When we lived in San Francisco, we belonged to an organization, BroadwaySF. It would bring anywhere from six to eight Broadway shows (plays and musicals) each season to San Francisco. As subscribers, we were guaranteed seats and we regularly purchased six tickets for each show.
The last one we saw was the musical “Anastasia” in September 2019.
We also used to enjoy going to a lot of local live performances by artists we loved, including Billy Joel, Jackson Brown, Don Henley, Peter Frampton, Sting, Steely Dan, and even Randy Rainbow.
We didn’t renew our BroadwaySF membership for the 2020 season because we knew we’d be moving to the East Bay in early 2020, but still planned on going into the city to see at least some of the performances.
And then the pandemic hit, and everything shut down, including BroadwaySF. I believe it has since started sponsoring live performances again, but we are done with going to live venues, even outdoor ones, because people are crowded in. And despite what everyone says, people are still contracting COVID.
So going to live performances, be they shows or music concerts, are over for us, I’m sad to say.
Diana was excited. She hadn’t been to an actual movie theater to see a movie since before the pandemic. She remembered the last time she’d been at this multiplex. It was right before Christmas in 2019 and the theater was packed with movie goers coming out to see the Christmas blockbusters and holiday movies. She loved going out to the movies in those pre-COVID days.
Now here she was, after an absence of more than three years, about halfway up the steps from the multiplex’s lobby on her way to the second level, where there were 14 individual auditoriums, each showing a different movie. She had a box of Raisinets in her coat pocket, a bottle of water in her left hand, and her ticket in her right hand.
She glanced at the ticket. Theater 10. The showing time was at 1:25, eight minutes from now, according to her watch. Plenty of time to get in, find her seat, take her coat off, and settle in before the previews of coming attractions started.
Diana hoped that this outing to a multiplex theater marked the beginning of the return to normalcy in her life. In all of our lives.
Written for Cyranny’s One Minute Fiction Challenge. Photo credit: Cyranny.
Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.
How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Flashback Friday post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.
If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 17th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.
This was originally posted on March 17, 2020, just as nearly everyone in the United States was being ordered to stay at home, to shelter in place due to an outbreak of coronavirus.
No, No, No
No sports No late night comics on TV No bars and restaurants No school No entertainment No movies or shows No concerts No gatherings No toilet paper No fun
Welcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration.
By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.
What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.
In the decade before I retired almost six years ago, I worked from home. I only went into the office about once a month at the most. And I loved working remotely. I had several headhunters contact me about potential job opportunities, but when I found out that they were office-based, I wasn’t interested.
I retired three years before the pandemic hit and sent a significant portion of office-based workers home. But it seems now that a growing number of employers are requiring, or are planning to require, employees to return to the “brick and mortar” offices to perform their jobs.
Companies like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Apple, Google, and Twitter have or are trying to get employees back to working on-site. A May survey found that 76% of high up executives say in-person work is critical. And Elon Musk is demanding that Tesla workers return to the office full-time or quit.
This demand that employees head back to the office after nearly two years of working from home is a growing source of tension between employees and management. Some recent surveys show that millions of workers want to stay home and would likely quit their job rather than go back to a daily commute.
The most recent round of research from this month shows that among full-time wage and salary employees who are able to work remotely, more than three in ten said they wanted to do so five days per week. Only 16.8% of respondents said they would rather be in person pretty much all the time.
So my provocative question this week has to do with your thoughts on working from home versus going into the office everyday. If you’re retired, or if your job is one that can’t be done remotely, you might respond hypothetically, as in if you were not retired or if you had a job were you could potentially work remotely.
Have you ever worked from home as an alternative to going into a worksite to do your job? Would you prefer working from home or working from an office? If you have been able to work from home since the pandemic hit and are now being told that you have to return to showing up at the office everyday, how would you feel about that?
If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments. But remember to check to confirm that your pingback or your link shows up in the comments.
This, That, and the Other 