And we’re on to another month, the ninth of this year. In some ways, the year has flown by and in others, it has dragged on at a glacial pace. I no longer trust my perception of time. It’s another gift of the pandemic. That enormous interruption in the usual routines of life and the Groundhog Day repetition of the shut down threw everything all catawampus in regards to my usual understanding of the measured order of time and season and I find myself confusing things that happened six months ago with those that happened six years ago. And things that happened pre-Covid in some ways seems clearer and nearer in time than things that happened in the last year or so. We’re only four months away from the pandemic’s fourth birthday (the first reports of what we would come to know as Covid having been filed in Wuhan on December 31, 2019.) I prefer to think that these wrinkles in personal time are due to psychological coping mechanisms that come into play in times of great societal stress and not the first symptoms of incipient dementia. I feel my mother’s hereditary variant of Pick’s disease hanging over my head from time to time. Fortunately, it doesn’t strike until after age 75.
12 Angry Jurors closed last night. It ended up being quite a good show and was both an artistic success and a success for the company as it encouraged people in Birmingham interested in live theater who had never been to the venue to come check it out. The Encore Theater is the only African-American theater company in town with its own stage. I got to know Marc Raby, the founder and artistic director just after it got up and running when we were cast opposite each other in a production of Choir Boy. We decided we quite liked each other and I’ve tried to help Encore in my own small way at various stages in its development. By doing a larger cast play with a multiethnic cast, they stepped outside their usual wheelhouse of African-American entertainment for African-American audiences and showed that they could put up as engrossing a production as any theater in town. The production was inexpensive, but it was so well cast and the cast truly performed as an ensemble (all the other cast members besides me were onstage for the entire two hours of the running time. I wandered in and out a few times, mainly as a plot device) that the end result was a powerful piece of theater and audiences ate it up.
That’s the end of my scheduled theater life for now. I have a performance of the Faure Requiem with the symphony chorus in October and a show I was cast in last year and which was delayed until this year is scheduled for December. But I am not sure if I will continue with it. It really needs to go into rehearsal early October and I am out of the country from the 6th to the 22nd. I have submitted self tape auditions for a couple of things – a comic monologue for The Man Who Came to Dinner (I have a callback next weekend) and a song for Into the Woods. (No word on callbacks for that one yet – but the Narrator/Mysterious Man part has my name written all over it). My choice for audition song was Kurt Weill’s September Song from Knickerbocker Holiday as Weill is about as close as you can get to Sondheim without singing Sondheim. As I listened to the tape before submitting, I was rather surprised with how decent I sounded. The voice lessons are paying off.
Let me just say that I hate auditioning. I always have. At least the pandemic has rewritten the rules somewhat and we’re not doing as much cattle call sit around the lobby. Rush up on stage, sing your song with an accompanist you don’t know and then try desperately not to fall over in the dance call where you’re feeling like that guy in the ‘On Broadway’ sequence from All That Jazz and wondering why you’re up there as you wrote all over the audition sheet that you aren’t a dancer and never have been. Most of my on stage dancing in recent years has been box step waltz in operetta and that I can handle. I can still do the Hustle as well but there isn’t much call for that these days. Maybe if I get cast in Xanadu. Now we set up an iPad and film ourselves as we emote or sing and send the file off to the theater company where they probably get infinite joy nitpicking on the mistakes. September Song is a good fit for my age and type. I just wish the published key was about a step lower. I can sing it in the published key (and that’s what I submitted) but it would sit better in my voice just a bit lower.
I was looking earlier this week at a study out of UCSF wherein the researchers estimated that in the coming few decades, roughly 25% of the population that will develop dementia will be living alone without spouse, children, or other informal in home supports. For this geriatrician, that’s a rather frightening statistic because I see all of the things that happen when an older adult ages into dementia without an appropriate support system. Finances go to hell as the individual doesn’t understand the basics of math and the moving of money. Bills aren’t paid (or are paid multiple times). Junk mail that looks like bills are treated as such and soon checks for thousands of dollars are happily sailing off to scammers in Jamaica. Taxes are forgotten. Cars are repossessed. Properties are sold at auction without the occupant understanding what’s going on. Driving is a relatively automatic process and demented people tend to operate cars fine. However, navigation is not and the trip to the grocery store ends up with them running out of gas in a neighboring state as they missed the exit, didn’t realize it and just kept on going as they kept looking for it. Getting food on the table is a very complicated process in our society which involves getting out to the grocery (usually farther away than walking distance), navigating the store, affording the bill, schlepping it all home, storing it properly, and then preparing it in the right way at the right time. Things go wrong all along this food chain which is why often the first physical sign of dementia is weight loss. And don’t get me started on trying to manage medications and health appointments when your brain doesn’t work properly. I’ve said for years that in geriatrics we don’t have appointment times, we have appointment suggestions as cognitive issues keep many of our patients showing up at the wrong hour, the wrong day, even the wrong year. Geriatricians know that no adult human being will take medication more than twice a day with any sort of regularity (morning and evening). We work like hell to get medical regimens down to that and then our colleagues in various subspecialties show up and put them on something three times a day, something four times a day, something before meals, something that can’t be taken within two hours of food, and something that has to be half an hour before other medications. Forget it bub… it ain’t happening.
I’m fast forwarding in my head twenty years to 2043. The lead edge of the Baby Boom, the 1946 babies, will be turning 97. (Cher, a 1946 baby, will be on yet another farewell tour). The prevalence of dementia at age 90 is about 60% and at age 95 is about 80%. Most of the early boom will have cognitive impairment and we have done nothing as a society to prepare for this eventuality, regarding it as a private matter rather than one for public solutions. But, as this study says, about a quarter have no private social capital on which to rely so we’re either going to have to have some sort of public system for them or we’re going to have a whole lot of nonagenarian bag ladies all over the boulevards. But that may be the plan, at least on one side of the political aisle. Don’t fund elder services and hope they die fast. I have news… people, if given the chance, will live a great deal longer than you think they should.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 