A Look On The Lighter Side: The Zoom where it happens

Judy Epstein

 

It happened in a Zoom meeting of my Moms’ Coffee group.

We were watching the new Disney+ release of “Hamilton,” and chatting about it over Zoom, when the very catchy song about “The Room Where it Happens” came on. “I want to be in the room where it happens,” crooned Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr.

Suddenly, one of my friends posed a question to all of us: “Suppose you could time-travel to anywhere— be it a room or anywhere else. Where and when would you go?”

“One condition,” she added. “You can’t change anything. You can only be a fly on the wall.”

Personally, I think this is an insult to flies, who surely manage to spoil food, sicken people and change history everywhere they and their filthy little feet go… but OK.

One woman said she’d like to watch the parting of the Red Sea. Another chose to watch the Berlin Wall coming down.

I couldn’t decide. It might be fun to see if Benjamin Franklin really flew that kite and key in a lightning storm, but it would be hard for me not to yell at him, “Go back inside, you fool! Do you want to get yourself killed?” Even though, as a fly on the wall who’s read history, I know he didn’t!

I might enjoy seeing Archimedes shout “Eureka!” when he discovered the Principle of Buoyancy, upon stepping into a brim-full bathtub.  But I would have to avert my 3,000 compound eyes if he then jumped out of the tub and ran stark naked down the streets of ancient Greece.

Or I could be at Kitty Hawk on Dec. 17, 1903, to watch Orville and Wilbur Wright launch the world’s first powered, heavier-than-air machine into controlled flight. Maybe I could hitch a ride.

Maybe I could drop in on Leonardo Da Vinci. If I timed it just right, I could see with my own eyes whoever was the model for his Mona Lisa — and judge for myself whether or not he did justice to her smile.

Better yet, I could travel to Florence, Italy, in 1419 and watch one of the great presentations of all time: young architect Filippo Brunelleschi proving, to skeptical elders, that he should design and build the dome to complete their huge but unfinished cathedral.

He told them he would build a dome within a dome, octagonal in shape, supporting itself and letting in light at the top — all without ugly scaffolding.

“Show us your plans!” the elders demanded.

But he refused, for fear that someone else might steal his ideas. “I have a counter proposal,” he told them. “Give the job to anyone who can make an egg stand up on end.”

Of course, no one could. After all his competitors tried and failed, Brunelleschi supposedly took the egg and whacked it on one end. He then turned it over and stood it, unbroken-end-up, on the table.

“Why, any one of us could do that!” someone exclaimed.

“Of course you could — now that I’ve shown you. As you might have done with my plans, if I had shown you those.”

Brunelleschi got the job, and Florence’s Santa Maria del Fiori got its dome — still the largest unsupported dome in the world that’s constructed of bricks and masonry. It may have inspired St. Peter’s at the Vatican, and even our own Capitol dome.

I would love to see that moment.

But suddenly I realized that there’s something I want to see even more.

I heartily wish my husband and I could be with our oldest boy this week, when he defends his Physics thesis and (fingers crossed) obtains his Ph.D. I’ve never been through this particular milestone with anyone … and I still won’t have been, not really.

(I do know that if anyone turns to those of us listening and asks “Any questions?” that I am to keep my mouth firmly shut. Just as if I were a fly on the wall.)

There’s nowhere in the world that I want to be more. But we can’t. We can only join a Zoom presentation — God and the electric company willing — thanks to this dreadful pandemic.

No gift card. No celebration cake. And God only knows when I’ll be able to put my arms around him and give him a proper hug. Not until we arrive at better days.

Until then, I’ll have to make do with “zooming” to the room where it happens. It shouldn’t happen to a fly.

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