Post 766 - June 4, 2025

I have been working almost from the time I learned how to ride a bicycle.

The first job I remember having, besides babysitting and leaf-raking, was delivering the Suburban Shopper. It was a local paper, which people called a rag, that was little more than a collection of coupons for businesses in town. Surrounding the ads would be stories about the High School track team or something the town council had voted on. Rarely was anyone not mentioned in a story interested. If people caught me in the act of delivering it, I’d often get yelled at for littering.

The Bergen Record was a step up from the Shopper. For one thing, it wasn’t free. My customers had to pay for it. Each week, I would collect a couple of bucks from each of them. I had a key ring full of cards representing every subscriber’s account. I’d slowly gather the money and use it to pay the distributer for the papers. Anything left over, I could keep. I remember it being a pretty good deal.

My poor Dad. When it rained, he would drive me around the neighborhood so I could cover my route and stay dry before I went to school, and he went off to work. Otherwise, it was me on my bicycle riding through the neighborhood as the sun came up.

When I got older, I got a job working at the Grand Union supermarket as a cashier. I worked the night shift. They taught me to pack grocery bags – something I am still very good at. This was just before scanners arrived, so I had to punch in the price of everything manually and assign it to the proper department. I also had to make change and figure it out in my head. I joined the Cashiers’ Union. For my life, I couldn’t tell you what local it was.

Once I got to college, I had a whole variety of interesting day jobs. I worked at the gift shop at the American Museum of Natural History during my Freshman year summer. The following year, I got my first paying theatrical gig at the American Place Theatre. From then on, the quirky jobs were all connective tissue between gigs.

For a while, I was the evening receptionist at the American Ballet Theatre offices at 890 Broadway. The people I worked with there were fantastic, and I am still friends with several. At the time, Mikhail Baryshnikov was the Artistic Director.

I was a swatch boy for a few months with a company called Andover Togs. They were a clothing wholesaler. Buyers would come in to see suit samples, and the salespeople would strew the swatches of the available fabrics all over the showroom. I, along with a small unit of fellow swatch boys, would gather them all back up and put them into their proper order.

One of the other boys was blond and buff, and I had a wicked crush on him. He invited me over to his place during lunch one day to smoke some pot. Certain that being stoned on the job would get me fired, I turned him down. I still regret not going with him.

The Andover Togs office was high atop a building across from Madison Square Garden. I remember once, looking down and seeing hundreds of tiny Brides and Grooms on the day the Moonies staged their mass wedding.

For the rest of this year, I don’t have any work. There are a couple of small things tentatively on the schedule, but I think that they will likely go away. Before anyone tries to start a GoFundMe page for me, though, this is by choice. The calendar has always looked this way, so it isn’t a surprise. I planned this.

What is surprising to me is that, despite the planning, the realization a few days ago that I would be without work gave me a momentary start of panic. I am hardly the first person to be a little shocked when the reality of retirement settles in. I thought I was prepared for it. That I even had a second thought about it, though, was… interesting.

The word retirement has all manner of negative stereotypical connotations connected to it. Puttering around the house with nothing to do and getting in my wife’s way was never going to be how I spent these years. In truth, I don’t feel like I am working any less, these days; it’s just that the work I am now doing is not necessarily generating income. I thought I was fine with that.

The COVID pandemic did more than anything else to prepare me for this next phase of life. Without a paying job during the lockdown, I still managed to find a lot of work to do. I wrote. A lot. I took pictures. A lot. I thought. A lot. Deciding to publish my book turned into a year-long, unpaid job. I was thrilled with that. The government began paying us a weekly salary, which kept us alive. We had minimal expenses. We couldn’t really go anywhere or do anything. I very quickly got used to living that way. It was hard to go back when it was over.

I was ready to make a change in my life when the virus struck. I just didn’t fully realize it yet. I had worked my butt off for decades with minimal time off. I was moving at an unsustainable pace. It was inevitable that something was going to slow down. When I started working again after COVID, I found I was doing it more out of habit than passion.

Throughout the time I’ve spent in professional theatre, I’ve been lucky enough to land in jobs, one job in particular, that ticked off almost every goal on my list. Jersey Boys was not a job I could ever have planned for. When it happened, though, it changed my life. When it finished during COVID, I had a lot to work through before I could finally let it go.

AI is about to put millions of people out of work. Goldman Sachs predicts that AI, along with automation, could knock three hundred million people globally out of their jobs in the next five years. Three hundred million people. That is 18% of the current international workforce. Other companies believe that far more people than that will be affected.

There will be new jobs created by AI, in theory. What, though, will those new jobs be, and will the newly unemployed have the skills necessary to fill them? Will there be enough work for everyone who needs a job? There already seems to be a shortage. Most people don’t want just any job; they want to find the one that inspires them. At least they’d like one that doesn’t bore them senseless. What happens when our unemployment rates begin to grow?

Andrew Yang is a guy who ran for President in 2020. One of the pillars of his platform was the concept of Universal Basic Income. He believed that every American over the age of eighteen should be entitled to receive a thousand dollars a month from the government. He believed that putting this money into our hands would stimulate the economy and increase job growth. Most importantly, it would allow us all to fulfill that most elusive of goals put forth in the United States Declaration of Independence, the right to be able to pursue happiness.

Yang didn’t get very far with that idea. He was, in fact, laughed off the stage and out of the race. Who wouldn’t want to work? Why should people get something for nothing? Mere months later, though, there we were getting a weekly pandemic check from the government without having to work for it. Four years after that, I now don’t see how we will survive what is about to befall us with the growth of AI without something very similar to the idea of a Universal Basic Income that Andrew Yang so unsuccessfully tried to float.

Our individual identities are hopelessly tied up with our jobs. We judge people according to their positions and salaries. There is a word people use to describe those who don’t work: bums. Nobody wants to be a bum. If you lose a job through no fault of your own, that’s what you feel like, a bum. Working in theatre seems to many laymen a frivolous way to earn money. We always seem to be out of a job. I’ve felt that there were people who considered me a bum during my entire career. Never mind that many of them earned far less than I did. That I enjoyed doing what I did as much as I did always seemed suspect.

We go to school to learn skills that will help us get hired into top-level positions and earn a good salary. Competition in school and in the marketplace is fierce and sometimes cut-throat. Who we feel we are gets wrapped up in what it is we do. We judge ourselves in relation to those around us. Are we doing better than our neighbors or worse?

What happens, then, when there are no jobs? How will we figure out our relative worths to society? To each other? Will we all become bums?

The film and television business in this country is contracting at an alarming rate. So many of my friends, many hugely successful people, are having trouble finding work. There just isn’t any to be had. Streaming has hit its peak, and now there is a glut of product. Costs have risen so high in California that much of the work available is being done in other countries with cheaper labor. The COVID shutdown and the recent strikes delivered a one-two punch that has left the industry reeling.

Many folks are trying to pretend that this new reality is fine. People are taking comfort in the fact that it isn’t just them. This slowdown seems to be hurting everyone. These are people who still have things to say and stories to tell. Who are they if nobody will listen?

That’s just what’s happening in one rather contained industry. What’s going to happen to three hundred million people who suddenly find themselves unable to contribute across the job spectrum? Never mind that they might get a check from the government each month. What will they feel like not having anything to do?

I will always work at something. There is too much left that I want to do while I am still here. That I am lucky enough to have been able to put enough away from my regular paychecks during all these decades that I was working so hard is not something I take for granted. Not for a second. I understand it could all change in an instant. One good global crisis could blow it all away. I am crystal clear as to just how much of a factor sheer dumb luck has played in putting me into my current situation.

Michael and I also made the decision not to have kids. We would not be able to stop working if we hadn’t done that. Was that the right decision? On most days, we think it was. At least I do. We love our nieces and nephews, though, and occasionally…

My guess is that most of the three hundred million people about to be replaced during these next five years will not be nearly as ready for this change in their work status as I was. If this is giving me pause at this time in my life, I cannot begin to imagine what it’s going to do to people a couple of decades younger than me or to those just breaking into the market.

Michael worked as a waiter for years when he was starting out as an actor. I, however, could never get a restaurant to hire me. I ended up doing things that I’m not sure he would have ever considered. We are both lucky that our entire lives have been peppered with jobs that ended. Until I got Jersey Boys, I had never had a single year in which I didn’t claim unemployment benefits at least once.

My Dad lost his job once when I was in High School. It seemed like forever before he found another one, but it was probably only a few months. Even so, the stress of that experience nearly killed him. Michael and I, on the other hand, lost jobs ten times a year or even more. Those of us in show business can navigate through unemployment much more easily because it happens to us all the time. We know we will eventually get something else. What happens, though, when there isn’t something else and AI starts doing everything?

We might be able to solve the financial impact of all of us not working by implementing something along the lines of what Andrew Yang was talking about, but what about the emotional and social impact this will all have?

What’s going to happen when we have all that free time? Most people are not prepared for that. All we have been taught our whole lives is what Darwin so neatly summed up as the survival of the fittest. We’ve been trained for battle since birth. Not having to fight to survive might be lovely, but we couldn’t be less prepared for it. What is there if there isn’t that? It is a question, I think, well worth looking into. It could change everything if we could figure it out. We, however, are certainly not going to know how to adjust our societal outlook towards not working during the next five short years. The shock of what’s about to happen is likely to create chaos.

It feels weird not working. As happy as I am to not have to, it’s not my natural state. I’m trying not to let the anxiety it generates keep me from doing the things I want to do. We do have a whole batch of concert work coming up in the spring so between now and then will be good practice.

I can learn to live with the discomfort of not feeling like a productive member of society. We aren’t our work, is what I need to keep reminding myself. The nagging question of who we are, then, if not that, needs to be answered. It is a question we should have been asking all along, but we were all just too busy hammering away at our jobs to give it a thought.

The future will be whatever the future is, and just sitting around waiting for it to happen is a fool’s job. I have no idea how long Patti will want to keep performing. So far, she seems ready to keep going forever. At some point, like everyone else, she will stop. For now, though, she still has plenty left to say, lol.

And so do I.