The night it happened is now called Kristallnacht or Crystal Night because of all the broken glass. That night marked the beginning of the Jewish genocide.

In November of 1938, Harriet, who is Jewish herself, turned ten.

Back here in the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected President. At the same time that the Enabling Act passed in Germany giving Hitler and his cabinet full power to rule, Roosevelt was beginning a set of initiatives called The New Deal.

Public Works programs were started to give the unemployed work. Arts programs took root and flourished. To this day, our country’s art museums have huge stockpiles of astonishing work created during this period. Theatre grew and thrived. Slowly, we began to pull ourselves out of the Great Depression.

In 1939, the rains finally came. After a decade without water, the center of our country finally began to heal. Roosevelt’s Administration established regulatory guidelines legislating how the land should be farmed to prevent another disaster like this from ever happening again.

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.

Harriet lived through World War II. She’s lived through the Korean War. She’s lived through Vietnam. She’s lived through the Cold War when the threat of nuclear attack from Russia, the Evil Empire, was feared to be so imminent that kids were taught how to “duck and cover” in their classrooms. She got through the AIDS pandemic. She’s made it through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That we are poised to put poor Harriet through yet another massive National crisis seems almost inconceivable.  That this crisis is coming at a time when the markets are seeing record highs, and the economy is as robust as anyone could hope for defies logic. What we are about to experience has nothing to do with intellect and everything to do with emotion.

The plans for dismantling the government of the United States of America are well on their way to being enacted. The Biden Administration is putting as many Federal Judges into place as they can while the Senate is distracted, but who knows if that will be enough of a deterrent. The Republicans want to get rid of everything including the guardrails put in place by Roosevelt’s New Deal which have protected us so well over this last half century.

Despite what they claim, the Republicans do not have a mandate to do as they please. As the final tallies trickle slowly in, it’s becoming clear that they will have gotten less than half of the popular vote. More people voted for someone else than voted for the current President-elect.

What, I wonder, are the Democrats in Washington doing now to stop what’s coming at us? Yes, they lost the election, but they still have a couple of months to do something. Democratic governors around the country are doing their best to shore up their respective states’ freedoms but will that be enough? I would like to think that they are hard at work, but are they?

 It feels like the onset of a tsunami. The water has receded leaving the seabed exposed and we are all standing around gaping at the lack of water. We’re a bit in the dark as to what we are about to be slammed with. We don’t want to know. Whatever it is, it will be here soon enough.

Most everyone, including me, is disengaging from the news. It’s too distressing to read. It’s hard to process and accept. What’s coming is not going to be survivable, or so it appears.

Everything we’ve been through as a country was insurmountable as we were experiencing it. I dreaded being drafted and sent to Vietnam. I dreaded going to war with Russia. I dreaded getting AIDS. This, I hate to say it, seems different than any of those, but maybe it’s just another thing to add to this hateful list.

Hiding from it all is not the answer. Engaging in terror isn’t the answer either. How do we find a place in the middle where we can be alert but at the same time not be paralyzed with dread?

Last night, when we got back from visiting Harriet in Englewood, I found out that Steve Pugliese had passed away from a heart attack.

Steve worked as an electrician at the August Wilson Theatre, so I got to know him during the run of Jersey Boys. You all might remember him as the guy who befriended Sal, the Squirrel during the pandemic. Steve got Sal to trust him enough that the little squirrel would jump onto Steve’s shoulder. Steve built him a tiny house on his deck and Sal brought home a girl and started a family in it. Sal got his own Instagram page and all through the lockdown we all watched the videos of Sal and his life that Steve posted.

As another friend of his just said, Steve didn’t live to work, he worked to live. He was one of the best electricians in our industry. Not only was he beyond skillful at his job, but he was also somebody that everyone loved being with. There are very few people that I am always happy to see, Steve was one of those.

Steve’s lifetime lasted only half as long as Harriet’s has lasted so far. He wasn’t born until a decade after Harriet’s job on Sweet Bird of Youth had ended. He was too young to remember the war in Vietnam.

Harriet has been planning her funeral for at least as long as I’ve known her and that’s been nearly twenty years. Yesterday, while we were toasting her with a diner cheeseburger and a little cake, she went over the schedule of events again. There’s a specific timeline that must be followed when a Jewish person passes, and Michael is fully onboard to make that happen. Harriet wants to go home to Kansas City at the end.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t imagine that Steve had given much thought to his own funeral. He should have had plenty of time left before he had to start worrying about that. Harriet has reached a point in her life when few of her contemporaries are alive. There are still plenty of people left around Steve.

While we were living through our various National crises, at the time, we didn’t think we’d survive any of them. Somehow, though, we did.

Even in the middle of the Great Depression, Hitler and World War II, Vietnam, Korea, the Cold War, and the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics, everyone still managed to find time to laugh and love. As horrible as what’s ahead of us seems, we will get through this.

Towards the end of Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard wrote the following exchange. It’s one of my favorite things the man has ever written. I quote it all the time. All collective hell has broken loose at a theatre where they are performing Romeo and Juliet. There is no possible way that the performance can be salvaged. It seems utterly hopeless.

HENSLOWE

Another little problem.

WILL

What do we do now?

HENSLOWE

The show must… you know

WILL

Go on.

HENSLOWE

Juliet does not come on for twenty pages. It will be all right.

WILL

How will it?

HENSLOWE

I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

I’m not saying that what lies ahead isn’t going to be awful, but I do truly believe we will get through it. We always have before. I will never not be incredulous that this is the path that we, as a country, have chosen, but there you have it. This, too, shall pass. All we can do is keep walking forward and trust that things will work out.

How? I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

Happiest of birthdays to our dear friend Harriet and rest in peace dear sweet Steve. The world rarely makes any sort of sense, but it’s a better place having you both in it for however long you’ve each been given.