I’m tired of writing about Covid. I really am. A thousand pages and three hundred thousand words of The Accidental Plague Diaries was enough to exhaust me on the subject and everything I could possible say about it. But, as much as I may be done with Covid in this the first ‘normal’ summer since the summer of 2019, it is not done with us. There’s been very little media coverage of current pandemic trends but medical social media has been starting to light up over the last few weeks with all sorts of ominous warning signs. The prevalence of virus in wastewater samples doubled over the course of July and is still increasing rapidly. Pediatric admissions in the greater New York area are at their highest since the summer of 2020, the early days of the pandemic. Lab test positivity rates are soaring in various spots. It’s difficult to get confirmation on these reports or truly see national trends. The CDC website seems to be the best source for up to date information currently but it’s only as accurate as the data being forwarded to it by our patchwork system of public health departments, many of which are not functioning well in the wake of pandemic burnout and political chicanery.
The local numbers here in Birmingham seem to be increasing, but not soaring and, from what I can tell, hospital numbers and death rates haven’t increased appreciably but those are lagging indicators and it may some weeks before they start to rise in response to the current increase in infection rates. As our long hot summer continues (and I cannot begin to tell you how tired this Seattle boy is of temperatures in the 90s with high humidity), there is a continued push toward indoors with air conditioning activities and, given climate change, we may be looking at continued summer waves of infectious disease due to this phenomenon. What am I doing personally? Living my life. Planning on a fall booster. Keeping my hands washed. I haven’t gone back to masking in public yet but that may be coming.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which seems to have suffered from every other disaster imaginable during its rehearsal period other than a Covid outbreak amongst cast and crew, opened last night and I couldn’t be prouder of the company for the end result. Sixteen performers, many of whom had never worked with Shakespearean text and a crew of seven came together and, with a budget approximately equal to what would spend at McDonald’s to feed a family of five, created a fast moving, funny, summertime romp through the woods which engrossed the audience and kept them chuckling for two and a quarter hours. As for my work, I don’t know how to gauge it. I can never judge my own artistry as a performer or creator. The one thing I can judge is that I think I met my goal, which should be one of the chief goals of any community theater, and helped build an ensemble, a community out of disparate individuals, getting them to create something that none could do on their own. Each actor or technician brings something unique to the show and I have favorite moments from all of them. (Including a last minute gag thrown in final dress involving a white plastic chair – it’s very Alabama).
I’ll turn up at all the performances I can to cheer them on from the back but my job is finished. I’m not sure what’s next for the theater career. There’s a couple of things out there in the ether and I have a few auditions I have to put together this next week. Once things are settled and contracts are signed, I’ll let people know. I’m pretty sure that whatever it is will not involve directing Shakespeare. I wouldn’t mind doing it again but it does take a lot of thought and mental energy to turn those four hundred year old texts into something fresh and relevant to today. They are so brilliantly written that it’s possible and will always be possible. Except, perhaps in the state of Florida where school districts are banning high schoolers from reading the plays due to ‘racy’ elements and replacing them with ‘excerpts’. Really. They should just shovel the whole canon into the dumpster and replace them with copies of Lamb’s ‘Tales from Shakespeare’ and go full early Victorian. The bowdlerization has already been done. Don’t waste effort.
I’m just getting to the point where I’m rolling my eyes at the political news from all over. The sense of desperation in word and action rolling off of the Republican party as it crashes into the unyielding walls of demographics, science, and cultural attitudes would be funny if it didn’t have such real world consequences. They hitched their wagon to a particular star and I think they’re about to find out that actions have consequences. We may find that eventually the GOP is going to go the way of the Whigs to be replaced by another conservative party that will accept logic, science and reality. But I’m not holding my breath.
I’m very sad about the news out of Maui regarding Lahaina, a lovely town which I have visited many times and was a particular favorite of mine and Steve’s. We made a number of Hawaii trips together during our years in California as it was our tropical beach getaway. Steve hated seafood (he always ordered Chicken when we went out to dinner there) but he loved the ambiance of sitting on the terrace at Kimo’s with the waves lapping just below our table. We were having dinner there one night, sometime back in the 90s when a large bustling family group came in and proceeded to get rip roaring drunk at a nearby table. Everyone, that is, except the babe in arms (although I really don’t know what was in his bottle). Late in their meal, grandpa got up and picked up the baby and was dancing around the room with it when he tripped, fell and the baby shot out of his arms and struck a planter. The baby, being none to happy about this, began to wail, the mother began to shriek and, in her desperation to reach the baby tripped over grandpa and down she went. She got up with a bloody nose. The sight of the blood made someone at another table vomit their dinner all over the place. We decided it was a good time to leave and made a beeline for the lobby and paid our check there. We had no interest in remaining in a scene straight out of the Marx Brothers.
Time for me to head off to today’s performance of Midsummer to egg the cast on to another great performance.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 