Tale of 2 towns: Texas and California namesake

Mayor knows coronavirus still a danger: ‘We need to take this opening nice and slow and watch the numbers.’ Margaritas could help

Pleasanton, in Texas and California, blaze different paths in reopening as COVID-19 concerns continue.

In Pleasanton, Texas, Sheila Crouch served margaritas on the rocks Friday to the customers she hadn’t seen in weeks at Paisley’s dress shop to celebrate the re-opening — finally — of downtown’s Main Street after the coronavirus lockdown.

“We all need a drink after this,” said Crouch, the shop owner. “We’re slamming the door on April and welcoming May.”

In Pleasanton, California, Jim Coughlin led a yoga class — alone, in front of a video camera — inside his Downtown Yoga studio on nearly-empty Main Street.

“I feel like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage — I don’t know, bewildered, betrayed?” Coughlin, 62, said. “I feel like Steven Colbert on the Late Show doing an act without an audience. I have the Mac Air up and an iPhone on a tripod. I hit record and start my monologue — ‘Day 475’ — I feel like the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979.”

Hey Texas, pass the margaritas!

As the rest of the country takes baby steps to reopening Main Street, Californians are watching with a little bit of envy and a little bit of disdain. Texas is opening churches. California is closing beaches. And despite public health officials warning of a secondwave of infections if we let up too soon, you don’t have to go to Southern California to hear the growing griping.

“It’s killing our businesses, and I think it’s an overreaction,” Herb Ritter, chairman of the Pleasanton, California, planning commission said Friday morning as he walked his dog down the shuttered storefronts on Main Street. “It’s a ghost town.”

The Lone Star State was one of at least 10 on Friday to begin lifting stay-athome restrictions. There, retail shops, movie theaters, libraries, churches and restaurants — with some restrictions — started flipping the closed signs to open.

In their Pleasanton, selfproclaimed birthplace of the cowboy and home to the biggest chicken-fried steak platter this side of the Mississippi, residents do believe everything is bigger and better in Texas. But Mayor Travis Hall Jr. insisted they’re only dipping a toe into the shallow end as they restart their economy and will be taking plenty of precautions with the coronavirus still very much a threat.

“We need to take this opening nice and slow and watch the numbers,” he said of the COVID-19 infection rates. “As we do, if the numbers start spiking, we’ll probably have to back off.”

The mostly ranching and farming Texas town about 40 miles south of San Antonio has had three people test positive for coronavirus and all are recovering.

Paisley’s, which has been doing business online and with curbside pickup for the past month, welcomed in about 50 customers Friday morning in the first hour and a half — it’s a big store and people spread out, Crouch insisted — and did brisk sales of their bedazzled face masks.

Since wearing masks is voluntary in Texas, according to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, she gave her employees the choice. When an older customer came in without a mask, her employees donned their own.

At The Office Bar and Grill, manager Cindy Arevelo already had booked reservations for 48 people for Friday night — half her available tables on her outdoor patio that seats more than 375. But the lunch crowd was slow — only four tables by 2 p.m.

“I think people are a little wary or people are back to work — I’m hoping people are back to work,” said Arevelo, who closed the restaurant a week before it was required in mid-March because business had dropped off so dramatically. “Some people have made comments they don’t want to go out to eat yet.”

The Office was one of the few local restaurants to open Friday. Others found the rules too onerous, including operating at no more than 25 percent capacity, stationing an employee at the front door to open and close it, and using paper menus and disposable plates and cutlery.

“The list of guidelines to open is three pages long. By the time grandma looked at it, it would be more costly for us to open up,” said Erica Lopez, who runs Chris Cafe with her grandmother, Mary Rodriguez.

Besides, she said, their famous chicken fried steak with fries is Texas- size — and won’t fit on a paper plate. And it will be difficult to hold back from her customers, many who grew up in town and “walk in and get a handshake or a hug.”

“I don’t want someone to go in that’s careless or hasn’t been abiding by the lockdown and they’ll go in and get one of my regulars in their 70s or 80s sick,” Lopez said.

One of those regulars is Ray Wisdom — who’s “crowding on 80” years old — and has been frustrated from the start of the lockdown.

“We‘ ve been through some real hard times due to droughts, and I’ve been through about three oil field busts,” he said. However, “my personal opinion is that we’ve overreacted to shut the whole country down, and I think that’s what China wanted us to do.”