Some of us are old enough to remember that old Memorex commercial featuring Ella Fitzgerald. For the rest of you, Memorex is a brand of cassette tape…but you don’t know what that is, do you? Think of it as a really fragile CD with static on playback and all the songs recorded as a single track…or do you remember CDs?

The marketing message insisted that we would not be able to tell whether we were hearing Ella live or on tape, and insinuated that the taped version could break a wine glass. Like all marketing messages, it was a combination of lies and misdirection. First of all, we were hearing this from a TV, so it was neither Live nor Memorex. Cassettes had some tells, like hiss. Also, can a human voice really break glass?

I am skeptical.

Pre-pandemic, my husband and I semi-regularly attended a monthly shantey sing held aboard the 1890 steam ferryboat Eureka in San Francisco’s Maritime National Historical Park. How casually we treated the opportunity to join 80 others in joyous singing, our voices echoing through cargo bay, an opportunity I wonder if I will ever have again. Like many public organizations, the MNHP is very conservative, and their shantey sing seems banished to Zoom forever, a format which precisely prevents its most endearing quality, that of mingling one’s voice with others’.

Or so I thought, until last week when the park’s email newsletter showed up bearing a subject line which read in part, Live Shantey Sing. Alas, it was but a cutesy turn of phrase, something along the lines of, Next month, the shantey sign will be Live…in your home. My thoughts briefly turned to criminal acts to which I could subject the author, then I Unsubscribed from the newsletter.

I am impulsive.

Words being confused with their own antonyms are scattered along our descent into the Idiocracy. My favorite, which in the spirit of this topic means the one I abhor the most, is literally substituted for figuratively, a construction that was alarmingly popular ten or so years ago. For me, never hearing it again would be figuratively a dream come true.

Confusing the concept of live performance with on-screen performance is reality slippage. We went to the SF Symphony last weekend, and even though we had to both show vaccinations cards and wear masks, the experience was exuberantly Live. Witnessing the musicians at the moment of performance, thanking them with applause and cheers, gasping or laughing as one with hundreds of others, and even walking to our car past the graceful Civic Center were all enlivening experiences. On a screen, that experience would literally not be the same.

I’ve lost interest in screen-based folk festivals, concerts, and classes now that live ones are available. Next week, however, we will be attending a replay of a recent performance by the Met in a movie theater.

I am sometimes inconsistent.