Are we out of the woods? I fear I have strayed far from the path. But are any of us sure of our journey these days? Is this finally our long promised Hot Girl Summer or is that burning sensation Monkey Pox? Last week I was spitting distance from Sara Bareilles as the Baker's Wife in Into The Woods and tonight I was sitting across from Matty at the Cookshop in Chelsea. Life felt normal again but then as I passed the gleaming vast emptiness of the Hudson Yards it suddenly felt like an unnecessarily optimistic night in early October 1929. When do we all come to a happy end, or are we doomed to drift through the darkness of this second act in American life forever.
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| Contrary to public reports, I did not spit on Sara Bareilles |
As you can tell, the relentless brutality of the last two years has not dissipated like a fine morning mist but I haven't seen Matty in four years and was determined to not be a total summer bummer. On my walk from my office to the restaurant I made a plan to dig up a dusty old story to amuse him should things all turn too dark. A cheerful hill to pull us out of any emotional valley. It was the story of the worst date I ever went on, really two dates since after the first one I somehow thought the second one would be an improvement. It was not. Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald was right! In my defense, the date had been with a 99% match on OKCupid but then in the retelling I accidentally called him a 99 cent match and honestly that seems a lot more accurate. Plus the story came with a recent twist that was both topical and timely.
We caught each other up on each other and shared the cheesy dish on all our mutuals over cheesy dishes. I told Matty about running into Charlie and his husband Kent in line for Into The Woods with their five year old daughter. Charlie was levitating at the prospect of his daughter attending her first ever Broadway show, while she, no doubt familiar with this blog and with a lawyer for a father, invoked her right to remain silent. But mostly I recapped all of the aftermaths and recriminations this blog has caused over the years that he had either not heard before or politely forgot. All those criticisms of me were valid but without 'whatever this is" our mutual history would have been lost to the hazy last days of disco and cruelly forgotten. Besides, if I may step way up in class here, I am sure everyone found Marcel Proust unbearable in his lifetime, no doubt leaving him free to blog incessantly.
Lately MonkeyPox is much on all our minds. Personally, I am not yet ready for the second act of the pandemic, still being in the "Or Is It Covid" phase: "Is it seasonal allergies or is it covid?" "Am I stressed out or is it covid?" But now that social media is filled with graphic stories and even more graphic images, near panic has set in among the gays. But then when faced with traveling to Brooklyn or The Bronx for an appointment, the kind of gays that definitely would have gone to The Bronx for free tickets to see Meryl Streep's cartwheel in Shakespeare In The Park suddenly are weighing the chances of permanent scarring from the August company at their next Hamptons weekend.
Who is already vaccinated and who feels comfortable waiting has turned into a not entirely judgment-free acknowledgment of who among us is the biggest slut. As Dorothy Parker said, "Don't be the town drunk. In Manhattan." Personally I think the CDC should team up with Buzzfeed for a Cosmo-style quiz "Are You A Slut?" If you aren't that slutty, you get a Little Miss Goodie Two Shoes meme, but if your summer street meat habits bear more than a passing resemblance to the Coney Island hot dog eating contest, your quiz ends on the confirmation page for the one injection your body needs most this summer, at a clinic very near you.
There is a reason that when schools perform Into The Woods, they only do the first act. Just as in real life, it is all wishes fulfilled and consequences TBD. The second part is darker and more perilous with too many lost along the way. Jonathan would have happily flown to NYC for the weekend to sit in that second row with me. And instead of sadness, my feelings are more reminiscent of Kitty Dukakis' response to her husband's loss in the 1988 campaign: "I'm bitter enough for the both of us." I wished and my wish came true. But then the consequences came and now as I try to make my way back out of the woods again, I wonder what is waiting on the journey,
Stephen Sondheim has proven F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong. There are second acts in American lives, they're just a lot less fun without the people you have met along the way. We are all of us now In Search Of Lost Time, and a vaccine appointment that isn't too inconvenient.
