Thank you, this is so well written.
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Thank you for shedding light on the murky area of online delivery tipping policies/practices. One of the reasons I chose to use Instacart over its competitors is its explicit “100% of your tip goes to the driver” policy.
Naively, I assumed this meant that the driver would get 100% of my elective tip on top of his/her regular base pay. Surprise! Big tech misleads again. Sigh.
I am now giving cash tips to the drivers (I don’t know how this affects the store shoppers). I do hope Instacart and others figure out a model in which transparency/fairness and profitability are not mutually exclusive.
I saw the play last weekend (easy day trip to Baltimore). The production affected me very deeply. Aside from the gorgeous, emotional production and very fine actors, the theme of forgiveness is a thread throughout this beautiful play - and not just by the parents but of several characters who have their own need for forgiveness, to forgive and be forgiven. I am very touched by this article: that a person can forgive someone who caused such pain and tragedy is a lesson for all of us. Bravo to the investors at EVERYMAN THEATRE and any theatre, who are willing to put down money so that audiences can take what they learn and apply it to real life. This play is healing.
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There are people who continue to suffer the worst parental fate imaginable - the loss of a child. Here's hoping this story can help ease the pain that never really goes away.
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Excellent. Thank you for publishing.
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@Anne Russell, I agree, this was very moving. And eye-opening, in that in New York City, we regularly see amounts like $50,000 (often raised from an artist's family and friends) spent on a modest festival show, or artists raising far far upwards of $10,000 to make a CD. I never would have guessed that there are theater companies of this caliber for whom $10,000 makes the difference between a play (whether socially significant or not) getting a real production in their season vs. never being shared with an audience on their stage.
Here, the matching between ideas and the benefactor just happened; how great this happened, and that this was made public. Would it work if such matches were deliberate?
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@Freddie, I live in Philadelphia and am on the board of directors of a very small non-profit opera company which has been in existence for over forty years. Recently my great aunt remembered them in her will, leaving close to $10,000. She also left the same amount to many other non-profits, including The Metropolitan Opera House. To many of these big companies it was no more than a drop in the proverbial bucket. To us it quite literally kept the company alive.
I mention this because I hope more people think about those small companies and small non-profits that don't, and probably can't, get the big sponsors but are an important for our society at large. I also hope you write more about these little companies and help to make it public knowledge that their existence is not only important but very fragile.
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@karinablacktie, thanks for that reminder. Amounts can mean so much more away from New York, it seems away from Manhattan in particular.
Since Ethel Merman is a topic in another comment thread now, it brings to mind that while Madame Rose was a liar at times, she may not have been wrong in this -
Miss Cratchitt: “New York is the center of everything.”
Rose: “New York is the center of New York!”.
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