The Show Must Go In
June 25, 2022
Spring cleaning didn’t happen in 2020. Or in 2021 for that matter.
I don’t mean cleaning. I mean cleaning-cleaning. The kind where you dig in under the piles and get rid of the things you don’t need. When you put the things you do need in their rightful places. When it became clear that the Covid pandemic was going to last more than a few weeks, we did one, big rearranging-session, but since then I’ve been living on the surface of things, a visitor in my own house.
This spring, something has changed. On the radio I keep hearing the phrase, “during the … pandemic,” with a little pause to search for a word that sums up everything that happened in the last two years. The pandemic is not over by a long shot, but we are into a new phase. And this spring, it was time for me to excavate.
Behind a curtain in my workroom, I found the paraphernalia of my in-person Feldenkrais practice. There were folded towels and pillowcases, roller, yoga mats, and the gardening pads I and my students use for props. There was the pouch where they used to put cash payments at the end of class. All of them, gathering dust, and (in the case of the yoga mats), crumbling from disuse.
And beneath that, the items the Draft Reading Series used for fifteen years in its live incarnation: the cash box for the book table, the donations jar, the business cards. They were all hastily stashed behind a curtain when, in 2020, the unthinkable happened.
With an excavation of stuff came an excavation of feelings. We cancelled our March 2020 reading. I didn’t let myself feel how hard that was.
Life as an artist had trained me to keep going no matter what. Sick parents? Tough luck, keep writing. Got to move? There are libraries. No time? No excuse.
As an organizer, too. Snowstorm? Sno problem. Show up. Power out? Use candles (leading to the late and sadly missed Stephen Heighton’s “inflammatory” performance in 2008). No staff at the venue? Ask the audience if someone has a Smart Serve license. Venue locked and barred? Take a walk down the street, sound system in hand, and find another one.
In March, 2020 The Show Must Go On was, for the first time in my life, not the right motto under the circumstances.
Opening the curtain in my workroom took me back to a particular phase: the first lockdown, before vaccines were on the horizon, before we understood how this thing was spread. Was it lurking in the recesses of that kale salad? Could a jogger toss it my way, huffing past me on the sidewalk? And was I even supposed to be on the sidewalk? Some people adopted dogs so they wouldn’t get the stink-eye for being outside.
Draft was up and running again in April. Like so many others, we “pivoted.”
Everything got four times as hard and became about a quarter as satisfying, but if health care workers could go to their jobs every day, if grocery store workers could mask up and show up, I as a teacher and event organizer and massively privileged person could show up, too.
Zoom meetings had all the overwhelm of letting dozens of people into my personal space, with all the loneliness of imagining they were congregating elsewhere, without me. I felt, still feel, panicked at the start of every meeting. Rolf said: “You’re safer on zoom than live. You can press ‘end meeting’ or throw someone out at any time.”
Yet these people were in my place of worship, my creative space, my doctor’s office, my bank. Most of all they were in the private space where I connected with friends. When Draft was zoom-bombed, friends in the audience said they would not have known I was nervous. I’m not over it yet.
When I heard about people getting excited about the creative possibilities of online life, I admired them, but that wasn’t me. Creative people: embrace this! Create! I wasn’t embracing. I was making do, and all of a sudden making do felt like something to aspire to. I complained regularly and vocally. I didn’t want the labour of this to become invisible. For me or anyone else.
Draft kept going. I kept teaching. The show did go on, though in another way. The show went in and is still in.
“During the … pandemic.”
“During the pandemic.”
Lately, the pause has been disappearing. “The Pandemic” has taken on the sound of other phases I heard a lot in my childhood. “The Depression,” for instance. I used to watch Shirley Temple movies on late-night television. In one, Paul Revere rides across the sky with a banner declaring “The Depression is over!” That’s ridiculous, I thought. People must have been really stupid back then.
Then there was “The War.” In our white, middle-class household in the 1960s, the source of all suffering and injustice was contained in a single phrase, consigned to the past. Its being over meant nothing bad, nothing really bad, could ever happen again.
Is Covid in the past? The recent “transition,” the “return to normal” has brought much debate on that question. The pandemic has become “politicized,” (as if anything is ever anything else) with opinion divided over whether it’s an ongoing threat.
I believe it is. I believe health-care workers and scientists, but sometimes I want to have a different conversation. Let’s just say it was all over and we knew it was over. I would still not be ready to “pivot” again. I’d still need time. I search for a word, and “transition” isn’t it. As someone easily able to work from home for two years, living with a partner I love, with plenty to eat, lots of space, no kids to home-school, no financial anxieties, “the … pandemic” was still huge. I had to look at everything, everything differently. Those two years have changed me. I need time to integrate the person I became during that time.
With or without the pause, “The Pandemic” is not just a bad dream, from which we all need to wake up. As long as we think of it that way, we never will.
