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The shows will go on For local musicians, the past year has been a mix of missed and new opportunities By Joe EMansKi
Darla (left) and Butch are among the dogs that are available for adoption at the EASEL Animal Rescue League in Ewing right now.
EASEL saw record number of pet adoptions in 2020 By Joe EMansKi
The year 2020 will be remembered for a lot of things. At the EASEL Animal Rescue League, it will be remembered as the year more people rescued dogs and cats than any year before. EASEL is the nonprofit, no-kill shelter for dogs and cats based at the municipal complex in Ewing Township. Mark Phillips, EASEL’s director of operations, says that while dog adoption numbers have been on the rise for several years, 2020 saw the biggest jump yet.
The standard at EASEL used to be 75 to 95 dogs adopted per year. That number was up to around 250 in 2018 and 2019, and rose to more than 300 this year. For cats, 600 adoptions were typical in a given year before jumping to about 800 in 2019. In 2020, EASEL had already surpassed 1,000 adoptions by November. Phillips says the increase in applicants is not due to people making impulsive decisions to adopt a pet during a pandemic. Rather, it has been a result of the pandemic rearranging
people’s lives in a way that made pet adoption more practical now. “It was families that had thought about [adopting] for a while, and now was a really good time to do it, with everybody being home,” he says. “Particularly with dogs, we saw that families that previously were too busy to train dogs suddenly had lots of availability.” The shelter has seen similar trends with cats. “You had people who were stuck at home, they had one cat, they had been thinking about getSee EASEL, Page 6
Carnegie Hall. Many musicians dream of performing live and in concert in New York’s famed, 130-year-old concert venue. Alex Otey was all set to do it last April. Otey — a singer, songwriter, pianist and composer — was on a good run. On Feb. 27, he accompanied Grammy Award-winning Hawaiian folk singer Kalana Pe’a in the Appel Room at Lincoln Center. As April approached, he and other members of a group called the Indie Collaborative were scheduled to give an Earth Day concert in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall. Then, on March 11, New York City shut its collective doors. All live performances were off because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, Carnegie Hall rescheduled the Indie Collaborative concert for April of this year. But Otey says he recently learned that the concert has been pushed back to 2022. The reason: too many mouths to feed. When the concert was initially canceled, Carnegie Hall’s schedulers would have been hoping they would be shut down for weeks or months at most. By the time concert venues in New York,
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New Jersey and many other parts of the country are fully open again, a year or more will have been lost. A year in which thousands and thousands of live performances were canceled or postponed. “Once things open up again, it’s going to be like floodgates,” says Otey, who lives in Ewing. “People who haven’t been able to earn money are going to have to get back into the queues to get into the venues. From a musician’s perspective, it’s probably going to be frustrating finding places to perform.” The past year has been challenging for music venues, which have been unable to host live indoor events at anything resembling full capacity. And it has been difficult for the musicians who used to play those live events. Both groups hope that with Covid19 vaccines now approved for distribution, things will be different soon. But even once things return to some semblance of normal, there will still be challenges to overcome, and one of them will be finding ways to get gigs again when just about every musician out there has been equally starved for opportunities. When the weather was warm, musicians were able to eke out a buck here or there working outdoor gigs. Now that winter — and a new wave of coronavirus — is upon us, some musicians worry that opportunities may be few and far between until spring. If there is good news, it’s that both musicians and venSee MUSIC, Page 8
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