EPISODE 1012: EASTERING IN US
Of sausage rolls, tourist traps, and the end of honking cars in New York?
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow! I’m mixing it up a little bit this week, with a couple little vignettes. Hope you enjoy it!
Is It Still a Party If No One Is Coming?
My friend Joe spends the winter half of the year in Wilton Manors, a gay neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale, and the summer half in New York. Though he’s glad to avoid the cold, Joe never especially likes the winter months away—“Not a lot of arts in Fort Lauderdale,” he tells me wryly. We text frequently about the plays I’ve seen and the ones he wants to see when he gets back.
Recently we had a different kind of exchange. “How’s life in Wilton Manors?” I asked him. “It’s weird,” he told me. “There are no Canadian tourists this year, at all.”
I mentioned this comment recently to a friend from Vancouver. He confirmed this is not just my friend’s impression. “So many of our friends are cancelling trips and plans to the United States,” he told me.
As reported by AP, in December Tourism Economics predicted an almost 9% jump in international visitors for 2025. Two weeks ago it signaled instead a likely 9.4% drop. And to me that still seems ridiculously optimistic. In March alone the number of tourists from abroad dropped almost 12%. One major travel booking site in Canada has seen vacations to the U.S. drop by 40% from a year ago.
When I visited Australia in December, I met a number of people who had never been to the States, and had no real interest in going, either. “There’s so much [in the world] to see,” one person told me. “The United States has never struck me as particularly interesting.”
In the moment it felt like there was something almost political about their statements, like they might see themselves as taking a stand against the hype and triumphalism of America. And who can blame them?
One Short Ride
In New York City, congestion pricing plus the drop in tourism has seen traffic within and around the city diminish. Which is a good thing by pretty much everyone’s estimation. Supposedly, even car honking is down 70%.
But one place you can still see a lot of traffic is on 50th and 51st between 8th and 9th . Each afternoon and evening, after Wicked lets out from the Gershwin Theatre, pedicabs teem at the street side, Eastern European men lifting their hands, calling out, and ringing their bike bells as though they recognize the people walking by, trying to get someone to take a ride. There are no prices posted on any of the vehicles, though if you look closely you can usually find a sign somewhere on the side (and you should because the city doesn’t regulate how much cyclists can charge). Instead each vehicle is decked out with neon signs, plush interiors and dolls, while Alicia Keys, Taylor Swift or Chappell Roan sing out through each cab’s speakers.
“I’ll give you a discount,” one young driver said to me as I tried to explain I wasn’t standing around because I was looking for a ride. While I asked him how many bikers there are—over 500 pedicabs throughout the city, he speculated—some women hopped into a nearby cab. Immediately, as though to spirit away any sense of buyers’ remorse, the rider zoomed off. The others keep shouting, keep waving, keep reaching for that most elusive of treasures, eye contact.
After a few minutes, the crowds begin to peter out Just like that, most of the riders stood into their pedals, and glided away. Are they on to another show?, I wondered. To Central Park? Or just to drift along into Times Square, hoping for a fare? By the time I thought to ask, they were all gone.
Votive Economics
Most Christians are currently entering into Holy Week. Over the course of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Christians will reenact the Last Supper as depicted by the gospel writer John; remember Jesus’s crucifixion; and celebrate the resurrection.
Good Friday is the most unusual official liturgical service of the year. Where normally a priest would spend the second half of the liturgy leading the rite of consecration which turns the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ, on Good Friday there is no liturgy of the Eucharist. The consecrated hosts offered to those who come are planned-for leftovers from the Mass of the day before. One parish I know actually had lay people run the whole service, until they were told they couldn’t.
Good Friday also involves one of the most challenging moments in the liturgical year, the reading of the Passion from the Gospel of John. How do you keep people’s attention for a 20+ minute reading of something unrelentingly sad and formal that was not written to be read aloud and also that they only just heard five days before? A few years ago the service I went to sang the whole thing. Absolutely none of the music was familiar or singable. It only made everything feel longer and more alienating than it already was.
Afterwards I ran into a Jesuit friend and asked him why they would do it like that, when it so clearly did not work. “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “They commissioned that piece some years ago, and it cost them a lot of money.”
Sometimes Easter is the Blues
In my own own sort of nod to the holy, I spent one night last week at Old Mates, a new two-storey + basement Australian pub at South Street Seaport. Upon arrival I was surprised to discover there was actually a line to get in on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Inside the main floor was truly wall to wall people, too, all of them young and more of them Australian than I expected. As I walked around more than a few quipped about the blue and white Carlton Blues scarf I was wearing. After five games the Blues have won just one. It’s a long season, I told them. They chuckled.
Grabbing a schooner of Cooper’s Pale—think a slightly smaller pint of a delicious pale ale—I planted myself before a TV screen replaying the Brisbane Lions against the Western Bulldogs. It was the first footy game I’ve gotten to watch all year. The picture crisp and close in on the action, the sun in Adelaide going down, I felt like I was looking through a window. And before long I wasn’t so much watching the game as I was just feeling grateful to be here.
Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “Let him Easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us.” Sometimes that happens in a religious setting. And sometimes all it requires is a sausage roll and a cold beer in a happy place.
I’ll be away for Easter next week, but I will have a little something for subscribers before I go. Stay tuned, and take it gently.
And sometimes Easter happens in a grandchild's first steps barefoot in the spring grass . . .
Happy and holy Easter to you.
My hope is that, for the next four years, no one comes to the US and no one from any other country buys any US products and that every other country bans US citizens from traveling to them - the entire world should put us on timeout (I know none of that will happen).