(Editor’s Note: This column — penned by Todd Tarbox, author and editor of two Welles-related books — first appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette. It is reprinted with the kind permission of its author.)
By TODD TARBOX
Since March 13, when the World Health Organization characterized the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, the Coronavirus tsunami has flooded into every fiber of humanity’s being.
Two weeks ago, I was enthusiastically engaged in convincing a New York theatre company to stage “Marching Song”, a play centering on enigmatic, controversial, firebrand abolitionist, John Brown, written by seventeen-year-old Orson Welles and his teacher and life-long friend, my grandfather, Roger Hill, published last August by Rowman & Littlefield.
For the past several days, my focus has shifted radically to combing Colorado Springs grocery stores for toilet paper. Both searches, to date, have been feckless. Being of an optimist bent, I’m confident of achieving both objectives, one, hopefully, sooner than the other.
In my quest for the latter, the adventure is sobering to the point of alarming. Not only is toilet paper not to be found on the shelves, but all paper goods have also been wiped clean. Neighboring grocery store shelves that less than a fortnight ago were overflowing with abundance, now approach, or equal the availability of a loo roll.
My trek to the grocery store recently with my bride, wish list in hand, was like we were playing bit parts in Groundhog Day. To our disappointment, again, egregiously few wishes came true. Particularly distressing was the total absence of meat and fish. “We’re expecting our next load in two days,” our typically ebullient butcher, Ben, informed us despairingly. “I’ve never seen anything like this in thirty years in the grocery business.”
Checking out with a literal handful of items, in front of us was a middle-aged couple who were shopping for a grandmother living in a nearby nursing home. As I saw, who I presumed to be the husband, take a package of hamburger buns out of his cart and hand it to the cashier, I interjected, “Well, you must have picked up the last hamburger in the store. Congratulations.” No, there’s not a pound of hamburger in the store,” he responded. “I shot an elk.”
Returning home, I opened my computer and read an email from my fellow Wellesian (author of three biographies, and the fourth and final volume in progress), English actor of the first rank, referred to by many of his countrymen — and — me as “a national treasure,” Simon Callow.
Reflecting on our times, Simon wrote:
“To think that only ten days ago, I was rehearsing a big Broadway-bound musical (score drawn from Britney Spears’s back catalogue). I arrived on Tuesday night, ten days late because the U.S. Embassy had dragged their feet over issuing the visa, rehearsed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning. At lunchtime, the producer, with trembling lip, announced that we were “suspended.” “Go home, Simon,” she said. I was on the 8:25 p.m. plane back to London, where I bumped into the director Stephen Frears, who had likewise been told to go home: he had been about to shoot a six part-series starting on Monday.
“So, we are At Home, as the Victorians would have it. It’s just weird. Streets empty, cafés, pubs, restaurants, closed, to say nothing of theatres, concert halls, museums, and galleries. I wrote a little something about it for the New York Review of Books,” which he attached, and I recommend highly.
He concluded, “I imagine that spring is bursting out all over your mountainsides, as, ignoring our mere human scourges, it is here in the parks and our garden. The globe, now markedly less polluted than it was, is serenely going about its business, and the birds are in full-throated celebration of their very existence. So, all is not quite lost.”
Spring is bursting out all over our Cheyenne Mountain. Simon is quite right, despite evidence to the contrary, “all is not quite lost.”
Todd Tarbox, author of several books including “Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts,” lives in Colorado Springs.
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