C2 eZ re THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAy, MARCH 18 , 2020
college, so they had a head start),
life has been completely upended.
Their daughter, Chloe, returned
home from UC Berkeley the same
day they were to have their first
showing to sell their too-big
house. Skorupa and her husband
were due to move into a two-bed-
room condo, and they’d already
sold their extra car that their chil-
dren used. “We realized no one
was coming home in any real way,
except for holidays,” s he s aid.
But then Chloe’s summer in-
ternship in Australia was can-
celed, Berkeley shut down, and
she headed home. Their son,
Chase, a first-year law student at
George Washington University, is
on his way. And Chloe’s friend,
who is at Notre Dame, is all set to
settle into t he guest room.
“We’ve kind of gone about our
business as a couple, and living a
very different life that you work
towards,” S korupa s aid. “of course
you miss your children every sin-
gle minute they’re not with you.
But everyone is independent and
happy, as they should be. This is a
strange turn of e vents.”
This isn’t the natural order of
things. Babies are born, they grow
into children who are taught how
to be independent. W ith luck, they
move out and on and it’s back to a
quiet house. There is nothing nor-
mal about this time we’re living in.
So for many parents, they are
welcoming their children home
and h oping for the best. There w ill
be bumps — c urfews to be broken,
germs to wash away, empty milk
cartons left in the fridge and anx-
ious, sad teenagers who wish they
were somewhere else — as fami-
lies learn to live together again.
There will be more changes of
plans, graduation ceremonies
canceled a nd d reams deferred.
But deferred is the key here: If
everyone stays healthy, this is all
temporary, just like that duvet
cover left in the dorm room. Just
like that contract on the two-bed-
room condo. Just l ike those habits
that formed when parents stayed
home and k ids settled i nto a dorm.
“I used to say having children
saved us from being selfish. Your
whole world changes and you’re
not the middle of the universe
anymore,” Skorupa said. “You had
all those years of diaper bags and
snacks and being the homeroom
mom. But when that phase ends,
how easy it is to slide back to ‘I like
to sleep i n.’ ”
[email protected]to more parental worry? What
about the seniors who may never
have a graduation ceremony? The
learning that will be lost? And, of
course, h ow about the many, m any
students who have nowhere to go,
or no money t o get themselves to a
safe place?
for Kara Skorupa, that last is-
sue just meant she’d be opening
the house she and her husband
were about to sell not just to her
own two young adults, but also to
her daughter’s friend, who had
nowhere to go.
“We were lucky we had the re-
sources to get our daughter h ome,”
Skorupa said. “A lot aren’t, and
that’s concerning.”
So for Skorupa and her hus-
band, who had settled into empty-
nest life very nicely, thank you very
much (their daughter had been
away at boarding school beforehow it would be handled, but he’s
still not sure. “Getting professors
to enact a plan for accommoda-
tions is a challenge under the best
of circumstances. my stomach is
in knots.”
on top of that, he will be taking
courses o nline, right alongside his
16-year-old brother, who may not
love the fact he has to share a car
again. At l east, she said, her oldest
son isn’t coming home: “If all
three were home, I’d leave. It
would be a free-for-all with food;
trips to To p Golf would be re-
placed by some sport in my base-
ment. They’d go to bed at 3 a.m.
and I’m up at 5. There’d be no
productivity for a nyone.”
The college shutdowns come
with many issues: What of the
students who are off-campus and
don’t want to come home? Are
they safer there? Is it just leadingthem is i mportant. They m ay h ave
had their own schedule and au-
tonomy, and coming home where
there’s all that restriction again.. .”
And t hat’s where m any parents’
conversations fade off, t oo.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to
put restrictions on him for his own
good, which is tough for a 19-year-
old,” s ays maureen Stiles, whose son
Drew came home from Salisbury
University. “He doesn’t know what
he doesn’t k now, and I know plenty.”
for this mother of three boys,
the idea of his sudden return is
daunting for many reasons. “I’m
thinking I’m basically going to be
home-schooling a college fresh-
man,” she says of her son, who has
an Individualized Education Pro-
gram for attention and executive
functioning issues. He’s already
reached out to professors to see
time, she knows h er college kid w ill
be aching for that new life he had
started to create, with new friends,
independence. “ Being cooped u p at
home, I think i t’s going to be stress-
ful for everybody.”
It will help everyone if parents
take a moment and figure out h ow
they’re feeling about everything
right now, says mercedes Samu-
dio, a parent coach with Shame-
Proof Parenting. “So when your
child comes home, you don’t just
jump in.... You have to let them
come home and give them time to
get readjusted.”
And then, Samudio, who also
teaches at Pepperdine University
and Chapman University, says
parents need to remind those re-
turning kids, gently, that they are
still in school. “I think it’s going to
be tough,” she said. “really giving
that space of readjustment toenforce a study rule or class time,
since online classes started the
monday after he returned? And
that social distancing we’re all
supposed to be practicing — well,
have you e ver tried t o demand that
a 19-year-old college student, sud-
denly thrust back under their par-
ents’ roof after so much time on
their own, stay away from their
high school friends? “They don’t
really want t o be t old what to do by
their parents,” mcCarthy said.
“But there have to be some rules.
This is a very uncertain time.”
It’s uncertain, it’s unsettling.
And for many parents, this s udden
return isn’t just shaking up their
young adult’s life; it’s changing
theirs. Vacation money may have
been spent on sudden plane tick-
ets to get a child back home. The
quiet routine t hey had gotten used
to is back to chaos. The fridge
needs to be filled again — and
again. And for people like mcCa-
rthy, whose 83-year-old father
lives with them, this virus comes
with new rules, rules that will be
hard for a college freshman to
adhere to or even fully compre-
hend. “Kids are going to want to
get together, go to the gym, have
parties,” mcCarthy said. “What do
you d o?”
When Helene Wingens found
out that both her 27-year-old at
Harvard Law School and his
younger brother, a freshman at
Tufts University, were coming
home to Livingston, N.J., she sent
the older one to get the younger
one and then commenced worry-
ing. “first of a ll, I’m buying out the
grocery store because I don’t have
nearly enough food,” s aid t he man-
aging editor of Grown and flown.
“A nd I’m worried t hat actually this
may sound selfish, but what are
they bringing back to us?”
Sayali Amarapurkar was excit-
ed when her son, om, an 18-year-
old freshman at Stanford, re-
turned home days ago. There’s no
reason to believe he has the coro-
navirus. But s he a nd h er h usband,
an oncologist, sent him to the
basement guest room for a few
days of quarantine. “He sleeps
there and just comes up for food,”
she s aid. “ We’re just trying t hat for
a week to make sure he’s okay and
no o ne else g ets it.”
Then after that, she’s picturing a
lot of sweet f amily time with N etflix
and board games, both of her sons
together again. But at the same
college from c1
‘A strange turn of events’: College kids return to the nest
BIll o'leAry/tHe wAsHIngton Post
gaithersburg resident Maureen stiles with her sons Reed, center, and Drew, who is home from college because of the coronavirus. The
sudden university shutdowns have been daunting for many parents who have adjusted to their kids being away.“Epidemics are a category of
disease that seem to hold up the
mirror to human beings as to
who we really are,” he told the
magazine. “They show the moral
relationships that we have
toward each other as people.”
We are in the very early stages
of learning how those moral
relationships will be revealed in
the age of coronavirus. We’re still
in the double-take period, the
that’s-a-good-question period.
Disneyland only just closed. The
Kennedy Center only just closed.
The NBA only just suspended its
season. Things could get so much
weirder and more surreal, as we
fight to put aside our own
comfort and think of the older,
the sicker, the weaker among us.
The time of making calculations
is just beginning. Will your math
be simple or complex?
We are not in a state of
emergency if you are down to
your last three rolls of toilet
paper. We are in a state of
emergency if you have 96 rolls,
and some people have no rolls,
and you don’t care.
[email protected]Monica Hesse is a columnist writing
about gender and its impact on
society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.She ended her guided meditation
by staring into the camera and
whispering, “Go wash your
hands.” maybe there’s something
to be said about the language of
combat vs. the language of
cooperation — how they reflect
masculine and feminine tropes
and whether one is better suited
than the other to the kind of war
we’re now in.
In truth, though, there is only
one division that matters in a
pandemic, and it is not gender.
It is whether you believe you
deserve to hoard all the toilet
paper.
Hoarding all the toilet paper
means one of two things: one,
you think you are genuinely
more worthy of comfort, and if
other people wanted to be
comfortable then they should
have bought all the toilet paper
first. Two, it never even occurred
to you that, if you buy everything,
someone else is going to come in
— someone who had a different
work schedule or was waiting to
get paid — and they will not be
able to buy anything.
The medical historian frank
Snowden gave an interview to
the New Yorker recently about
pandemics and epidemics and
what they m ean for societies.So, when you went to the
store, did you buy all the toilet
paper? Did you shove
36 megarolls into your cart, and
then smush in 36 more, because
your primary concern, in all of
this mess, was saving your own
butt?
or, did you stand in the aisle
and do the math: How much
toilet tissue is already in your
linen closet, times the number of
butts living in your house,
divided by how long you think
this apocalypse will last.
Did you also factor in the
number of butts (and hands, and
hearts, and lungs) in your town,
your state, your time zone? Was
your math simple, or was it made
complex by a sincere belief that,
just as public health depends on
herd immunity, public sanity
depends on herd empathy —
meaning you acknowledge that
everyone else’s rear end is also on
the line?
my job is to write about
gender, and I’ve spent days
trying to think of what that
might mean in a pandemic. men,
dying at higher rates than
women, at least in early reports
from China? Women, bearing the
brunt of extra child care and
housework caused by closings,
not to mention being the front
lines of nursing and home health
care? men, who, at a rate of
69 percent, apparently do not
regularly wash their hands in
public bathrooms? The long
social history that apparently led
to this hand-washing gap, with
century-old ad campaigns
imploring women to be “modern
health crusaders”?
If you want to get really deep
into the most woo-woo of gender
stereotypes: on Wednesday you
could have watched President
Trump talk about using “tough
measures,” “vigilance” and
“authority” to “defeat” the virus.
And then you could have
watched former Democratic
presidential candidate marianne
Williamson talk about the
“infinite love” necessary for
“healing” the world of the virus.
Hesse from c1
MONICA HESSE
How many rolls do you r eally need?
sAlwAn georges/tHe wAsHIngton Post
At costco stores in Arlington, Va., a nd across the region, customers
have been stockpiling paper towels and toilet paper.the coronavirus outbreak
BY PEGGY MCGLONEDire. Catastrophic. Unprece-
dented. Daunting.
The vocabulary o f Washington’s
nonprofit arts leaders has taken a
depressing turn in the past week,
when a global pandemic began
upending their local communities
and throwing their businesses
into a d ownward spiral.
Uncertainty has become the only
constant, as leaders worry about
making payroll, refunding patrons
who purchased tickets to now-can-
celed performances and the hidden
costs of canceling future produc-
tions to staunch the bleeding.
Closures continue to cascade.
Theaters, dance troupes, music
ensembles, film groups and art
galleries are revising their plans
almost daily as they watch spring
approach with a forecast for more
economic hardship.
In Tysons, Va., 1st Stage sus-
pended the musical “A New B rain”
with the hope of resuming perfor-
mances when conditions improve.
Synetic Theater in Arlington can-
celed “Life Is a Dream” — l aying off
some 30 people in the process —
while postponing “Teen romeo
and Juliet,” a piece its student
artists have been working on for
eight m onths. Women in f ilm and
Video canceled almost a dozen
events over the next month, al-
though some are being shifted to
virtual settings.
Although their responses vary
somewhat, arts leaders share a
goal. This isn’t about the next
show; i t’s about survival.
“It’s going to be long, sad haul
for everybody,” said rebecca me-
drano, e xecutive director o f GALA
Hispanic Theatre, which canceled
its current production — a crush-
ing blow because it included 13
sold-out student matinees — and
is discussing the f ate of “ Tía Julia y
el Escribidor (Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter),” slated to run April
23 to may 17. The future rests with
the final show of the season —
“Ella es Ta ngo,” a musical review i n
collaboration with the Pan Ameri-
can Symphony orchestra, set to
open June 10.
“If we can’t do the June show,
that’s going to have serious cash
implications. It will mean going
into reserves, and that will impactthe o pening of t he f ollowing year,”
medrano s aid.
Christopher morgan, executive
artistic director at Dance Place in
Washington, is concerned about
the dancers and choreographers
whose incomes will be decimated
over the coming months. Like
dominoes falling on one another,
he said, each action he takes rip-
ples through the community.
Dance Place is closed at least
through this month — a loss of at
least $28,000 in revenue — but
that’s just the start. morgan has
postponed performances sched-
uled for April and may, too. re-
hearsal space has closed, so new
work won’t be ready, and paying
travel expenses for out-of-town
performers seems too risky. His
focus is on paying the salaries of
his 23 employees and covering
most of contracts of the indepen-
dent artists w hose dates h e’s going
to try to reschedule.
“We have cash reserves for mo-
ments like this,” he said, but the
hurt will continue. Not only will
many individual artists suffer
from cancellations, but next sea-
son — across all disciplines — per-
forming arts organizations will be
conservative, and that means the
pain will continue.
He predicts some groups will
close, putting further strain on an
already s tressed s ituation.
“A s other institutions shutter
their doors, it will increase pressure
on the ones that remain,” morgan
said. “A rtists, p erformers and chore-
ographers look to institutions for
venues and for support. That w ill be
exacerbated in a creative economy
that already lacks space.”
The cost of this seasons’s can-
cellations will affect the future in
many ways. The Washington
Stage Guild won’t produce its
fourth and final production, “Sam
and Dede, or my Dinner with An-
dre the Giant,” but instead hopes
to present it next season. The deci-
sion was made after the theater
expended money f or rehearsal sal-
aries and other costs. In addition
to single-ticket sales lost, the pro-
duction was part of a four-show
season subscription that some
300 patrons already purchased.
“If all 300 ask for refunds, that
would be really terrible,” artistic
director B ill Largess s aid. officialsare determining their next step,
including asking patrons to do-
nate the balance of the subscrip-
tion or apply i t to next season.
If there is a next season.
“I’m going to say I’m guardedly
confident” a bout the future, Largess
said. “right now so much is uncer-
tain. We don’t know what it’s going
to cost us. Some of the smallest
theaters — we’re a large small the-
ater — a re going to suffer g reatly.”
Ticket sales typically represent
less than half of a performing arts
group’s r evenue, which is bolstered
by unearned income such as spon-
sorships and grants. These funds
are a source of worry for Theater
Alliance, a socially conscious the-
ater company in residence at the
Anacostia Playhouse. After cancel-
ing the last two weekends of “The
Bitter Earth,” the company is wor-
ried about the viability of its final
show, “The Blackest Battle,” sched-
uled to begin its run on may 16.
Commissioned and developed
by the company, the play earned a
coveted grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts. manag-
ing director Jen Clements is look-
ing into whether the grant can be
rescinded if the work isn’t com-
pleted — information that will
help her a nd h er colleagues d ecide
the s how’s f uture.
The theater has two weeks to
decide to move forward and risk
losing money if performances
can’t start as expected, or pull the
plug p reemptively.
“That would leave us dark for a
long stretch of the year,” C lements
said. “one of the core tenets of
Theater Alliance is service to our
community.”
one sector of the District’s cul-
tural economy that might not be
harmed is the city’s art galleries,
where visitors typically do not ex-
ceed virus guidelines advising
crowds of 10 or fewer. margery
Goldberg of Zenith Gallery said
she remains open, although she
will probably cancel opening and
closing receptions.
“A nybody who requires an audi-
ence is pretty much screwed,”
Goldberg said, adding that visual
artists c an carry o n, at l east for the
short term. “Every artist doesn’t
sell art every day. But they make it
every day.”
[email protected]Arts leaders navigate refunds, closures