It’s definitely a Monday. My work schedule is set up so as to front weight my week with Monday and Tuesday being my two hardest days and things slowing down a bit the rest of the week. After tech week and having to put a number of things in abeyance in order to be at the theater every evening for a week and then up to all hours writing notes for cast and production staff, I am a bit behind in other areas of life. I came home fully intending to make a start on the backlog, sat down, opened the laptop, and promptly fell asleep for two hours. So much for noble intentions. Fortunately, none of the backlog is due tomorrow so I have time to make good on it all later this week. Assuming I don’t do the same thing tomorrow evening and the evening after.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is now half way through its eight performance run. I was a bit nervous about it a few weeks ago when our first couple of runs were wobbly and running very long. But it gelled during our three dress rehearsals as lines finally fell into place and the set and costumes were completed giving it the Jacobean cartoon look I was going for. (You have to be somewhat conceptual when you have a very limited budget). And, now that they have an audience, the actors are finally relaxing into their roles and giving them the physical component necessary to land the humor. Unfamiliar Shakespeare is not the easiest thing for an audience to understand but true physical intent and humor helps land the jokes even when words are missed.
As I sit at the back and listen to the audience response, my favorite bits aren’t the big set pieces like the stuffing of Falstaff into the laundry basket (with the contents of the chamber pot tossed in on top of him for good measure – my addition), but rather little moments that half the audience may miss but which I can hear at least one person get and react to. Dr. Caius having a Julie Andrews with the curtains in The Sound of Music moment. Mistress Ford and Page trading nautical metaphors. Pistol teasing a passed out Nym. Falstaff caressing Mistress Ford’s ankle. Fenton and Anne’s relationship deepening in a series of vignettes invented to keep the staging cinematic and to cover scene shifts. Thespis, like all the gods, is in the details. When I direct (or when I write for that matter) I throw in all sorts of jokes and humor and I put them in because I find them funny. I have no idea if anyone else will get them but I don’t care. They’re the right thing for that particular moment.
I owe a great deal to the cast and crew of Merry Wives. It’s not an easy play to tackle. It’s big in terms of cast and multiple settings (Shakespeare not feeling a need to be confined by Aristotelian unities). The comedy and jokes are dated by over four centuries. It has no famous speeches. Nobody read it in high school or even college unless they were an English Literature grad student. But, this group of volunteers from all walks of life have managed to take the ideas that poured out of my brain and turn them into something that takes an audience on a rollicking good time. A community building a community. In multiple ways.
I suppose I had better check in on the covid front as that’s what half my readers tune in for. We remain in a significant wave. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 150,000 to 750,000 new cases daily nationwide. It’s difficult to really know as there is no longer any systematic reporting system. Most of the data comes from wastewater surveillance but even that is hit or miss as it has no standardization. Hospitals are not reporting ER visits or inpatient admissions in the way that was being done a few years ago. The number 10 million cases is being floated around too – meaning roughly 3% of the population has been infected at some time this summer). I have no idea if these numbers are trustworthy or not.
Numbers that are being bandied about that I think we can trust. Test positivity rates in emergency departments are running around 20% (and Walgreens reported a number of 40% last week). This means somewhere around 1/5 Covid tests done for symptoms is positive. In general, a disease has to have a test positivity rate of less than 5% to consider it under control in a population. Total number of hospitalizations seems to be running around 5,500 inpatients nationwide of whom 10% require ICU care. It’s up significantly from spring but only about half the rate of last winter. Most healthy people are recovering without incident. Death rates are up some but nothing like we saw in the throes of the pandemic. Covid is now the 10th leading cause of death in the US (down from 3rd) at about 80 a day nationwide. The majority are in those with significant underlying health or immune problems. The kicker, of course, is that no one knows what this is going to do to long covid rates. The more infections an individual has, the more likely they are going to develop long covid and, given what I’ve seen of those problems and the disability they can bring, I’d rather not, thank you.
What to do? The advice is pretty basic. Keep those hands washed. Keep up to date on boosters as they become available and are tweaked to give additional immunity against the latest circulating strains (no, I don’t know when the promised fall booster will be shipped.) Stay away from people who are obviously ill. If you do get it, Paxlovid is a good idea if you’re over sixty. It doesn’t seem to do that much for younger people. Stay home until you’re fever and major symptom free for 24 hours, then mask in public for an additional five days. Pray to Hygieia and which ever other gods of health you believe in that long covid passes over your door.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 