‘Is the city back to normal?”
That’s the question every non-New Yorker asks about our city. And the answer, I’m afraid, remains “nope.”
On the outside, it can look as though things are normal-ish. In reality, we have simply adapted to a set of insane, unsupportable rules which look set to remain in place forever.
While thousands packed into the Super Bowl stadium last Sunday, schoolchildren in California, like New York, continue to do physical exercise outside with masks over their faces. A New York friend relates that last weekend he watched his double-vaxxed son play soccer outside in a mask. For the first time, parents were allowed to observe. Also in masks. Only to be policed by officials threatening to expel parents should their masks slip below the nose.
Enter Libby
I had a taste of this fresh hell last Saturday. Some Canadian friends were in town and generously took a group of us to see “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway.
On the way into the theater, bouncer-like staff screamed at us to form the correct queues and have the right documentation ready. We appeared to be visiting Azkaban, not Hogwarts. It was just the first of the evening’s delights.
Inside the Lyric Theatre, they had tried to recreate the atmosphere of an English boarding school. As a survivor of such an establishment, I can tell you they did a grand job emulating the most sadistic aspects of such institutions.
The trouble started when one of our party bought water and a couple of beers for the group. With not much change for $100 for this pleasure, we took our seats. All through the auditorium prefects marched around with signs saying, “Masks Up.” We were in the welcoming arms of the Ambassadors Theatre Group.
Soon a member of staff came to warn me that I had failed to pull my mask up fast enough after my most recent swig of beer. As the show began, someone with a name badge saying “Libby” came over and told off another member of our group for failing to bring their mask up swiftly enough after sipping another of the overpriced drinks the Lyric Theatre had just sold us.
As the show began, it seemed that Libby (a k a Dolores Umbridge) had identified us as troublemakers. Flagrant sippers. After the lights had gone low, I noticed Libby standing at the end of our row staring down it, hands on hips. There she stayed, glaring through the dark.
To say this distracted from events on stage is an understatement. Impressive though the effects are, the 3¹/₂-hour plot was already pretty arse-numbing. What made it more so was knowing Libby was monitoring us throughout. Whenever she slipped out briefly, another monitor took her place. Eventually, Libby got what she wanted. About an hour into Act 1, she spied through the dark that a female member of our party had failed to replace her mask swiftly enough over her nose and mouth. Libby clambered behind our row in the stalls and startled my friend by spitting at her loudly to pull her mask up.
By the time the interval came, one of my Canadian friends — Jordan Peterson — and I decided it might be a good idea to do that regrettable thing and ask to speak with the manager. We asked. At which point we were reintroduced to Libby. Libby was the manager, and explained that we were under suspicion because our group had already received three warnings for insufficiently speedy remasking after sips. Jordan and I both asked for further guidance on what exactly constituted permissible sip length.
‘These are the rules’
But there is nothing you can do when you meet blank officialdom like this. Libby told us that this demented policy applied to all theaters run by the Ambassadors Theatre Group. “These are the rules,” she kept saying, and if we didn’t like them we were welcome to leave. Jordan Peterson and I appeared on the brink of expulsion from Hogwarts.
I later checked the ticket prices and was astonished to see that stalls tickets for “Harry Potter” range between $149 and $329. Meaning that my kind hosts had paid a couple of thousand dollars for a night out at a theater where we were sold drinks we could not enjoy in a theater we were invited, without refund, to leave. Eventually, Libby wielded her ultimate threat. A thread of my own mask had come undone and had been harmlessly tied up. Infraction number four. Libby struck.
“I am going to get my COVID safety team” she announced, storming off. I imagined being pursued by Dementors. In fact, the COVID safety team turned out to be a large girl with a new mask for me.
It is hard to relay how reluctantly we returned for Act 2. The only moment of relief came at the show’s climax when the dark lord Voldemort appeared on stage. Very scary. High tension. Some cowering from the younger members of the audience. Eventually, the Dark Lord came down off the stage and made his way scarily through the center of the audience. “He’s going to tell us to pull our masks up,” said some wag. A portion of the theater dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
On the way out, we took our masks off with an air of abandon. But the Ambassadors Theatre Group was not done with us. Bouncers stood outside, bellowing at us to exit in particular ways. Only once we had thrown off this last line of Dementors were we finally free. For all the effort of the performers, I wouldn’t go back to “Harry Potter” or any other theater run by the Ambassadors Theatre Group if they paid me.
But I was left thinking, not for the first time, how our city needs liberation from these people. The COVID enforcers have to go. Along with all the stupid, pointless, carefully demeaning rules they are making us live under after most of the world has clambered out from them.
What will happen to the mask enforcers when their empire finally does fall? Well, I don’t know about Azkaban, but I know Rikers Island always needs wardens. How strange that Broadway should have been the place that trained up its next intake.
