Opening Day

As I write this, I’m sitting in the house. Not MY house. THE house. As in the part of a theater where the audience sits. For the first time in nearly two years, I’m attending a members’ meeting of my local community theatre. The meeting is about as boring as I remembered these meetings to be, but I don’t even care. It’s one more step on the road back to something resembling a post-Covid normalcy.

I know we’re not at normal yet. Every day brings worrisome news of some new variant that’s more contagious, more lethal, or both. And at the same time, I’m sitting maskless amongst a group of community theatre actors. And if you know anything about “community theatre actors,” you know that that’s a synonym for “older than dirt.” Let me put it this way: I’m a veritable whippersnapper in this crowd. These are presumably the most at-risk folks, but we couldn’t stay away.

At the same time, as California has officially reopened, the paranoia and neurosis run deep. At my workplace—a college—we’ve been informed that, come August, we will be back to business as usual. In keeping with the state and county guidance, we will allow the public back on campus, we will forego mask requirements, and even social distancing will be a thing of the past. Which would all be a lot more impressive if we hadn’t had to create the fall schedule back on March. As it is, the college will be open, but most of the classes remain online. Fall, then, will be a nice, liminal sort of semester—a transitional zone between sheltering in place and resuming normal, public human interactions.

A lot of people don’t see it that way, though. They’re kind of panicking at the thought of interacting with the unmasked public. Have they been vaccinated? For the most part, yes. But when you point out that the CDC has declared that vaccinated people are essentially safe—no need for masking, no need for distancing—you’re met with greater of lesser degrees of hysteria. “It’s not 100% safe!” Well, no, it isn’t, but, then again, you realize nothing is, right? You weren’t “100% safe” at work before Covid-19, either. At some point, you just have to start living your life again, right?

Here’s the thing that gets me: All through the awful year of 2020, as the Moron-in-Chief railed against medical science and insisted that the coronavirus would just disappear like a “miracle” and peddled snake-oil cures and advised people to drink bleach—all through that time, the non-brainwashed among us pleaded with people to listen to the doctors, listen to the science. Well, now the science is telling us that we can venture forth without masks, we can stop social distancing, we can get back to our lives—and people don’t want to hear it!

I know that people are nervous. I’m sympathetic—I really am. But in the end, you have to take a plunge sometime. The time has come.