Dateline: Seattle, Washington

Today is the last day in what I like to think of as normal climate and weather here in the Pacific Northwest. I head back tonight on a red eye and will be back in Birmingham tomorrow morning, vaguely ready to plunge myself back into the usual work stuff, a new show (an original dramedy called Before I Let Go coming up at the Carver Theater produced by Encore Theatre and Gallery), and some chaotic issues in the lives of friends which are spilling over into mine. C’est la vie. And I think I would rather have a life with a bit of chaos around the edges than one that was overly placid and dull.

Not a lot has happened. I’ve had more time to visit with dad (who continues to do amazingly well for one ten weeks shy of his 94th birthday), my sister, and my brother and to catch up on various things and to talk through family business of one type or another. As retirement and major financial changes loom on the horizon and as I have no family in Birmingham, I try to keep them somewhat abreast of what I am thinking and how the various pieces of my life are likely to settle in the next phase as they will be the ones that will have to clean up after me should the plane go down before all of the various pieces are in order. I have a plan for simplification and consolidation over the next year or so but one thing my life has taught me is that nothing ever goes according to plan.

I got together with one of my oldest friends, Lauren Marshall and her husband Michael Schell on Saturday. Lauren and I were frequent collaborators during our years together at Stanford and also later, when we both ended up in Seattle in the later 1980s. And even to this day, we share ideas and thoughts and critique each others work. Trained as a lawyer, she went back to school and got an MFA in musical book writing at NYU and now runs a theater company that works with kids on the spectrum. We all went out to Issaquah (an outer ring suburb on the other sidde of Lake Washington) for a delicious Setzuan dinner followed by a performance of Ragtime at The Village Theater

The Village Theater has grown from outskirts small community theater of forty years ago to one of the more prestigious and professional producers of musical theater on the West Coast and their Ragtime was top notch. Most of the cast were local to Seattle but would have given the cast of the recent New York revival a run for their money. Incredibly well performed and directed. As the stage at Village is not that large, it was a much smaller cast than the show usually has (just over 20) so principals double as ensemble throughout but deft changes of costume, wigs, and body language kept it from being confusing. The director also took a new take on the show conceptually. All of the action takes place in the attic of the house that father has built. All of the set props are constructed from things one would find in an attic of a turn of the century house (including the car). If I had a quibble, the orchestra was a bit small and relied a bit too much on synthesized sounds. So, if you’re in the Puget Sound area, go.

The show was also a stark reminder of just how much time has passed since I was a part of the Seattle theater scene. The apex of Lauren and my collaborations was an original musical ‘Wadda ‘Bout My Legal Rights’ which was designed to teach highschoolers about legal principles. Six high schoolers each runs into a different issue with law and the legal system in song and dance and it runs about an hour, designed to fit into a high school double assembly period. (I think it’s still available from Concord Theatricals if you really want to do it). In 1989, after a year or so of workshopping, the late lamented Empty Space Theater did an equity tour of the show through the Northwest with a cast of six young professional actors playing the students. One of those six was in Ragtime….as grandfather.

My father’s apartment is just south of Northgate and overlooks Thornton Creek as it meanders its way through north central Seattle neighborhoods. I’m sitting looking out over the various bushes and water plants, watching some juncos visit his bird feeder and listening to a couple of jays fight over something down below. A few more hours of calm and then everything goes back in the suitcase and its off to the light rail, the airport, a cramped sardine can, minimal sleep, and a return to my reality and a backlog of patient issues. March the first cannot get here soon enough

Dateline – Seattle, Washington

The weather has clouded over and cooled off which is just fine with me. I’ve live in warmer climates than the one I grew up in for almost all of the last fifty years and I still don’t do heat well. I don’t mind it in the tropics with a beach or a pool constantly at hand but in ordinary daily city living or sightseeing, lets keep it under 75 degrees please. Of course, climate change is not my friend when it comes to that particular desire. The only consolation is that it’s getting easier and easier to grow tropical climate vegetation on my back deck. Mandevilla in particular is very happy out there.

I finished up with what I was interested in attending of the GLMA annual conference yesterday. (There was more today but I figured the ten hours of CME I’m garnering should be enough to put me over the top for 2026 so I was a slug this morning rather than heading out for the light rail after breakfast). I’m glad I went to get a sense of the intersection of the medical profession and the modern LGBTQ community. I’ll never go again as it was enough to reinforce that I have become a dinosaur in terms of modern American healthcare and its debates. Forty-two plus years in and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the world I was built by and trained for is now ancient history and that the field belongs to a new generation. I know folk that continue to practice from their twenties through their eighties but they must do it by walling themselves off in their own little world. I think retiring and remaining part of the world at large rather than trying to maintain an ever shrinking world in stasis is a wiser course.

Last night was family dinner at my sister’s house. She lives in a turn of the last century fisherman’s bungalow in Ballard where she has been for about thirty-five years. She has created a small urban paradise in her garden which is dominated by an enormous sequoia that someone planted a century or so ago when the house was new and which is now about a hundred feet tall, creating a shade garden around her patio and koi pond. Every time I’m in it, I can’t help but reflect on two parties that were held there. One was my fiftieth birthday which Tommy put together and one, two years later, was our wedding reception after our legal marriage at the King County Courthouse. Being back there with her ferns and her flowering shrubs is always a little bittersweet.

Pretty much the whole immediate family turned out for dinner – father, brother and sister-in-law, both nieces, sister. My sister’s partner being the only one missing as it was Friday night during football season and he manages a sports bar. The extended family includes my uncle, various cousins, and some in-law connections but we generally only get the entire gang together on major holidays as it can be quite the houseful. Everyone appears to be well and we spent the time in a combination of bemoaning the state of the country, remeniscing about years ago, discussing recent books, movies and TV, and catching up on what everyone has been up to recently. Both nieces are now through the majority of their education and into the workforce. Bella, the elder, is a high school physics teacher in the Seattle Public School system and Iris, the younger, is an urban horticulturist working on some sort of additional certifications. I remain here for another couple of days. We may get together again. We may not. They know where I am.

I was gratified to see the population of DMV rallying around the Kennedy Center yesterday, venting their displeasure at Trump’s treatment of the memorial. It’s purely performative and doesn’t really accomplish a whole lot but it does give some nice visuals and soundbites. The whole Kennedy Center fiasco is a microcosm of how Trump has always conducted business, political or otherwise. Barge in and take something over, ensure conditions that will worsen the situation, loudly announce himself as the only possible solution, extract anything of value and then quietly withdraw and let the entity collaspe into bankruptcy or worse.

Given the way our government actually functions, street demonstrations don’t do a lot. As our system ensures that the person or entity that gets 50.000001% of the vote takes all the marbles, it tends to encourage two factions, of roughly equal size, which will continually tussle over the money and the power that comes with an electoral win. Sometimes one will be in the ascendancy, sometimes the other, and the names and identities of the factions will evolve over time but there will always end up being two because of that majority thing and no proportional representation as exists in many other democratic systems. There are really only two ways to affect the outcome and change what’s going on. The first is to turn out those who will more likely vote your way and get a majority of the electorate to vote. (This only tends to happen in presidential elections and even then the turnout is usually only about 62-67%). The other is, unfortunately, to put money into the system on your side given that the system in general now responds to money and not to the needs of the electorate. (Thank you SCOTUS).

If everyone who was at the Kennedy Center went home and wrote a check to a progressive candidate of their choice and made sure, on election day, that one other person who might not make it to the polls, was able to be there, it would do a lot more to push the needle against Trump than anything else. I have no idea how the midterms are going to turn out. The mood of the country is definitely against the administration and the Republican party but there’s a lot of room for manipulation and, as we have seen, there’s little in terms of norms or rules that the current administration isn’t willing to blithely ignore in order to get what they want. Most people vote their wallet ‘(It’s the economy stupid’ being the catchphrase that helped get Bill Clinton elected) and we’re heading for a perfect storm of misery given the failed military adventures in the Middle East leading to spiking fuel prices. People are having trouble filling their tanks and, more importantly, the huge spike in diesel prices is going to lead towards inflation as most of our food and consumer goods require diesel trucks at some point on their route to the Wal-Mart near you..

I’ve got lots of other things I could write about but I’m not right now. Going to get ready to go out to dinner and a show with one of my oldest friends and theatrical partners in crime.

Dateline – Seattle, Washington

And it’s another trip to the Pacific Northwest to check up on the family. They’re having a heatwave up here too so I won’t feel too far out of my element but here a heatwave is low 80s and no humidity so it’s much more pleasant than the one back home in Birmingham. My only complaint is that my father dislikes running his air conditioner so his apartment is a little warm for my taste, but I can’t complain too much. It is the climate in which I grew up and which I still consider ‘normal’ when making subjective comparisons.

The journey here was uneventful, but long, as it always is. There is no such thing as a non-stop flight between Birmingham and the West Coast so one always has to change somewhere. As I tend to fly Delta, this is usually Atlanta but this time around it was Detroit. Three hours of layover in the Detroit airport was spent falling asleep over a Stephen King novel as I had had to get up at 4:30 am in order to catch my initial flight. ‘Not a morning person’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Why anyone schedules anything before a civilized hour like 10:30 am is beyond me.

I chose to come this week as the Gay Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) of which I have been a member for decades, is having its annual conference in Seattle. This way, I can write the trip off the taxes, top off my CME for the year, and actually go to their annual meeting for the first time. It’s been interesting and another reminder that it is time to retire as I’m about twenty to forty years older than the majority of the atendees and most of the conversations are about very different issues in LGBTQ issues than the ones I spent years battling. Most of the battles I fought have been won to a greater or lesser extant and the new ones are somewhat alien to me. I did win a prize in the Human Rights Campaign’s trivia contest about their Health Equity Index initiative, mainly because I was old enough to have seen all of that happen in real time and to have served on UAB’s HEI committee for a number of years. At least no one called me grandpa.

Time spent hanging out in airports and hotel lounges has given me a chance to catch up on all of the political developments of the last week or so. I’m not sure what to make of the chaos emenating from DC. The president seems to be trying to tear down the Kennedy Center for the Arts, a living memorial to a slain president, in a fit of pique as the courts will not let him add his name to the building. The skeleton of his ballroom is rising showing how badly it will dwarf the White House and look completely out of place. He’s about to start on a triumphal arch that nobody really wants which will tower over every other building and monument in the capital. And that’s just the vanity projects.

His compliant Speaker of the House adjourned all business until after the midterms to avoid having to deal with articles of impeachment against a DOD secretary who has been actively destroying the American military machine. Mideast policy is such that not only is the strait of Hormuz closed, now the Red Sea on the other side of the Arabian peninsula has fallen to the control of the Houthis, Iran’s allies. You think gas prices are bad now. Not to mention what’s going to happen to worldwide food availability once we get through current fertilizer stockpiles and cannot get any additional. It’s OK, we may all be dead of infectious disease before we starve. His secretary of HHS is busy leading an antivaccine conference.

I read somewhere that, since 2020, corporate profits are up 47%, consumer prices (mainly housing, food and energy) are up 35% and wages are up 12%. No one is in a posiiton to get ahead other than the very wealthy who seem quite content to continue to rig the game and use a bought and paid for legislative system to ensure the continued flow of capital upward. Revolution happens when enough parents cannot feed and raise their children and we seem to be headed on a crash course for this. I’m not sure I want to be around if and when it happens. It’s likely to be very messy.

On another note, the new covid shorts have been distributed and are now available. I’m planning on getting mine in a couple of weeks before I head off to Europe. Covid does not scare me. Long Covid does and I’ll do whatever will help keep that out of my life.

My feelings about 9/11 and our national grief at the time are complicated as they are so intertwined with private grief. I did not lose anyone close to me that day. I had friends who were in the towers who escaped. I had a few passing acquaintances who were lost but my grief and empathy were not so much for the dead but for the living who would have to relive the terrible events of that day and the incalculable losses they suffered over and over again with every news special, every documentary, every official or unofficial rememberance. Social media was not yet a thing in 2001 which is probably just as well, seeing some of the negative uses it has been put to over the last couple of decades. There will be another mass casualty disaster in the USA that will stun us sometime. It has always happened. It always will. 9/11 was a unifying moment. I fear the next one will be polarizing.

Steve died on Wednesday, August the 1st, 2001 around 11 am. I was not there. He had been in his usual stable condition that morning so I had gone to work. I got the call from Tameka, his caregiver, that he was gone. His heart simply suddenly gave out from overwork at trying to continuously pump blood through lungs that had been slowly turning to cement as the spongy alveolar tissue became more and more fibrotic with time. It was an inexorable process and both of us knew how it would end. We lived as normal a life as we could until his was over. I got through that first ten days or so in a bit of a fog and then I decided I needed to run.

I gassed up the Mustang, packed some clothes, and headed out of town accompanied by Steve’s cremains which I intended to scatter at his favorite place in the Anza-Borrego desert outside of San Diego. It was a leisurely road trip where I went where I wanted when I wanted, visiting friends and reconnecting with life. Someitme in early September, I made it to Seattle and moved into my brother’s guest room for a week or so. Long hours in the car allowed me to be alone with my emotions, my grief over losing Steve, my thankfulness that he was no longer suffering, and my wondering what the heck I was going to do with the next phase of my life as a thirty-nine year old widower.

On the morning of the 11th, I was having a bit of a lie in. Sally Bergesen, my sister-in-law was downstairs getting breakfast for my toddler niece Bella. At some point she flipped on the living room TV for the morning news. I can still hear her anguished shriek calling up the stairs ‘Andy get down here now!’. I threw on some clothes, stumbled down the stairs and was confronted with the images with which we have all become indelibly imprinted. The south tower collapsed shortly after I tuned in and I was glued to the TV all morning, watching the north tower collapse a bit later and all of the other confusing coverage as we, as individuals and as a nation, began to try and make sense of all of the confusing and contradictory information that came in. I don’t remember how I felt at that moment. I know I cried. Was I crying for Steve? For the country? For those immediately impacted? I don’t know. Likely all of the above. To this day 9/11 and losing Steve are throughly entwined in my head.

I was there as the country mourned. As our leaders, for cynical political reasons, turned the country’s anger and resolve away from the actual culprits in the ‘war on terror’ and towards Iraq in a neo-con project to dominate the region economically in a new American Empire. As a portion of the country saw through this farce (akin, as someone once said, to have declared war on aviation after Pearl Harbor and then invaded Brazil), I became involved in antiwar projects and sentiment. My first Birmingham performance credit was as the narrator in a production of Lysistrata for The Lysistrata Project put on by the Birmingham Peace Project. It was the catalyst that produced Politically Incorrect Cabaret a year later and I was off to the races.

We’re now twenty-five years later. I am teaching medical students and residents, full grown adults with advanced degrees, who have no memory of that day. It seems a bit incredible but it’s no different than how I was at that developmental stage. The 25th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination was in November of 1988. At the time, I was in my first year of residency at UC Davis in Sacramento and remember clearly the older generation remeniscing about it. I had no memory of it even though I had been alive at the time. I was eighteen months old and in a playpen. Such are the cycles of life. Today’s young people will have a similar experience in another twenty-five or thirty years about some event that has yet to occur.

My rememberance of 9/11 was to attend a performance of Red Mountain Theatre‘s production of Come From Away last night with my regular Theater Bud, Patti Steelman. I had seen the show several times before. The original production on Broadway and a touring production a couple of years ago. The stock rights became available this past year and, given that it’s the 25th anniversary, it appears that every theater company in the country capable of mounting a production is doing so. There’s something like 145 productions happening this fall so I’m sure there’s one close to you. (There’s also a pro-shot of the original produciton on some of the streaming channels). It’s a good way to revisit that time and leave with a message of hope rather than despair.

If you’ve never seen the show, it’s about what happened to the town of Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11 when US airspace suddenly closed and 38 flights, mainly transatlantic were diverted to Gander (home to a large airport left over from when flights had to refuel before or after crossing the Atlantic) and a town of 9,000 people (roughly 2/3 the size of Jasper, Alabama) had 7,000 air passengers arrive with no notice. The show is touching, funny, emotional, and ultimately deeply human. It also taps into the essential goodness that exists in both Americans and Canadians which makes the current actions and rhetoric from our executive branch seem even more deeply shameful. It was nice to revisit the show with a talented cast, many of whom are friends and colleages from pevious projects but, as I watched all of that movement up there on stage, I realized I have become too old to be able to do that kind of ensemble show at this point. My joints aren’t up to it anymore.

I saw some clips of the rememberence ceremonies in NYC. The grave, solemn and serious countenances of our past presidents and dignitaries, willing to let the occasion speak for itself was in sharp contrast to the hoe down in Texas where our current president offered bribes to voters, declared he is divinely ordained, and asked those in attendance to swear fealty to him as an individual rather than to the country and constitution, all deeply anti-American attitudes. I could continue to pick all of that apart but I refuse to grant it that much attention. Public and media attention is the oxygen the MAGA movement lives on. If we all ignored it, it would eventually snuff itself out.

It’s time to remind myself of my mantra and continue to live by it. Get up, get dressed, go out, do good….

It’s the waning hours of Labor Day Weekend: Do you know where your children are? Well, in the great state of Alabama I can answer that fairly easily. Anywhere besides out of doors. We’ve been enduring god-awful temperatures in the high 90s with a level of humidity that’s driving the heat index to somewhere between 100 and 112- day in, day out for the last few weeks. I absolutely refuse to venture out of air-conditioned environments for more than five minutes.  I had vague plans of doing a bunch of things around the condo, but for the most part, even though my HVAC works perfectly well, the heat has kept me from wanting to much of anything.  Therefore, my Labor Day Weekend has been unencumbered by too much labor.

I did get a few minor things finished and caught up on everything that has an imminent due date so it wasn’t a complete vegetative state weekend.  I also managed to have a few decent meals out and spent time with friends, mainly watching old movies.  One of the nice things about having younger friends is the ability to acquaint them with cultural touchstones of earlier decades and being able to revisit them through eyes that have never seen them or read them or listened to them (depending on the medium involved).  Not having children or grandchildren, I have to do this outside of family circles and I often do it with younger gay men of my acquaintance – they have to learn gay culture 101 from somewhere and it might as well be me.

This weekend’s revisit was Baz Luhrman’s first film, Strictly Ballroom, which has always been one of my favorites since I first saw it on its initial release in the early 1990s.  Australian cinema was going through a bit of a renaissance at the time and one of the types of film that emerged were rather sweet souled dramadies with a bit of a loopy sensibility, a heightened reality and visual style, and a killer soundtrack.  Strictly Ballroom, made on a low budget based on an Australian stage play, set up Luhrman’s unique visual style which came to full fruition a decade or so later with Moulin Rouge!.  I’ve always thought of it as drag sensibility for straight people.  About 20 minutes into the movie, there’s a sequence when our hero and heroine ballroom dance together on a rooftop in front of a Coca-Cola sign while Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time plays on the soundtrack.  It sounds odd but the actual combination of elements is magical in context and the first time I saw it, I knew this was a filmmaker to watch.  I haven’t always liked his work over the years, but even in his worst pieces, there are amazing visual and emotional moments.  It was lovely rediscovering the piece through someone who had no idea what it was about and I always find the ending with its message of family, connection, and joy emotionally cathartic.  It always makes me cry.

While it would be lovely to live in a society that’s a technicolor extravaganza with happy endings for all, we don’t.  We continue to have to contend with a society that seems to have gone off the rails at the very top.  A president who thinks he can run around renaming US states at his whim.  A Secretary of Defense who has pushed out most of the experienced senior leadership at the Pentagon, gleefully ignores facts that do not fit his worldview, and is busy wasting hundreds of billions in an unwinnable conflict with Iran.  A Secretary of the Interior busy facilitating the transfer of public lands into private hands.  A Secretary of Education busy trying to destroy educational opportunities to the underserved.  A Secretary of Health and Human Services destroying public health programs while advocating unproven therapies. An Attorney General gleefully trampling on the constitution.  Will things change in eight weeks or so at the midterms?  I’m not sure.  One thing I have learned about our current administration is that anything can happen (and usually does).

The next few weeks promise to remain relatively calm, whatever the weather and politics are up to.  I have short work weeks the next few weeks due to my jaunt to Seattle to check up on the family.  September has long been my favorite month there due to the magical golden light of the Indian Summer afternoons.  With my luck, it will rain the whole time I’m there.  I come back from that to a cameo role in a play (another judge) where I spend most of my time napping backstage. Then, a week or so later, my major fall trip to Eastern Europe.  Still trying to work out how to deal with the life changes of retirement.  I’ll probably try a few different patterns of living prior to finding what works best for me.  In the meantime, I’m still trying to organize myself and all my boxes of ephemera.  Someday I may be done.  And then what…

I’ve been watching the film clips of the flooding in Nepal with fascination. This son of an oceanographer has always had a healthy respect for the power of water. It can eat away cliffs, create deep canyons, carry boulders far from their origin. Our lives on this planet, nearly three quarters of which is covered in water, are continually shaped by where water is and isn’t. The geography that the movement of water has sculpted across land masses. The constant changes in weather patterns caused by the movement of water through the hydrologic cycle that produces storms and rain. Even our bodies remain those of water creatures with a heart pumping salt water through our vital organs and our kidneys regulating that balance of water and salt keeping our cells, the descendents of unicellular sea creatures, happy and productive.

What caused the disaster? Sudden glacial collapse down a steep mountainside which suddenly displaced millions of cubic feet of water out of glacial lake and into a nearby streambed. Gravity did the rest. At least some of the collapse was due to global warming and climate change and we’re likely to see more of these sorts of events in the future. Can it happen here? Of course it can and it has. Look up the Missoula Floods which shaped much of what is now Northern Idaho, Eastern Washington, and Central Oregon. We’ve even had manmade catastrophes such as The Johnstown Flood. The rather shoddy state of our infrastructure makes it only a matter of time before we have a dam failure somewhere helped along by either excess rainfall or seismic activity. I don’t know where the Amrican image as indelible as that of the Chinese/Nepal border crossing that was swiftly overcome by a deluge, scraping the area of everything down to bedrock is going to be. I just know that it’s out there somewhere awaiting us at some future date.

There are other less showy disasters of course. It’s been a while since I gave an update on covid but it has not and is not going away. Cases are on the rise throughout the US and, if it keeps to the pattern it’s shown the last few years, it will kill somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 Americans over the winter cold and covid and flu season. It’s fallen out of the top ten causes of death but it’s still significant, running neck and neck with the flu. Covid causes about 1.5% of deaths and flu about 1.7%. Flu is deadlier as there are many more cases. Covid has a higher chance of killing you if you get it.

Keeping your vaccination status up to date remains the best protection short of isolation away from possible sources of infection. There is a new covid vaccine updated for the newer ciruclating strains such as XFG but you can’t get it yet. The FDA finally gave its approval for its use (long delayed for various political reasons) this past week and it will take a few more weeks for it to make its way through distribution channels to clinics and pharmacies. It should be easily available as of mid-September. Should you get one? If you have an immune problem, respiratory problems, or are getting older, it’s not a bad idea. I’m getting one because the data continue to show a consistent benefit in terms of preventing serious complications such as hospitalization and death and it significantly decreases the chance of long covid following an infection (and you can develop long covid after even mild disease). There are about 10 million cases of long covid in the US at the moment and their medical needs are one of the reasons why its so impossible to get a timely appointment with certain kinds of specialists these days. For those of you who remain dubious about the vaccine due to risks of side effects such as myocarditis, a recent meta-analysis in JAMA showed that cases of myocarditis were significantly higher in unvaccinated populations (due to the effects of the disease) than in vaccinated populations. I no longer argue with people about vaccines. I do my own research (which I’m pretty good at given thirteen years of higher education including medical school).

The news out of Washington DC this week is that the administration is busy uprooting the cherry trees on the Potomac in order to make room for a golf course that the president wishes to be built. Add that to the reflecting pool, the East Wing of the White House, the South Lawn, the Rose Garden, Lafayette Park, and the Kennedy Center in terms of mishandling of public property. I remain mystified at how the enablers, on both sides of the aisle – those with power to actually do something who either encourage bad behavior or wring their hands in public before abetting such behavior in private to keep their campaign dollars flowing are ultimately going to end up justifying their actions. There will be an accounting. I hope I am alive to see it.

I’ve been offered a role in a play that rehearses and performs late September/early October. I don’t know much about it yet but I think it’s a glorified cameo that will require little effort. It should keep me from becoming too bored before I head off on my next major travel trek in mid October. Still nothing penciled in after the first of the year other than opera chorus for Rigoletto in late April. Gonna get my Vendetta and Zitti Zittis ready. And if I’m going to talk about performing, I guess I have to mention Tim Curry who left us this past week at age 80. I’m of the Rocky Horror generation. The movie came out when I was in Middle School and became a midnight movie cultural phenomenon when I was in High School. I remember my first foray to it – It was after a Halloween party at Maren Beck‘s house and a bunch of us headed out to the Neptune Theatre and joined the line waiting to get in. I wasn’t sure what to expect but Tim Curry’s gleeful gender bending over the top performance made an enormous impression on my adolescent brain. I went back many more times during the next few years, even seeing a screening in NYC hosted by Sal Piro who started the phenomenon. I always had a fondness for Tim Curry in his later roles as he brought just an anarchic brio to everything he did from the butler in Clue to Pennywise to Long John Silver.

Monday marks the beginning of the six month count down until I retire from UAB Geriatrics Clinic. It’s becoming real. I’m not sure how to feel about that. I’ve been working in ambulatory clinics since 1984 and at UAB geriatrics since 1998. What a long strange trip it’s been

It’s 5:30 am, I cannot sleep and Dolly Parton is dead. There is no connection between these two things but it struck me as being a great opening sentence for whatever form today’s musing is going to take. Occasionally I plan these essays out, usually when I think it’s time to do a deep dive on a topic of interest but mainly it’s just brain vomit at some random hour of the day and I’m rather surprised that the end result is even readable half the time. I’ve been writing these entries (?) epistles (?) essays (?) in this form for something over eight years now. Only about a third of them made it into The Accidental Plague Diaries volumes. What should I do with the rest? Print them out and line the cats litter box I suspect. Better grab the ones which might be useful for ‘Boom’ before they’re too badly stained.

Dolly Parton was a first year Baby Boomer, born in 1946. She was not the one I expected to go this year. That honor would have gone to Liza Minelli who has been looking very frail at recent public appearances Other first year Baby Boomers (or very close) are Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Cher, Susan Sarandon, Sally Field, John Waters, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Steven Spielberg. They are all entering their uncertain 80s and we are going to hear of more and more icons of Western pop culture leaving us more and more rapidly in the coming years. It’s been a few year and there, but starting around 2030, when the lead edge of the Boom hits their mid-80s, it’s going to accelerate. Roughly 18% of the Boom (those born 1946-64 inclusive) has already died. Another 3 or 4% will die between now and 2030. Of the Boom population that will see that date on the right side of the sod, somewhere around 45% will die in the 2030s and another 45% in the 2040s. By 2050, only about 5% of the original Boom will be living and will range in age from 86 to 104 and will no longer be a major social force. (I expect I will go in that second cohort in the 2040s as that’s when I hit my uncertain 80s – going from 78-88 over that decade). Gen X will also be in their 70s and 80s and the Millennials will be of retirement age so Gen Z, Gen alpha and Gen beta will be in charge. Demography is destiny.

I’ve been peripheral to arts and entertainment circles on a national level for forty some years now and have heard a lot of scuttlebutt about celebrities over that time. The one person that I have never heard an unkind word or negative remark about in all of that time was Dolly Parton. She was not only incredibly talented, she was a smart business woman and a kind soul who believed in treating everyone with respect and leaving everything she touched better than when she found it. In a time when American Christianity seems to be drifting farther and farther away from the message of the gospels, she exemplified what the faith should and could be. I love my UU church and family but if someone out there starts a church of Dolly, I might be tempted. She was self deprectaing, the first to laugh at her image, never forgot her roots or her people, transformed the lives of the people of Appalachian Tennessee, gave generously, especially to children, and sustained a very happy marriage of nearly sixty years. I think the most fitting words for her epitaph are ‘Well Done’.

I never got to meet Dolly. I’ve never gotten to meet most people. I did perform with her once, in a fashion. A few years back, I played the Sterling Hayden role in the stage version of 9 to 5. The rental package includes video clips starring Dolly as narrator at the top and the end of the show. Our video clips were a bit tempermental and Dolly missed her cues on a couple of performances, something the live Dolly would never have stood for. It’s not the greatest of musicals, but it’s a lot of fun and that title song remains one for the ages. There is a social media movement afoot to have an unofficial holiday for her. If May the Fourth can be Star Wars Day, then September Twentyfifth needs to be Dolly Parton day (9/25). I am entirely in favor of this idea. Perhaps we all need to get out our rhinestones and tease our platinum blonde wigs to get ready for the occasion.

I was looking back over the political headlines of this past week and becoming somewhat nauseous. Hegseth’s purging of the Pentagon of talent in favor of ideology seems to have pretty much hamstrung our military. Trump is threatening to tear down The Kennedy Center if he can’t have his name on it. The Republicans continue to enforce policies that are destroying our immigration system, immigrant communities, and don’t seem to care who gets caught in the crossfire (remember that demographics is destiny thing? The die off of the Boom means that there will be more deaths than births in the US from 2030-2050 and, as everything in our society is set up around expansion, the only way to do that is going to be through continued immigration). There are lots of ominous signs that the Republicans will try to fix the midterm elections one way or another. The food safety system appears to be collapsing. And the president seems bound and determined to piss off all of our allies and trading partners.

I’m not sure I can take another two and a half years…

I had a cold this week, not an unsurprising sequel to a period of stress, so I’ve been a bit low energy and under the weather and haven’t felt like doing too much constructive. I have made my way through my usual weekly thickets of progress notes, the unravelling of thorny personal issues amongst patients and friends, and even got a couple of chores done around the house so I think things are going relatively well. I have a weekend with minimal obligation so I’m going to try and knock out another legal case and at least unearth the study out from under the top layer of detritus thats come to rest from the academic office having come home to roost. If that all happens, I’ll consider it a win.

I’m looking ahead at my calendar for 26-27. There’s not a whole lot on it yet other than fall travel dates and singing the Messiah in December. Other things will come, they usually do. I have received some notifications regarding auditions for upcoming projects that would fit in with other commitments so I may flex those muscles over the next few weeks. In the meantime, maybe a little bit of laziness is called for after a rather busy 25-26 season which included a couple of foreign trips, three plays, a musical, directing Shakespeare, two operas, several symphony concerts, and a serious illness requiring hospitalization and surgery. I am less than a year away from becoming officially geriatric myself. I’m still trying to figure out how that happened.

As things may be a bit slower than usual the next couple of months, I am trying to get things organized in my head (and on the laptop) regarding getting a complete draft of the new book, Boom, put together. (Perhaps I should retitle it Jug ‘O Boom’ as an homage to Dungeon Crawler Carl which has become my latest pop culture obsession – I’m nearly done with book three and will probably make my way through the whole series by the holidays. For those who haven’t heard of it, imagine The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy crossed with a truly sadistic Dungeons & Dragons campaign). This is causing me to have to plow back through The Accidental Plague Diaries to lift the sections which discussed generational aging and impacts on society and institutions so I have somewhere to start on those pieces. In looking back at what I wrote not all that many years ago, I’m reminded what a wrenching time 2020-2022 was for society and for individuals, how much pain and trauma we endured. And now I’m looking at a society that seems to want to bury all of it in collective amnesia.

This does not strike me as being a healthy impulse (but an understandably human one). If there’s one lesson I have learned in life, it’s that trauma and pain and the negative aspects must be dealt with. If they are not, they will come out later in mutated forms and wreak additional havoc physically and psychologically and that’s not good for anyone. The administration, led by the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to extirpate the collective memories of that time. It’s doing nothing to honor those who sacrificed for others. Somewhere between 3500 and 4000 health care workers died in 2020 in the US from occupationally caught covid. No one seems to have kept count one the vaccines came out of what happened after. The structural changes in health care that have taken place following the pandemic is pushing all of my generation of clinical providers towards the exit. In another era, I might have worked another decade; not now.

For the last fifty years, the holes in the care system have been filled by immigration and the importation of workers willing to take lower level jobs or of high skilled workers to make up for what our system does not produce for various reasons. Haitian, Eritrean and Somali nurses aids, Filipino nurses, South Asian physicians have all become common and important pillars of the system. It’s all about to come crashing down. Let’s look at Florida which has some 800 skilled nursing facilities with about 90,000 residents. There are roughly 85,000 nurses aides/CNAs employed in these facilities. Of these, about 45,000 are immigrants. About 1/4 of these immigrants are Haitian. Nearly all of them lost their ability to work with the administration’s recent rescinding of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants. You can say, if you are of a certain political persuasion, Great! 12,000 new jobs for native borns. Immigrants fill these jobs for a reason. Native borns don’t want them. They are low paid, low status, back breaking labor. Anyone who has cared for an infant or toddler knows how stenuous it can be. Now imagine that toddler is two hundred pounds. Alabama is not as badly off as Florida looking forward for various demographic reasons but the long term care industry is not in good shape and, for the most part, I no longer make any recommendations regarding facilities as most have been bought up by corporate entities in post-pandemic consolidation and generally aren’t being run in the way that they were a decade ago.

The administration seems bound and determined to break pretty much every societal institution that has led to American power and prestige in the post World War II period. We can all speculate on the reasons. Putin trying to diminish the West due to unknowable holds over the president, the billionaire class as disciples of Curtis Yarvin, trying to prepare for a future technocracy in which they hold all reins of power, just the natural cycles of history which every eighty years or so turns over when the lviing memories of why instiutions and rules were created dies out so people think they no longer apply. The media is pretty much gone, bought up by those who wish to curry favor with Hegseth eviscerating Stars and Stripes editorial independence, which has existed since The Civil War, being only the most recent blip on the radar screen. The courts have been packed. SCOTUS could be won back with an expansion of one justice for each circuit (which should have been happening all along) but I’m not holding my breath. Everyday there’s a new horror story about the thugs of ICE ignoring law and human decency. Our new concentration camps remain full. (One thing I wonder, if ICE is reined back and immigrants are no longer in the cross hairs, who will the system decide is worthy of such treatment as those cells will be filled and the money will flow to the owners under federal contract for someone to be in residence and brutalized – I’d say the LGBTQ community is in line and I have no illusions that my social position or resources will protect me should the Christianists have their way).

The midterms, happening in about ten weeks, are promising for the Democrats, but I am, once again, under no illusions that the current administration will allow free and fair elections. I have no idea what executive orders, scare tactics, or chicanery is on the table. Unfortunately, our winner takes all system means that it doesn’t take a major shift in voting patterns to create a starkly different result. We would be better off with some sort of proportional representation to allow miniority voices and opinions to be heard but that would take a constitutional convention and that would open up a can of worms like we’ve never seen.

I think I better just stick with working through my ideas on the aging Baby Boom, an area in which I have some decades of expertise and an ability to envision some solutions and stay out of the other areas of politics and society. It gets too depressing. I think it’s a cocktail before and a cocktail with dinner evening.

I am constantly reminded that there is nothing like live theater. At last night’s performance of The Tempest, I watched an actress hurriedly exit the stage and heard retching sounds from the wings. She appears to have had an acute case of food poisoning and was on the mend by late last night. The show went on. Patti Steelman, stage manager extordinaire appeared a scene later book in hand to keep things together and the rest of the cast continued to give stellar performances. The friends with whom I went weren’t altogether sure that it was unplanned. Enough goofy things had happened that they thought this might just be one more. I’m very proud of the whole crew for rolling with it and not letting it phase them. Rebecca Luker used to tell a story of her time as Christine in Phantom of the Opera on Broadway of a performance where she was on stage near the end of the first act, watching her Raoul enter, race across the stage and vomit into a bucket in the wings before coming back on, taking up his part of the duet. And all the time all she could think was ‘We’re supposed to kiss’. You have two more chances to see The Tempest, hopefully without an illness interlude. Today at 2:30 and tomorrow at 2:30 at East Lake United Methodist Church.

Now that Summer Shakespeare is melting away into such stuff as dreams are made on, I am coming out of my narrow focus and back into paying attention to other areas of life. I can get back in the groove of putting away all of the boxes of ephemera that came out of my academic office, start deciding what needs to be rehomed, clean out my storage area of things I will never touch again etc. etc. It’s going to be a slow process but one box and bin at a time. There’s no deadline or timeline involved. That’s part of my problem. I can just close off the mess in the study and pretend it doesn’t really exist.

I have also got to get back to the new book which has been sadly neglected these last few months between foreign travel and theater commitments. The more I look at what is going on in society regarding aging, the more I think it is needed. The new National Geographic arrived in my mailbox yesterday. (It’s one of the few paper periodicals I still receive routinely – the others being Smithsonian and The New Yorker). The cover story is all about how the billionaire class is trying to end the aging process. If I were Michael Crichton, I’d be half way through a novel about what happens when they actually succeed at that and haven’t thought through whether they should just because they can. There are organisms out there that do not age and senesce the way we do but they are a minority (and few, if any are vertebrates). Aging is programmed into us. We are supposed to create a new generation, different from our own, and then get out of the way as they in turn create a new generation and so on and so on down the line. Without aging, We might still be jostling around with Caesar Augustus and Genghis Khan and Louis XIV.

The hoarding of resources by older generations preventing younger generations from flourishing is one of the underlying building blocks of the economic conditions that lead to revolution and destruction of political systems and empires. When enough parents cannot feed their children, the system collapses and we are rapidly beginning to approach that kind of tipping point thanks to the current administration’s bulldozing of safety nets in order to pay for tax breaks for wealthier Americans. The legislative class, which has more or less abandoned the job of producing legislation for the profit and protection of the American people for making sure that those who fund their war chests and campaigns get what they want seem to be caught up in full apres moi le deluge thinking. I don’t know what will happen with the midterms. If the elections are free and fair, it looks like the Democrats will flip the house and maybe the senate. But I’m not holding my breath that a Democratic majority is going to start actually producing legislation of significant benefit. They are just as beholden to money as the Republicans.

It seems fairly clear that Hegseth and Trump, with their ill advised war and clearance of decades of experience from the Pentagon in the name of ideology, have seriously damaged the US military. An enormous number of individuals with experience in logistics and supply have been relieved of duty as they aren’t MAGA warrior enough. Unfortunately, as Call of Duty has no quartermaster mode of gameplay, there is minimal understanding at the top that an army and a navy march and sail on their stomachs and without adequate and continuous supply lines, you’re screwed. I have enough connections into active duty to hear the real scoop and it isn’t pretty. When the Abraham Lincoln finally docks, thousands of misstreated sailors are going to start talking to their buddies and there will be wholesale deenlistments due to poor morale – not exactaly what is needed at the moment. Not to mention the billions of dollars in wasted munitions, now unavailable for defense and a hold up on new fleet as a president with no military experience demands a redesign on ships to align with his personal aesthetics.

The Department of Homeland Security has gotten smarter. After Minneapolis where their heavy handed and murderous tactics gathered nothing but bad press and the turning of the population against ICE, they have spread the wealth. They are now rounding up more immigrants than ever, many of them who have come here legally and obeyed every rule, to the tune of 50,000 a month. Got to keep those private detention centers full and the payments to GEO group flowing. Each story out of detention or in the community gets worse. Subhuman treatment. Lack of medical care. Inedible food. Physical tackling of American citizens on the street due to misidentification without so much as an apology. As a society, by not demanding that this end, we are all complicit and the true stories of what goes on behind those closed doors will eventually come out and we will all share in the guilt. Now ICE is getting some sort of fancy shock gloves. I’m just waiting for the tales of induced cardiac arrest on the street of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My fall is looking relatively quiescent. I have nothing performance on my calendar until the Messiah in December. That may change. It often does. If it doesn’t, more time to get caught up on the projects mentioned above. I do have three trips scheduled – Seattle in September (how Music Man), Eastern Europe in October, and Mexico in November. Travelogues forthcoming. In the meantime, off to my matinee.

Sometimes the gods of the theatre smile and make sure that everything turns out all right. Sometimes they don’t. Fortunately, The Tempest received the blessings of the former. Our first tech run on Monday was semi-disastrous. First dress on Tuesday was an improvement but still marred by some unfinished costumes and a couple of missing cast members. Final dress on Wednesday, was another leap forward with pretty much everything in place but with a few scenes still shaky due to folk being uncertain of line sequence (and I saw a few notecards out on stage…) Opening Thursday – every performance was in place. Any lines that were dropped were covered seamlessly and would only be noticed by a scholar following along with a transcript. The complex staging scenes were executed the way I envisioned. Audiences over the first three performances have thoroughly enjoyed by somewhat goofy Polynesian fantasy take on the material and have been very complimentary. A few whom I trust and who know Shakespeare well have said I have taken a play that is difficult to stage and sell to a modern audience and made it an enjoyable two and a half hours. Full of enough spectacle and color, even on our teeny tiny budget to keep people engaged even when they aren’t completely sure of the language. I take that as meaning I did my job. If you’re in the greater Birmingham area, you can catch tomorrow’s matinee or one of four performances next weekend.

A few people are talking about what should we do for Summer Shakespeare next year. I do not plan to direct. The production will coincide with my retirement so I have no idea what I’m going to be up to at that point. Possibly off on an around the world cruise. Or maybe locked in a cabin somewhere with a bottle of gin, some Judy Garland records, and a packet of razor blades. If I were to do another, I think I would like to do Twelfth Night but it’s time to let someone else take the reins. Actually, what I would really like to do is King Lear but we’re not ready for that one.

There were various issues getting through the last week. We had to cut the hazer after it set off the fire alarm in the middle of Act I during first tech. The tech crew will have to experiment with it some and with ventilation before we bring that out again. There was a case of Covid (it has not spread). Compared to last year when we were battling a light system that completely stopped working and a car accident that kept us from having any costumes for dress rehearsal, it was a piece of cake. I spent the whole week channeling Geoffrey Rush in Shakespeare in Love. Maybe I was on to something.

I’ve been living with The Tempest for about three months now and I’m still not completely sure what it’s about. Perhaps it’s why I love Shakespeare so much. Four hundred years later and we still haven’t completely penetrated all of his secrets and meanings. And has anyone understood the complexities, the joy, the terror, and the opacity of human life as well as he? I always do a bit of reflecting on how the play I am working on reflects current events and what society is up to today. Prospero is an autocrat. He deliberately and wilfully manipulates all of the other characters in the play for his own ends. His population is small but he places each of them in a place where they, in general get what they want.

My first thought was that Prospero is a Trump figure but then I realized something. Trump’s autocratic impulses are about one person and one person only. Prospero’s are not. At the end of the play, he has his rightful place as Duke of Milan but he has lost his powers, his daughter, and his servants so that they can fulfill their proper destinies. And he is OK with that and comes to terms with it in his famous epilogue. He is the anti-Trump. Using powerful means for selfless rather than selfish ends. It’s the underlying arc of the story of Jesus, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Harry Potter vs Vodemort, a powerful Jungian myth which keeps cropping up in cultural tales as it’s what we know is necessary for the betterment of society as a whole.

I wrestled a whole lot with trying to figure out who are Ariel and the spirits and who is Caliban and Sycorax, his mother (a character frequently mentioned in the original but never seen) – I put her on stage as I had just the right actress at age 87 to provide a balance of old earth magic and age and wisdom against Prospero’s learning and empiricism. I wanted to leave the audience understanding that Prospero is not the sole center of power, but part of a larger cosmos which we may not yet fully understand. It also helps humanize Caliban. I must admit I was a bit goofy with the spirits giving them hakas and hulas and the all spirit kazoo band. It’s not the tack I would have taken if I had a larger budget but many of my ideas had to be constantly adjusted based on technical capabilities and what performers could handle. I’m a fairly fast and flexible thinker and my mantra of taking the simplest solution to problems as we put the production together ended up serving everything well.

I’m tired. Not only have I been Tempest tossed, I’ve also been helping a number of friends through life meltdowns and mental health crises. I think everything is calming down but I feel in need of a glass of wine, bad television and hiding away from the world for a few days. I can feel my brain getting older and more rigid and less able to absorb everything that is tossed at it these days. I’m just hoping it’s not the first fingers of my mother’s genetic dementia crawling along my cerebral cortex.