Post 711 - January 30, 2025

Yesterday morning, I had an appointment at the DMV all the way downtown. There was an issue with my license that I couldn’t fix online, and I couldn’t get anyone on the phone to help. So, I bit the bullet and headed down. Everybody there was very kind and helpful, and the issue was resolved in a few short minutes.

My sister’s birthday is in a few days, so I picked up a gift or two for her, came home, wrapped them, and managed to get to the post office before it closed.

The cat is on a very specific kidney diet these days and we were running low on his food, so I ordered more from Amazon. As much as I don’t want to give Jeff Bezos my business, the food I need is not readily available in any of our local stores, so Amazon turns out to be the only option. We were also down to a single can, and I needed it to be delivered quickly.

I desperately needed a haircut, so I did that, too. Laundry – done. I then packed up all the clothes I had left that had Broadway logos on them and will bring them down to the Broadway Cares offices in the next few days. The time had come to get rid of it all.

I’ve realized that my career as a stage manager has been spent with me helping other people tell their stories. I now want to tell my own stories, and theatre is not the medium I want to use.

Getting rid of the old t-shirts and hoodies, and even an unworn pair of boxer shorts was not done with any anger or resentment. I will always treasure the years I spent working in the theatre. It’s what I dreamed of doing since I was in school. That I was able to accomplish what I did, still seems miraculous to me. My work over the years has given me what seems like a master class in life. My Broadway goals, however, feel as if they have now been accomplished and while I feel like I have been moving on since the pandemic, this seemed to me to be the indication that I truly have moved beyond that work. That’s no longer who I am.

As I was going through the day, doing all those errands, and trying to organize my time to get everything in, the dismantling of our government was moving ahead at a dizzying pace. The disconnect between what is underway in Washington and what is occupying me during my rather mundane days here in New York City seems almost laughably absurd.

Why am I out getting a haircut while people I have never met are already suffering horribly from the actions of this new Republican administration? How can I be just living my life as usual, while thousands are having theirs upended?

Keeping up with what is going on down there is not easy. I clearly wasn’t the only person feeling like I was being inundated with emails from the Contrarian news site. Yesterday they announced that they would now only send one email at the beginning of the day and one at the end. Their job is to monitor the news all day, it isn’t mine. I don’t need or want to hear about these horrible things unfolding as they happen. A nice overview is plenty.

Engaging in the news in real-time makes it almost impossible to separate what’s important from what is just nonsensical noise designed to distract.

What’s interesting to me is that over these first few days, this new administration has been making some glaring mistakes. I find that hopeful.

The blanket pardoning of all fifteen hundred January 6^th conspirators keeps coming back to haunt the Republicans. The idea was never to pardon them all, just the ones who had been swept up in the excitement. Instead of going through them person by person, a process our new leader does not have the patience for, he just let them all go.

Some of the people he set free committed truly heinous acts of violence. Our president ran on a promise to decrease the number of violent criminals on our streets and the first thing he did was add to them. We noticed.

A couple of days ago, the Republicans initiated an across-the-board funding freeze to stop federal grant-making to any organization that was operating under what the President called “Marxist” diversity or green initiatives. Instead of targeting those specific programs, however, his Executive Order simply stopped them all.

Suddenly, people who need daily life-sustaining medication were cut off. This pause affected everything from schooling, nutrition programs, and section-8 housing to food banks, childcare, and Medicaid. All of it, halted by a careless flourish of a signature. We noticed.

The negative reaction was immediate. It was so extreme that the White House announced that the order had been rescinded. The new White House Press Secretary, however, then said that what they rescinded was the memo, not the idea outlined in the memo. Needless to say, chaos has ensued.

Yesterday, our new President, after blasting President Obama in 2016 and President Biden in this past election for not closing the penal facilities at Guantanamo Bay, announced that he will be using the prison as a de facto camp for deported immigrants. He wants to move 30,000 people there.

He also, of course, is attempting to end birthright citizenship, a right explicitly stated in the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution.

Federal judges have halted both the freeze on federal grant-making as well as the end to birthright citizenship. Neither of those initiatives is popular with any but a decided minority of Americans. We noticed.

There are plenty of other things this new government wants to do, some horrible, and some like the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, simply idiotic. I don’t care about the renaming, that can be easily fixed. I do care about the orders that will endanger our lives.

If you just follow the major news outlets, it all seems very bleak. The problem is these compromised news services are giving far more weight to what the Administration is doing rather than what is being done to fight against these mostly illegal edicts.

There is an opposition. State Attorneys from eighteen states have filed a lawsuit against the President for his attempts to overturn the 14^th Amendment. That number may have risen to twenty-two. At any rate, the legal response should mire the edict in the courts for some time.

The price of eggs is rising and will continue to rise. This is because of the spread of the Avian Flu virus and not because of anything the former or current president has done. The current president politicized it so now it feels like the hike in cost is his fault. That was a mistake and one that is going to make his supporters begin to worry.

The President just gleefully announced that he had single-handedly restored water to a region of California. Water hadn’t gone anywhere. Routine maintenance had shut down a conduit which had then reopened after a few days as had been scheduled. Announcing that he had anything whatsoever to do with it makes him look like an idiot.

I happened to see a bit of a street interview with some of the President’s staunch supporters on television yesterday. I can’t remember what the overall questioning was about, but the people being asked were decked head-to-toe in Republican swag. One woman was explaining to the interviewer that the government was controlling the weather so the recent natural disasters in North Carolina and California were the Dems fault. She was crystal clear that this was true even after admitting that she’d only heard about it, she hadn’t read or listened to anything to support her assertion.

There will always be people this uninformed and willfully ignorant. There always has been. It behooves us to stop listening to them. We need to stop giving them airtime and bandwidth. Amplifying abject stupidity does nothing to end it.

Any spiritual practitioner will tell you that saying no to something doesn’t make it go away. It just reiterates its power. Saying yes, however, to something else will lead you toward that positive end.

Adam Kinzinger posted a video either yesterday or the day before in which he criticized the Democrats for not coming together to present a united opposition. I, myself, wonder what they are doing and where they are. They need to be out there and vocal about what we should be doing. At the moment, it feels a bit as if the sane among us have been set adrift.

Tomorrow in Tarrytown, New York, we have our first new Patti LuPone concert in many weeks. I think I am ready for it, but I’m going to need to go through my checklist again to make sure. We have a series of them coming up and I need to get it all back into my body.

Stage managing Patti is not the same for me as stage managing a show. Yes, we are telling the story that Patti wants to tell, but it feels different to me than working on a show does. Maybe it’s just sheer habit. Twenty-six years is a long time to have been doing something. Somehow, it feels as if our little group is all telling the stories together.

I’m not going to dig too deep into that apparent contradiction because, frankly, the gigs are also fun. Mostly. I just enjoy doing them. That said, I’m also dreading how early I’ll need to get up tomorrow. I also wonder what I’ve forgotten to do.

Michael comes home tomorrow, so I have some cleaning ahead of me. We’ve only been home from Italy a few days but already I’ve managed to make a mess. I always like it when I get a day or two to myself in the apartment because I can spread things out and go through them. It’s easier for me to create order out of intense disorder than it is for me to just try to clean up things piecemeal on the surface.

Maybe the same will be true of our government. It is currently being taken apart on the front lawn and having its many parts scattered out into the grass. In the end, it may be easier to reassemble it using what we need and discard the pieces we don’t.

I don’t think the people who are doing the dismantling are in any way capable of doing the restoration, but until we can replace them in office, all we can do is take note, take care of each other, protect what we can, and live our lives.

We all have things to do today. We can’t let what’s going on in Washington stop us from accomplishing them.

I have some kitty litter to buy.