2024-03-28
A study claims “The COVID-19 pandemic caused the most severe drops in life expectancy seen in 50+ years,” and though I know this is not what the study meant I can’t help but think this pandemic has also caused a most severe drop in what we feel we can expect from one another.
I have a dear friend who, if I'm being completely honest, is more intelligent, erudite, and witty than I am. Despite this, they are kind enough to have continued a long-running email volley with me. My trying to keep up with their brilliance occasionally leads me to saying something coherent.
This was excerpted from one of those lucky conversations.
One thing the pandemic has taught me with agonizing clarity is that my ego apparently has limits. Limits which others in the world of performance I knew apparently did not share.
When I am teaching, I speak at length about the duty of a performer to create safe spaces for their audience.
While originally said as a figurative thing about emotional impact and trauma, it seemed obvious to me that this care would extend to their physical safety as well.
This seemed obvious to me, as I've worked professionally with high risk acts. In those situations, the audience's safety was as deeply considered as that of the performer.
Yet, for all that wisdom, I watched performers get hungry. Whether it was for food or adulation, one by one they made their excuses and crossed the line back to the stage long before it was safe to do so.
Now that part is unfortunate. What's excruciating is that I know which of them called me to see if I was making the same decisions, and I know exactly how they reacted when I told them not to stupidly and selfishly endanger their audiences.
To my mind, the worst of these offenders are the ones who had other sources of survival. They didn't need the stage to survive, which means they made those choices on neediness and selfishness alone.
And I know who they are, and what they think about the people who pay to love them.
That's a difficult thing to square with once you know it.
The irony of all of this is that at the time it was strictly an ideological battle for me. I hadn't caught covid yet, nor had I been moderately and possibly permanently disabled by it yet.
This was before I ended up with actual brain damage, or had to plan to walk more than a flight or two of stairs. I wasn't factoring in the fact that if I had a "normal" job, I wouldn't be able to keep it.
I simply believed that my own need for praise and love from an audience had a limit: Doing imaginary things for them was not a valid enough excuse to play a very real game of Russian Roulette with them.