Different neighborhoods are reacting differently to the shelter-in-place order. Some are silent and still with all the residents tucked away in their houses. Others are, well, rocking out.
The denizens of Village Way in south Sebastopol fall into the latter camp.
Last week, Village Way resident Erica Vogel heard from a neighbor about a Facebook group called the Quarantine Sing-a-long. Every day at 3 p.m. the group publishes the name of a song for everyone to sing that evening. It’s part of a ritual that begins each night at 7 p.m. and involves a moment of silence, one minute of applause for the frontline workers — nurses, doctors, grocery check-out people and others — and then the singing of that day’s song.
That evening, after her neighbor told her about the Facebook group, Vogel said, “I just decided to go outside on my porch and start singing outside instead of inside, and then I heard her from around the corner.”
They followed each other’s voices and soon they stood face to face in the middle of the street — 10 feet apart—singing their hearts out.
“We were just looking at each other and singing the song together,” she said. “It just felt so good to be near each other even though we couldn’t be close to each other. After we did that song — it was ‘I Will Survive,’ by Gloria Gaynor— we were, like, ‘We should invite the rest of our neighbors!’”
Vogel said they have an unusually close neighborhood on Village Way. Before the shelter-in-place order descended, they had monthly potlucks together. Vogel sent word about the sing-a-long to all her neighbors via their neighborhood Google group.
And that night, just before 7 p.m., almost everyone on the street emerged from their houses in the fading light to sing and applaud — and they’ve been coming out every night on for more than a week now.
“There’s a core group of people that have been there almost every day since we started it, including our 80-year-old neighbor,” Vogel said.
Some people sing along, some people dance. Everyone claps for the frontline workers in the pandemic.
Careful to preserve social distancing, Vogel’s son has drawn large circles on the street for families from each house to stand in, separated from other circles by at least 10 feet.
For Vogel, organizing this nightly experiment in neighborhood togetherness seemed like the natural thing to do.
“I work for a nonprofit organization called Community Matters and everything that we do is about connecting people and about helping people, students mostly, to be kind and more connected and to watch out for each other,” Vogel said.
“Social distancing does not mean that we have to be socially isolated,” she said. “What I’m seeing from people being disconnected” because of social distancing “is the immense need for connection coming out in ways that I haven’t seen for a very long time. I think that’s a positive thing we can look at.”
Vogel’s neighbor Dennis Rosatti, a political consultant, said he really looks forward to heading outside every evening to see his neighbors.
“It gives me something to look forward to during the day — to the social interaction, even though we’re distancing.”
Rosatti said they’ve replaced the moment of silence with a moment of gratitude, with everyone calling out, popcorn-style, what they’re grateful for that day.
Vogel said that her neighbors’ eager embrace of this nightly ritual means “that people are needing that connection,” she said. “And in times like this, we have to find different ways to provide it.”
She finds it ironic that social media was the conduit for making this happen. Vogel said she often blames technology — everyone staring at their cell phones — for what she sees as the growing social distance between people.
“Now we’re suddenly finding ourselves needing to use technology to make those connections happen in a positive way,” she said.
Village Way isn’t the only street in Sebastopol that’s got it going on. Voting rights activist Carey Wheaton reports that there was an open-air (and safely distanced) jam session on Jesse Street near downtown.
Teacher Miriam Silver posted photos on her Facebook of luminarias lining porches and sidewalks in the Calder neighborhood as part of Unite the Night, another Facebook-powered event created to show social solidarity in the fight against the virus. Unite the Night asks people to put luminarias out on Sunday evening between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m.
Vogel sees all of these efforts as ways of maintaining the social fabric during the crisis.
“Using this time to do what we can to support each other, however that looks, is the best way to manage this kind of pandemic and quarantine,” she said.
