The Dancer

Cafe Locked Out: The Essays

The Dancer

These should be christened the paradoxical years, for in a time of darkness, some people found light; in a time of fear, some people found their courage; and in a time of silence, some people found their voice. I have evidence. I have recorded some these.

The flat’s window

That said, as I started writing this, I discovered that my memories of these last five years have fused their locations within time, and now are softening into those pieces of broken glass you find on a beach—the ones whose sharp edges have been smoothed out, and whose holy pellucidity is now and forever, a cloud.

My first recollection of covid, was our tech guy talking incessantly about Wuhan and some virus that was locking that entire city down, a city few of us had heard of before, as our company’s new play, Adrifting, performed to a small audience in Kew. The play was inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, except in our time and country, the Orchard was a house, the temple of the Australian Dream, and since they couldn’t afford the mortgage repayments, they were about to lose it. Oh yes, and it was our first comedy.

Adrifting, The trial run

This was a test season. I was scrutinizing the audience to see if and when they looked at their phones, meaning they’d lost interest. Meanwhile, with deepening concern, the tech kept whispering about the pandemic. His wife was Chinese, so he claimed to have first-hand information, but when he whispered to me, “They’re gonna shut us down too. You watch. They’re gonna shut us all down.”

I replied, “Watch this, they love this scene.”

And as the audience laughed, it stoked my Producer smile. Together, Rohana and I had worked hard to get the play on, so to see and engaged audience laughing, was gold, especially seeing how Rohana was in it too.

“Shutting us all down?” What did that even mean?

The next afternoon, though, as we turned up to prepare for that evening’s show, hand sanitizers were sitting on the bar, and sheets of paper with information about what we could do to minimise the threat of the virus. I can’t recall what it said, for a part of me was thinking that it just was the government being overly cautious. Plus, we were too busy.

Two original full-length plays on simultaneous runs, both being well received. Another, The Magnolia Tree, only a few months away from our first fully funded regional tour, the Army preparing to tour Marooned, and several other plays waiting for their turn to try their luck on the stage.

This was the shore of our dreams. In our fifties, and thanks to lots of hard work and persistence, we had reached here, on our own terms, and built a jetty. Now we were stocking our boats to see how far each play could sail.

Snap shot from our play Marooned

That’s why we were too busy to notice that another stage was being erected beneath our lives. One that would accommodate all of us, and this combined play was about to stop.

That said, parts of our own play had already stopped. For various reasons, none of them good, Rohana and I had been experimenting with a trial separation. So while Rohana had taken a lease on a flat above a struggling café, I was moving between house sitting gigs and renting a room in a mate’s flat.

We were trying to evaluate whether living apart would see us work better together.

Her flat was old, and rundown, or if you like, had bucket loads of character. This was the fringe of inner-city Melbourne, and her large bedroom was the front room, and her paint-peeling windows overlooked the North Balwyn shops, through which, every few minutes, the trams rattled by.

But by the time she’d allowed me to move back in, since I was always there working, Covid was here, all these shops were closed, and everyone who was on the tram, including the driver, was wearing a mask.

I remember watching these masked folk and contemplating my already forgotten place in history. It was a ghost of an entry that briefly stated, as a playwright, he’d almost made it, but then he’d died, with millions of others, in that century’s plague.

It wasn’t even a sad thought. To be honest, I thought it sounded cool.

Whether this was fate, or destiny, or just plain old bad luck, it was clear that it was going to be an interesting ride. Then again, if we did survive, what sort of plays would you write about and for an audience brutalized by pestilence?

This was the time when they were pushing, two weeks to stop the curve, staying apart keeps us together, as videos from China showed citizens dropping in the streets, and videos from Italy displayed Italians singing from their balconies to celebrate the courage of their medical staff who were tirelessly working on Covid’s front line.

This amount of global fear was new to us, and since medical experts were claiming that hundreds of thousands of us were going to die, and since, too, the virus was airborne, staying at home, to stem the spread, sounded like the best of a couple of bad ideas.

Also, since many of us were also being paid a government allowance to enable us to stay at home, Rohana and I did something we hadn’t done in years . . . We stopped.

Initially it wasn’t bad. Up until then, life was working hard, paying bills, worrying about our children and their future, and money. Always, there was the worry about money. But suddenly the government was giving us enough to live on, and since the theatres were closed, this was kind of like a forced holiday.

Rohana was a doer. In all our 20 years together, I’d rarely seen her do nothing for so long. Yet here, with the luxury of time, we became lovers again.

With our two teenage children haunting their rooms, where they both went to school and accessed their lost world and all their friends via the web, we’d sleep in, and lay there listening to the music of the now-empty trams, before, out of boredom, Rohana signed up for an online flamenco class, and I decided to have a crack at writing novels.

I gave myself a goal of writing a thousand words a day for each novel. In the morning, I wrote one, and then in the afternoon I’d write a thousand words of another, while downstairs, in the living room we rarely used, Rohana filled the flat with her petite stomps, before, in the afternoon, we’d edit the work together, before spending time consuming something neither of us had consumed before ... Podcasts.

we weren’t awake, then. Like many, we had suspicions about many things, but rarely discussed them, because they didn’t, directly affect our lives, plus we had a passion for our work.

I had already taken it for granted that the virus had been engineered in a lab, but rather than believing in depopulation, I thought the virus had escaped, and now the authorities were scrambling to control the damage and hide the truth of their incompetence, and I was on the phone to my father, who lived in Perth, suggesting that he keep mum inside, for with compromised immune system, she was definitely in danger from the virus.

At that point in time, living deep within the worlds of my emerging novels, I still hadn’t sensed anything nefarious. Instead, I, like Rohana, was just secretly praying that all this would pass quickly, so we could get back to the boards.

And then our prayers were answered.

Totti Goldsmith and Ezra in The Magnolia Tree

As soon as the first lockdown was over, we commenced a preplanned, city and regional tour of our play, The Magnolia Tree. Once again, we were a small theatre company on the road; setting up our set on various stages, watching the audiences arrive, then pulling the stage down and packing up the van with it, before heading to the next gig.

There were masks everywhere, elbow handshakes, but bottom line, I just kept working and enjoying the tour.

Our company up in lights at The MTC Melbourne Theater Company

My son was with me. He was our roadie, and I knew, as it was happening, that this time was precious. Not only did we work hard and well together, but driving between gigs, he’d be the DJ, playing me music I’d never heard, and generally, without even knowing it, gifting me with his presence.

But then, on the morning of our last gig in Sale, the government claimed they had recorded one or two cases of Covid, and they had decided that from midnight, the entire state would be locking down again.

Having fun in the Lockdowns

After that performance, where we played to a theatre that was only a third full because a lot of the audience had cancelled, due to fear, we packed up and raced back to the city, and our children, hoping we could make it before midnight, in case the police or the army locked us out of the city.

But there were no border patrols. There were just the lights of Melbourne, glittering as though nothing changed had, and a sense that things were beginning to spiral out of control.

Thanks to social media, we were now receiving information from two sources: mainstream media and online, and the jigsaw pieces that were being delivered to us via the web did not match the picture being fed to us by the government. Worse than that, a lot of our government claims, didn’t make sense.

Daily, they kept spruiking fear, fanned by main stream media, and the more claims they made, the more holes appeared in their story. Plus, unlike those videos from China, we began noticing that people weren’t dropping dead in the streets, instead, the media and the Government were just acting as though they were.

Were they just making mistakes, under pressure? Or was it truly possible that something else was happening, something, darker and on a global scale?

Yet if you brought up your concerns with people, they didn’t see it. They just trusted the Government who they saw as benevolent.

It was around about then, as they were just starting to sell these new vaccines, developed in an impossibly short amount of time, that during a phone call with my father, that I asked him what he thought was going on.

“I think they’ve decided to cull us,” he said.

“Me too,” I replied, and that belief must have been lingering under my skin, looking for a way to break through the part of me that wanted to hold on to what was already being lost, and not wanting to believe that what I suspected to be true, was true.

Suddenly, I changed my tune, and suggested that in order to keep mum safe, they should avoid the vaccine. Just give it some time.

They did. Three times they cancelled their appointment, before on the fourth attempt, they went and took it.

It was now that I also noticed that the public’s blindness was become darker. While we see could what we believed were glaringly obvious holes in the unfolding narrative, fewer and fewer people around us could. And the more holes we found, the more we wanted to point them out, only to find even less people wanted to know. Instead they started putting this ring around their profile pic:

“I just got vaccinated, you’re welcome.”

And as few people questioned that, from our evening window, it felt like we could see lights going out. One by one, as the encroaching darkness began to lay siege to our little flat.

Woman Locked Down with Dogs

To keep our own lights burning, I used the fuel of common sense to create and post rants. Short ones asking simple questions, and while some people agreed others began attacking. But they weren’t debating the substance of my rants, but rather me personally for having the audacity to challenge their government.

I just had questions that no one else seemed to be asking. But instead of receiving answers, people in the theatre world, supporters who liked our work, were contacting me secretly, and urging me to stay silent. Warning, that by speaking out, I was endangering my theatrical career.

At this point, the theatres were all closed again, and it appeared that they would be for a long time.

At this point, the novels were both written and posted on Amazon, where no one was reading them.

At this point, I’d started remaining indoors, not because I was scared of the virus, but because I couldn’t understand why so many people were silent. Whenever I was in the supermarket I searched their eyes, for a connection, but most people avoided this, and or quickly looked away.

At this point, the government had already upped the stakes, once again, by bringing in the first curfew.

A curfew? What? Now the virus can tell the time?

But if their goal was to up the fear, it was working.

It was now winter, and below our window, after nine, the street was always empty, apart from the trams. Even if they pulled up at the stop across from our window, the masked people who emerged would quickly scurry away, as though they knew that something was hunting the streets for them.

At this point Café Locked Out was weeks away from being born, and still unaware of any marches, locked up in our own flat, we watched the Government singing the praises of the jabs, as MSN and the public sang along like a choir.

I do recall one man, on an ABC radio talkback show, stating proudly, that he’d already download his vaccine passport, and that anyone who refused to get vaccinated should be forced to and jailed, and instead of challenging him, the host agreed. What made it worse, was that all the people calling in were on the Governments side.

And to make sure we understood that there were now sides, they began talking of segregation, and job losses.

Then one night, around midnight, as Rohana tried to sleep, I sat at the window searching the street again for who knew what.

I could not see then that our theatre careers would soon be gone, or that our marriage would also eventually fail, or that from the ashes of both, I would become a podcaster.

All I could feel then, in my silent soul, was the persistent approach of this encroaching dark.

A darkness from which suddenly a young man emerged and alone he stood under a streetlight.

My first instinct was to call the police. It was my duty as a citizen, to dob in this dangerous non-conformist. Then with my next thought, I began reigning myself in.

What are you doing. He’s not hurting anything.

This was the momentary battle to defend who I was, from who their fear was trying to make me become. It felt like I was trying to extract poison.

And then I stopped fighting, for despite seeing that he was unaware that anyone was watching him, upon his tiny stage and below his street light spot, this young man began to dance. It was a slow moving breakdance, and even though he quickly turned around and vanished back into the dark from whence he came, sitting here now, I can still see him dance, because in the dark of those memory’s this young man was and still is, a light.

And despite the fact that I will never know his name, or where he came from or went, nor will he ever know that I wrote this about him, if this story moves you enough to like or share it, or even retell it, then the light of his artistic moment of courage could continue to spread, like an elixir of hope for us all.

Michael Gray Griffith

Cafe Locked Out The Essays

Would you be interested in a novel of these collated essays, or perhaps you have a book of your own you want published, if so please contact John Stapleton who will soon publish them.

These are his details:

John Stapleton
Commissioning Editor
A Sense of Place Publishing

Emails:

john.stapleton@gmail.com
asenseofplacepublishing@gmail.com
Skype: mr.john.stapleton

Websites:

http://asenseofplacemagazine.com/

https://johnstapletonjournalism.com/

www.asenseofplacepublishing.com