In 2021, All the World’s a Stage

We got through 2020 with pictures of normality in our heads. In a few months they’ll start to come true. 

By Peggy Noonan

The Wall Street Journal

Dec. 31, 2020 7:21 pm ET

[Original article contains links] 

Image from article PHOTO: CHAD CROWE 

You have to go into this year with dreams, there’s no other way to do it. We’re still in an epic struggle, and it will be a while before things settle down into some approximation of normal. Dreams are how we got through 2020, or maybe not dreams precisely but a picture you kept in your head that helped you keep going, that captured what you missed and will have again. It was a picture of When the Pandemic is Over and we carried it in our psychic wallets.

My friend John’s picture: He’s in Fenway Park, the seats are full and close together, and he orders a Fenway Frank and chowder, and the other people in the row pass them down without fear or masks. Someone gets a hit and no one’s afraid to cheer. He is certain this will come.

My friend the professor would see this: He and his students are in a room, and he is teaching them. For what seems like forever they’ve been postage-size faces on Gallery View on Zoom, which is how they see him. But in his head they’re together and know each other and he’s Mr. Chips again, not Max Headroom.

A friend who’s a reporter kept in her head the idea of future spontaneity. She’d be on the phone with a friend: Whatcha doin’? Wanna get in a car and get lost? What if we just show up and surprise them? Let’s see who’s in town. 

My vision of 2021, the picture I held of that future, came into my head in early summer. This would come: We are gathered in a darkened theater, 1,500 of us, for the first time since March 2020. The orchestra starts, the curtain rises, and on the stage a crowded old railroad coach is in full cry. The train conductor booms, “River City next station stop!” And in the audience applause starts, unplanned, just erupting, and the actors playing the salesmen on the train play through. “Ya can talk-talk-talk. . . . Ya can talk all ya wanna, but it’s different than it was.” Suddenly a tall man in a natty suit comes forward: “Gentlemen, you intrigue me. I think I’ll have to give Iowa a try.” It’s Professor Harold Hill, the Music Man. He’s played by Hugh Jackman. We’re at the revival that was supposed to open in 2020. Now pent-up emotion really breaks out and what builds is a wave of unstoppable cheers, and then we can’t help it, we stand. And Mr. Jackman understands this moment, and after a minute he stops the show, and in a great flourish, as if speaking for all the history of the theater past and present, makes a deep and graceful bow. As if theater itself were bowing to all of those by whom it lives.

And all of us know: Theater is back. The thing we loved, that stands for New York City, that is this city, the stage, has returned. And we applaud for 4 minutes and 18 seconds straight, and in that time we realize we’ll never get over this moment, this first show when we knew the great pandemic was over. And life went on.

The great comeback of 2021 is surely coming, at least according to the new picture I have in my head, and it will be led and fed by the idea of pent-upness. There’s so much pent-up desire for joy out there. Surely it will begin to explode in late spring, with vaccines more available and a spreading sense that things are easing off, and be fully anarchic by summer.

Growth will come back, people will burst out, it’s going to be exciting. Businesses will start to come back to office buildings and see if that works. The great newsrooms will be full and bustling with noise again, and the young hire will be given a desk, not a Zoom link. We will call old friends for dinner and meet at crowded restaurants and everyone will be grateful for each other. Some people will go a little crazy and say how about a long weekend in Paris, and we’ll do it and not only for fun but to see that Paris is still there.

There will be a hunger to be out there again, en masse again. On the streets of my city at night it was once fairly common to see glamorous men in tuxedos and women in satin shawls. We are going to see them hailing a car and on their way to a party again. The young will come out of their apartments and flood into the streets dressed in all the colors in the world.

There will be much wreckage to get through, no point in not seeing that. It is odd that after almost a year the government doesn’t seem to have its hands around the number of small-business closings. Yelp reported that 60% of its listed small businesses that had closed as of August would never reopen. An estimated 164,000 had closed, 98,000 of them permanently. The numbers may be higher: A study from the University of California, Santa Cruz found that in May, the number of small-business owners was “down by 2.2 million or 15 percent from February,” although it had risen 7% in April.

There’s always a lot of churn in small businesses each year, but walk any city or town now, and there’s an unforgivingly targeted nature to this catastrophe. It’s not only “job loss” or even dream loss; small businesses are the beating heart of everything. Salons, restaurants, shoe stores—they’re where people go and gather. They keep the streets alive. They need support, and in my city it’s not only the pandemic doing them in. Real-estate firms have bought up buildings and closed the shops below to build expensive condos. They’re removing part of what made people want to live in the neighborhood, the stores and their street traffic, the sense of liveliness and the commerce they bring.

What guts it will take the owners and workers of small business to keep going, or start again, or shift weight and go into something else, something new.

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote about the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is of something, you can name it and face it, and in the facing of it lift your own morale, show yourself what’s in you. Anxiety is amorphous; it doesn’t quite have an object, it’s a state. And so it’s harder to shake and no empowering necessarily comes from it. A lot of people this year will have to break down a generalized anxiety into specific fears and deal with them courageously.

America has been through so much this year—world-wide illness, lockdowns, death, sickness, searing arguments about how to handle it all. We tried to do what we had never done before, close everything down to fight a disease and each day, in real time, face the economic, social and cultural repercussions. The personal ones, too. It’s going to be the work of years to dig ourselves out fully, but there are many reasons to believe we can and will. 

My idea of an appropriate American attitude comes from Carl Sandburg, in his poem, “The People, Yes”: “This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.” That wouldn’t be a bad picture to keep in our heads for 2021, the laughing anvil.