“There are things we can all do to get through this by following the advice of experts and taking care of ourselves and each other, no? Remember, despite all the current events, there is no crying in baseball. Hanx”
Tom Hanks tweet today
(Tom and his wife Rita have been diagnosed with Covid-19)
I took the above photo of The Old State House in Boston on the first day of this month. Just 11 days ago—but it seems like a year of events have transpired in that time.
At least in New England life seemed relatively normal. I went to a documentary workshop in Rockport, Maine the last week of February knowing that there were concerns of the COVID-19 virus overseas and limited places in the United States. But overall, it was business as usual.
I walked around some of the key historical sites in Boston on the afternoon of March 1, and flew back to Orlando later in the day. The next night in Boston state health officials announced they’d identified “the first presumptive positive case of the coronavirus in Massachusetts.”
And that situation was duplicated in various parts of the country, and before you know it SXSW canceled their upcoming conference in Austin, movie premieres were pushed back, the stock market took a big hit, NBA suspended their season, MLB canceled spring training, Disneyland and Disney World announced they would be closing for the month of March, and colleges began making plans to finish the semester via online education.
A lot can happen in a little over a week. We’ve sadly seen the damage done and the loss of lives in in China, Iran Italy, and radical steps throughout the world have been taken to stop the spread of the virus.
I doubt I’ll write much about the virus and will plan on continuing to blog about movies, screenwriting, and filmmaking for anyone looking for a healthy creative distraction from the regular news. But I do pray for those suffering and hope that the world can get back to normal in the coming months. (And since a pandemic has built in goals, stakes, and urgency I might be writing about it from a dramatic perspective more than I think I will.)
The symbolic thing about The Old State House is back on July 18, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed by Col. Thomas Crafts from the east facing balcony to a crowd gathered below.
It’s reassuring knowing that this country has weathered a lot of storms for the past 200+ years and will hopefully weather this one without too much damage. I didn’t care for history when I was in school, but I love it now for the perspective it gives.
P.S. My next post will touch on how Walt Disney helped entertain people through one of the toughest decades in U.S. history.