Covid Blues

 

I was hoping my next entry would be about the joys and details of the 2024 Jazz Cruise.  Until….

 

Up until this point, Ann and I had avoided coming down with Covid.  Mostly everyone we know has had the virus in spite of, like us, having the full arsenal of seven shots.  Feeling invincible, we boldly resumed our normal social lives, wearing no masks, although we were about to go on the one cruise we treasure above all, The Jazz Cruise. We went to the theater several times before departure and Ann participated in not one but two Mah Jongg tournaments.  It was inevitable I suppose but the timing couldn’t have been worse, Ann coming down with Covid exactly one week before our departure. 

 

We had a devil of a time getting Paxlovid which was unavailable at the nearest two drug stores and then getting a voucher (for Medicare recipients) from Pfizer to cover the new $1,300 price tag on the prescription.  So within two days she was on medication but still it was a bad bout, the worst being three days of an extremely painful sore throat.  Yet, naively we still waited to pull the trigger on canceling the cruise, hoping, hoping, but two days before departure we had to throw in the towel.  Another experience lost to this pandemic, although luckily, never feeling her life was in danger.

 

Our first Jazz Cruise was right before Covid hit in 2020.  One wasn’t even planned for 2021 as we were all in the nadir of the pandemic. We booked the 2022 cruise as it looked feasible with certain precautions, but then the CDC suddenly advised against cruises because of a new Covid surge at the time. We patiently, no anxiously, awaited 2023 and by then it was considered safe and we had the time of our lives.

So we were looking forward to this year’s festivities until Covid came to visit.  Not living in NYC any longer, and now being only an infrequent visitor, the Jazz Cruise is our only opportunity to see some of our favorite jazz performers live.  My other entries in the links above mention the names of some of the jazz artists we closely follow.  Most are on the present cruise, with the exception of Bill Charlap (he will be on the 2025 Cruise which we have already booked).

 

Still another experience missed, three years out of five, not a very good grade, 40%.  At our age, how many more opportunities?  Besides not seeing family, Covid also canceled our 50^th wedding anniversary, one we expected to celebrate, possibly, in the presence of the great man himself, Stephen Sondheim.

 

Being marooned at home again, gave me more time for my own piano.  Bill Mays, a great jazz pianist who I met a few months ago when I was playing for a Christmas party (talk about being outside one’s comfort zone, playing with one of the greats listening), was nice enough to send me some lead sheets of his music and one by Johnny Mandel who he worked with and we mutually admire although he recently passed.  I thought I had most of Mandel’s music but I did not have the one he sent, “The Shining Sea,” such a plaintive, Mandel signature song.  I love it and will eventually try to record it.

 

Mays’ own “Gemma’s Eyes” is challenging for me, both rhythmically and harmonically and I’ve been practicing it.  I like challenges such as that as it helps one keep moving forward.

 

He also sent me Quincy Jones’ “Pawnbroker,” again a song I had never heard before, the theme from the film of the same title, which more easily fits into in my playing style and is a haunting melody.  From our brief encounter, Mays certainly put his finger on what I would respond to and I’m grateful to him, especially this week as I feel cut loose in a space we had reserved for non-stop jazz. 

 

This leads me another musical observation, a very unlikely one for me.  I just “discovered” Taylor Swift.  I’m not sure what led me to her other than having this void of a week of great music lost.   Whenever I’ve seen her it’s been in the context of her world tour concert, with music blasting, back up bands, strobe lights pulsating, hoards of screaming fans, and, well, essentially the way popular music is presented now, everything geared to overwhelm the senses (“deadening” might be a better word).  Maybe that’s what we need in this chaotic world but I’ve always avoided that scene.  But I’ve also seen her briefly televised at Kansas City football games, cheering on her man, the outstanding tight end, Travis Kelce.  Except for her exclusive seats in the owner’s suite, she seems like just another football fan.

 

As I never really heard her sing, I tried to find her in a more intimate setting without all the over the top fireworks of her concerts and I came across Taylor Swift’s NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert.  It is 28 minutes of her performing four of her well-known (well, not to me) songs "The Man", "Lover", "Death by a Thousand Cuts" and "All Too Well" at the Tiny Desk, indeed an intimate setting where it’s just her and the guitar or piano and a handful, maybe a hundred, standing, adoring fans.  It was so enjoyable to hear her singing solo. 

 

 

It's as if Paul Simon was reincarnated more than 50 plus years after I first heard him.  There are eerie comparisons.   I can see the attraction of today's youth to what she has to say.  (I first heard Paul Simon -- who lived in my neighborhood --in 1957 when he performed “Hey Schoolgirl” with his partner Art Garfunkel. They were then known as “Tom and Jerry,” that recording making it to the national charts at the time.)

 

Swift is a cross over country and folk, a little rock and a lot of pop.  Yet every generation has its troubadour (or in this case a “trobairitz” -- in my generation there were Carole King and Joan Baez).  My generation also had Bob Dylan as our troubadour, singing his songs of despair and political activism.  But most of all, Paul Simon is more relevant to Swift’s music, with his songs of lost love, sadness, nostalgia and of course, loss in general (“hello darkness my old friend”  “and we walked off to look for America”).  When I was going through my divorce in the 1960s, his songs spoke directly to me the way Taylor Swift’s speak to her generation now magnified by social media.

 

Just listen to her sing “All Too Well.” I was touched by her ability to evoke a certain kind of emotion like Paul Simon did with a guitar (or in this NPR concert, her playing the chords on the piano as she sang).  It’s a song about autumn and lost love, a sense of the same emotion in Simon’s “Leaves That Are Green” (albeit, different rhythm, styles, one contemporary and the other vintage 1960’s).

  

In “All Too Well” she writes about a boy who was her love.  She sings:

 

Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place

And I can picture it after all these days

And I know it's long gone and that magic's not here no more

And I might be okay but I'm not fine at all

 

Some of the lyrics from Simon’s “Leaves That Are Green” could be that boy answering:

 

Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl

I held her close, but she faded in the night

Like a poem I meant to write

And the leaves that are green turn to brown

And they wither with the wind

And they crumble in your hand

 

She's the real deal and this intimate NPR setting helped me to fully understand her popularity.   Maybe in these Covid infested times I’ll become a Swifty!  I certainly respect her values, encouraging her generation to vote.  So many of those in their 20s and even 30s haven’t the slightest interest in voting, not caring (or even being conscious of) that my generation is handing off a world where the existential threats are far greater than when I was of that generation.  Shame on my generation, but shame on them to eschew the only possible route to change.  Maybe she will continue to be a force to set that right.

 

So we beat on.

 

The Continuing Political Piñata of the Pandemic

 

It was one of my better Op-eds, “Freedom” for the Few at the Expense of All (August, 2021)

 

The impetus for writing it almost exactly two years ago was DeSantis’ response to Covid at the time.  It was when he retreated from his original response (which was tempered by some sobering data), and he went rogue for political reasons turning Dr. Fauci into the enemy of the “freedom loving” people of Florida.

 

I walk into restaurants, theaters, or just down the street now and wonder, was it all just a bad dream?  Not really, the dream has morphed into yet another bad dream.  Maybe a worse one?

 

We now have more reliable data, but with the engine of conspiracy theories, abetted by social networking, it filters into the self-serving grab for political power, and we fail to learn from experience. The anti-intellectual vein of the American psyche goes deep, and populists very effectively tap into that.

 

One only has to read the July 22 New York Times article The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis's Vaccine Turnabout, and then the lead editorial in the July 26 Wall Street Journal, The Real DeSantis COVIDRecord

 

Nowadays, an alternative reality is easy to “prove” and the WSJ does a pretty good job at that.  I’m not going to dissect the two, but my article from two years ago makes some of the same points as the NYT.

 

I will however quote the concluding paragraph of the WSJ article as it is so emblematic of how we can choose to look at this horrible episode in American history: “The lockdown damage continues, but progressives can’t admit they were wrong.  Nor can Mr. Trump.  So they are trying to take down Mr. DeSantis for being right.”

 

There was no “right” or “wrong” when we went through the dark Covid tunnel.  There was scientific advice about responding to the rapidly moving target of the pandemic, and that advice was based on informed experience. However, I don’t recall anyone claiming that it was a hard and fast “truth.” It was thought to be the best advice at the time.  Who was closer to the “truth”, Dr. Fauci or Dr. MyPillowGuy?

 

Trump’s “Evita moment,” ripping off his mask, after climbing the steps to the White House balcony (gasping for air), following his Covid treatment at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, was clearly a high point of his political narcissism.  Look at me!  Look at me! Mr. Tough Guy!  But he received the experimental monoclonal antibody treatment not available to most of his fellow Americans who were dying from Covid.  He did not opt for the "miracle cures" he advocated (and probably killed some of his cult supplicants) such as hydroxychloroquine or injecting disinfectants.  No, he listened to health experts.

 

So would have DeSantis with his own life on the line. Instead, he surrounded himself with hand-picked health advisors who supported his views, all calculated to put him in the White House in 2024.  Lots of luck with that Governor; you didn’t count on the increasing popularity of your indicted adversary.  Trump or DeSantis: demagoguery is their commonality.

Sondheim in Memoriam

 

He was a cultural deity, the leading musical artist of our age, always on the cutting edge of American theater, the consummate artist, his lyrics totally integrated with his music.  If Bob Dylan is deserving of the Pulitzer, seems to me that Sondheim is as well.  Although a “musical theatre” figure, he is far more, a poet whose lyrics captured the urbanity of modern life and chronicled human relations in dramas within a musical structure.  His musicals have as much in common with opera as they do with Broadway theatre (although Sondheim himself did not generally enjoy opera). 

 

If you look at one’s life as a piece of music, there may be a few long measures preceded by a rest notation.  Covid not only led to sickness and death, but also took large blocks of our lives away, experiences we can never recover.  It’s like a musical piece where, suddenly, the rest notation is unnaturally prolonged, taking up space where there should be music.  The older one is, the more that horridly mismanaged illness is a percentage of one’s remaining life.

 

Thus the pandemic marked the loss of experiences, such as the one I wrote about involving the reimagined production of Sondheim’s Company and our 50^th Wedding Anniversary.

Although we missed that moment, we had hoped there would be another, and then the following year Sondheim passed away.  After his death I learned about the letters he wrote to others, even selflessly responding to strangers like me who revered him.

 

He had an extensive exchange of letters with Robert Osborne who for so many years was the face of Turner Classic Movies.  Watching the classic movies on TCM is just about the only TV I truly enjoy.

 

Sondheim also had an intense interest in such films, particularly those of the thirties, such as ones starring Joe E. Brown, and a host of other stars from that era.  Where in the world did he find the time to watch all of these?  I think of him, steeped in nostalgia and pastiche.  He once said something along the lines that if he was on a trip and a customs officer asked him where he’s from, he’d reply, “the past.”  He wrote to Osborne, a kindred soul, formed a mutual admiration society, and obviously Osborne kept him well supplied in tapes of films mostly from that era.

 

I’ve been able to collect ten of those letters.  Eighty-five were auctioned off in London in 2018 so my collection represents only a portion of their exchanges.  I framed the ones I collected and they now grace our hallway with other Sondheim memorabilia.  I’ve transcribed the contents of the ones I have below for future Sondheim scholars. 

 

They are fascinating, such as the September 5, 2006 letter in which he says “As for Angie's interview, do you by any chance have an unedited audiotape of it? I'd love to hear what she said.”   That must have been Osborne’s interview of Angela Lansbury who originated the role of the mad meat pie maker Mrs. Lovett in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and was in Sondheim’s early short-lived musical Anyone Can Whistle (1964).  Lansbury said Sweeney Todd was a huge success for her and that the show was a benchmark for Sondheim and “finally, down the road, that is the [Broadway] role” for which she’ll be remembered. (Watching that interview reminds me of the gift Osborne had, such a gentle, probing ability to get the best from an interview.)

 

The one dated Jan. 3, 2008 was on the eve of the financial (and ultimately political) crisis, and Sondheim concludes it with “Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all of us, please God” – something we were all feeling at the time.

 

Or the July 28, 2010 letter, the only one not signed “Steve,” which he signs “Affectionately Yours, Merle” obviously an in-joke, and not seeing what preceded it I’m guessing it was a reference to Merle Oberon.

 

The June 27, 2011 letter requests that Osborne send the tape of "London Can Take It;" as he wanted “Jeff to understand what went on during wartime there,” presumably Jeff being his husband-to-be at the time, Jeffrey Romley.  Or, the last Sondheim – Osborne letter I have dated June 12, 2012 requesting “Act One,” a 1963 film based on Moss Hart’s autobiography.  As he explains “James Lapine has been trying to track a copy down because he's writing a play based on the book.”  The play premiered on Broadway in 2014 to good reviews.

 

There are so many interesting references in these letters, so I’ll let these transcriptions do the talking themselves:

 

                                                                                August 31, 1998

 

Dear Bob –

 

Thanks so much.  What can I do for you?

 

                                                                                Steve  S.

 

*****

 

December 18, 2003

 

Dear Bob -

 

What I do with TCM is tape the movies and watch them days, weeks or even months later. I don't remember which Gordon Douglas, but it was in the midst of the Gordon Douglas festival a few months back.  I didn't mean to keep you awake nights when I brought this whole thing up -- my apologies.

 

You got me on "Whispering Streets.” If it's part of the TCM catalogue, make a copy for me. (I'm only up to the C's at the moment, but compiling as I go along.) And as far as Madelon Claudet and Rachel Cade go, what about Harold Diddlebock?

 

Meanwhile, have a Christmas worthy of Ann Harding and George Raft, or even Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly.

 

Best,

 

                                                                                Steve

 

*****

 

September 5, 2006

 

Dear Bob –

 

Thanks, as always, for your generosity. I can't believe the number of movies that Joan Blondell made. It seems she made one out of every two movies that were released before 1940. As for Angie's interview,

do you by any chance have an unedited audiotape of it? I'd love to hear what she said.

 

Does your visit to Telluride have anything to do with Bill Pence's resignation? When I was there so was Ted Turner.

 

Surely, these can't be coincidences..

 

That was a joke,

                                                                                Steve

 

P.S. Is "Down on Ami-Ami-Oni-Oni Isle" from "The Hurricane"? I suspect not.

                                                                                SS

 

*****

 

January 3, 2008

 

Dear Bob –

 

Thanks for the DVD. One of the things I love about the series films is that people like Audrey Totter and Dennis O'Keefe show up in them in tiny roles.

 

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all of us, please God.

 

Gratefully,

as ever,

 

                                                                                Steve

 

*****

 

January 5, 2010

 

Dear Bob

For the thousandth time, thank you so much! When are you coming to our fair city next? Give me a little notice, and we'll have an in-depth conversation about Rondo Hatton.

 

Meanwhile, Happy New Year.

 

                                                                                Steve

 

*****

 

July 28, 2010

 

Dear Bob -

 

The new recorder didn't arrive in time, so please add the following to your list: "Eleven Men and a Girl"; "Top Speed"; "Broadminded"; "Going Wild"; Local Boy Makes Good"; "Sit Tight"; & Day Bike Rider"; "Bright Lights.”

 

I don't expect these till 2012 at the earliest.

 

                                                                                Affectionately Yours,

                                                                                                Merle

 

*****

 

June 27, 2011

 

Dear Bob -

 

Thanks so much, as always, for dredging up the movies. By all means, keep them coming if you can. I'm particularly grateful for "London Can Take It;" as I want Jeff to understand what went on during wartime there.

 

I'd like to add four more titles to the lengthy list:

“The Man with Two Faces," "Innocence," "Gates of Heaven" and "Trouble the Water."

 

What can I do for you in return? Since you're getting some evenings off, perhaps when you're in New York you'd like to come to dinner and we'll talk about Johnny Sheffield. Seriously, just let me know.

 

As always,

 

                                                                                Steve

 

*****

 

August 2, 2011

 

Dear Bob

 

The usual request: I screwed up trying to tape "On with the Show' and "Going wild," so please add them to your list.

 

You're looking more chipper than ever - maybe it was anticipating your vacation. If you spend any of it in New York, give me a call and we can have a drink at least.

 

                                                                                Steve

 

*****

 

September 8, 2011

 

Dear Bob -

 

Just to ruin your vacation, would you add the following four movies to the list of Things My VHS Machine Screwed Up: "Crooner," "Guele d'Amour," "Virtue," "No More Orchids"?

 

As always,

 

                                                                                Steve

 

*****

 

June 12, 2012

 

Dear Bob -

 

Is "Act One" in the Turner Classic Movies library? It's a Warner Bros. picture, so I thought I'd ask. James Lapine has been trying to track a copy down because he's writing a play based on the book. Can you help him out?

 

Hope you're thriving -- you certainly seem to be, in your public appearances.

 

Best,

 

                                                                                Steve

 

 

Alongside these letters is a framed Sondheim-signed sheet music of “Anyone Can Whistle”.  It reads “For Bob   Forte’” and as he dates it 10/5/91, well before TCM, perhaps this not dedicated to Osborne.  So when I play that piece I do so Forte’!

 

 

The opposite wall is devoted to Company Playbills surrounding a cast-signed New York Philharmonic poster of the 2013 production of Company which included such luminaries as Stephen Colbert, Jon Cryer, Neil Patrick Harris, and Patti LuPone, among others. (Yes, Colbert and Cryer who we don’t think of in the context of musical theater do credible work in this production which was aired by PBS that year.)

 

We’ve made that hallway in our home a memorial to him. Thus, “Not a day goes by / Not a single day / …you're somewhere a part of my life.”

 

‘Sunday’ from Sunday in the Park with George is one of his masterpieces.  I include a brief video of my playing it as I often do with him in mind.  There will never be another Sondheim.