What a beautiful day! The sky is so blue, it looks like it was painted with cerulean blue watercolors. The new baby flower blossoms are out! Yesterday our entire street exploded in pink and white fluffy puffs! I wake each morning to yet another, and another, beautiful blue and yellow spring day ... and then I remember where I am, where we are … and my brain flounders trying to reconcile the sweetness of Spring with the horror of what we are facing.

Where's the line between panic and preparation? Isn't the military creed "Hope for the best and plan for the worst?" It’s so strange watching people's reactions to this, to all the many ways people respond in a crisis.

Denial;

Everybody's an expert;

Hoarde-and-gouge;

Miracle cures, snake oil, supplements;

Faith healing through your television;

More and more clever ways to profiteer "Top Ten Ways To Make Money From The Coronavirus"

Russian dancers are offering sage advice on how to survive scarcity: "If you see a line, get in it. They're not standing there for no reason."

And still … the birds are peeping and chirping outside our windows! It's like all the warm eggs hatched this very morning, just for us. To sing us through this.

"Radical Kindness" - how did that phrase get in my head? Did I hear it somewhere and filed it away till needed? Or did I made it up myself, one night, in a fever dream? Radical kindness seems what is needed now. Extreme, over the top, radical, kindness. Going overboard, lathering it on, superbly, ridiculously kind to every person at every moment. Kindness and love is needed now.

Finally, local dances are being cancelled. Events - finally being cancelled. I had never thought to wonder how the west coast swing community might behave in a pandemic (Did anyone wonder that?) I don't know what I must have been expecting, or what unconscious assumptions I had made about who we are as a community and culture. It's been a real surprise to me, just how much resistance there's been to acknowledge what, to me, has looked for months now like a clearly approaching danger. Especially considering the very significant role our international west coast swing community has in either slowing down - or speeding up - widespread transmission, infection, disability, and death.

I will repeat this - our dance community can, and should, take a leadership role, not only in the dance world, but in the arts community, and the facebook world, in general. We can and we should. We’re in a unique position to take on this role, because of the nature of partner dancing, and because we’re freelancers with a fragile, vulnerable economic and social infrastructure, and because we’re international so can speak across boundaries, across all continents, even. And because we’re performers, so unlike most people, we love being out in front of an audience. We like attention.

Personally, my husband and I, and our four kids, eight grandkids, and extended family, are like many families in that we have family members who live hand to mouth, with no insurance, some with fragile health, less sanitary living conditions, a reliance on public transportation, without bank accounts (should there be an economic collapse), and no healthcare. We're worried for our own family members, and we're worried for other people’s family members, and we’re disappointed to learn that everyone else isn't.

This feels a lot like AIDS in the 80s. And like stories my parents told of polio in South Philadelphia during the Depression. Heard yesterday kids in school are calling this "The Great Boomer Remover." ha ha very funny. Not to us, as Boomers.

Speaking of kids - let's share youtube channels of things to do with your kids during a pandemic. Please. I’m betting that one of the many great things that will emerge from this horror is tons and tons and tons of innovations: creative, genius brilliant ideas and arts and programs and SOFTWARE and connections, relationships, friendships, insights. THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET! I predict that we will LIVE on the internet during, and then surely after, this pandemic. Those of you too young to have known life before the internet can't possibly know what a TOTALLY different world this is, because of it.

Anyway - families with kids - let’s get groups together, forums, discussion groups, play groups, diy, baking, games, kid-created business ideas, home schooling ... so much resource.

I feel great today. My body feels really good, strong, my immune system feels delighted with life. This weather just makes me happy, through and through! It's dry, and sunny, and those birds and baby bees and ladybugs. The air smells good.

Guess we're going to be living with that big brown blanket draped across our sliding glass door. No trips to the hardware store now, to find the perfect "window treatment." (Why can't they just say "curtain?" or "blinds?" Even a pretentious "drapes" would be better.) Too bad we don't have aqua-blue colored paint - we could finish the bathroom that we started painting in 1998.

These are times of uncertainty. All times are times of uncertainty, we’ve just been kidding ourselves if we didn’t recognize that.

Things seem to have moved into a new era of Judgement Calls. Since there's so little data on this thing (and who knows, I’m sure with these crooks data may very well be deliberately withheld, denied, or misconstrued) and since there’s no testing (here in the US) so there is no understanding of rate of spread, or lethality, or hospitalization rate. Because of the dearth of actual knowns, we are now in "The Phase of Judgement Calls" where you now have to decide who you're going to trust not for their knowledge, because there isn't much knowledge to be had at this point, but rather for their ability to think clearly, and make ethical, intelligent decisions. In other words everyone now, including public health and disease experts, everyone is speculating, and navigating this pandemic, in the dark.

Come on dancers! Set an example! Make us proud of our community and our west coast swing culture. Make a history that we can retell with pride, later, when we tell the story of the West Coast Swing Community In The Pandemic. Show how to be an actual patriot, for real - not with fanfare and parades and lofty speeches and moral pissing contests - but in the real caring for your dance community, for your neighbors, your townspeople, your state, country, your continent, your planet. Act how you want other people to act. Show us how it's done.

And … don't forget to wash your thumbs. We noticed we actually are forgetting to wash our thumbs. They say the virus gets stuck under rings, so make sure to wash there, too, and under your watch strap. Who would have dreamt, last spring, that in a year we'd be telling each other how to wash your hands.

I woke up this gentle spring Saturday morning to the distant hum of some power tool floating to us across the muddy lawns of this little suburban neighborhood. Like the sound of a far-away chain saw in the woods, in the fall, there is no sound more comforting than the far away buzz of a cordless drill, or the hosing and vacuuming of a car, in the spring. There is no sound more hopeful than the soft rhythm of a hammer.

When did the good, solid, descriptive word, "story" turn into the longer, less clear, pretentiously trendy word, "narrative?" I'm noticing lately that all the "narratives" in my dreams are about solving difficult questions. I'm often standing in some heavy brown book-lined room, contemplating life-and-death moral decisions, ethical dilemmas, frowning at hard questions, who do I save, which is more important helping my family or helping others, how to manage liars and opportunists, how to get information out there in a time of rampant disinformation, what to do about partisan news sources, what about facebook's explosion of fake news. I never have answers, just questions. Thank God for my Genieboy keeping me grounded, his strength, his common sense, courage, kindness, goofy playfulness, and his extreme leave-it-all-on-the-field love of people.

What's that hashtag thing you’ve been seeing all over the place now? Here, I’ll explain: the hashtag #FlattenTheCurve just means make the outbreak of infections roll out more slowly, so that there are enough hospital beds, enough breathing machines, enough ICU spaces, and enough not-sick doctors, nurses, and aids - rather than so many people becoming sick all at once that our healthcare capacity is overwhelmed, like in Italy, France, and Spain. The curve in #flattenthecurve is the graph that can either look like an upside down U (bad) or an upside down smiley face (good.)

I'm dreading the moment the first dancers, or dancer's family members, become sick. Not proud of what will be presented to workers trying to track lines of transmission once contact-tracing is undertaken for infections coming out of recent dance events. Or local dances. A more opposite strategy to "Social Distancing" one couldn't possibly dream up. It's good that dances have stopped, and now we can just hope that we'll get this thing contained. Somehow.

I'm noticing the public "narrative" seems to be adopting a moralistic, holier-than-thou, self-righteous tone now. Now everybody's not only an Expert, they're also a Rabbi. Me too - I'm hearing Radical Kindness in my sleep. But sarcasm aside, I think it's okay to want to be a preacher, to console people. I think that it’s the human impulse to want to reach out and comfort those who are suffering. I think we can't help it, it's in our DNA, that humans care for each other. With a few exceptions.

Hey, keep yourself informed. It's important. Read my posts on Facebook. I'm using Facebook to post news items fast because information comes in so continuously and rapidly. Facebook seems like the quickest way to get stuff out there.**(more below on my relationship with fb) I do recommend you go to my Facebook page and read through the posts you'll see there. I started posting about a month ago and have since posted news pieces, science pieces, tweets and expert opinions from agencies, labs, scientists and policy makers around the world, and an occasional cute nature video.

Find yourself other places as well, that you can use as resources for trustworthy information, and make a list for when you might need to know something fast.

Here are some I think are very good:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.cdc.gov/media/index.html

https://www.elsevier.com/connect/coronavirus-information-center https://www.cell.com/2019-nCOV http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-02272020.html https://www.nejm.org/coronavirus https://www.theatlantic.com/category/what-you-need-know-coronavirus/ .

Here are my two most recent previous Updates:

http://lizamayliza.com/updates/2020/03/covid-19-outbreak/ 

http://lizamayliza.com/updates/2020/03/dancing-in-the-rain/

On a personal note: I have 7,000 followers on Facebook, and 5,000 friends on Facebook. So if Facebook would circulate my posts in all those people's newsfeeds that would mean 12,000 people might see information they might not find elsewhere. I don't know if that's happening. But I've noticed an interesting pattern: First, my fb posts appear to go unnoticed - I'll get a total of 3 "likes" and zero comments. The odd part is that I'm getting a sudden increase in private messages and emails about the very posts that appear to go unseen. I'm not exaggerating when I say "increase" - I am getting a lot of private messages.

Which makes me wonder if my posts are, in fact, being seen, but for some reason people don't want this to be known? Have I become controversial? I did happen to see a comment in some long tangled thread in which I was mentioned (no tag, so I wouldn't have known had someone not told me to look) in not the most loving way. Maybe I'm seen as a panic-stricken fear-mongerer? Or maybe a hoax-spreading Democrat? Or, it could just be that I'm not getting likes on my posts because those 12,000 people are just not into me? Maybe I’m just one more voice, when everybody in the whole world is yelling all at once.

None of this matters to me. I don't care if everyone thinks I'm a total dingbat. But I do care that people have access to updated, accurate information. It's the not-knowing, the confusion about what the actual facts are, what reality actually is, what the truth is without spin or bias; it's the hiding of the truth, that is causing panic, and the foolish, irrational, self-sabotaging behavior we see in more and more of our fellow Americans. So in that sense, I do care that my posts make it into all those many people’s newsfeeds.