First Drafts: Pandemic Reflections

I wrote this long weekend and want someone to see my first draft

I shouldn’t have moved out of my Washington Heights apartment in March 2020. Even as death tolls and positivity rates only rose, hospitals piled bodies in trucks waiting for availability in funeral homes, and more businesses shuttered, I felt a part of myself die as my family moved me back to the suburbs. It would take me about 4 years to move out of my parent’s apartment, the third time I would move out since graduating college.

Aside from world events, I was fine. Despite disruptions, I could still finish my graduate degree, interact with my family, and continue my part-time fellowship. But I have never been able to weather chaos well. So, I chose the home I knew versus the one I was still building. I didn’t know what was coming but I did know how to live at home. In her own way, my mom tried encouraging me to have more faith. She assured me the city and I would bounce back. But frequent sirens drowned her out.

For her, being a New Yorker meant finding joy even when the city seemed bleak. It was how she thrived in a New York City that withstood the crack, heroin, and AIDS epidemic, as well as Stonewall, various race riots, and the aftermath of 9/11. She had grown up in a Do the Right Thing kind of Brooklyn, her home city had always been a disaster. When she attended high school, the city became bankrupt. Crime rates skyrocketed when she returned from college to start med school. Nixon, then again Reagan, had defunded many of the public programs that lifted her and her peers into the middle class. Still, in all the fires, casualties, and rubble, she found ways to move forward. Hope for humanity was a choice she grimly made every day.

She and my dad think of those times fondly. They found themselves even as the city spun out of control. My dad also used to reminisce on the Punk, Hip Hop, and Disco scenes. When driving down the West Side Highway or through Times Square. He would note how these areas used to be “the pits,” how even drug dealers were afraid of these areas. “Even if the city is safer now, at least back then the city had character,” he’d lament. Communities who lived through the strife raised the city’s value, not real estate developers changing parts of the East Village to NoHo.

In contrast, I’m only familiar with post-Giuliani, Friends (lifting from Living Single), Sex in the City, Bloomberg business, concrete jungle where dreams are made of.

In October 2020, Bill Burr was delighted that the global pandemic and national lockdown actually had helped New York return to some of its scrappy roots during his SNL opening monologue. The city started looking like the inside of a Bed Bath & Beyond, he joked. Pandemic-era New York City looked and felt like the 70s and 80s, given he’d gotten punched in the face by a stranger not long before the show’s taping.

My first experience with the ghosts of NYC’s past sent me running home.

The short-lived operatic teen drama/hip-hop’s origin story, The Get Down, displays for younger viewers some of these characteristics. Baz Luhrmann’s penchant for melodrama ironically suited this project—even if Luhrmann’s flair for flashy optics did not impress Netflix executives when he spent 16 times his initial 7.5 million budget. Netflix canceled the show after one season.

The series is set in a mob-run, divested south Bronx and follows poet Zeke and his friends who aspire to be a part of the growing hip-hop and disco scenes. Even with flashy dance scenes and over-the-top martial arts imagery, the show highlights a New York City clawing its way out of bankruptcy and the young black and brown kids finding a way to create amongst the devastation.

I wonder now if the show would have been more successful if it had debuted in 2020 versus 2016. The nation wasn’t ready to romanticize New York quite yet. Also, millions of people weren’t locked down with nothing to do but watch streaming platforms. For these reasons, the 2021 film West Side Story remakes found greater success than it might have otherwise. Nostalgia made many forget that most West Side Story remakes, including the Natalie Wood version, suck. Racism always makes something go awry in the production of a musical about racial animus.

But back to disco and youth culture of the 70s. To celebrate the release of the Renaissance, album taps ballroom culture, disco, house music and all their intersections, Beyoncé hosted a 70s themed party, hitting us over the head with deja-vu. Not surprising that the interest in disco, house music, and dance genres coincides with book bans, anti-trans anti-LGBTQ propaganda, and rising misinformation.