Nik Rabinowitz reflects on lockdown
Comedian Nik Rabinowitz fills us in on how he got through lockdown – and he wants you to know his pool is clean and his Grade 4 maths is on point!
‘IT WAS ME! I DID IT, I GOT THE BEACHES TO OPEN’
WHEN Covid- 19 brought everything to a grinding halt last year, comedian Nik Rabinowitz was determined not to let the global panic get him down. It’s not all gloom and doom, he told YOU – there’s still so much to be thankful for. A year on he writes to us again, reflecting on the challenges of lockdown and trying to stay sane when everyone around him seemed to be losing their minds.
HELLO, YOU!
It’s been a year since we last spoke. After three hundred and eleventy-sixty-seven days of awkward elbowslash-fist-bumping, obsessive hand-sanitising, temperature-taking, mask-wearing, Zoom-watching and moonshine-making madness, I’m back!
How are you? Introverts, still living your best lives? Let me guess, you never want the pandemic to end. Introverts who formerly identified as extroverts, isn’t it great that you can finally “come out” (but stay inside) as your true introverted selves?
It’s been an incredibly challenging year for everyone. Some have had it far worse than others, of course. Many lost jobs. Others lost loved ones. Yet others experienced the hardship of having to cancel skiing trips to Europe and not being able to buy cooked chicken from Woolies. #TheStruggleWasReal #TooStressedToBeBlessed “Pivoting” quickly became the 2020 buzzword. My cousin pivoted from furniture-maker to PPE manufacturer around the same time I pivoted from stand-up comedian to sit-down homeschool principal, a position I didn’t manage to hold for long.
In my defence, I was physically present for school every morning but I’d frequently disassociate and stare into space until our three-year-old started yelling or hitting me with her bunny, or both.
Once, during a Zoom call, she moved her potty underneath my desk and dropped her pants. I muted myself and shouted, “Sophie, what are you doing?”
She shouted back, “Shush, Dad, you’re disturbing me,” followed by, “I’m finished, wipe my bum,” followed by, “Don’t forget to unmute yourself.”
One morning I woke up to find she’d completed an art installation on almost every wall in the house with a permanent marker. I was walking around the kitchen muttering, “I can’t cope” and “This is too much” when the middle child asked, “Dad, why are you mumbling to yourself ?” I said, “I’m not mumbling. I’m in a parent-teacher meeting.”
For his lockdown birthday, I suggested we play hide-and-seek. My plan was to get everyone to hide then just not seek, ever. I figured that would buy me at least 10 minutes of peace. It didn’t work. Like moles, they just kept popping up.
BY WEEK three I understood why so many dads “go out for a pack of smokes” and never return. Unfortunately for me, 1. I don’t smoke and 2. even if I did, I was too scared to ask our neighbourhood WhatsApp group who the black-market dealer was in our area,
although it was probably the same woman with blonde highlights delivering bottles of whisky to my neighbour in brown paper bags and yelling, “I promise I didn’t take your bottle of brandy!” into her cellphone.
Middle- cl ass lawbreaking used to involve fiddling your tax and watering during water restrictions. Now all of a sudden the president of the school PTA was trying to distil pineapple beer in his backyard, and our daughter’s nursery school teacher was trawling the backstreets of Diep River for illegal cigarettes.
And then there was the random classification of essential and nonessential goods. At one point you couldn’t buy a jigsaw puzzle from Pick n Pay, but you could pick up a 12-grand robot vacuum cleaner online at Yuppiechef. I imagined them sweetening the deal by throwing in a block of Himalayan salt hand-polished by Tibetan monks.
By the end of level 5, the country was a pressure cooker. Powder kegs of ginger beer and apple cider could’ve gone off at any point. The battle of the yeast hoarders seemed inevitable. Imagine a group of marauding bakers taking on a gang of home brewers – things could’ve got truly messy.
Relationships were taking strain. Take Sophie and Peppa Pig, for example. They’d been solid for years. Suddenly she was screaming, “I HATE PECKER PIG!” at the TV for no reason.
After listening to psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel talk about repetitive cleaning being “the antidote to desire”, I decided to take my wife “out” on a date to watch the full moon rise (from the stoep).
It lasted five minutes. She claimed she was cold, but we both knew she secretly wanted to finish a black-market puzzle and the penultimate episode of Tiger King.
There were some lockdown benefits. I cleaned the pool 16 times a day, perfected my newfound laundry folding technique and “helped” our oldest with his Grade 4 maths homework.
I’d overheard my wife’s friend on their
Zoom call say she was doing her daughter’s homework, and I thought that’s how I could pull my Grade 4 maths average up from a D to a B, and then if lockdown got extended for another decade, I’d get the marks I needed to get into medical school and finally make my Jewish mother happy.
Also, in the words of [comedian and actor] Robbie-Rob-Rob van Vuuren, “Nature was making a comeback.” My kids became budding backyard ornithologists. “Dad, that’s an Arctic tern.” “No, son, that’s a mossie.” Videos went viral of dolphins returning to the waterways of Venice (which turned out to be a story fabricated by people so bored they’d turned to inventing fake animal news to pass the time). The penguins took over Simon’s Town. There they were, while we were stuck inside, rolling down the high street, vindictively rubbing it in as if to say to us humans, “You guys used to make fun of us for how we walk . . . Look who’s walking now.” People started saying, “Think of all the great works that came out of previous pandemics.” Shakespeare produced three plays during London’s Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and an outbreak of the bubonic plague the following year. They asked, “What will our generation come up with?” The answer to that, apparently, is memes.
AND then, like banana bread from heaven, Cyril gave us level 4. Four soon became 3, 3 became 2, 2 turned into 1, 1 kind of went back to 2, but not quite, and now, almost a year later, we find ourselves in what I begrudgingly call “the new normal”.
If, like me, you’re still trying to figure out what the new normal is, when it will all go back to the old normal, what happened to Max Normal, and to what future normal this will all lead, well . . . who knows?
Perhaps amid the confusion, uncertainty and drama the best thing for us to do is to continue to be kind to ourselves and each other, and to remember the wise words of a wise sage who once wisely said, “This too shall pass.”
Because of course corona shall pass, even if it shall pass like kidney stones. My friend Larry had some kidney stones removed during the pandemic and he’s fine! So that’s hopeful.
The only cliché left for me to add is, “Stay safe and be safe.” Oh, and also, “Lock the safe” – even if there’s nothing of value left in it.