In cleaning off a bookshelf, I found about a half dozen New Yorker magazines from December 2019 to the beginning of March 2020. My subscription ran out at that point but I had kept these magazines for no other reason than I hadn't yet read them. I stuck them on a shelf and then the Year of Quarantine Thinking began and I forgot all about them.
There's a kind of sad nostalgia looking at these tiny time capsules now. Things that we took for granted in the Before Times now seem whimsical and outdated: a feature on what was going to be opening in New York museums and what plays were slated to run in various live theaters, the schedule of the NY Philharmonic, music that would subsequently never be heard. Reviews of movies, of night club shows. So much that seemed so normal.... and now seems lost forever or at least deep in shadow.
Of course, we know theater and music, art exhibits and movies will return and we will enjoy them and yet some of us will be wary of being in an enclosed space with strangers. Where once we looked forward to a concert or a special show at a grand museum, now we have trepidation. It's as if something shut down and will never actually reopen in the same way.
But there is hope. The reality of that hope may not be in the near future, but let's concentrate on the possibility of hearing live music again, sitting shoulder to shoulder at some wonderful venue like the Ryman Theater in Nashville, listening to the likes of Lucinda Williams, joyfully forgetting for two hours how we once thought nothing about mingling with strangers. And marveling at the fact that we can.
No comments:
Post a Comment