Dear WBW Readers,
It’s Memorial Day Weekend! How can I tell? There’s no traffic because everyone’s left town! But there’s been no traffic for the last 10 weeks and everyone who could leave town left back then as well. So never mind.
It is, in fact, the first Memorial Day I have spent In New York City, by my careful calculation, in 23 years – since the kids and I made our triumphant return from New Jersey in 1997. The Jersey Shore, other New Jersey environs, Philadelphia, Buck Hill – that’s where I’ve been on Memorial Days past. My most recent memory of a Memorial Day in the City goes back to 1987, when I was living in the West Village, working days at Continental Insurance, nights managing Invisible House (shout out to the band’s bass player, Liz Baxter, who may just be reading this). I remember going to The Gap to buy a pair of white jeans, there’s nothing like white jeans – tight white jeans -- to announce “summer has arrived” which I stuffed myself into to meet a b-school pal for dinner whereupon I knocked a plate of squid ink pasta in vodka sauce on my lap. Vodka doesn’t stain but the tomatoes do and so does the squid ink. Unlike on coronavirus, Clorox did work. A memorable Memorial Day. As this one will be for sure.
Not much new news since the last WBW. Here’s what I’ve got.
TWO WEEKS LATER
Thank you thank you THANK YOU for your voracious readership of the previous endless two-parter WBW which achieved an all-time record high not only for its word count but total views and open rates as well. I suspect this has more to do with the fact that many of my loyal readers have run out of ways to better to entertain themselves, but I’ll take what I can get. I feel you pain, as I always reread the previous WBW (Parts 1 and II this week) before plunging in to write the next update, to reorient myself and avoid telling the same stories over and over AND OVER again and could barely get through the two issues myself. So, my gratitude and admiration to all of you who did.
I await anxiously the day the Daily Cuomo Show announces that the New York State death count has finally fallen below 100.This dramatic metric follows the brighter news of falling numbers of total hospitalizations, net change in total hospitalizations, net change in intubations, number of new Covid hospitalizations per day (three-day rolling average) before the Governor puts on his sad face and announces the death toll. I am convinced the bookmakers are having a heyday with these numbers. Maybe tomorrow we’ll go to double digits. I doubt I’ll head out to dance in the streets, but it will be a psychological boost.
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s Covid experience is lagging New York’s by about three weeks and at ET’s assisted living facility there have now been six residents who have tested positive, four within her memory care unit (a “closed” area of the building) and now as of last weekend, the first recorded Covid-19 death of a resident (presumably one of the two previously disclosed cases). Next week there will be a huge tent erected on the grounds and every resident and every staff member across all three divisions of the community (independent living, assisted living and memory care) will be tested. It will no doubt be…a circus.
It’s not fun opening the emails that come from Brookdale. These days they generally bear bad news. Still, I do believe that everything that possibly can be done is being done, whatever cold comfort that provides. There was a story in the New York Times last week that circulated among the Lowengard sibs about an incident at another Brookdale facility, in New Jersey, where one (there are more than one, I happen to know for a fact, even though the story insinuated otherwise) of Springsteen’s E-Street Band guitarists had moved his mother-in-law (the guitarist, Nils Lofgren, not Springsteen’s) in January. Unfortunate timing, for sure Apparently, the mother-in-law was suffering from dementia but was not in a locked memory care unit and managed to “escape” from the facility four times. Clearly, she didn’t want to be there. Some other charges of abuse and neglect were leveled as well. Then, Covid-19. She has now recovered and has been placed at another facility and the family is pursuing a lawsuit against Brookdale corporate and making waves by publicizing this story in the Times.
Having gone through the eighth and ninth circles of hell last year dealing with truly neglectful and avaricious institutions that we unwittingly had been seduced into believing were competent and caring places, I can sympathize with the Lofgren family’s outrage. However – and this is a big however -- I did bristle at the muddle the reporter made of the reporting of this story, failing to differentiate between a “nursing home” (aka “skilled nursing facility” or, as a delightfully blunt lunch guest of my London friend Dorothy informed me it is called in England, “the old-people’s home”) and “assisted living” and “memory care.” These are horses of three different colors entirely – with three different levels of resident care and three different types of residents.
The sad truth is you really can’t granny dump at any of these places, any more than you would put a two-year-old in day care or for that matter a 12-year-old in boarding school and never ask questions or check up on whether the kid was eating lunch and wearing clean underwear (or diapers in the former instance). You must be involved no matter how diligent and plentiful the staff is at the old people’s home or day care. And suing a place at a time when the spectre of Covid-19 is haunting the world, given the woefully inadequate supplies of PPE, unavailability of testing and just general panic and ignorance that prevailed a month or two ago is like kicking a dog that’s down. I suspect no mater how much money they throw at their attorney they will discover in due time that those 187 signatures that are required when one enrolls one’s loved one in a facility will indemnify the institution.
I emailed the director of Brookdale West Hartford a link to the Times story, and my regrets, and a stern warning that if any members of the E-Street band – or their parents – were to take up residency at Brookdale Chatfield I hoped to be the first to know.
Anyway, let me dismount this high horse and suffice it so say we continue to trust that ET is getting the best care she can receive under the circumstances. I saw her on Monday on a Zoom doc visit and she looked great and seemed with it. At the previous Zoom doc meeting the week before she wasn’t quite locking on to the concept of a video visit; all I really could see was her top of her right ear.
These video visits require a planning effort befitting the Churchill War Rooms between proactively calling to confirm all the phone numbers and email addresses for all parties to the call, then educating the office staff that yes, you can have three people in three different places on a Zoom call 10 minutes before the call is scheduled to start, making sure the Brookdale aide assigned to take care of the dial in is with the program and can actually see the little microphone on the lower left corner with the red line through it -- and then convincing ET to speak up. One of these calls took so long to get going the doctor appeared and immediately announced she had another (obviously more important) meeting in 19 minutes and I, well, exploded.
I continue to dutifully attend the Brookdale Zoom meetings every week and have taken to entertaining myself by Googling the names of the other participants to see if anyone important is in attendance. So far, no. And I try – I really try -- not to be annoyed when the families of ET’s dorm mates appear in the lit square and ask the same question for the third time, or worse, show up 10 minutes before the end of the session and demand a recap of what they’ve missed. Really, people – and by the way we can hear you clearly before the meeting starts if you haven’t muted yourself.
HAMMING IT UP
I have continued to pursue my unnatural preoccupation with keeping alive the bunches of tulips that I purchase every 10 or 12 or 14 days, though have yet to make it past a week in spite of vigilant daily water changing, formula mixing and diagonal stem slicing. My once-every-10-day grocery trip was extended to the 12th day last week, not a personal best, but not bad for a former daily shopper. The rotation took me to Trader Joe’s. It was divine. Clean, well-stocked and the checkout swift and my bounty so professional bagged I inquired if perhaps the cashier had an advance degree in this art. My refrigerator runneth over, so stuffed I had to beg to rent space in my pal Vinnie’s fridge up on the ninth floor. He is now sheltering a 14-pound ham I bought the trip before this one at ShopRite that was, pardon the expression, hogging up half a shelf. Still, it takes about five or six days after shopping to be able to open the fridge door and not have a fennel bulb roll out onto my foot.
My major form of entertainment has evolved into the vicious cycle of cooking up a storm, making a mess, watching two episodes of brutally violent Netflix shows, cleaning the kitchen up after, and then starting all over again the next day. Sabrina Ghayour’s Persian Saffron Chicken, Fennel & Barberry Stew seemed fairly straightforward though I wasn’t about to go foraging for barberries which I wasn’t sure I was up to festooning the dish with anyway. In Buck Hill my lower yard was replete with Japanese Barberry, an invasive, nasty if exotic species much loved by Lyme-disease-infested deer ticks. Probably not one and the same barberry the recipe called for but still. In its place I used lemon-juice-soaked dried cranberries.
Every dish I prepare has its own unique set of problems, and this one happened to be that I started cooking around five and had only skimmed the recipe. It seemed straightforward enough until I was stopped quite dead by the directive buried in the penultimate paragraph to “simmer for 1 hour” the chicken I’d already browned and mostly cooked in onions and orange juice and spices. Then, a few lines down, I was instructed to cook it for another hour after that. This required some fancy footwork involving transfers to the microwave in order to get it delivered to Elise and Aaron before the 10 O’Clock News. I am thinking of revamping the existing recipes I have loaded onto my tourtle account and those I will add going forward from entries in “The Covid-19 Cookbook” which really does have kind of a deadly ring, to “Mistakes I’ve Made and it’s Still OK.”.
Other notable kitchen adventures included spending pretty much all day last Sunday preparing Samin Nosrat’s Big Lasagna recipe which had been billed as a Big Event she wanted all her fans to cook, in unison, on May 3. I didn’t get the memo and while a fan, I’m not that big a fan. Last Sunday was two weeks late or maybe just two weeks later, so sue me.
The recipe has 18 steps and that doesn’t include the detours she wanted me to take to create the pasta from scratch (Ronzoni got this assignment) and tomato sauce (I did this in advance and it was well worth it). I probably should have watched the video first which might have helped me over several humps due to vast number of ambiguities in the instructions but I just soldiered on, producing a 10-pound tub of lasagna that really did weigh 10 pounds. It outweighed the limit on my kitchen scale so I dragged the bathroom scale into the kitchen where I discovered I weighed eight pounds more than in my bathroom that morning, perhaps due to ricotta tasting? I gently eased the pan on it but it wouldn’t display either, so I had to weigh myself first and then again holding the lasagna and do the math. Yes, I am well on my way to making the 19 of Covid-19 a reality. And I don’t need to make or eat lasagna again for a very, very long time.
Following the lasagna clean up, just before midnight there was a major Raoplosion in the larder when I managed to knock a jar of Rao’s Marinara off a shelf whereupon it fell with such a force it splattered not just the floors and walls but the undersides of several shelves and my Adidas with, well, clotted blood. This after a particularly gruesome Season Three episode of Fauda. What a great opportunity to clean up the pantry, the Pollyanna in me declared. But first I had to mop it all up.
CITIPHOBIA, IRSAPHOBIA, HEBREW SCHOOL
Other exciting events of the last two weeks haven’t been all that exciting. Cancer moved out of Virgo (astrologically speaking; sadly, not out of me) at the beginning of the month, boding better luck in financial matters. Had I known this I might have been more vigilant about checking my nonfunctional frauded Citi bank account for signs of life or rather restoration of the stolen funds. And even though I called the Citi fraud squad on May 4th and they gave me the usual line that day that it would be 30 to 90 days before the money *might* appear, I discovered six days later when I made a random check that in fact the funds had been redeposited on May 1.
It might have been nice for Citi to let me know this (phone call? Email? Snail mail? Homing pigeon?) but they didn’t so the money just sat there, waiting for someone else to sidle up to a teller in Miami and remove it again. In which event I would have been SOL because I had to sign an indemnification agreement should the account was re-frauded where I acknowledge I would not get this money back because Citi had advised me to close the account at the same time they told me they had to deposit the returned funds once investigated in it. Figure that out. Yesterday, I discovered that Citi had taken it upon itself to close the account even though I had specifically asked that they NOT, as I have other deposits coming in that I couldn’t detour to the new account but did they listen? No.
I got my taxes done. Finally. And technically speaking, this is early which is unheard of in my world. Next week I will tackle my mother’s. Maybe. My IRS phobia gets worse with age. I hate thinking about taxes, doing taxes, planning for taxes, mailing taxes, preparing taxes, even signing the form to have my taxes released electronically. This should definitely be in the DSM-5. I could write the entry.
I have now completed all three seasons of Fauda and two of Hostages and my Hebrew should be fluent at this point but hasn’t progressed much beyond “ken” and “toda” and of course “fauda” which isn’t Hebrew at all, it’s Arabic. The word for chaos in Hebrew is “chaos.” The upshot is I am strongly advising everyone to remove Gaza from their bucket lists. I went TV-free Wednesday, which was alarmingly delightful, I may have to try this more often.
IF IT’S NOT ONE DAMN VIRUS IT’S ANOTHER
There are viruses and then there are viruses. Some wretched individual hacked my Facebook messenger last week. There’s nothing like a Facebook hacking to smoke out hundreds of friends who ask how you are and why you just sent them a porn cartoon. Most of my closest pals suspected something was amiss because the note I allegedly sent urged them to click on the video because “I was “impressed” with.it. And didn’t click for that reason. Yes, they know it takes a lot to impress me. Thank you and sorry!
The next day my computer got hacked by the Capita Search virus. Really nasty.
Of course, in a broader sense, we’ve all had our lives hacked by Covid-19.
TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
I spent four hours on Saturday May 9, 2020 thinking it was Sunday. At the end of the week I’m now finding the line between Thursday and Friday starts to get a little blurry. And weekends are really just weekdays in sheep’s clothing. It helps that on Thursday nights at seven I join a ragtag group of theater fans to watch the weekly National Theatre Live play on YouTube and Fridays at six I indulge in a three-ring circus of Central Synagogue Shabbat Services on my computer, Law & Order on the big flat screen and a running text conversation with Amanda Gordon who also participates (silently) in the service. There are the twice-weekly meals for Elise and Aaron, a standing Friday morning call with Katy Ramaker, the weekly Brookdale Zoom calls scheduled on different days and times to keep us on our toes. The rest of what I do with my time I’m free to do when I am so inclined. Somehow, I manage to be swamped with projects from dawn ‘til dusk, at which point most evenings I migrate from my desk to the kitchen, and then back to the living room in front of the TV that I am thinking of giving up (but never will)..
SMALL THINGS IN BIG BOXES
Check this out. I thought I was getting a surprise lobster shipment. Instead, I got two extremely coddled, chilled hypodermics of Dupixent, the cure for my atopic dermatitis -- and a bonus 12 – count ‘em – 12 reusable cold packs and a free Styrofoam cooler. Let me know if you need to cool anything this summer; I will be receiving this medication every two weeks for the unforeseen future as both the pound of cure and then ounce of prevention thereafter.
I administered the first dose on Wednesday, following the 13-step instructions in the illustrated, suitable-for-framing poster-size fold-out package insert so confusing it led me to wonder if perhaps Samit guest edited it. My favorite step was #6 headlined “Choose your injection site.” It instructed “You can inject into your thigh or your stomach, except for the 2 inches (5 cms) around your belly button (navel).” Just in case you’re not acquainted with what a “belly button” is. I am finding randomly reading other sections of the Dupixent literature endlessly amusing as the company’s proofreader was either a third grader or quit just before the publication went to press: The perfect thing to lighten my mood in dark moments.
The Box
The Box Opened
The Ice
The Product
MY HOLLYWOOD DEBUT
I successfully frittered away an entire day this week scripting, filming, directing, editing, costuming, tending to hair and makeup, casting and starring in a special film project I can say no more about except to note that hands down I discovered the most important person on any film production crew is the lighting director and I didn’t have one. I planned the filming for the late afternoon when the light coming from the setting sun on the west side of the Park dances across my living room (and I hoped, my cheekbones) which was a great idea except by the fifth or sixth take it started to disappear and all the makeup I’d loaded on began to give me a certain raccoon-like appearance. The result, all 68 seconds, is no Sundance entry but I got the job done.
THE LATEST LIST
Another sign things are looking up, or at least I am, is that I’ve started a new list.
Things I Plan to Do When Covid-19 is No Longer Novel.
1. Get the TV mounted
2. Get someone to wash the windows
3. Head north to West Hartford
4. Head south to North Carolina
5. Head west to Buck Hill
6. Head east to . . . some place
7. Renovate the kitchen
8. Play tennis
9. Play tennis
10. Plan a lobster party
11. Reserved for future us
My good deed of the week was making a $137 contribution to WNYC during its three- day pledge drive. I phoned it in to a strangely un-cacophonous call center which of course wasn’t a call center at all, it was to the kitchen of a hired fund raiser. Turns out, it wasn’t even in New York City. She was in Michigan! She asked if it was still “dangerous” in New York City. Haha, I told her – not as dangerous as states with open carry laws. The previous week All Things Considered featured an on-the-scene interview with a protester at the Michigan state capitol who was crying – crying – on air because the lockdowns meant his daughter was missing her senior prom. While waving a gun in the air. I originally pledged $120 but she asked her an additional $17 for the News Fund. Of course, I told her.
Have a happy Memorial Day everyone!
Cheers
mbl
so entertaining... am a bit behind but catching up as a sit in an... airport!!