Dateline: Paris, France

Today was a day of celebration. I must note that this celebration of David Pohler‘s official engagement to Jonathan Uday Ramteke was capped off with three bottles of champagne and three bottles of red wine. Now this was consumed over six or seven hours by three grown men so don’t judge too harshly but if there are a few typos here and there, please forgive. I knew that the proposal was coming. but it was not public knowledge. My job was to make sure that David did not know and that he would not plan anything that might get in the way of Jonathan’s plan for a romantic proposal on the top deck of a Seine dinner cruise last night. I played my part and stayed out of the way until today.

This morning, I devoted to art and artists. I spent time in both the Musee D’Orsay and the Louvre this morning and early afternoon. It’s been 42 years since my last visit to Paris (why do I feel like Gloria Stuart in Titanic while I’m writing this?) and the Musee D’Orsay didn’t exist the last time I was here and the I M Pei pyramids at the Louvre were also nonexistent. The Musee d’Orsay, built into an what was once a 19th century train station is a gorgeous piece of architecture. It’s dedicated to art form the mid 1800s onward. The Impressionist galleries with their superb collections fo Manet. Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne and the like were mobbed but I enjoyed the quieter parts of the museum dedicated to the pre-Raphaelites, Art Nouveau design, and Rodin sculpture. I’m a bit spoiled when it comes to Rodin. The largest collection of Rodin outside of Europe is on the Stanford campus (thank you Gerald Cantor of Cantor-Fitzgerald) and I walked past the Burghers of Calais and the Gates of Hell fairly routinely in my younger years.

The Louvre was a mob scene, especially in the galleries around the Mona Lisa. That painting isn’t all that impressive in person. There are four other Leonardos, most of them larger and of better quality in the next hall but we’ve all been conditioned to regard it as the greatest paining ever so that’s where attention must be paid. It’s a good thing I am not agoraphobic. The crowds were a bit reminiscent of the time I was on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. My favorite pieces in the Louvre are the massive early 19th century neo-classic paintings of Ingres and David and their contemporaries. They were less crowded. The Louvre is a lot cleaner than my last visit. What stays with me from my time in Paris in 1984, aside from the art, is that the Louvre was filthy, as if no one had taken a mop to the place since Marie Antoinette. I still have the handwritten travel diary I kept from my race around Europe that summer. I really should transcribe it and compare 22 year old Andy’s thoughts to 64 year old Andy’s thoughts. If anyone is interested in reading it, encourage me to undertake that task.

After art and tourist crowds, I met up with David and Jonathan for lunch (Vietnamese on la Rive Gauche). We then decided to head for the flea markets at St Ouen, not something I would have ever thought about but a favorite of Jonathan’s so into the Metro and off to the banlieus. A lovely afternoon poking through various antiques and fines. I ended up purchasing a water color of the Pont Neuf (currently shrouded in canvas and resembling a miniature mountain range. It’s apparently becoming a walk through art installation of some sort and a homage to Christo and Jean Claude). I also bought a new casquette as it’s been quite sunny and in the 80s and the one thing I forgot to pack is a hat and my thinning hair leaves my scalp quite exposed.

We parted to our respective hotels and then met up again for the real celebration. We started with a bottle of champagne in a lovely wine bar to toast the happy occasion and then proceeded to Jardins Latin for dinner and the cabaret floor show (more champagne and red wine). My budget last time I was in Paris did not allow for cabaret performances so this was my first time. Think Las Vegas revue on steroids with a European flair. A lovely three course dinner. An hour long preshow with a rather Rubenesque singer and the dance corps, and then the main revue itself. Can cans. Pegasus descending from the ceiling. Lots of bare breasts. A hysterical female comic magician. ABBA sing along. It had it all. Afterwards, back to the wine bar for more and then a meander across Paris to respective hotels.

David and Jonathan depart tomorrow for New York. I have two more full days in Paris before heading towards Italy. There will likely be less alcohol involved. I’m getting old

Dateline: Paris, France

Last night was the first night I had trouble sleeping all vacation. Wide awake around 2 am for no particular reason and none of my usual tricks helped so I did my usual thing which is put the TV on mute and make up my own dialogue in my head. It usually ends up lulling me into at least a doze. It did that and I got enough sleep to be functional. Today was a transition day from the UK to the continent. In Agatha Christie novels, they’re usually racing to catch the boat train from Waterloo in order to cross the channel. Now, you take the tube to St Pancras/Kings Cross station and catch the Eurostar non-stop high speed train from London to Paris. (They also offer non-stops to Brussels and Amsterdam if you’re bored with France). And so I did. And I’ve determined that the day is coming where I need to budget for a travel companion to handle the luggage.

St. Pancras was a bit of a zoo but I did manage to get in the correct queue and through security and customs with minimal fuss (thank you Brexit) and found my seat in Coach 6. The Eurostar heads underground until out of suburban London, then spends about a half hour crossing southeastern England before diving into the Chunnel for the journey to France. It doesn’t take all that long and then you pop out into the French countryside which looks pretty much the same as the English countryside only the street signs, flashing by at a hasty clip, are in (surprise) French. The entire trip from St Pancras to Gare de Nord Paris is only about two and a half hours but three and a half on the clock due to the time change. But those of us who drive routinely between Birmingham and Atlanta are familiar with that one.

On arrival at Gare de Nord, it was full of noisy fans of some French football club that had just done well so it required some delicate maneuvering to get around the inebriated young men in red and yellow singing some sort of chant at the top of their lungs. Once loaded, into a taxi, I had time to draw my breath and look about. This is my first visit to Paris in forty-two years. It looks about the same with the boulevards and the acre upon acre of six story apartment blocks. My hotel (serviceable but not overly luxurious) is in the 2me arrondisement about half way between Opera Garnier and Les Halles. I checked in, wrestled with an elevator which has room for one but not quite for one with rolling suitcase, and put my feet up for a bit before heading out. It’s quite warm in the 80s and I thought waiting a few hours for the temperature to cool off before heading on a trek of several miles might be a good idea.

It was then out to a sidewalk cafe for dinner and a limoncello spritz, and then a walk through Les Halles down to the Seine, across L’Isle de la Cite (where Notre Dame is mostly repaired from the disastrous fire of a few years back) and then up the Rive Gauche, past the Louvre and back towards Opera Garnier and my hotel. Opera Garnier, home of the phantom and a few other things, is undergoing a resurfacing and is covered with a very large advertisement for Tiffany and Company. So much for a good photo of that. Had dessert and a drink at another bistro across the street from my hotel and then headed up to try and get some decent sleep tonight before meeting up with David and Jonathan tomorrow. They needed a day to themselves and I’m not about to go full Jacqueline de Bellefort on them.

Dateline: London, England.

And tonight is the last night on this sceptered isle. Off to the continent in the morning with three stops prior to returning to Birmingham and the workaday world. It the other stops are as magical as the first two have been, it will have been a grand tour indeed. Fairly amazing for something that kind of fell together around a lot of other people’s schedules.

Today began with clear skies so I met up with David Pohler at Sloane Square (prior home of Princess Di and her Sloane Rangers set of many decades ago) where we took a look at some of the floral installations that are part of the Chelsea Flower Show. Think stationary and smaller Tournament of Roses floats. We really should have done that yesterday, Eliza Doolittle Day, but this is just the way things worked out. I didn’t get the visual decorative gene that so many of my gay brothers have. Tommy and Steve both had it. Hand them some tissue paper, cardboard and a hot glue gun and they would have a parade float ready in a couple of hours. I, on the other hand, would likely create something completely unrecognizable in either form or function.

We then decided to do something cultural so we headed up to Marylebone and spent a couple of hours in Hertford House gazing at the Wallace Collection. Like the Frick, it’s one of those smaller off the beaten path museums with multiple excellent pieces and a size that keeps you from feeling completely overwhelmed. It was my maternal grandmother’s favorite museum in the world. I visited it on my first trip to London more than forty years ago but hadn’t been back since. It has a lot of very good 17th and 18th century paintings and sculptural pieces courtesy of the Marquesses of Hertford and the Wallace family. I particularly liked the room full of Canaletto’s views of Venice.

Then we headed off to the South Bank of the Thames for a pub lunch followed by the matinee of Into The Woods at the Bridge Theatre. I had fallen in love with the Bridge as a venue after seeing their arena production of Guys and Dolls a few years ago. I was hoping for something equally revolutionary. It wasn’t as they had reconfigured the space back to a fairly traditional proscenium house. The woods set, however was spectacular. The performances were uniformly good. And, most importantly, it was a production which more or less solved the biggest flaw in the material. The three moralistic ballads that end the show – No More, No One is Alone, and Children Will Listen. That last twenty minutes usually drags and drags but there was some alchemy here that prevented that from happening. No More was devastating and it’s usually the weakest of the three numbers. That provided the impetus to take us through to the end.

After the show, David went off to join his other half and I made my way across Tower Bridge and into the City of London to meet my cousin Jack for a belated birthday dinner. We’re both May babies. He happened to be in town on business – something about a supply chain of building materials from quarries in Wales to the greater London area. We had dinner together in a Japanese/Brazilian fusion place called Sushi Samba on top of one of the new glass towers that have arisen over central London this century. From the dining room on the 39th floor, looking down over the gherkin, the Thames, and St Pauls, we enjoyed cocktails, short ribs, sushi, edamame and a chocolate mousse dessert. It was nice to catch up on various family matters. We are the bookends of our generation – I the eldest and he the youngest but as we have reached our middle years, we have found ourselves more and more simpatico and enjoy getting together when we can. I headed back to the hotel after, calling it an early night as I have to get up tomorrow and get myself on the Eurostar.

It’s been very nice not being inundated with American political news here in Europe so I am going to continue refraining from commenting on it for a while longer. On the public health front, it seems pretty clear that withdrawing from the WHO, decimating foreign aid, and hamstringing the CDC has helped Ebola emerge again in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ebola and the other filoviruses are the ones we really don’t want getting loose in the US. They kill somewhere between 30-90% of patients, depending on the strain and they are fairly easily transmitted through body fluids. Previous administrations, understanding the danger, have always made the resources available to combat outbreaks where they occur so that they don’t make their way here. This administration has destroyed our ability to do that. There’s no need to worry yet but all it’s going to take is the wrong person getting on the wrong flight and it could easily seed in one of the USA’s international travel hubs. No need to panic, just a need to remember that viruses have no interest in human politics and will go wherever they are given an opportunity to spread. There’s no need to panic over hantavirus yet either. That appears to be properly contained. At least I have not heard of any new cases breaking out related to the cruise ship affected for some weeks. Keep those hands washed.

Dateline: London, England

The Northwest Marine climate system that I grew up with has been in full evidence today. It’s cloudy and a lovely temperature. The sun comes out and it gets too hot and off comes the extra layer. It clouds up again. It spits rain for ten minutes. Maybe the climate is one of the reasons I love this city so much. Well that and affordable theater tickets. And an international ambiance. And two thousand years of sustained history. And every other block bringing some cultural allusion or other to mind.

After a light breakfast, I met David Pohler at Buckingham Palace in time for the Changing of the Guard… which wasn’t. Apparently they weren’t feeling it today or something so only a dozen horse guards wandered down the boulevard and that was it. I still quoted my A A Milne “They’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace. Christopher Robin went down with Alice. Alice is marrying one of the guards. ‘A soldier’s life is terribly hard’ says Alice. As we wandered down to Victoria Station in search of a pub, we were treated to a file of elderly Korean ladies in red hats playing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ on some sort of electric kazoos marching for Jesus. It almost made up for the canceled changing of the guard, not quite.

Fortified with a pint, our next stop was the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace where David had scored us tickets to a special exhibit of Elizabeth II’s wardrobe over her nearly century of life. Everything from her christening gown to her wedding dress to her coronation dress to decades of evening dresses for diplomatic affairs to the matching bright colored dress/coat/hat ensembles she favored in later years. It was very impressive seeing how her fashions and sense of style changed over the years and being able to look closely at the details of the embroidery and beading. The various news photos of her wearing them over the years sent me back on a Cooks Tour of my memories of her from boyhood on. I think I first became aware of her from my maternal grandparents, who always remained British citizens and staunch monarchists. They would bring me magazines on the doings of the Royals when they came to visit.

Then a walk up the Mall and through Trafalgar Square with some West End window shopping and a late lunch/early dinner at Dishoom Covent Garden which has become one of my favorite restaurants and I try to eat at least one meal there per London trip. David then went off to do things with his other half while I went back to the hotel and took a brief nap before setting out for the theatre. My choice this evening was the long running Witness for the Prosecution which I had heard good things about but had not yet seen. It’s immersively staged in an opulent, but no longer used court room at London County Hall, just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament and next door to the London Eye. The audience sits in the spectator’s seats and there’s a three quarter thrust stage built from the judge’s bench which is large enough to be a good playing area and where they can easily set up and take down the non-courtroom scenes. One goes for the experience, and the Agatha Christie mystery (which I have known the solution to since I first read the short story when I was about twelve), not for brilliant acting. The cast were perfectly serviceable but none gave a performance that I would call exceptional. The sound and light team deserve kudos however as I could hear every word in a space not designed for performance acoustics and the lights helped us define where we were at all times and helped with mood and suspense. Afterwards, a walk back towards Westminster to admire the city at night and then back to the hotel. Tomorrow is the last full London day. I have a lot of things planned. And so, to bed.

Dateline: London, England

It’s the end of a very long day that started about 8 am on Monday the 18th and is just now drawing to a close. Not a whole lot of it took place on the Monday. The morning was spent in leisurely pursuits and in making sure that Patti Steelman got placed in a car headed to the correct airport for her return to Birmingham. Once she had been safely sent on her way, I went downtown a few blocks to Herald Square and to Macy’s. It’s not holiday time so the store wasn’t especially decked out but I do have a Macy’s account and like to exercise it occasionally. My perusal of all six floors of the men’s department ended with me purchasing a polo shirt and a Karl Lagerfeld black and white shirt that I thought was quite comely but which apparently no one else liked as it had been marked down about eight times so I got it for a very reasonable price.

I then had a snack, collected my bags and headed uptown to meet up with David Pohler for our parallel trips across the pond. He was on Virgin and I on Delta but our flights were within a half hour of each other so we thought traveling together was reasonable. He and his other half have a lovely apartment in Harlem (very different now from the images you may have conjured up at that word) and, after a long chat, we hauled our suitcases down to the subway out to Jamaica and transfer to the Sky Train to JFK. Light dinner and cocktails at the Amex lounge (I knew my card was good for something) and then our separate ways for our respective redeyes. Due to various delays, both in take off and landing, we arrived at Heathrow within fifteen minutes of each other and met up again in baggage claim. Can’t say much about the flight. I got some sleep and watched both Mamma Mia movies somewhere over Iceland as they seemed mindless. The second one has grown on me a bunch after a rewatch or two. There’s apparently a third one in production but I can’t imagine that there’s much left in the ABBA catalogue from which they can draw. And i don’t think the world needs the song stylings of a 73 year old Pierce Brosnan,.

David and I, slightly bleary eyed, caught the Lizzie Line of the Underground from Heathrow. I changed trains at Paddington to head to my hotel in South Kensington while he went on to meet his other half Jonathan Uday Ramteke near Tower Bridge. My room was, of course, not ready at 11 am when I arrived so I dropped my bags, had something to eat and headed up the street to the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum which are conveniently only a few blocks away. I had not been to the Natural History Museum for many years. It hasn’t changed much, being mainly about getting small children and exhibits about dinosaurs into close proximity. I waved at various fossils, animatronics, taxidermy specimens, and ubiquitous portraits of David Attenborough and then headed next door to the V and A. I have been here several times in recent years but I always find some new corner to explore. This time it was the Theater and Performance galleries which had been closed for renovation pretty much every other visit over the last decade. Costumes from film, period TV series, the West End. Ephemera from theatrical production going back to the Victorians. Models of stage sets. I was in my element.

A quick return to the hotel (The Queens Gate at the corner of Queens Gate and Old Brompton Road) part of the Hilton Curio Collection. I think it’s called that as my room is about the size of a curio cabinet. But as I’m not planning on spending a great deal of time in it, that’s fine. It’s built into a lovely row of Georgian town homes so I feel very Upstairs Downstairs when I pass through the front door. After a nice hot shower and a change of clothes, I headed East to the West End (if you know your London geography, that will make sense) and met up with David to wander Covent Garden and then to meet up with Jonathan. We had some lovely nosh and polished off two bottles of wine together in a very nice wine bar and after, David headed for the musical Hercules while Jonathan and I went highbrow and went to the Royal Opera Covent Garden. (A suitable thing to do on the eve of Eliza Doolittle Day).

Tonight’s opera was Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila. It was musically lovely with some powerful voices (other than the tenor playing the Philistine High Priest who sand through his nose all night). It suffered from a bit of European Regietheatre. I want my grand opera to be grand with stunning costumes and huge sets and slightly over the top. The current fashion in Europe, however, is for directors to take the material and strip it down and go for minimalism, often with political overtones. Therefore, the set was serviceable, but uninspired. The costumes, off the rack, and it was all pretty tame until the fourth act. Then things came alive. Dalila appeared in a costume from a provincial tour of Follies with rhinestones everywhere. The Philistine army started Irish step dancing. Dagon, the god of the Philistines, was revealed to be an unkind comment on a certain American president. I enjoyed it. Another wine bar after, and then a tube back to South Kensington where I am catching up on correspondence and putting myself to bed. Tomorrow’s plans are still in flux but I hope to do some things I have never done before in London. And given this is my fourth trip in the last four years and seventh trip in total, that’s saying something.

Dateline: New York, New York

Last full day in NYC on my Cooks tour of the four major cultural capitals of Western Civilization and another day stuffed with all the things the city has to offer. The weather has continued to hold and, has in fact, warmed up to the point of being nearly too hot for comfortable walking having topped out somewhere in the mid 80s. Fortunately, the humidity has not yet set in so it wasn’t too bad. Just as well as it was another 20,000+ step or eight mile day.

We actually began moving relatively early this morning (if you call 8 am early) as we had an appointment at 10:45. We headed across town to the Museum of Modern Art to meet Lois, long term friend from Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham circles. The initial plan was to attend church services at All Souls UU as we have done with her before but then the decision was made to worship at a somewhat different temple, MoMA and to spend the time in the company of the Braques and Chagalls and all that. I hadn’t been to MoMA since sometime in the early 90s and it was nice to revisit Vincent’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon (which did not go down on the Titanic no matter what James Cameron might have suggested), Matisse’s circle of dancing naked women and all the rest in the permanent collection. This was followed by an excellent brunch at The Harvard Club where we all over ate.

Making our way from MoMA to the Harvard Club was a bit fraught as 6th Avenue was shut down for the Asian American Heritage Parade. Floats full of women in native costumes, Chinese dragons, various drum corps. We had to thread our way through the staging areas. As Lois is now in her 90s, I was a bit worried about her balance and her stamina, especially after she was mowed down in the street by a passing car a few months ago, but she’s a true New Yorker and galumphed her way down ten blocks of sidewalk without the least bit of difficulty.

Following brunch and a farewell to Lois, we headed back to the theatre district for our last Broadway show of the weekend, the comedy Oh Mary, currently starring Maya Rudolph and Cheyenne Jackson. Martin Landry (whom I once directed in Kiss Me Kate) is in the company as an alternate but was not on for our performance which is too bad, as I would have liked to have seen him on stage again. The play is vulgar, juvenile, and outrageously funny. The whole thing depends on the performer in the central role of Mary Todd Lincoln (whom in this telling longs to return to the cabaret stage). Maya Rudolph did a phenomenal job of balancing all of the elements so that the character came across as a human, rather than just some sort of sick cartoon.

While watching the play, I had a major moment of deja vu. Many years ago, I had a patient who was brought to me by his family for complaints of cognitive decline. (He was in his 80s and therefore this was not completely unexpected). The family decided he needed to see me after they took him in to have his drivers license renewed and the California Department of Motor Vehicles decided he needed a road test. He was willing – and immediately drove the examiner into the dumpster which ended that test. When I saw him, he told me that he was fine except for the metal valve that had mysteriously been implanted in his nose and which he was afraid would close one day causing him to suffocate. No assurances from me or anyone else that no such valve existed would shake his delusion. He then proceeded to tell me that he had discovered a way to keep the valve open. He just needed to put a we washcloth on his head, and then rubber band a plastic bag over it. He then put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it, crammed a stocking cap over it and went to bed. Worked like a charm. The only follow up question I could think to ask him was ‘Does it have to be vanilla?’ which was also the punch line of one of the best jokes in Oh Mary. But I thought of it first, back when Cole Escola was in elementary school.

After the show, Patti and I took a long and leisurely stroll from Times Square over to Hells Kitchen, and then down to Hudson Yards, and down the Highline. We stopped in the meat packing district, killed a bottle of white wine between us at a sidewalk cafe, and then continued on to the West Village where I introduced Patti to Stonewall and we ensconced ourselves at Marie’s Crisis for piano bar sing along, shortly joined by my friends David Pohler and Calliope whom we had hung out with earlier in the week. Then it was across the street to Buvette for more drinks and a nosh where are bartender server was Alex Belli whom I had not seen for some years. Feeling no pain, we returned unscathed to our hotel to get some sleep before our separate journeys tomorrow. Patti Steelman returns to Birmingham while I and David head across the pond to London and to meet up with David’s other half Jonathan Uday Ramteke. There may or may not be an update tomorrow as I’m not doing much besides prepping for leaving the country and getting on a redeye to the UK.

In the midst of all this, I received a text from Bill McMullen who is vacationing in Egypt. He was wearing a T-shirt with my mantra ‘Get up, Get Dressed, Go Out, Do Good’ on it. It apparently caught the eye of some of the locals who wanted to know where they could get one. I have let him know if he wishes to have the T-shirt concession in the Arab World for my pithy sayings, he’s more than welcome. I never expected my philosophy to have international reach…

Dateline: New York, New York

Those crazy madcap kids Andy and Patti slept in again this morning. Probably due to a little too much carrying on with $5 kiwi cocktails and karaoke last night (but it was fun). We emerged from the hotel about 11 am to run smack dab into the 9th Avenue Hells Kitchen International Food Festival which occupied the road from 42nd Street all the way up to 57th. We didn’t feel like eating on our feet so we ducked into a diner about half way up for coffee and breakfast food. Little has changed about New York Diners in the last century other than the prices which are a good deal higher than they once were. Patti bought herself a new jade choker at a booth. I didn’t feel the need for one.

We did some more midtown wandering (gorgeous weather again today but the temperature was definitely going up into the high 70s and low 80s). We stopped in at the Krispy Kreme store for Patti (alas, no vegan alternatives) and the M & M store for me (I didn’t buy any) and eventually ended up at the Longacre theater for the matinee of Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York. It’s a charming little bon bon of a show with dynamite performances from the two leads (who are the only people on stage). Young Dougal (Sam Tutty) is a Brit on his first trip to New York to attend a wedding. He has the personality of a Labrador puppy and it excited by everyting. He’s met by Robin (Christiani Pitts), the bride’s sister at JFK. She’s repressed and unhappy. Eventually the unlikely duo are charged with getting the wedding cake from Brooklyn to Manhattan leading to various complications and an unlikely bonding. The whole thing is charming and I thoroughly enjoyed it from the effervescent performances to the simple but effective set (a pile of rotating luggage that becomes all sorts of locations in clever ways). Sam Tutty would be a shoo-in for the Tony if Joshua Henry weren’t his competition. I saw Christiani Pitts some years ago as the leading lady in King Kong: The Musical. She has much better material to work with this time and is quite lovely.

After the matinee, we checked out the flagship Lego store on 5th Avenue, as one does, marveled at some of the constructions, and then went off for dinner at a very good Thai restaurant (Mitr Thai on 46th between 5th and 6th). Then it was time to fight our way back across Times Square to the Golden Theater for our evening show, Operation Mincemeat. This was a show that I had had recommended to me several times over the last few years but I was told it was best enjoyed going in cold with minimal knowledge. I was aware that it was a British show and that it had something to do with a real MI-5 World War II mission involving a corpse, that Ian Fleming was somehow involved, and I had no idea how that would make a musical. As the show started I was somewhat disconcerted by what I thought was some odd cross gendered casting but I soon realized it was because there were only five actors playing dozens of characters across multiple locations. As the show continued, I became more and more drawn in by the outrageous (but true) plot, the talents of the five performers and some incredibly inventive direction (and costume accessory changes) that kept it clear where we were, what was happening, and kept a consistent tone that was part David Lean and part Monty Python.

We have a rather full day planned tomorrow so we decided to retire relatively early. And so, to bed. And to dreams of singing and dancing on the streets of New York and in the underground chambers of Churchill’s war bunker.

Dateline: New York, New York

Patti and I slept in this morning as we didn’t have anywhere we needed to be for some hours. When we did decide to start moving, we found the weather to again be lovely – in the 60s with no humidity and intermittent sunshine and high overcast. Again perfect walking weather. We ambled up 9th avenue in search of brunch and found a place with decent coffee and vegan avocado toast (Patti) and a reasonable omelet for me. We then hopped on the subway and headed for the Upper West Side. The idea was to wander across Central Park to Museum Mile on 5th Avenue, stopping as we felt like it.

Due to some paths taking unexpected directions, we wandered through a great deal of the park’s midsection, taking in the lake, some of the rambles, the Bethesda fountain, and eventually emerged near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had been to the Met together on our last trip to NYC together so we decided to skip that this time and headed a few blocks further uptown to the Guggenheim. Patti had never been. I hadn’t been for some decades. The last time I remember going was with Steve on one of our trips in the 90s to see the Chinese terracotta warriors form Xian which were on tour. That visit was memorable as we unexpectedly ran into my cousin Jack and his wife at the top of the ramp. Great minds…

The major retrospective this time was for New York artist Carol Bove. Lots of crumpled painted steel ducting which I rather liked. And it’s always fun to climb that Frank Lloyd Wright designed ramp, even if the parapet preventing you from plummeting over the age feels dangerously low. Once through the Guggenheim, we continued down 5th Avenue and stopped at the Frick which is my favorite New York museum. It’s small but every piece in it is a masterpiece. And it has the Holbeins of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More on either side of the fireplace in the green salon.

Continuing down 5th Avenue soon brought us to the ritzy shopping district with its stores full of trinkets that are far out of mere mortals’ price range. We looked in the windows, were disappointed that Tiffany’s was not serving breakfast, and sped past Tiffany’s next door neighbor and its golden escalators without engaging. Crossing the street, we wandered through Rockefeller Center (no ice skating at this time of year) and stopped for early supper and cocktails at the restaurant that was Steve and my traditional pre-show eatery – Pasta Lovers on 49th. Vegan penne marinara for Patti and spaghetti carbonara for me, followed by a huge helping of tiramisu.

Tonight’s show was a small off-off-Broadway production of Sweeney Todd put on by Village Light Opera Group. My dear friend David Pohler was in the cast as Toby. It was in a small black box space on the upper floor of a church and ended up being one of my favorite productions I’ve seen of the show. As most of you know, I worship at the altar of Sondheim and I’ve seen about fifteen productions of Sweeney over the years – everything from the original on tour to NYCO’s recreation of the original to Atlanta Opera to community theater to college theater to the Barrow Street version which was done with eight performers in an immersive staging based on the pie shop. The vast majority of these productions have all used the original Harold Prince staging as a template. Only the Barrow Street with its pie shop setting threw it out and set out to create something new. This production did the same thing. The technical limitations of the space and an obviously inventive director led me to be constantly surprised, usually in a good way, by staging and character choices. The whole thing was set in a barber shop/beauty parlor with the props coming out of things one would find in that environment. The ensemble was on stage constantly becoming a Greek chorus and adding movement and a personification to objects that I had never seen done before. Large quantities of stage blood appeared in the second act making Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s activities much darker and gorier than usual. Everything was helped along by top notch casting. The Sweeney, who is a psychotherapist by day and a University of Michigan trained musical theater performer by night, gave one of the best sung and best acted interpretations of the role I have ever seen. He was matched by a Lovett with a huge belt and a great sense of comic timing. David’s best moment was his Not While I’m Around duet with Mrs. Lovett. Tender and scary.

After the show, David, Patti, David’s friend Calliope and I headed out for drinks and ended up in a queer restaurant bar that was having a karaoke night. Cocktails were consumed. Karaoke was sung. Much hilarity ensued. I’m planning on sleeping in again.

Dateline: New York, New York

And the all four major Western cultural capitals in two and half weeks tour has begun. First stop, New York, New York. A helluva town. The journey here was uneventful. The worst part was having to stay up until one am last night in order to get all of the various clinical in boxes thoroughly empty prior to departure. Knowing I was about to leave town, everyone and their third cousin submitted last minute requests for prescriptions, advice, patient care needs, and the kajillion and one administrative inconveniences that are yet another reason for me not to reconsider my decision to retire next year. Fortunately, I did not have an early flight this morning so I was able to get some decent sleep.

I was out of the house about 9 am with my large roller bag packed for the next seventeen days and my backpack with the various necessities that I have to have with me these days. Laptop, chargers, CPAP machine… Fortunately Birmingham airport remains easy to use and uncrowded at that hour of the morning. I met Patti Steelman, my traveling companion for phase one, in line at the airport Starbucks and together we boarded the small jet that serves as the direct flight from Birmingham to Laguardia. The flight was uneventful. I snoozed.

We arrived to reasonable weather – high overcast, not too warm, not too cold. Perfect walking in the city weather. The first step was getting from Queens to Manhattan. I’ve done that cab ride many times in the past. It usually takes just under an hour. This time it was 95 minutes. Zohran Mamdani appears to be making good on his promise to fix NYC’s infrastructure. Every other block was torn up leading to significant traffic jams and delays. We were in no hurry so it wasn’t a huge issue. Once settled into our hotel (the Doubletree behind the Port Authority Bus Terminal), we decided food was in order so we wandered up 9th Avenue and had an early dinner in a very good vegetarian Indian restaurant.

Our first show was the revival of Ragtime at Lincoln Center so, after dinner, we just continued wandering up 9th avenue and soon arrived at the Beaumont. The Lincoln Center plaza was in the process of having a temporary pavilion placed for some red carpet event so it wasn’t as nice as it usually is but the reflecting pool in front of the Beaumont was unscathed. We jostled our way in and found our seats.

The production was magnificent. Ragtime has always been one of my favorite shows of the last thirty years and it’s not often done due to its enormous scope, being more or less a social history of the first decade of the 20th century in the USA, weaving historical incidents together with the personal dramas of several families whose lives intertwine. It’s also the perfect antidote for our current political moment. Thematically, it shows how in the early 20th century, modern America was created, strengthened, and improved by the blending of traditional Anglo culture, African American culture, and Immigrant culture from Eastern Europe. The current administration is busy undercutting two legs of that tripod and the subtext of the show makes clear what a huge mistake that is. Not only does it weaken who we are, it basically returns us to the nineteenth century and before.

None of the principals were out for this performance (it’s Tony voter season and a number of them have nominations). Joshua Henry’s incredibly powerful voice landed Coalhouse’s major anthems with such an impact that the audience came to its feet several times. I saw him in Carousel back in 2018 and he has definitely grown as a performer in the interim. I was also very taken with Brandon Uranawitz’s Tateh, a character who is usually underdeveloped in other productions I’ve seen. I quite liked Cassie Levy’s Mother and she held her own but she has huge shoes to fill given Marin Mazzie’s performance in the original. i also quite enjoyed Ben Levi Ross as Mother’s Younger Brother and Shaina Taub as Emma Goldman. The only major performance I was not so fond of was Nichelle Lewis as Sarah. She sang her heart out but her diction made Patti LuPone sound like early Julie Andrews.

Afterwards, carried along on the wheels of a dream, we walked back down Broadway through Times Square at night and back to the hotel. Someday, when the current administration has been flushed from DC, the Kennedy Center can be cleansed with a first class mounting of Ragtime. Perhaps it should run there in perpetuity.

I’m officially another year older, having passed through my 64th birthday yesterday. I don’t feel any different and I didn’t do anything different, spending the day at work seeing patients and the evening at home writing progress notes. My clinic staff did give me a cake and sang Happy Birthday to me in the afternoon, each in their own key. It was lovely. I have to power through tomorrow, including an evening emptying all of my electronic in boxes and powering through any remaining notes, so that I can depart on vacation on Thursday morning with nothing work related hanging over my head. I am looking forward to several weeks of only having to worry about curtain times and transportation schedules. This does mean that I will go into travelogue mode starting with the next one of these missives. Those interested in those musings will rejoice. Those bored to tears by them can rejoin me in June when I shall return to regularly scheduled programming.

I’ve learned some things about the psychology of aging in recent years. The first is that the brain’s rapid growth and development in our first quarter century, which comes to a crashing halt in the latter half of our twenties, leaves us all with a rapidly growing divide between brain and body as we age. Our brain is finished and it’s full authentic adult self in our late twenties and so our self image and our autopilots remain firmly stuck at that time. We always, no matter how old we grow, still think of ourselves internally as that healthy young adult. And our brain continues to want to run our bodies the way we were then. In an era when few lived past the age of forty-five, this wasn’t a big deal but we can now live healthily into our ninth decade with minimal fuss and that leaves a huge gap between our physical reality and abilities and what our brain understands about body mechanics. And so every year I see older men who seriously hurt themselves after they fall off ladders trying to string up Christmas lights the way they always have or women who can’t understand why their joints hurt after a night of salsa dancing. And we all look in the mirror expecting to see young adult us looking back and are shocked as we see our parents and eventually our grandparents looking back at us.

This is all going to get a bit worse over the next decade or so with the continued aging of the Baby Boom generation as they still consider themselves young, even though the classic Boomers are all now in their 70s. Their brains, expecting their bodies to do what they have always done are going to have a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, when that just is no longer possible. The demands on the health system to fix that are going to be… problematic. Yet one more reason for me to head off into the sunset. (414 more sleeps until retirement but who’s counting?)

The second phenomenon I’ve noticed is that we do not see the people we love and care for and who are long term presences in our lives in the way we see others. Internally, we are all of the ages we have ever been at once. And the older we get, the more of them there are. We see childhood and young and middle-aged and older self all wrapped into one when we look in the mirror or wander down memory lane with old photographs or reminiscences. And family members or close friends of long duration. We see them the same way – we don’t just see them as they are but as they were and this colors our perceptions. I see what happens when this gets damaged by dementia and there are hiccups with this ability to sort out all of these various versions of an individual we carry around with us and I spend a lot of time teaching families how to deal delicately with these perceptions and how they may change.

As the birthday greetings poured in yesterday (and I will acknowledge them all. If you haven’t gotten yours yet, hang tight. There were something like 700 of them), I found myself picturing each individual. Some, whom I am close to and see regularly were in layers of different ages. Some were stuck at the age when I last had significant interaction. College friends forever in their twenties. California friends forever in their thirties and forties. I don’t have children of my own, but having been a member of the same church for over 25 years has allowed me to watch a lot of them grow up, spread their wings and eventually show up with children of their own and that always seems a little odd as I tend to have been closest to them when I taught them in early elementary Sunday school, which I have done off and on for decades.

I like to think that I’m aging relatively gracefully. I keep myself busy. I’m interested in what my younger friends are up to. I mentor where and when I can. I try to leave things I’m involved with in better shape than when I began. I should exercise more and eat better but a lot of those choices boil down to lack of time as I run from one obligation to the next. As I once told a previous boss at UAB. I’ve mastered being in two places at once but I’m having grave difficulties with three. But I only have to be one place at a time the next few weeks and most of those places should be fun. I think that’s a better birthday celebration than charging my friends seven figures to witness a wrestling match on the lawn.

Next stop – Manhattan 5/14-18