Editorial: All tomorrow’s parties

“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around!” – Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

Sonoma’s date with abject boredom appears to be working.

The county and state’s strict sheltering in place orders of the past three weeks, say California health officials, are showing a bending of the curve – the curve being the rising trajectory of COVID-19 cases since early March – with the prospects of a flattening, and eventually a lowering, to come in the weeks ahead.

While that’s certainly cause for optimism, it’s little consolation for those actually suffering from the disease, not to mention the rest of us suffering from financial losses, dispiriting isolation and in many cases both.

Or, in other instances, since the crossing of school closures with work-from-home mandates beginning mid-March, suffering from not quite enough social isolation.

“Dad, will you play with me?” 9-year-old Evie asked again.

“Not right now, honey, I’m editing another story on how the coronavirus has affected an everyday activity that Sonomans once took for granted.”

Precisely two minutes later: “Dad, now will you play with me?”

This dialogue is largely interchangeable with all sorts of similar everyone’s-at-home plot scenarios these days -- from the Will You Make Me a Sandwich scene to the My Sibling Is Playing With the Thing I Want to Play With tearful plot twist at the end of the afternoon’s second act.

And who can resist the drama of the emotional You Gave My Favorite Toy I Haven’t Played With Since I Was 3 to Goodwill Last Year climactic breakdown as backdrop to Mom’s Zoom meeting with her administrative team.

Hey kids, mom and dad are trying to work here – this isn’t summer vacation. It only looks like it.

At this point, it’s time to press upon the children the seriousness of the situation, and do what any good parent would do: Illustrate the very rational reasons we are self-imposed-quarantining ourselves to prevent the spread of a debilitating virus.

And what better way to encapsulate that for the tots than through the wisdom of 19th century gothic horror?

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” is set at the time when a grisly pestilence – “with blood as its avatar and its seal” -- sweeps through an unnamed kingdom, decimating half the population -- the disease kills in a manner of a half an hour, from infection to death. Believing he can keep the “red death” at bay within the bolted walls of his massive abbey, a party-monster nobleman, Prince Prospero, and a thousand of his courtesan BFFs hole up in the abbey in the hopes of waiting out the contagion in his pleasure dome, believing “the external world can take care of itself.”

After a few months inside, the Prince assumes they have surely outlasted the disease and, to celebrate, throws “a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence” -- a massive rager brimming with booze and bodices and bacchanalia.

Through most of the evening, the shindig seems to be going well -- “it was a gay and magnificent revel,” writes Poe, and Prospero’s decorations “glowed with barbaric lustre.”

Yet, as the clock nears midnight, a previously unnoticed guest starts making the rounds, his costume that of “a stiffened corpse… sprinkled with the scarlet horror” of the red death.

Outraged that a guest would dress in such a blasphemous getup, Prospero demands he be unmasked so “that we know whom we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements!”

Of course, they unmask the figure, only to reveal he is the personification of the plague itself, which proceeds to make quick work of Prospero, before killing all thousand of the merrymakers faster than a knife fight in a phone booth.

“He had come like a thief in the night,” Poe concluded. “And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.”

Believe it or not, it’s one of the happier endings to a Poe story, if memory serves from the “Edgar Allan Poe and the Imp of the Perverse” course I endured as a San Francisco State English lit undergrad.

However, not everyone in my family viewed it as the cautionary tale about the importance of face covering and 6-foot distancing as intended.

Twelve-year-old Sam interpreted it as a subtle way of telling him he could never attend a classmate’s birthday party again; while kid sister Evie hid under her covers the rest of the afternoon so the “red death won’t make my eyes bleed,” as had been the fate of unfortunates in Poe’s tale. (Hands up: I probably should have left that detail out.)

It goes without saying that our planned “family fun night” screening of “The Road Warrior” was now postponed indefinitely.

But still, the overall lesson shouldn’t be ignored: the postponement of all the enjoyable things in Sonoma – its parties, meals in restaurants, movie screenings, gatherings in bars, author festivals, film festivals, Easter egg hunts – can, and should, be a one-off. Temporary delayed gratification – at least, that is, if we continue to take seriously the shelter-in-place order the county health officer has decreed, we can beat this bug – sooner rather than later.

The alternative may be to meet the fate Poe envisioned for Prince Prospero’s kingdom:

“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,” the story concludes with grim directness.

“Dad, now will you play with us?” Sam and Evie ask again.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

Email Jason at jason.walsh@sonomanews.com.