It’s been a weekend of better weather with temperature and humidity both down to manageable levels. It’s been a weekend of trying to keep abreast of the latest corrosive news out of the federal and state government. It’s been a weekend of theatrical rehearsal and performance that I’m still wrapping my head around and trying to process in various ways. It’s been a weekend of starting to come to terms with the fact that I actually am retiring from clinical medicine, the thing that has defined my life more than any other, in a few short months. I like to keep my life full and diverse. My brain starts to stultify when I’m asked to operate in a continuous pattern from day to day. But there are times when I feel like the train is running at a velocity a bit faster than the track rating.
We all remember a year or so ago when the president decided to unilaterally rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America (ignoring the history of the region – Mexico had been used for a couple of centuries prior to a German cartographer coining America in 1507 and his lack of power to rename international bodies of water). It didn’t matter that much in Alabama as the locals have referred to it simply as ‘The Gulf’ for ages and everyone knows what they’re talking about and that has continued. Unfortunately, this past year, the state legislature passed an Alabama state law requiring the body to be known as ‘The Gulf of America’ and referring to it by its dead name, if you are a state employee or an affiliate of a state agency acting in official capacity, you can be reprimanded, fired, demoted etc. (And these are the same people who have difficulties with the concept of a trans person changing their name). This state law will remain even if a future federal administration changes things back until the state legislature rescinds or overrides it. Given the enormous problems in this state – substandard education, a collapsing health care system, a horrific penal system constantly under federal investigation – and this is what is considered important. I shall be glad to no longer be an active state employee worried that the atlas in my office has an incorrect name on a regional map.
I am currently in rehearsal for two plays. I haven’t done that for a while. One is a new original work entitled ‘Before I Go’ and plays next weekend at the Carver Theatre downtown. It has a very tight rehearsal schedule. I had my first in person rehearsal tonight and then we have four nights of tech/dress before four performances. It’s a princess track with a mechanism for me to read my lines as necessary (although I will know them more or less) so I’m not worried about it. I’m playing a judge and courtroom scenes bookend the show. It’s a dramedy and I’m trying to figure out just how broad to play the comedy half of the equation. As I’m sharing the stage with a lot of Black Women with comedy chops, I’ll let them set the tone and try to match them beat for beat. We’ll see how it works out as we refine things this week. The second one is that old standby, Arsenic and Old Lace. I’m playing one of the cops. As I am out of town for most of the rehearsal period, we’re blocking my scenes this past week and in early October and then I vanish, only returning in time for first tech. I’ll take the script with me and learn it on the deck of a riverboat. I haven’t done the two at once thing for a while. I can tell I’ve gotten older.
Last night, Patti Steelman and I, along with Doug and Sandy Tilt, went to see a play at Terrific New Theatre called The Counter. I knew little about it but, as I have known and worked with all three of the cast (Kyle Holman, Talia Lin Pepke and Courtney Cook) for years, I figured I’d better turn up. The play is a rather sweet character study in which very little and yet everything happens. The setting is a small-town diner somewhere in New England. The waitress (Pepke) who has the early shift of coffee and coffee cake, is a transplant from New York, running away from something. Her usual early morning customer (Holman) is aging in place, afraid of his rut. They form a bond. The third character (Cook) is another customer who might hold the key to his being able to move forward with life. The direction (Tawny Stephens) is nuanced and brings little moments to the fore and revels in the interior lives and what is unsaid by all three characters. I enjoyed it very much. I left the theater with ‘Two Lost Souls’ from Damn Yankees running through my head and deciding ultimately that I found the play uplifting. It put me in mind of what is good and decent in our impulses as humans. Our need to find common ground, to reach out to each other, to provide succor, even imperfectly. Living with a government, on both state and federal levels, that seems to revel in trying to destroy these things about us made the play more meaningful to me in this moment than it might have been if seen at another time. As E.M. Forester famously wrote – ‘Only connect’.
It was actually a two-play weekend. Patti and I went out for lunch today at our favorite Indian restaurant and then on to Virginia Samford Theatre for their world premiere, Growing Up with Atticus. It’s not so much a play as an on-stage conversation between two older women. One, Cecilia Peck, the daughter of Gregory Peck, and the other Mary Badham who played Scout in the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird as a child many long years ago and remained close to the Peck family ever after. The real and the reel daughters. It’s not a piece that could be performed by anyone else as it depends on the real connections they both had with Gregory Peck, both at the time of the filming, and in the years that followed. It’s a love letter to Peck, who comes across as being just as loving, firm, and righteous as the fictional Atticus Finch.
My understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird began in fifth grade at Laurelhurst Elementary back in 1972. Vietnam was ongoing, the Paris Peace Talks were in full swing, Nixon won an overwhelming victory (Watergate still in the future), and a new NFL expansion team was announced for Seattle with a naming contest. Our veteran teacher, Mrs. Ruth Husfloen, had a student teacher with her that year (whose name I do not remember). Her student teacher, having identified a half dozen or so avid readers in the class, gave us paperback copies of To Kill a Mockingbird to read. It was the first time a teacher had handed me an adult novel. I opened it and was transported back to the world of Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930s, a world I knew a little bit about from the stories of my parents (children of the Depression) and grandparents. Being all of ten years old, I immediately identified with Scout and Jem and Dill (mostly Dill as I was tiny, verbal and slightly eccentric myself), finished the book at record speed and immediately reread it. I didn’t understand it all at the time. It took adult rereadings years later to grasp some of the themes and points Harper Lee was making fully. But it became part of my understanding of the world, especially a world which was changing as fast as the world of the late 60s and early 70s. I had not seen the film on initial release, of course, as I was an infant at the time. I don’t think I saw it until high school or college when I caught it at a revival house (remember those?)
I had no idea at the time that I would come to call Alabama home. Home was definitely on the West coast – the Pacific Northwest or California and I never really conceived of living elsewhere until life circumstance and serendipity brought me and Steve to Alabama in the late 90s. When we were readying for the move and discussing Alabama, I found out that Steve had never read the book. This was the days before Audible and, on long car rides, it was our tradition that Steve would drive and I would read aloud to him so I picked up a copy and read it to him in the month or so before we relocated. He loved it and was a bit disappointed that Birmingham, when we got here, bore little relation to Maycomb or Monroeville of the 1930s. After Steve got sick, one of the things he became involved in was the Alabama Humanities Society as a volunteer. On his death, I took a portion of his life insurance and made donations in his memory to causes he supported and AHS was one of them. The year I made that major donation was the year that Harper Lee was given their annual award and she agreed to come to their gala as honoree, one of her only public appearances in decades. My donation (thanks Steve) secured me a seat at the gala and I got to meet Harper Lee, tell her what the book had meant to me, and received an autographed copy (which I still have).
I am well aware that the book and its characters have come under criticism in recent years for being a white savior narrative and being inauthentic when discussing the lives and issues of people of color. I think that misses the point. To me, the point of the novel, the film, and the various stage adaptations, has always been that injustice for one person due to color, belief system, or mental illness is injustice for all and that there are times when one must stand up for this idea or the society is not worth saving and must change. Atticus stands up, takes a case he knows he will lose, and does it because the rightness of that action trumps all the forces of society set up to oppose him. As I was listening to these two women reminisce and tell their stories of Atticus Finch and Gregory Peck, I could not help but think that the ideals that Harper Lee and her interpreters were trying to convey are the antidote for the illness of selfishness and willful blindness to others that are permeating society and government.
Birmingham is imperfect. As an outsider to Southern culture, I see those imperfections, both large and small quite clearly. But I also see that Birmingham tries. It moves forward tentatively, sometimes three steps forward and two steps back, but it does move forward. It could move forward much more rapidly with things like regional governance and less state control of local affairs in place but I’m not holding my breath. The gentry continue to pit the Black and White working classes against each other (and believe me, I’ve seen more bad behavior over my decades here from the country club set than from those living in areas of poverty). But there are occasional glimmers of hope. I remain an optimist. The show ended with a Q and A portion and some introductions. In the audience were Sapphira Shuttlesworth (widow of Fred – a visionary civil rights leader whom I wish I had had a chance to meet. I’ve met a lot of those who worked with him over the years and took care of some of them in their later years but we never crossed paths), and Doug Jones, running for governor on the Democratic ticket. I’ve run into him occasionally over the years and his successful prosecution of the 16th Street Baptist church bombing is legendary. I couldn’t help feeling that the stories brought into that theater space, both by those on stage and those in the audience, and the way that they synthesize are the raw materials on which we can start moving forward in better ways, both locally and nationally. Kudos to David Strickland and Philip Mann for bringing the production to life.
