Weekly Margin 2020, W21: Still here

I don't really have any wisdom for us this week. Watchlist and developments below the cut:

Heart to Heart

I miss hugging
I miss pressing my heart to your heart
My ear to your shoulder
Wrapping my arms as far as they will go
Held tight in the wrap of your arms
Safe
Close
Tight
I miss the hello hug
Immediate and warm, a smile
The goodbye
A squeeze before an exit, perfunctory but felt
The reunion hug, which can last for minutes
To make up for years
I text *hugs* to you
And wrap my arms around myself
Two stacked elbow vees, two hollow ropes
The arms wrap too much, too not ever enough
I roll my shoulders into it, curl my spine, I tuck my head
My heart reaches for your heart but all it hears is an echo
My blood pressure drops, my pulse races
An echo
An echo
I miss
An echo
I miss
Your heart

Weekly Margin 2020, W20: I finally went back to my spreadsheet

January 1-March 11 of 2020 I have logged twenty-four live theatrical experiences viewed. March 30-today I have an additional fifty-two streamed performances to add to that log: a mixture of archived filmed productions and televised performances, zoom readings of plays, remote concerts, and monologue plays. Some of the streaming content I'd seen before, either in person or at a previous broadcast; some of it's been brand new. None of it is the same as live theater. But, wow, if we had any doubt about my status as a theater junkie, I think that's been asked and answered.

Not much else to say. Nick Cordero is awake, a miracle. Watchlist and other theater developments below the cut:

Weekly Margin 2020, W19: Two Months

For not-on-Broadway New York theater community and its institutions, the death knells have begun. UCB closing was our first New York domino. Shetler is the second, followed only hours later by LIC's Secret Theatre. The longer this goes on (and prognosticators are saying not to expect theater to be safe any time this year, possibly even next year), more will fall. The pillars of low budget theater, the proving grounds for unknown performers, are beginning to collapse, and who knows if and when replacement scaffolding will be built. It's hard to hold onto optimism right now. While I love seeing theater companies find alternate performance venues online, and I've been trying to support them, one, I know the income they're generating doesn't match what they would make in the before times, and two, what will they find waiting for them when they're permitted to return?

Today is two months since Broadway's last performance. New York's state of emergency is extended to June 7th. For now.

This past week's watchlist and development summary below the cut:

Weekly Margin 2020, W18: A Moment in Time

Honestly the fact that I am tracking this week by week is one of the few things creating a semblance of a timeline, now when time feels meaningless. At least that's how I'd been feeling (and will probably feel again). But this past week I actually had appointment internet TV, night after night. We started with the Sondheim concert last Sunday, but then we also a SubCulture concert from Jason Robert Brown on Monday night, the benefit reading of Beirut on Tuesday, Richard Nelson's poignant and perfect Zoom play, What Do We Need To Talk About? on Wednesday, and I almost felt like myself again: weeping at good theater. Weeping at the simplicity of words being spoken (or sung).

It's always brief. People have been saying, during each of these, the moment itself transcended enough that they forgot for a few minutes about the pandemic (in fact, the characters in What Do We Need ... say it to each other, after one of the siblings tells a biographical mystery). We forget, and then one turn of phrase twists in our gut, and we remember again. And we mourn. We cry, and we laugh, we applaud for people who can't hear us. And we're grateful we're alive, and we're grieving for what is irrevocably lost, and what is still left to lose.