PareaGroove held a Saturday night party and a good twenty people came and went, one someone I never met, one I haven’t seen in over ten years. We had a regular quorum from NYC, and one zooming in from LA, one from Mexico, a number from across the river in NJ. We talked about the news, the science, the questions, the support for issues the quarantine coughed up for us all. Divorced parents and challenges with visiting kids, and regular order-outers having challenges cooking in their little kitchens. We also discussed and displayed our favorite salsas, the Groovers in LA and Mexico gave video tours of their apartments and balcony views, and a couple shared cat pictures. We also devolved a bit into a shouty political punch out for a few minutes, but that simmered down quickly with a bit of soothing and people came and went. I mentioned our upcoming book reading and one of our Groovers volunteered a poem, digging through reams of fresh work, and she offered a perfect poem on which to end. The Groove was sandwiched for me by two other Zoom meetings, a Saturday afternoon acting class and a Sunday afternoon college reunion. The acting class opened with introducing ourselves, all from our homes where we were sheltering in place, hailing from several different states, and coincidentally two from the same city in Belgium, a young man and a young woman, who didn’t know each other and met, rather charmingly, through that online class. One participant begged off early in the session, saying he was sick, a young man who proceeded to describe his symptoms, a clutching in the chest and terrible chills, and he blew it off as just a cold. I unmuted myself was all hell no, that’s Corona, take it seriously. His symptoms matched those of the people I know who went through it, and thankfully came out okay. This young guy will likely come out okay, but to dismiss it and hope it’s just a cold rather than take it seriously had me very nervous and felt compelled to express the seriousness. The class continued after he signed off. We enjoyed a scene reading, tweaking the the little Zoom boxes to focus on the two talking, and a video of a performance someone had made made, and workshopped a monologue one participant is developing. Sunday afternoon, today, I had another college reunion event, with more than fifty people showing up from all over the country, all over the world. We saw people’s pets and children in their laps, a cats tail crossing a box during it’s human’s share. Each of us had a minute to talk about what was going on for us, parents with remote learning challenges, our concerns for our elderly parents, our frustrations with being piled tight with families back home as schools sent kids home, our frustrations being alone in a small apartment, and people working harder than ever in their remote home offices without the boundaries of office hours. We had a NJ mayor speak about the challenges she’s facing and the support her senators were providing, we had a NY magistrate judge discuss the challenge of virtual hearings and assuage concerns about releasing some prisoners. Our university has a tradition of having a class reunion every five years, but these Zoom chats are bringing us together far more frequently. We mostly don’t know each other as our class was large, and some I did know I haven’t seen in decades, but the connection of having had four years together along with the connection of seeing each other cheered an otherwise gray rainy day.
March 29 – Weekending with Zoom
