August 22, 2021
“Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues
In the middle of the pouring rain.”
~Marc Cohn
Of course he was walking with his feet ten feet off of Beale Street, Memphis in that song, but it came to mind in Central Park, NYC yesterday anyway. The Delta Blues in this case aren’t the ones that inspired Cohn, Clapton, the Beatles and so many others. Rather, they’re the blues caused by the approaching Delta variant that’s been decimating the Mississippi Delta and the South generally all Summer long. It was a faraway and easily ignored problem to many a New Yorker, with no practical relevance here, as we smugly went about our fully vaccinated, masked, and socially distanced lives here. We were doing so well that we decided to spike the football after scoring a COVID-19 touchdown by throwing a week long “homecoming” celebration.
NY Philharmonic opened the show.
Not so fast! Upon further review, we are not actually out of the woods! A few weeks ago the CDC dropped a bombshell study – hundreds of vaccinated people in MA tested poz for the cunning and vicious new Delta variant. While most of them escaped serious illness and none of them died, the news was terrible because it showed the wily variant’s knack for getting past the vaccine. Not only did it evade the vax, the viral load in the breakthrough cases was as high as in the unvaxxed. Uh-oh is right!
Jennifer Hudson and the NY Philharmonic
So the CDC recommended going back to wearing masks indoors, even if vaccinated. In itself that was nbd for us here since many had never stopped masking and most shops and restaurants still required them. The chinstrap mask variant had become very popular around here. The problem was school. With no remote option this year and no vaccinations for children under 12 (who have been catching the Delta variant and becoming sick in alarming numbers) we have a recipe for disaster.
Music industry legend Clive Davis
Throwing an approaching tropical storm into the mix only made our collective sense of impending doom grow stronger. The Delta variant is coming! Booster shots are coming! Tropical Storm Henri is coming! And the first day of school is coming! So we decided to kind of ignore all that and throw the biggest concert in ages last night in Central Park. Tens of thousands of music fans snapped up free tickets and some super fans coughed up thousands of dollars for VIP seating. The show, like everything else this past year and a half, was the good news/bad news deal that we’ve grown accustomed to.
Carlos Santana
The good news was a lot of big names in music were scheduled to appear. The bad news was that most of them didn’t perform because Henri rolled in early dumping tons of rain and lots of thunder and lightning on the festivities. It set a new record for rainfall: nearly 2″ in the hour in between 10 and 11Pm. Almost 4 and a half inches fell on the Park overall yesterday, setting a new record for the date.
Barry Manilow’s set was interrupted by Trop Storm Henri
The celebratory concert ended, appropriately enough, with a succession of contradictory messages. Right in the middle of Barry Manilow‘s set a recorded announcement took over the sound system. It advised everybody to leave quickly and seek shelter from the storm. People looked bummed out, but since the rain was already starting to come down pretty hard, they complied without making a fuss. Many of them huddled under the nearby trees to shelter from the rain, practically daring the lightning to strike them down. Others simply kept going after calling it an early night.
But before most of the people had even left the concert grounds, another announcer piped up saying they hoped to resume soon as this weather moved out of the area. At this point a lot of people who’d been exiting did an about face and returned creating a bit of a pedestrian traffic mess. Finally, after all of this and with the rain now drenching absolutely everybody, an announcer said the show’s cancelled. Once again people headed toward the exits, this time in the pouring rain and with lightning bolts crackling across the sky above.
Coming? Or going?
The trek out of the park was a slow but orderly slog in a heavy downpour. Everyone was soaked through and through. It was around 8PM and the 86th Street station was filling up with soaking wet people. A crowded C train knocked off early at 145 Street instead of 168th and the A took us the rest of the way back to Inwood from there. Back up on the street the rain was still coming down hard. So we were pretty surprised when we turned on CNN to see Anderson Cooper talking remotely with various musical acts who were still backstage around 9PM and holding open the possibility of resuming the show. Was anybody even still in the park to watch it if they did, we wondered? Yes! Evidently some of the people who had paid a fortune for their VIP seats were holding out. No matter. After another hour or so of false hope, even CNN threw in the soaking wet towel and admitted the obvious: the show was over. The holdouts finally conceded the loss. Mother Nature had won another one, just like she always does. Well played, Henri (pronounced “ahn-REE”)
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