Wow. It’s September, 2020.
Our Pandemic Sh*tYear has entered its final quarter. And my family and I recently returned from a sojourn to my Growing Up Place, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The view from our campsite at Blind Sucker #2 campground, near Grand Marais, MI, July 2020.
We have our toes on the step of my favorite season: Fall. For me, it is always a season of renewal, as weird as that sounds - back to school, the new theatrical season, the new television season, new challenges, hopes and dreams. The New York City Marathon; apple cider and donuts, college football, dark beer, maple trees, sweater weather, and the sudden shout of foliage that our world makes as it deems the seasons to change.
I have always have taken deep breaths of possibility in September.
Instead, I am contemplating a water plant.
I grew up in Michigan, and am a now New Yorker, since 1993; we live in the Bronx. March and April of 2020 here in New York City were horrifying. SARS-cov-2 locked down the whole megapolis; our Bronx neighborhood wailed with ambulance sirens 24 hours a day, and our industry - our livelihood - froze, cracked, splintered and froze again, in tatters. Kristen and I both got sick in March, quite sick - Kristen with COVID-19 (she tested positive for antibodies in May, and I tested negative…twice. Whatever.) Jake, mercifully, was the healthiest of all of us. The background siren track eventually faded, but I believe the drivers were just ordered to turn them off to give the city a chance to sleep; because when they faded in late April, New York was still losing hundreds of people PER DAY - the crematoriums were running 24/7, and the hospitals had rows of reefer trucks with bodies stacked 3 and 4 high. Good friends of ours got deathly ill, to the point that they were hospitalized. And we know people who died.
Around the beginning of May, we needed something to look forward to. So we put some hopeful travel on the books. We knew it might be a tremendous risk, but just having those plans - ANY plans - helped us live our day-to-day, locked-down lives with a little more verve. So, sometime in the summer we were going to fly out to my parents place in the Soo (eastern Upper Peninsula), spend some time with them, and then head west.
Hope swelled in our hearts as we planned this huge trip, WEEKS in the blessed UP, an amount of summer vacation previously unthinkable for us.
Million Dollar Quartet, summer 2019, Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. HEAVEN. Kristen = bombshell. (I’m hiding in the booth on the far right.)
For those of you who might not know, my wife and I are professional actors, and summertime is always busy time. Simply put, summer theatre is a bread-and-butter time for the whole industry; many actors do a lot of work thru those months, and we are…were… no exception - we rarely have long sections of time between gigs, and they almost NEVER line up. Unless we’re doing the same show, the chances for Kristen and I to be on the same schedule are slim to none.
COVID changed all that. The pandemic hasn't simply been an attack on the live theatre industry - it has been nuclear annihilation to any live or in-person performance at all, anywhere. The bulk of our family’s work comes from theatre, and musical theatre at that. That’s right, think of it: We make our living getting into enclosed spaces with hundreds or thousands of people, and then we spit on each other, and on them.
I’m sorry to be crass: But ACTING AND SINGING IS SPITTING.
Sound like something that will be back any time soon? NOPE. Not without a vaccine, and distribution. Basically all of our union membership, our sisters and brothers in arms, are out of work for the foreseeable future. To say work prospects are bleak is a vast understatement.
So Kristen and I decided to make lemonade out of lemons, planned our trip, and made our plane reservations. Then everything went sideways.
“I don’t think you can come,” Mom said.
“What do you mean?” I mumbled into the phone, dumbfounded.
“Honey, think about it. You’ll be flying, and we’re in a high risk group. Your brother has risks. If you have the virus when you get here, it’s big big trouble.”
I put the phone down and commence to forehead slap. Of course. Quarantine. We couldn’t see my folks until two weeks had passed. But how…?
It was my brother who came up with the solution. I changed our timeline to THREE weeks, and we flew in to the Soo. The evening we arrived, as we walked out of the airport, my mom’s SUV was sitting in the pickup lane, empty. And just behind it, in an old ‘51 Ford that my dad has been meticulously restoring, sat my parents. Masks on. Doors closed. Their eyes revealing the silent battle within as they forced themselves to stay inside and not run and hug their son, their daughter-in-law, their grandson. We loaded our luggage into the car, and drove to the house in the Soo. Sitting in the driveway was my parents’ RV, a truck camper slid into the bed of my dad’s Ford F250. We transferred our gear, got a night of sleep, and with as little socially distanced conversation as possible the next morning… we left.
The plan? Traveling quarantine. First we would head to the back country up near Lake Superior and spend several days off the grid. Then, we’d take a huge trip down my own personal memory lane, with a visit to Iron County, and the town of Iron River, MI where I grew up. This is also the town that I left behind the week after I graduated high school, when my parents moved. I hadn’t been back in 35 years. Then, we would head to my brother’s place near Marquette, doing our best to maintain social distancing there, and finally, after 14 days of RV Yooper quarantine, we would go back to the Soo.
It worked. And it was glorious.
I still can’t get it out of my mind: A home on wheels that could go nearly anywhere, my family with me, and a grand circle of nearly 800 miles in one of the most beautiful places in the country, at one of the most beautiful times of the year. For years we had talked, idly, about doing such things, but with work and commitments it just never seemed like it could be approachable.
The campground near Grand Marais, just off the shore of Lake Superior, was stunning, with beach days to rival any ocean. The travel to Iron River was a road trip with ghosts, friendly and otherwise, and an absolution of memory. The visit to my Brother and Sister-in-law’s new place in Big Bay was nothing short of magical; and finally watching my parents hug their grandchild safely was deeply, tearfully satisfying.
And after three lovely, largely carefree weeks, we jetted home. Weeks later, we’ve cleared quarantine, and are staring down this new month at our pumpkin spiced, beloved Fall season in New York, with a renewed sense of…
What.
WHAT?
This blessed view. What does it mean, now, in these times?
My industry is at a near standstill. And the damages that the last six frozen months have done are only beginning to show: An article I read recently made the analogy that the US economy (now that the PUA has expired and the PPP loan program has run low) is like a jumbo jet at 10,000 feet with both engines flamed out - it’s still gliding, still aloft, has some altitude; and there’s a 20,000 foot mountain ahead. The mountain’s name might be October, or January. But it’s out there. And we’re going to hit it. HARD. Without big time help, we’re going to SPLATTER all over it.
This analogy serves doubly for the live theatre industry - just one example is our health fund, which pays for our Insurance coverage. This Fund is set up to function only if money is coming in on a steady basis, as people work. Money in, pay for care, money out. Well. As you might expect, right now it’s hemorrhaging cash. Foundering. I’ve heard rumors that the reserves that are in place may only last another year, possibly much less. Prior to those reserves running out there will be slashing moves made to keep the Fund viable that will crush peoples’ care or force them into being uninsured. And will there be enough work in a year to resurrect this Fund? Only time will tell, but the forecast is not good. Not good at all.
We got through the summer because we had things to look forward to.
What. Do we have. To look forward to now?
Both KB and I are accustomed to not working for stretches of time - that is a fact of our industry, as we lose every job we ever get. Unless you’re lucky enough to be in the long running Broadway show or a series regular on a multi-season TV gig, every job we land, ends. But after we got home in August, we felt ourselves sink into a deep muck of malaise while we waited for our most recent quarantine to expire. A malaise that is framed in a forecast of the biggest set of uncertainties we’ve ever seen. We don’t even have the opportunity to get down into the FIGHT; to audition; to see what we can make happen. Because nothing is happening. And no one wants to work more than we do.
On this night I’m ‘breathing in’ September, and there’s not a whiff of possibility.
The view from our balcony in the Bronx is stunning. We can see right down the spine of Manhattan island, all the way to the Freedom Tower, more than 10 miles away. On clear nights, it’s like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, twinkling and shimmering with every possible everything that a Great World City has to offer.
Still life with family and lily blossoms. Sorry, toddler. No such thing as still.
But now, instead of taking in the view, I’m staring at my phone, going through my pictures from Michigan again. Swipe…stare. Swipe. Stare. And I see the first day of our RV trip:
We scored a riverside campsite at Blind Sucker #2 State Forest Campground (sounds like a happening place, no?). In spite of the name, it was beautiful, with the breathtaking Lake Superior beach a very pretty (and buggy) 1.3 mile hike away. At the edge of our campsite a tiny, mucky beach, embroidered with lily pads. Lily pads with these gorgeous, perfumed, symmetrical flowers that would bloom during the day and then close up each night.
I can’t stop staring at these flowers-
Wait! Lotus flowers! /hits up the Googles
Oh MY. YES. A sign? A symbol! Yes! This is a time of rebirth, of, of, enlightenment, self-regeneration! A…. /runs the image through a search -
Oh.
That’s not a lotus. And that’s not a lotus flower. FUCK. FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK.
I see red for a moment. This…is BULLSHIT! Even my symbols of hope are shams! This is -
Wait a minute.
Coefficient of Wetness may be my new favorite phrase.
I gaze closer at the ID of the actual image that I captured.
What’s actually growing, lush and plentiful, in the water next to that first campsite? Nymphaea Odorata: The Sweet-Scented Waterlily. “…also known as the American white waterlily, fragrant water-lily, beaver root, and sweet-scented white water lily, is an aquatic plant belonging to the genus Nymphaea. It can commonly be found in shallow lakes, ponds, and permanent slow moving waters throughout North America where it ranges from Central America to northern Canada.” (thank you Wikipedia.)
But then: OH, BUT THEN.
“The fragrant water-lily has both medicinal and edible parts. The seeds, leaves, flowers and rhizomes can all be eaten. The rhizomes were also used by Native Americans to treat coughs and colds. The stem could be used to treat tooth aches if placed directly on the tooth.”
Fragrant. Beautiful. Edible. Medicinal.
A suspended breath. And I looked up from my phone and took in - really took in the view, maybe for the first time since I’d been home. This city; this flower.
Medicine.
Rooted in shit.
Basically, if you’re hurting, spiritually, mentally or physically… the Sweet-Scented Water Lily is your perfect plant.“What do you need, suffering human? Can I offer you some symmetry, perhaps, something pleasing to the eye? I have perfume? Nourishment? Maybe your tooth aches? (‘Cuz I got you there too, yeah, buddy.)”
And, from the larger philosophical view, just the same as the lotus, this lily grows out of the mucky, rotting bottom of a boggy lake - attaining this perfection fueled by the nastiest shit in the pond.
Well my friends. We are IN some nasty pond shit… right the fuck now. We’re in deep. And it’s gonna get deeper.
The Firestorm. Hold on tight, my friends.
So the lesson here, the WHY? Why couldn’t I stop staring at that flower? It was a whisper, a trumpet call, a not-so-coded transmission that was laid out for me simply and directly by the Great Spirit, filling the slow moving river that flowed lazily by our campsite on the way to a clear, cold Great Lake. A message, daubed with such Impressionist fervor that Monet surely came out of retirement just to give an assist.
Some of the prettiest things in nature spring directly from the ugliest. So let’s push that forward, logically - do some of the best things in life come from the worst? Very possibly.
There IS a rebirth coming our way. But the firestorm ahead of us is so wild, so huge, and so unprecedented that we can’t see the other side. Not yet. Not for a while.
Make no mistake; much of what we know is going to burn down. It is going to turn to shit. COVID has revealed in extremely hard light just how cracked and broken many of our public systems are. Public health, education, testing, for-profit healthcare, unemployment assistance, live performance, arts funding and support - I could, and will, go on and on. Whether these systems will break completely or just bend so far out of shape as to be unrecognizable remains to be seen; whether they will burn to ash or merely singe at the edges.
So what do we do?
Dig deep into the muck, my friends. Root down in the shit. Get strong. Hold tight. Things went sideways in March and April, and I do believe that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
And.
There is hope.
Keep that flower in your mind. Let it root, the sweet-scented water lily, the beaver root, Nymphaea Odorata, and rise to the surface - to YOUR surface - direct from the Earth. Hear it whisper: There is GREAT beauty that will grow out of all. This. SHIT.
Talk soon. I’ll be here for ya.