RVM Programs and the Pandemic

by Bob Buddemeier 

Remember when?  Back in the (pre-COVID) day, almost every Thursday evening and some Tuesdays, there would be live entertainment in the Manor auditorium.  Mostly a wide variety of kinds of music, but also occasional dance, lectures, or other performances.  Programs are funded by the Residents Council, with occasional chip-ins from the RVM Foundation

All were booked and arranged by Mary Jane Morrison, chair of the Program committee.  Bert Chumbler handled the technical set up and advertising, and Ollie Sontag looked after seating and getting in the residents from the licensed facilities.  Jo Ann Basin and I helped out around the edges with programs, thank-yous, etc.  It was a comfortable routine, with auditorium-only shows – “live performers deserve a live audience” was Mary Jane’s position.

L to R: Mary Jane Morrison, Performer Marty Davis,  Bert Chumbler, Ollie Sontag

Then — the dreaded virus.  Suddenly, a whole new dimension was added to the “live” in live audience and live performers, and keeping them literally alive meant not having them present alive in person.

And yet, a locked down community needed entertainment and distraction more than ever.

As the saying goes, when the going got tough, the tough got going, and as soon as Mary Jane could get approval to have outsiders back in the auditorium, we started having Thursday evening programs broadcast on Channel 900. The process, over more than a year and a half of the pandemic, went through multiple stages as shown in the chart.   From the original regime, we went through the initial shut-down and then into the televised restart.

Restarting programs involved major booking problems – since people could not get together to rehearse, almost the only groups available were solo performers or husband and wife teams.  Until social distancing and lockdown controls relaxed, we could get no orchestras, choruses, dance studios, etc.  Fortunately, some of the local performers were ready to step in on short notice, and Sarah Karnatz graciously shared her list of Bistro performers, some of whom accepted auditorium gigs. Although artists are permitted to remove their masks while performing, all performers must be vaccinated in order to be booked.

An important contributor to the shift to Channel 900 presentations was Mike House, RVM staff AV technician.  He had always seen to the sound quality for the auditorium show, but now he took over the tasks of broadcast and recording quality control as well as on-stage sound.

When restrictions loosened up somewhat, more groups became available for booking, but the auditorium was pressed into use as a dining venue.  Both the shows and the dinners managed to get done, but it was sometimes an uneasy compromise.  While the auditorium was being used for dining, there were difficulty adjusting sound levels, and sometimes competing noise from the diners.  Some performers found dining sounds (dishes & chatter) bothersome and felt it lessened the quality of their performance.

As it sometimes will, progress happened, and RVM began to transition to new video equipment and software.  And as is almost always the case, progress was not smooth and simple – for a number of weeks it was necessary to record the performance on one Thursday, and play the recorded version on Channel 900 the next Thursday.  This arrangement was generally confusing and frustrating for all involved.

However, we are now back to relative normality – the broadcast system is working, the auditorium isn’t used for dining, and we are able to bring in medium-sized groups.  But set aside relative normality – will it ever be absolute?  Mary Jane says she hopes that we can go back to live audiences by September 2022 at latest – maybe Spring, with luck.  In the meantime, she says that “What is missed most is feedback from the viewing audience.  Performers often tell us how much harder it is to perform to no audience.”

As long as occupancy restrictions are in effect, we will stick with broadcast only rather than trying to ration a limited number of seats among the residents.  When restrictions are finally lifted, Mary Jane plans to try an experiment: “When we open up to a full audience (100-150) we’ll still broadcast over Ch 900 provided that there is still a respectable size audience in the auditorium – otherwise we’ll have to limit it to auditorium only.”

One of the other problems with broadcast-only is that we have no idea about the size or reaction of the audience.  If you are watching and enjoying the program, let one of the Committee members know.  It helps to ensure that the show goes on.

by Anne Newins

Manor Library volunteer Liz Caldwell recently compiled a list of the hundred most read books during the past year.  We thought the list might spur residents to see what others are reading and check them out themselves.  It became the inspiration for our November display.

Ellie Cannon, former Library volunteer

The books include an eclectic mixture of non-fiction, mysteries, thrillers and literary novels.  A complete list of authors is too long to include here, but they include best seller authors, as well as ones who may be less familiar.  One of my personal favorites Is Maggie O’Farrell, author of Hamnet. The most read book so far this year is The Sentinel (Lee Child), closely followed by Anxious People (Fredrik Backman), All the Devils are Here (Louise Penny), and The Four Winds (Kristin Hannah).

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the origins of our discontents, was the most popular non-fiction book, followed by Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker.   I can’t resist mentioning a large print volume titled The Secret Life of Groceries, by Benjamin Lorr.

Finally, mention should be made of the most circulated RVM publication over time:  Vision With a View, by our own Faye Isaak.   This history of Rogue Valley Manor has been read by many library users as well as people who have purchased or been given their own personal copies.

Finishing a Novel during Covid Time

By Madge Walls

My novels have routinely taken six years to finish. Why? Working fulltime, many other distractions, and sheer laziness. Add in my favorite activity of reading other author’s novels, and you get the picture.

When Covid-19 hit in the spring of 2019 and Rogue Valley Manor closed down all group activities and began delivering all meals to our doors, we had to make peace with being basically shut-ins. How, then, to keep busy?

There in my computer lay my unfinished work, The Visiting Girl, inspired by the early life of movie star Katharine Hepburn’s mother, a suffragist who’d had to fight her guardian/uncle to attend Bryn Mawr College according to her late mother’s will and wishes.

I’d become bored with the novel after working on it for those six years. But when I went back to it, I realized I had unwittingly set the tale in 1900 through 1923 (reflecting the elder Kate’s young life), when my characters’ lives would have been impacted by the Spanish flu pandemic, The Great War, Prohibition, and the women’s suffrage movement.

As I dove deeper into my research, I saw more and more how our life today seems an echo of that era: our own Covid-19 pandemic; the wars of our adulthood—Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan; efforts to prohibit mask and vaccine mandates; and women’s rights that we are still fighting for. I was blown away by the similarities—do we never learn anything?

Guiding my characters (or having them guide me!) through their perilous times a century ago in Philadelphia and Portland led me to take a deeper look at our own dilemmas. The exercise was fascinating and opened my eyes to our recent history as never before (how bored I was with US History in high school!). Not only did I finish the novel, but I gained a whole new and evolving understanding of NOW.

Big thanks to Joanie Fotheringham for the perfect title of this essay: What Goes Around, Comes Around.

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Editor’s Note: Copies of Madge’s new novel will be available at the Craft Fair on November 1 in the Auditorium.

by Anne Newins

This month’s display will feature fiction and non-fiction books about actors.  Why are people interested in actors’ lives?  It seems to me that when young, one reason many people are curious about actors is because it gives them vicarious pleasure.  Most of us are not simultaneously rich, good-looking, and famous.

However, by the time actors have been in the business long enough to have biographies written about them, our interest in them may have changed because we have aged ourselves.  It is hard to believe that a seasoned actors  like Audrey Hepburn, Michael Caine, Robin Williams, or Ingrid Bergman would not have had challenges, some sort of artistic insight, or viewpoints different from our own as well as unusual life experiences.

Fictional work about actors gives an author tremendous leeway in terms of character development, usually skewing towards their flaws.  After all, who wants to read a novel about a boring, nine to five sort of person?  Suspense writers are drawn to actors, including popular authors like Jonathan Kellerman and Michael Connelly.

This month’s display also will include biographies about Michael J. Fox, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, novels by Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, Kristin Hannah, Stuart Woods, and many others.

The display table is located near the main entrance of the library.