Commentary
Ocean City Today May 13, 2022
Page 59
Next year will be bigger and better The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote about 286 years before last weekend’s Springfest, give or take a few months. Yet, the verse may be the most apt description of the ups and downs of resort business, whose success is dependent on so many things beyond its control, with the weather being the most capricious of them of all. No one knows that better than Ocean City’s Springfest organizers, who saw months of planning ruined, despite the expectation that it would outshine many of its predecessors because of its fresh layout and pent-up demand by a public desperate to celebrate outside. Food vendors, artisans, and nonprofit organizations just knew this year’s Springfest would be a full-fledged return to the opportunities they had been denied by other uncontrollable circumstances. And then this — a lumbering, howling nor’easter just blew it all away like loose pages from a notebook. Oh well, one might say, that’s life at the beach, where more or less everyone knows that nature plays no favorites. It’s a shame that Ocean City officials had to make the call to shut down one of May’s most celebrated and enjoyable events, but they did the right thing. Maybe having done all that planning and organizing helped with that decision by allowing them to recognize just how futile and even dangerous it would have been to attempt to push on through. Knowing their event and its requirements certainly didn’t hurt. But now, as the festival’s organizers have said, they will take the lessons learned this past weekend and fold them into their planning manual for the next time. In the meantime, optimists that we all are, there’s always next year, which, as everyone likes to say around here, will be bigger and better than ever. Weather permitting.
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EDITOR ............................................ Stewart Dobson MANAGING EDITOR ................................ Lisa Capitelli STAFF WRITERS .................................... Greg Wehner, ..........................................Jack Chavez, Mallory Panuska ACCOUNT MANAGERS.......... Mary Cooper, Vicki Shrier ..............................................................Amanda Shick CLASSIFIEDS/LEGALS MANAGER .... Nancy MacCubbin SENIOR DESIGNER ................................ Susan Parks GRAPHIC ARTIST .................................... Kelly Brown PUBLISHER........................................ Christine Brown ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT ...................... Gini Tufts Ocean City Today is published weekly by FLAG Publications, Inc. 11934 Ocean Gateway, Suite 6, Ocean City, Md. 21842 Ocean City Today is available by subscription at $150 a year. Visit us on the Web at www.oceancitytoday.com. Copyright 2022
PUBLIC EYE
Just covid, no options
I have come down with the covid, as they might say where I grew up. Not covid-19, or Delta or Omicron or the Alpha-Beta-Gamma Variant 2.3 of Subset Seven. It’s just plain covid and I have come down with it. From my perspective, knowing what edition of the coronavirus I have is pointless, since it’s not as if one version is more notable than the other. People aren’t going to say, for instance, “Oh yeah, he has covid, but it’s just By the base model.” Even though Stewart covid’s multiple variDobson ations has us citing all sorts of alphanumeric designations in our plague-of-the-week conversations, they don’t mean diddly to the average person, some of whom wouldn’t know the difference between a “viral envelope” and a #10 mailer. Besides, it’s a virus, not a car. There is no A-Class model at the low end, an S-Class luxury edition at the other, and for the sporty set, the Covid-RT Series with Offroad Capability. Even so, some people can’t help trying to appear more knowledgeable about this virus than they really are. “What? You have covid-19, the Omicron subvariant, BA.2.12.1?” “I don’t know, maybe. Does it matter?” “Well, the BA.2.12.1 (an actual thing) is trending, you know.”
“Gee, I hadn’t thought about the importance of staying on trend.” Again, I don’t know and don’t care what strain or subvariant hit me a little more than a week ago and left me isolating in my own home. It didn’t lay me low, necessarily, because I’ve had more vaccinations than a flock of baby chickens and that helps block the worst stuff. But it has been interesting having my evening meals presented to me on the end of a long stick. “Here you go,” she says, pushing a plate of pot roast toward my assigned dining area with a 10-foot-pole. All I need is for her to blow a whistle at suppertime so I’ll get close enough to the bars of my cage to snag the evening’s offering and take it back to my corner and gnaw on it. I do understand her concern, though, because it hasn’t been what I would call an enjoyable time, even though I have not experienced some of the more notorious symptoms, including the loss of the senses of smell and taste, and brain fog. Okay, I did inadvertently put toothpaste on my hair for that tousled-yet-in-control look, but that wasn’t brain fog. It could happen to anyone with a sink as cluttered as mine, and I do have to say that having a minty fresh head isn’t the worst thing that could happen. Still, I do miss being at the office, where I can aggravate a different set of people just for the sake of variety. I should be back soon enough though, depending on which subvariant I have. And again, it really makes no difference, because all I know is that after all this time, I’ve finally gone viral.
