I love my "quarantine" companions: Tina the cat, Dearest Partner, and my next-door neighbors. I see my gym friends via Zoom twice a week and my international group of crossword solvers once a week. But I didn't realize how much I missed the actual physical presence of other humans until I went to an outdoor concert at Primitive Hall on Aug. 30. (Primitive Hall, the big brick house on North Chatham Road between Routes 926 and 842, is the historical home of the Pennock family.)
This was the fifth year for the concert by local balladeer Charlie Zahm and fiddler Tad Marks, and there was much discussion among those of us on the Primitive Hall Foundation board about whether we should hold it: Could it be done safely? We decided that it could, if we enforced mask wear and social distancing and cleaned the bathroom after every use. We recruited a diligent bathroom attendant and used a measuring stick to space out the groups of friends.
And what was the response? The cars just kept pouring in! We had set up a folding table with spare masks and Hall information -- and we had to keep moving it to accommodate more cars. Over 140 people attended!
Folks were ecstatic just to get out of the house. Guests thanked us over and over for holding the concert: "You have no idea how excited I am," one woman told me. She said the last concert she saw before the shutdown was, in fact, Charlie Zahm, and she was thrilled to see him again (Charlie has an especially loyal fan base, known as the "Zahm-bies").
The weather was beautiful -- cool and sunny -- and sitting in the walnut grove with friends, listening to music again, was a truly heartening experience.
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