Your COVID Moments #4 … “Our profession was gone in a night.”

From TPM Reader AM …

My wife and I are both (or were) freelance musicians in Chicago. At this time last year, I was playing in the pit of a musical at a theatre in downtown Chicago. I had been following the news about the coronavirus with increasing dread throughout February—partly because there were early covid cases in Chicago in January, partly because I was playing in front of 500 people 8 performances a week, but most of all because it was easy to see that the federal response was currently and was going to continue to be maliciously incompetent. Our first panic grocery shop was the third week of February, by which point I had insisted that my octogenarian parents cancel all possible outside activities (including the choir they sang in) and skip the performance of the show that they were planning on attending on March 15.