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So Much Light … Not Enough Night
It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m back to doing doubles at the Deathstar. I’d say that it “seems like old times” but no times seem like old times anymore at the mothership. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
New Year’s used to be quite the event at my “day job” (a law firm that we support staff like to [half] jokingly refer to as the nexus of evil in a galaxy far, far away). Our offices loomed over 42nd and Broadway. We’d flock to the windows just before midnight to watch the team in charge of the ball drop scurry around below us on the platform and as the countdown ended, the fireworks would rise up to meet us, exploding literally before our eyes.
The novelty of the night shift soon wore off and I moved heaven and earth to get an early morning schedule, so I was as shocked as anyone when I volunteered to go back to overnights for a while. A while. Because I think even the most arduous work schedule is doable when you know that it’s temporary.
I’d originally thought I would talk about why I flipped my schedule on its head but suddenly, I could not. It makes me sad and crying is not allowed at the Deathstar. Suffice to say, this is where I need to be now, so that I can be where I’m needed, later.
Thus my long winter nights will be spent under lights and by summer, perhaps, my nights will be blessedly dark again.
I wondered, as I sat here in the Deathstar’s new digs, much farther west, if I’d be able to get a glimpse of the party goin’ on outside our old place. Yes indeed. Here are some Winter Lights for you:
Happy New Year, Ricochet. May it be a good one for us all.
Published in Group Writing
Happy New Year, Sweetie!
God bless you Kel.
Happy New Year’s Kel. The trouble I have working nights is that it makes it really hard to do things. Either you’re working when events occur in the evening or you’re asleep all day for ’em. On the other hand it means I almost never have management types looking over my shoulder. That part is pretty nice.
There’s a certain elegance to Captain French that makes further embellishment unnecessary.
Of course, I’ll post other comments anyway.
On the subject of elegance, you know what really cheeses me off about going back to nights? Every fast food restaurant in the city has shortened its hours using the excuse of the pandemic. If I need a burger and fries I’d better have my butt in the drive thru by quarter to nine, and then it’s a long wait ’till five thirty in the a.m. Buncha numbnuts.
I used to enjoy that late night, early morning solitude.
When I was a film projectionist on Times Square, in a disremembered time between the Nixon and Reagan administrations, I used to work some of the latest movie times in the city, probably the country. A nominal 4 am close time usually meant that a carefully scheduled show would end at something like 3:47 am. This work schedule isolated you from the vast majority of normal human beings, who slept at night and did not spend their work hours in company with Kung Fu fighters, rubber monsters, or European “dramas” with plenty of skin exposure. I’d take a fast cautious walk downtown to 34th street and caught a 4:30 am commuter train out of the city. I’d walk from the station and be asleep before dawn.
Projectionists had done this for a half century before me. Out here in Santa Monica, Douglas Aircraft built their own theater, the Aero, to provide 24 hour entertainment for the three shifts at the DC-3, C-47 factory on Ocean Park Boulevard. There was more street crime than we tend to remember back then, but nothing compared to later years. Without TV, bars and restaurants boomed until closing time. We think of the Forties as old fashioned and fuddy-duddy, but the slick, sleek, modern Fifties had what novelist Ross Macdonald referred to as “the television curfew”; night life was shrinking. The crime wave finished a lot of it off.
But you know what was a psychic lifesaver that arrived in the mid-to-late Seventies? VCRs. Suddenly you saw the same edition of the evening news and the same episode of Vega$ the same day, more or less, when everyone else did. You were no longer quite as isolated.
Long time no see, Kel!
It is more than an excuse. Night work is no favorite of the potential workforce, which is like as not to not bother showing for that late shift.
I love the city nightscape photographs in this post closing out our December theme: “Winter Lights and Dark Winter Nights.” January’s theme is “The Time When Life Changed.” Resolve to sign up and write this month.
Quelle Surprise
🤗
The worst was getting a mid-morning or noon audition at the last minute, for which you either had to try and squeeze in a power nap or just try to stay up and power through. I used to dream of finding a casting agent who kept “farmer” hours:
Agent: “Hi, I’d like you to come in and read tomorrow morning. Is 7am too early?”
Me: “No, that’s perfect!! I’ll just stop by on my way home from work.“
Yes. Supervisor sightings have been rare, here, thanks to the hols, which is just how I like it. Also, I believe that my being here outside of normal work hours with half a city block of social distancing between myself and the only other soul on the floor right now means that we are allowed to go with a much more . . . nuanced interpretation of our pointless, silly, annoying mask mandate. Since there’s no sup here to run that theory past, we’ve just gone ahead and put it into practice.
As you can see from the other comments, you’ve been missed around here. Thanks for checking in at last.
My usual desk is in the northeast corner of the building, which made me a solo audience member for some spectacular sunrises, when I was working here during the lockdown. I’ve now discovered that same corner has my favorite view at night, as well, which I got a shot of earlier this evening:
Something else I’ve discovered, is that the “New Yorker” sign does not stay on all night. Because I’d tried to take a “before” shot toward Times Square for this post, on New Year’s Eve — which was a much more clear, fog and rain-free night — but just as I went to take it, the sign went out. And yeah, since I’ve been away for about six months, after having looked out that window nearly every single day for so many days, it felt . . . . kinda personal.
I will try to do so more often.
Right now, however, I am checking out. It is dead, dead, dead at the Deathstar tonight and we are now close enough to the AM staff’s arrival that I feel safe cutting out a bit early.
I am so excited about going to bed while it’s still dark outside!
Kel, it was great seeing you just before Christmas. Alas, the new mayor appears to be just as insane as deblabbio was.