When summer comes, many of us place food at the Hollywood Bowl.
Whether we come for symphonies or reggae or to sing “The Sound of Music”, to fill benches in the back or boxes right in front, to eat pate or popcorn, drink champagne or soda, music has something to put together.
He’s true right now.
On Thursday, he sneaked into the Bowl parking lot, with a long queue stretching along the highland avenue blocks.
The screen or so familiar and so shocking, so overwhelming and so comforting.
Because it was in the morning, not in the afternoon, and no concerts were held.
People queuing to get loose boxes of food.
They arrived here at the distribution of food behind the wheel, organized through the Regional Food Bank of Los Angeles in partnership with Los Angeles County, BMW and Audis, in old cars banging and in new, lustrous cars, in vans loaded with children and pets, in pickup trucks loaded with paint cans and lawnmowers.
And the Hollywood Bowl, its entire season canceled through COVID-19, once back has to do what it has done for 99 years: be a kind host for a grateful crowd.
Public collecting puts in and its uses are being redesigned.The same goes for the way we paint and help others, either in practice and keeping hope alive.
In the food distribution and complex ecosystem of the Hollywood Bowl, a Los Angeles County park operated through the Los Angeles Philharmonic, examples of such a replacement abound in form.All of the approximately 109,000 in Los Angeles County are redistributed crisis services, and many have been redistributed in recent months.
Gary Gero, who oversees the county’s food distribution, its director of sustainable progression through March.He then became director of the county’s food security branch, and went from an immersion in a long-term policy on problems he described as “at the intersection of the environment, social justice and the economy” to a practical effort whose benefits to citizenship are immediate.
The county has worked with the food bank on about 30 gifts since April, I said.They’ve been detained everywhere, in closed county facilities.He told me about the first one he went to, at the downside public library headquarters, where the cars were covered for more than a mile.
“I’m a politician, so I’m moved to see that what I lead brings something so vital,” Gero told me.
When driving gifts, other people stay in their vehicles.At the Bowl, when they put them in the park and sat down in masks, the food bank and county and volunteers placed the boxes in their trunks.I met with the staff of the county’s closed parks and libraries who now built heavy boxes.
Patti Jack, a West Hollywood library assistant, now divides her time between sidewalk service in the library and this distribution work.”There’s no bachelorette time when I haven’t shed tears,” a food present, she told me.
Every family that came to the Bowl left with kilos of food: potatoes, onions and apples, pantry items that can’t be stored on the shelf, and meat.
Michael Flood, president and chief executive of the food bank, told me that the amount of food it distributes has now more than doubled since the pandemic began.The county has allocated $10 million to pay for pantry items.
There’s a lot of out of sync in our world right now.Countless solid livelihoods have wobbled.
In line, which formed before 6:30 a.m., I met Martin Henry of West Hollywood, who cared where his next food would come here, is a non-public teacher who hasn’t worked since late March.are closed and your customers are afraid to bring you home.At 58, he has now spent his savings and has the next 3 months of hiring just because he won a grant.
“That’s the difference between being homeless and homeless,” he told me, “like many people, I found myself on a stage I didn’t expect.”
I met Aracely Rendon, who paints in the workplace at a law firm and I haven’t been called again yet.Her husband was unemployed for two months. Your daughter has been unable to run again at Knott’s Berry Farm.She and her friend, Gilda Martinez, a housekeeper who hasn’t won in two months, arrived from Paramount with Martinez’s dog, Max.
When I went to a car, I saw a parking label in Los Angeles: Phil hanging from the rearview mirror.The pilot was the Venezuelan trumpeter Gaudy Sánchez, advisor to YOLA, Los Angeles Youth Orchestra, founded through his compatriot Gustavo Dudamel.Like LAPhil’s music and artistic director, Sánchez comes from El Sistema, the national orchestra of Venezuelan youth in which YOLA told me he was queuing, accompanied by his wife and daughter, to go and get food for a YOLA family that suffered.Grandma’s sick. The mother cares for the young, three of whom play with YOLA, which supplies loose instruments, music lessons, leadership education and education to 1,300 young musicians in Los Angeles.
Sanchez told me his salary had been reduced by 20% in L.A.Phil, who hit hard with no functionality revenue.
The L.A.Phil has canceled concerts until the end of the year, no one can say what comes next.The economic effect on the organization has already been severe, I heard from Los Angeles CEO Phil Chad Smith and Chief Operating Officer Gail Samuel, who is also president of the Hollywood Bowl.
Prevention “collided a bit like a truck when it crashed,” Smith told me.Immediately, the cancellation of the remainder of L.A.Phil’s 2019–20 season meant a loss of $9 million to $10 million.Subtract another $80 million from the Bowl season cancellation, and then another $10 million for the Los Angeles fall show.Phil quit. To fill the void, the organization has withdrawn nearly $21 million from its endowment.
Many part-time workers have lost their jobs. Fifty full-time workers were fired, as were the entire Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.The Bowl employs about 1,000 temporary workers, many of whom return year after year.Unfortunately not this year, Samuel said.
On Thursday, he was in the empty amphitheatre with Ed Tom, the Bowl’s chief operating officer, who started as a teenager 48 years ago.The coyotes, he told me, roam the empty seats at night.a resounding chorus of howls.
The Tom 500 summer staff is reduced to 17, he said, but works every day to make the Bowl fit to run as soon as he can welcome us again.
All L.A.Phil salaries have been cut and orchestral musicians now earn 65% of the weekly scale.
When I talked to musicians and other members of the L.A. family.Phil this week, I heard about a lot of tension, but also pleasures and anticipation for the future.
Victoria Dinu, who said goodbye to her two-year position as Corporate Sponsorship Coordinator, visiting the Hudson River Valley in New York When I contacted her, enjoying the outdoors, said she learned LA on timely professionals at the Bowl, bringing together other people who had been coming for decades, couples who had met there, staff of all ages exchanging stories.
Once the pandemic arrived, she and her roommates were unable to change the rent on the apartment.She moved in with her partner. He’s learning to cook. I used to eat out and didn’t even have plates.She is proud of herself for adapting and already dreams of “the roar and excitement” of a crowded Bowl.”I think it will be almost a spiritual and devoted experience,” he told me.
Akiko Tarumoto and her husband, Nathan Cole, are violinists in the LAPhil Orchestra.This week, her 7- and 5-year-old twins, virtual school and virtual kindergarten will be a real challenge.Some members of the orchestra had to sell their homes, he told me.Some are contemplating leaving. All the time to exercise the experience that has been perfected.
“When it hits you, we can’t even do our job, we can’t play, we can’t as an orchestra make musicArray …We’ve been through a lot,” he says.
Still, Tarumoto feels lucky: for the extra time of the family circle, the extra time of education, the ability to play in duet with Cole, whose online training has smoothed the cuts.
The same goes for online and socially distance education for Mindy Ball, the main harp of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra on license, in which he has conducted for 25 years.He hasn’t lost a student yet, he told me, and he’s still being paid until September through the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, his other music house for 41 years.She has a position in Lake Arrowhead to escape and in a boat in the water.
“I was thinking about how much we’ve been eclipsed and silenced,” he said.”To see and succeed on this, we want to look forward with hope and a sense of joy.”
Bowl’s circle of family members needs to help us do this, as productive as we can now, by locating new tactics to share the experience.
In June, Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne, who run Hollywood Bowl Food Wine, began offering takeaway versions of concert-ready food for Thursday and Saturday nights in Bowl’s now empty main parking lot.like Spanish fried chicken and fried fish for two, as well as three-course themed meals.
“We’re just looking to keep the Spirit of the Bowl alive and keep our core team on the job,” said Goin, who has been busy reconfiguring his restaurants, navigating security protocols and paycheck loans, and begging the Independent Restaurant Coalition to stay live local restaurants and bars.
“That is what many of us want to do right now: keep converting, converting and adapting to check and perceive that,” he said.
The same goes for LAPhil, which recently announced an on-air series with KCRW that will broadcast beyond the kcRW World Festival’s recorded concerts.Last week, KCET presented a new weekly TELEVISION show, “In Concert at the Hollywood Bowl”, which also broadcasts beyond concerts, with Dudamel as host.
The orchestra members recently met at the Bowl for two weeks to record a new series of concerts called “Sound / Stage” adapted to the moment we are in, which will begin airing on September 25.each six feet away from the next person, the maximum masked.Wind and metal musicians were layers of plexiglass.
“It’s a bit like giving someone a hug in a garbage bag,” joked Tom Hooten, the older trumpeter, who said more seriously that “it’s wonderful to make music.”
As for a hug from the Bowl, so awkward and clumsy, many of us right now would open our arms wide for that.