Comedian to host Ladies of Laughter THE DISH
Lamont adviser sees heroism, missteps in state’s reopening
Out there… The Friends of Greenwich Library is hosting an evening of laughs with the Ladies of Laughter from 7 to 8 p.m. Thursday, March 11, featuring Greenwich comedic performer Jane Condon as master of ceremonies. The virtual stand-up comedy night will feature Condon along with three other comedic queens; Boston-based stand-up comedians Kathe Farris, Christine Hurley and Kelly MacFarland. For more info and to participate, go to www.greenwich library.org or call 203-6227900.
Scene… Actor/writer and Fairfield resident Christopher Atkins, famous for his role in the 1980 film “The Blue Lagoon” with Brooke Shields and the TV drama “Dallas,” was seen celebrating his 60th birthday recently at a private party with family and friends at Wake-Cup Coffee on Constant Comment Way in Fairfield.
Out there… The Bedford Playhouse in nearby Bedford, N.Y., is featuring a Zoom Q&A on “Author Talk: Eleanor with David
Michaelis.” The conversation, moderated by Playhouse founder John Farr, takes place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 11. Michaelis met Eleanor Roosevelt when he was 4 years old. They were backstage at the WGBH-TV studio where his mother produced the first lady’s show, “Prospects of Mankind.” The prize-winning biographer is the author of “Eleanor,” a new biography that “chronicles the timeline of her life and achievements as well as her lifelong search for love.” Ticket buyers will receive a link when registering. For more info and tickets, go to www.bedfordplay house.org.
Scene… The long-awaited grand opening of Pizza Post and Gofer Ice Cream has arrived. Both establishments have reopened their doors at 522 E. Putnam Ave. in Greenwich, more than a year after both were damaged in a fire.
Out there… The RealReal has opened on Greenwich Avenue. The luxury consignment shop, which has 15 retail locations across the country, is famous for
its deals on designer clothing, jewelry, fine art and home décor. And all items are the real deal.
Test your trivia… Literacy Volunteers at Family Centers will hold its virtual trivial night at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 10. The game will feature three
rounds of 15 fun general trivia questions, and Literacy Volunteers students will also share inspiring stories and original written works to showcase their progress in their journey to learn the English language. Proceeds will benefit Literacy Volunteers
and its free English-language instruction and basic literacy services, which are offered to 600 local adults each year. For more info and to register ($25 to participate), text LVTRIVIA to 41444 or visit www.familycenters. org/trivia.
“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” — Eleanor Roosevelt And that’s all for now. Later …
Got a tip? Seen a celebrity? Email Susie Costaregni at thedish2@ yahoo.com
The day starts with snow, but it’s ending with sunlight and a wind that smells like spring.
The Nightingale Fiddlers are warming up in at Ivoryton’s gazebo. The group came together five years ago at Nightingale Acoustic Café in Old Lyme. They are adult beginners and accomplished musicians. Some read music. Some play by ear. When they’re not performing, they are engineers and teachers and people of uncertain provenance.
Every year – every non-pandemic year, that is — the group’s oeuvre shifts with the turn of the calendar page, says Dana Takaki, band member and a classically trained violinist. They swing from Christmas music to Irish to Americana, dance lightly through some classical music, and then they go back to Christmas, when the swing starts all over again.
This is the Irish part of their year — mournful songs sung at a pace that doesn’t seem sad at all. It is perfect for the day.
Takaki plays with the New Britain Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of Westerly when those organizations have concerts. She said she played more than 100 shows in 2019. In 2020, she played around 20. The last place the Nightingale Fiddles played before everything shut down in March 2020 was Fiddleheads Food Co-op in New London. When they finished, one of the patrons was crying. No one had any idea what we were facing. We just knew it would be scary and hard. Maybe that patron had a sense of how quiet things would be without live music in public places.
We lost the music, as we’ve lost beloved people, and sometimes,
hope. We’ve lost and missed so much, some of it strictly symbolic but important all the same.
As has been the case for nearly a year, Ivoryton’s small green is mostly deserted as the Nightingales unload their instruments. Has every small Connecticut town felt abandoned this past year? Local restaurants have been mostly take-out, though that’s changing. Ivoryton’s historic library across the street from the gazebo first went online, and now allows for scheduled in-person browsing. Patrons can also call and have books/puzzles/whathave-you left for them on the porch in a bag with their names on it.
Every town and every entity in the state has found new ways to exist, from one-way aisles in the grocery stores to signs that encourage social distancing and masking. What’s been challenging in Ivoryton hasn’t necessarily been what we’ve added to exist during a pandemic. It doesn’t take a genius to wear a mask or observe traffic patterns at the Big Y.
But there’s been something essential that’s been taken away in this little river town known for town-wide parties. Those include December’s Illumination, October’s Pumpkin Festival, and the Fourth of July parade that includes fire trucks, floats, and a large pig that once lived in town and developed a fan base. All events were modified or put on hold until better days returned.
This year, the town had Christmas lights, but no large hunt for the shelf on the elf, no Santa flipping the light switch, no public caroling, though just about every night, some family came to this same gazebo — lit bright for the season — and let their children run through the dreamscape volunteers create every year.
When you’re hunkered down and trying to live through a pandemic, you don’t dare stop to think about what life will be like when the virus is no longer a threat, when we can gather at the green for concerts and carve pumpkins as a town.
But better days could be coming. Recently, Gov. Ned Lamont lowered the eligibility for COVID vaccinations to people age 55 and above, which encompasses slightly less than a quarter of the state’s population. The next age group’s turn is just around the corner, and then the one after that and after that. President Joe Biden said all adults should be vaccinated by Memorial Day or thereabouts. The one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine just arrived in the state. The state positivity rate has dropped.
Might it be time for just a little music?
On this day in Ivoryton, temperatures will drop 20 degrees and the next day will be frigid, with wind that will rattle windows. But tonight?
Yes to fiddle music, especially fiddle music that’s lights up a too-quiet town green. Five musicians playing fiddles, a guitar, a whistle, and a bodhrán stand distanced and ready. Brian Schiller’s beard bulges from beneath his mask.
“What key are we in?” asks Michael Harris, another fiddler. B? D? Does it matter? It’s “Rosin the Bow,” and they’re off. A woman wanders by with a tiny dog on a leash. They’re wearing matching sweaters. An older man stops to lean against a light post. The music picks up steam and the band members sing a lusty “When I’m dead and laid out on the counter.” It is an audience of two, one nodding in time, and another smiling toward the gazebo. Better days ahead? Could be.
The Nightingale Fiddlers, including guitarist Hugh Birdsall, will play from 1-4 p.m. March 13 at Spruce Ledge Tree Farm in Deep River. The event is free, but donations are encouraged. The rain date is March 20.
We lost the music, as we’ve lost beloved people, and sometimes, hope. We’ve lost and missed so much, some of it strictly symbolic but important all the same.
NEW HAVEN — For Dr. Albert Ko, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health and a lead adviser to Gov. Ned Lamont on COVID-19, the pandemic has offered lessons the nation would do well to learn.
Structural problems in American society, including a lack of support for public health, including the ability to track emerging diseases, and major inequities in health care that harm people of color, predated the coronavirus and helped to plunge the nation into a year with 500,000 deaths, he believes.
“It’s almost a kind of a sadness — it’s very hard to escape — about what this pandemic has told us in the big picture,” Ko said.
One good thing that could come out of the pandemic would be finally addressing those endemic problems, he said.
Ko, who led the Reopen Connecticut Committee last spring with Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi, put together a plan with Gov. Ned Lamont and his team that spared Connecticut much of the suffering of other states and the confusion experienced in rolling out vaccines.
“[Nooyi] ran it tightly and she made sure that all the attention to detail was done. That plan was really to her credit,” Ko said. “We did it carefully and she really, in her executive skills, was really key.”
While the U.S. has not handled the pandemic as well as others, such as South Korea and New Zealand, the experience hasn’t been all negative, Ko said. “There are a lot of success stories like the vaccines. … A vaccine in one year, it’s just tremendous,” he said. There also have been “success stories, the really heroic efforts” of health care workers. “We saw how countries like Italy in the first surge got overrun, completely overrun — 20, 30, 40 percent of health care workers getting infected,” he said.
Erosion in public health infrastructure
Ko said the pandemic showed “the disproportionate impact that this has had on the United States compared to other countries. … This really showed us decades of neglect in investment in public health.”
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “kind of the pride of the country,” Ko said, “there’s been an erosion. That didn’t happen just in the last administration. And there’s certainly factors within that administration that eroded the strength of our public health decision-making processes, but that erosion happened over decades.”
Ko also believes the U.S. has fallen behind in its use of scientific data and evidence in addressing public health issues. “We see other countries have now become kind of the paradigms, thinking about countries in Asia, about really not only the flexibility but the speed and the rapidness of using data to inform decisions,” he said.
Another longstanding issue is the inequity in health care, “the disproportionate impacts on communities of people of color,” Ko said.
“It’s not like that happened overnight, either. We have to ask ourselves why,” he said. “This is a disease that affects the elderly, that affects people with underlying medical conditions, and how can we allow ourselves to have large swaths of underserved communities and the people living in underserved communities with really poor states of health that place them at risk.” COVID is merely a symptom of a deeper problem, he said.
Ko believes we will not be able to eradicate COVID-19, largely because it is so highly contagious. “There’s some similarities, but there are also important differences between influenza and the coronavirus,” he said. “The first thing is that this disease is much more transmissible. A good example of that is that we have almost no influenza, right?” That’s been attributed to measures such as wearing masks and social distancing.
“And yet we’re having a lot of COVID. That tells you how difficult, how this is different from influenza,” he said. “Because of that transmissibility … my gut feeling is that we will never eradicate this disease. The best we can do is to control it.”
Another reason the disease will continue on is the resistance by some to take those steps to protect both themselves and others. “That’s going to take buy-in, citizenship, people thinking about others, just not themselves,” said Ko, who has long experience working in the poor cities of Brazil.
“We just did a survey of people in the poorest slums, urban communities in the city that I worked in. Eighty percent of people want to take the vaccine,” he said. “And the biggest motivating factor is because they want to protect their family and they want to protect their community. And that’s what we need to create, that kind of citizenship.”
What the state got right
Ko said he thought Connecticut, for the most part, had made the right decisions when it came to reopening after the shutdown in March.
“It’s easy, especially for us in academics, it’s easy to sit back and criticize and be the armchair epidemiologist,” he said. “There’s an obvious need to make decisions, based on evidence, and science-driven, and those have been almost kind of like cliches now. But in reality, decisions are made on judgment because we have lack of evidence. … In reopening the state, I think we got it right. We had low levels throughout the summer and going into the fall.”
Keeping bars closed and schools open were two important decisions that some states went the opposite way on, he said. “I think we have to be completely humble in what we know and what we don’t know, and we still don’t know exactly what the risk is in people going to school,” Ko said. “But based on where we’re at now, I think the state got it completely right in doing everything it can to keep the schools open. One, because of this issue of disproportionate impacts, the people who depend on schools and don’t have access to the learning.”
Ko also defended Lamont’s decision to open up vaccinations largely by age, in order to get people immunized
in as efficient a way as possible. “In a mass vaccination campaign, or any mass public health prevention, we need to do it simply,” he said. “The more complicated … you make a lot of problems along the way. And I was always concerned about the CDC recommendations that came out.”
While some younger people with health issues will be behind healthy 50year-olds, Ko said “it’s a question of speed and efficiency versus precision.”
“Generally, age is what we call a marker or proxy of health status,” he said. “So, certainly, there are going to be those people, but … that’s the balance between … getting it out quickly and … targeting it to people with the highest risk. There has to be a balance between those two and especially in a mass-vaccination program.”
Ko said Connecticut has done a good job of protecting nursing home residents, at least in the second wave.
“I remember I was at Yale New Haven Hospital. The first case was diagnosed March 13,” he said. “And it just spread like wildfire in not just Connecticut, but New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts. … And there’s not enough time to react. Lesson learned. Second wave, they got the testing in. There are still outbreaks in nursing homes, but much less than what we
observed in the first wave.”
The speed with which the pandemic hit had everyone scrambling without the proper tools, Ko said. “We’ve got to take ourselves back. At that time, we didn’t have a diagnostic test. Remember that the CDC had dropped the ball on that. We were completely unprepared (in) the hospitals. … Marie Landry [director of the Yale School of Medicine’s
Clinical Virology Laboratory] was the first one to come up with a clear, FDA-approved test outside of what the state was using.
“It had already spread throughout the nursing homes,” Ko said. “We didn’t have a test. We didn’t know who was infected, who wasn’t infected, who needed to get quarantined, who needed to get isolated. … We’re telling people not to
come into the hospital unless you’re sick because we didn’t have any tests out there. So kind of bring ourselves back to that mindset. … Not to be kind or generous to the state, but it was a horrible situation. We were completely unprepared for it.”