This was Mother’s Day and that can be loaded for a lot of people. But we all have mothers, hence Mammal Day. I found a cute picture of a mamma meerkat and her cub, as our PareaGroove picture is of a group of meerkat pals. We found that most of us had a day like any other, thought those of us who could called our moms. We talked about walking in local parks and how the flowers this year are especially beautiful. Someone waxed on about how much she enjoyed trips to big suburban supermarkets. I mentioned I saw my first theater production, Blindness, which was held at the Darryl Roth Theater near Union Square. It was my first theater experience since the Pandemic started and it felt like water to a sponge I was so excited to go. There were no actually people live on a stage in this, instead we sat in pairs in the dark, six feet apart and strictly masked, and we wore headphones and listened to a dramatic one person show while we watched lights flash around us. It wasn’t quite the comeback I’d hoped but it was still great to share a theatrical performance with a live audience. It was well done but a tad dystopian and I found I wasn’t too keen about that aspect of it having lived through our recent dystopia. Of course the dramatic dystopia was worse than ours, but still it reminded of it when I was hoping to forget. My favorite part of the experience was when it ended and they opened the theater doors to a beautiful sunny day and a view of Union Square Park lush with spring trees, and optimistic reminder that we were moving forward and onward.
I had been invited to the theater as sort of a thank you by a friend whose recent Zoom wedding I had “MC’ed.” This was a remarkable event and I was grateful and honored to have been part of it but I was also happy of course to have this lovely “thank you.” He had posted on Facebook that he was going to hold the Zoom wedding with his partner of thirty years, and that somehow Zoom made it easier for him to wed, without having to endure the trouble of finding an event space, and more importantly to him, of having to ask guests to endure the trouble of traveling to it to attend the event (although I suspect most would have been happy to do so). I volunteered to help out having garnered this past (more than a) year’s experience of hosting Zoom gatherings. I dressed in “costume” inspired by Cabaret and wore a silver top hat, a red bow tie and boa, and a black sequined top, by Isaac Mizrahi of course. I introduced the classical quartet made up of a classmate and her family and the the several songs they played between the many speeches and the wedding ceremony. We all hailed from different homes, many from different states. We had more than 200 guests, and another friend of ours, involved with the Circus, and who had hosted our PareaGroove juggling class, assembled her circus friends to provide breakout rooms of entertainment, including a tightrope walker, a hat trick doer, a glass lightbulb eater, and of course her juggling. Then we had our own “breakout rooms” of friends, ours being one of college classmates, all of which rooms the grooms stopped by and visited, as if it were a live wedding and they were visiting tables. It was a tremendously successful event, all the guests felt entertained and welcomed and all of us participators and performers felt appreciated and helpful. These gents deserve it, they’ve contributed to their communities at home and at large, and we all were happy to launch them off into their next chapter.
After talking about theater a bit one of our regulars shared her travails of having busted her ankle in several places doing something so simple as getting out of a car wrong. She required serious surgery for it, joking it was on par with what rodeo clowns suffer. People advised her to use the hard cast rather than the soft cast and those with some expertise chipped in even more. One let her know the Hospital For Special Surgery, somewhat renowned in NY, was taking patients again, though for several months in the beginning of the Pandemic it had been limited to COVID patients, as all medical facilities were. We talked about how the Pandemic was winding down, how hospitals are now accessible again, and how Dr. Gottlieb was saying people should go back to work and that masks aren’t necessary with the vaccine. We talked about how we thought all this might impact NY commercial real estate as offices opened, and how people might be moving back into the City. We heard France is opening, people are finally getting their shots. Brazil and India however are still having trouble. We talked about the different vaccines, how the Chinese vaccine might be less effective, and how vaccine diplomacy was now a thing and how this was worryingly open to corruption.
Somehow from there we disputed the age old Coke vs. Pepsi argument with most of us leaning Coke-ward. We wondered about the Coke secret recipe, and how it had gotten out but that didn’t really matter, no one else was making it. The “secret” Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe had also been released but people weren’t really making it themselves either, we googled it and shared links for it. We also talked about our favorite recipes for mixed cocktails, and which beer flavors we were favoring as we are hitting the opening bars more frequently. We talked about the all you can eat sushi places and how those are opening again too. Everything is opening. The reports are that more than half the Americans are vaccinated, and in some parts of NYC more than two thirds are. We talked about Florida, how they’re behind, and how people are asked to remove their masks sometimes, which we up north found disturbing. Someone talked about the isolated Isle of Mann outside the UK and how that too is opening after having been especially protective of itself during the Pandemic. We then watched our friend’s dog eat green beans, which is especially cute. And we ended by talking about online games that evolved over this past year like PowerPoint karaoke.
