Well, ‘Hello, Dolly!’ has been put to bed and I’m trying to figure out how I feel about that. The show is one of the things I’ve organized my life and thoughts around over the last few months. I found out that I was going to be offered Rudolph during the period Tommy was in the hospital and the way things were going, I was expecting to have to eventually turn it down as he was going to be back home and have a lot of health needs and I would need to conserve my energies away from work to be able to be there for him and meet his needs, physical and emotional. Then he died unexpectedly and everything changed.

When the initial shock wore off and I made my decisions regarding life – take a few months off, travel some – one of the constants sitting at the back of the mind was that August and September would be taken up with Dolly rehearsals and performances. It became a bit of a rock in my grieving and turbulent emotional state… Just hang on, Dolly rehearsals begin in three weeks… two weeks… one week. It’s given me somewhere to be, people who are counting on me to do a job I love competently, a chance to hang out with friends, old and new, and a chance to be a part of something special. Maybe it’s the political moment in which we all find ourselves but pretty much everyone I’ve talked to who saw the show mentioned how it magically transported them away from their cares for a few hours and that they all left the theater singing and feeling light of heart and more assured of the general goodness of people. What a gift to be able to be part of a group that’s capable of doing that.

I had thought about trying to go into another theatrical project this fall. Something with an October rehearsal period and early November performance dates would have worked, but I think it’s better that I sit out for a few months now that my brain has been a bit reordered by the incredible supportive experience of Dolly and spend a few weeks closer to home. I still have a lot of Tommy’s life that I have to plow through and dismantle and there are some work projects that have been on the back burner for six months. There’s also the question of what these writings are to become…

There needs to be a story. Here’s a relatively recent one. It pertains to Dolly in a tangential way. Please forgive me for being a Carol Channing fan. I first learned of her from my mother who had always closely followed her career (they had gone to the same high school and Carol, who’s about ten years older was making her initial splash in NYC when my mother was in high school herself). We had copies of the OBCs of Dolly and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and childhood me didn’t quite know what to make of the tall lady with peroxide hair and the foghorn voice. I learned to identify her in the 60s and 70s when she made the rounds of talk shows and the occasional commercial and found her weirdly fascinating. In the early 80s, I helped direct Hello, Dolly! at Stanford and, shortly after that show, Carol came through San Francisco on one of her Dolly tours so a bunch of us went up to the city to see the show. She was gawky, quirky, not much of a singer, and you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. About the same time, Forbidden Broadway had opened and released its first album with the hysterical parody ‘Dolly is a Girls Best Friend’ which I immediately learned in my best Carol Channing voice and with which I annoyed my roommate and any number of other theater friends.

About three years ago, a group which raises money locally for senior services asked me to participate in their fundraiser – an all male beauty pageant in which men involved in the aging industry locally don drag and make themselves ridiculous on stage. I said sure and tried to decide what to do and then recalled the old Forbidden Broadway number and MissClairol Channing was born. I made an mp3 of the number, worked out a routine, had Tommy make me an updo wig with red feathers and pulled a red beaded gown out of our stock. Barry Perkins was my nurse at the time and he agreed to do my makeup. So on I go in my finery, waiting for my music to begin… and someone has decided to jettison my ‘Dolly is a Girls Best Friend’ track, which is why I’m dressed as Dolly at the Harmonia Gardens, and replaced it with Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend’ from the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Soundtrack. Oh lord, I thought, none of my routine is going to work. I’m going to have to wing it. Thank god I know the song so I can lipsynch and away I went… (there is video… I’m not posting it…)

I didn’t win (I make an ugly woman and red feathers and spangles didn’t help) but a good time was had by all and no one was aware that my routine was made up on the spot. I’ve threatened to bring MissClairol Channing back some day and I still have the wig. The time will eventually present itself.

Actually, MissClairol appeared again about a month later for Halloween. I had to do the makeup myself so it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Barry’s. I still had the wig in Tommy’s stock and his assistant, Holly, graciously restyled it for me.

Another long post tonight. What? Two in a row? What’s wrong with him? It’s just that he gets to sleep in tomorrow for the first time in nearly three weeks. Whether he’ll actually be able to do so or not remains to be seen. I have the unpleasant feeling the eyes will flutter open around about 6:45 am when the alarm usually goes off. I’ll try to will it not to happen but I haven’t been sleeping well the last few months so I’m not going to be surprised by anything.

I spent the last day or two scurrying around looking for W-2s and tax returns for my bank. I’m refinancing the house from a 30 to a 15 year loan and I need to go through the unpleasant task of having Tommy’s name removed from the title. It seems wrong. This was very much the house he picked out that suited him and his interests. In some ways I feel like an interloper here, a caretaker who should be careful about putting too much of my imprint on the place. I imagine I’ll sell it in a few years as it’s much more than I need and I’m really not a yard person at all, at least in this climate. I have a real estate person keeping an eye out for an urban condo that might suit and in which I will be able to maintain until I’m carted off to the dementia unit.

Tonight’s audience for Dolly was more docile than last night’s. At least in the first act. They must have all slammed tequila at intermission as they came alive in the second act and were absolutely roaring by the time we got to the end of the title song. Of course, that number is designed to elicit audience response. (Change keys, go into four parts and start marching around the passarelle and the audience goes wild. It’s almost pavlovian.) As I’m standing on the stairs center stage for a good part of the proceedings, I have a lot of time to look at the audience and watch them clap and sing along and wave their arms. We’re doing the original Gower Champion choreography so you know it’s going to get those of a certain generation right in the nostalgia button.

I was musing last night about what Tommy might have thought of the show. Tonight I was wondering about Steve. My time with Steve was more or less my theater interregnum. I had to give it up when I hit residency more or less. Every third night on call and theater do not mix. Later on in Sacramento, after I had finished residency and had settled into geriatrics with its easier hours, the first priority was still career building so I did very little. We became avid theater goers, befriended a number of local actors, and I was occasionally coaxed to lend a hand backstage. I did no performing. I auditioned for a couple of things on a lark but didn’t get cast but that was fine with Steve as he had had more than his share of nights sitting home alone when I was in residency and he always felt a bit slighted when I was out doing something that didn’t involve him. One of the few projects I did do was stage crewing/running sound for a production of Psycho Beach Party. Steve solved the problem of not wanting to be left alone by coming to every performance and sitting in the front row. He laughed uproariously at absolutely everything and had the whole audience keyed up every night. I had several discreet inquiries from various sources whether he was rentable as an audience plant.

Steve loved going to the theater and would go with me to see practically anything of any genre in any venue and always thought it was wonderful, whether it actually was or not. I honestly can’t think of anything we saw that he didn’t love. When life circumstance chased us to Birmingham, we went to a few things. The first thing we saw here was a production of Kiss of the Spiderwoman on the same stage where I’m currently performing and starring Jan Hunter who is now Dolly. If you had told me then I’d become a regular on that stage opposite the star of the show we saw that night, I would have thought you were not just mistaken, but plum crazy. Odd the surprises life has for us. Steve got sick within a year of our move so nights at the theater fell by the wayside and I didn’t see much for the next few years and then, before I knew it, I was in the middle of it all.

Theater is full of ghost stories so here’s the only one that personally involves me. I can’t explain it, but it may mean that someday I’ll be able to ask Steve his opinion of my second act. Steve died in August of 2001. This was about three years after we had left California and after about two years of serious illness from pulmonary fibrosis. I spent much of the next year travelling and trying to put my life and head back together. I was in the old house, the aerie up on top of Red Mountain, one evening about a year or so after he died when the phone rang. It was a woman I had known slightly through professional circles in California. She wasn’t a particular friend. I know she knew both me and Steve as he had met her at a couple of networking type events and, quite frankly, until she reminded me of her name and where she had worked in Sacramento, I had completely forgotten her. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and then she said ‘Steve’s dead, isn’t he?’. ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘Last year from pulmonary fibrosis’. ‘I know’, she answered, ‘I was in my bathroom on the toilet earlier this evening when he stepped out of my shower and told me he had a message for you. He wanted me to tell you that he’s OK’ I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I think I said something non-committal about is he still there. ‘No, he disappeared, but I’ll let you know if he comes back’. I never received any further messages.

Now, it would be just like Steve to step out of someone’s shower when they are on the toilet. He had a rather simple sense of humor. I have no idea if this woman was pulling a prank, after hearing about his death through the Sacramento grapevine or if she has some sort of sensitivity that allowed him to reach through and send me a message. He died in the old house and for years, I waited for a sign or visitation, but none was ever forthcoming. Tommy died at UAB hospital and I doubt he’s hanging around there. I can see him popping up backstage at Red Mountain Theater or the Wright Center. This rather weird story gives me the comfort that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, and that maybe both of them are hanging around somewhere, just out of sight. I wonder if they’ve found each other and what they think of me when they compare notes. I have a feeling I’m going to be ganged up on when it’s my turn to join them. In the meantime, I can see them both sitting in the patron’s balcony of the VST together each enjoying Dolly in his own way. Steve with huge hearty laughs and complete engagement, Tommy with his incredible eye for detail looking for minute flaws and creating solutions so that his next project will build on what he learned.

We’re nearly half way through the run of ‘Hello, Dolly!’ so I suppose it’s time to do a long post again. I’m writing this stream of consciousness so I have no idea where it’s going to go or how it’s going to turn out. Bear with me and hopefully I will eventually have some profound insight or make an exceptionally witty joke. Or I just might end up with a lot of word salad, you never know.

Tonight’s performance was one of those times when you know the show is clicking along on all eight cylinders and all the moving parts are falling into place. Everyone is comfortable with lines, lyrics, staging and all the little kinks with costumes, props, sets and lights have been worked out. The audience must have all had a few orange things at Bottega before the show as they were roaring by the end of the opening number and their response helped fuel our energy in a super charged exothermic cycle. We probably came as close to hitting it out of the park as we ever can.

I was thinking about Tommy a lot backstage. Dolly would not have been his kind of show. He was always much more about musical drama than musical comedy and he always loved the ones where there’s plenty of angst and some sympathetic character dies before the final curtain. He would have been happy to work on it in a production capacity, would have sat through it dutifully for my performance, and then spent the next two hours while getting ready for bed telling me how much he loathed the collected works of Jerry Herman, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe. I, on the other hand, love both musical comedy and musical drama. There are times when what we need is a show whose major purpose is simply to radiate joy into a world that at times appears to grow darker with each passing day. Tommy’s ultimate goal as an audience member was to go to local theater and see a show filled with actors he knew but to see no one he knew on stage. Are we achieving that? I’m the wrong person to ask but I know I’m losing myself in the cartoon valentine of 1890s New York we’re all creating.

Dolly is the right show for me at the moment. It’s the message. It’s about a woman of a certain age who makes a decision to break out of her rut, created by her personal tragedy, and in doing so changes her life and the lives of all of those around her for the better. The famous title song symbolizes her rebirth into the human race and all its follies. She has decided to live a fool among fools rather than a fool alone. My part in the show is a minor character role but that moment as she comes down the stairs to join me and the waiters is speaking to something deep inside of me and I hope it’s helping me figure out my own path in life. Will I have a staircase moment at some point? Well, Miss Clairol Channing has the red dress and the wig with the feathers so you never know…

Tommy and I went to a lot of theater in New York over the years together. The first show we saw together was the Studio 54 Cabaret, notable for us both getting somewhat squiffy on Southern Comfort Manhattans (we had one of the cabaret tables right up against the stage). The last was the current production of Waitress. I think the show that made the biggest impression on him was the original production of Rent, which we saw together late in the run. As he said afterwards. ‘That was my life on that stage’. He had had a horrific early 20s with trying to survive on odd jobs and little money, battling the HIV epidemic, losing friends, and an unhappy love life. I enjoyed it but I had spent that period in college and med school nose to the grindstone so I hadn’t been as thoroughly affected as he was. I lost friends and fully expected to be gone by age thirty myself but that educational structure had kept me focused and sane. He hadn’t had that.

I hope that Tommy takes some time out from whatever he’s up to in the next life to look in on Dolly and take in a performance and give a sign that he approves. I’ll be waiting like Dolly waits for Ephraim. I just hope it doesn’t involve blue wallpaper.

I got myself up this morning and dragged myself to church. I didn’t want to after the ridiculous call night on Friday topped off by the three am call last night from the lady who just wanted to talk because she has a high level of anxiety about her husband’s health. When those calls come in, I have to remember to put myself in his or her shoes, remind myself that it’s part of the job I signed myself up for, and reach down into my well of patience and compassion and give him or her what he or she needs to hear. Reassurance, a little wisdom, and most of all, someone in authority who will take the time to listen to his or her story for a while. I have found that by doing this, my patients almost always feel better after a few minutes even though I really haven’t done much.

Anyway, I did manage to get in some sleep last night and the choir was due to sing this morning, so up I got for choir rehearsal and service and it’s a good thing I did as it was a service I needed to hear. Our minister is out on maternity leave (safe delivery of a son last week) so we have some pulpit guests for the next six or eight weeks until she returns. Today, it was John Archibald. Anyone who considers themselves an informed Birminghamian will be familiar with him and his writings as a columnist for the Birmingham News and its various on line permutations. His topic was Finding Reason in an Unreasonable World. I was expecting some sort of dissection of the political status of Birmingham, Alabam, and the United States but, instead, he began by reflecting on the difficulties he had in creating a coherent message to go with his topic. (I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks of a bang up title for a lecture and is then stymied by the task of coming up with material worthy of that title).

His ultimate message was that the only way to find reason in the crazy political moment in which we find ourselves is to draw back. None of us can fix the US political system. What we can do is find meaning, order and reason in small moments and kindnesses in our everyday lives and that’s what we have to hang on to. It was a sermon that resonated as it made me think about my life and its changes over the last six months. I am now a different person and in a different place than I was in March. What has made that bearable have been hundreds of small acts of kindness from hundreds of people over the interim. The words of sympathy, the funny texts, the invitations to dinner, the offers of help, positive comments on my writings. Each and every one keeps me going from one day to the next. They make me recognize that I am a thread in a grand tapestry of life, touching other threads and making a complex pattern. We sometimes spend our time fighting and worrying over threads far removed from our own and while it’s good to see how they contribute to the overall picture, our courage, resilience and fortitude comes from our immediate surroundings, not capitol buildings in distant cities.

Storytime – This one involves me and my medical school experiences. I entered medical school immediately after completing my undergraduate degree. Stanford handed me a diploma in June and I was behind a desk for my first medical school class in late August. I was at the University of Washington for a combination of in state tuition and because it was the only med school I got into. My first year, spent in what was known as the WAMI program (Washington/Alaska/Montana/Idaho) went well. The three smaller states do not have state medical schools so students from those states can attend U of W as in state students. They spend their first year and many of their clinical rotations in their home state. Washington participates in the same way but it’s rare for them to get a lot of volunteers to head off to WSU in Pullman so they draft to fill up the complement and I was one of the draftees. We were a small group and that sort of seminar learning worked well for me and I had a good time and did quite well grade wise. It probably also set the stage for my interest in rural health.

Second year, everyone was back in Seattle in large lecture classes and I hated it. My grades remained OK, but not stellar and I became one of those indifferent middle of the pack med students that aren’t destined for a particularly illustrious career. I found that I could learn as much on my own as from lectures so by the spring quarter, I was barely going to class. When I hit clinical rotations in my third year, being in the WAMI program I rotated out to places such as Boise, Nome and Whitefish. As one of only a few students at a time, I did well. When in the huge complex of U of W, I did not do so well as I did not like playing the subservience games medical students are supposed to play.

I did graduate on time and, as I wasn’t certain what I wanted to do with a medical degree decided to match in Internal Medicine as I figured it was probably the most flexible thing I could do. I had no idea what I wanted to do. The match system put me at University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento so in June of 1988, I packed up the U-Haul and headed to California. Most of my first year of residency is a blur due to the combination of overwork and sleep deprivation and I was not happy with my life or my choices. However, in my second year, I started to really get to know Faith Fitzgerald, our residency program director. She was a tall, angular woman with a brillo pad of iron gray hair who I at first had found quite intimidating. She, through luck of the draw, became my outpatient clinic preceptor my second year. One day in clinic, she made a remark about the bed of Procrustes. This brought blank stares from the other residents; I on the other hand knew the reference and lobbed something back about Jason and the Argonauts. I think I was the first resident she had had in some years who had a deep interest in the humanities as well as the sciences and she took me under her wing and helped me find a balance in my life between medicine and my other interests and she, more than anyone else, showed me how to love medicine as an art, unusual in this time of science. She didn’t favor me over other residents, she just took the time to understand who I was, something that hadn’t happened ever in med school, and gave me a little nudge or two over the years that eventually led me to develop the career I have today. It’s the little kindnesses and the listening that can have enormous ripple effects years later.

It’s 4:15 AM, the beeper has gone off five times since midnight so I might as well accept the fact that there’s not going to be any sleep tonight. I would have a crazy call night on the only night I have off from the theater this week. Ah well, such is life. If I’m going to be up in the wee hours, I might as well do a little writing and updating on the last few weeks.

Where to start? Perhaps with Hello, Dolly! which is going rather well. We start tech at 10 tomorrow morning. This is the stage of the process that is both exciting and infuriating. Those who do not do theater have no idea of the enormous coordination of elements that have to come together to get a big musical put together. Sets, costumes, lights, props, actors, dancers, musicians… and if anything is out of place, things fall apart. I have my track more or less down in my head – lyrics learned, bass part in the harmonies down, dance steps down, lines mainly in the correct order. Now I have to add in the costume changes, making sure I’m not in the way of rolling set pieces, and figuring out how to fit into the nonexistent stage left wing with fifteen actors and the fly rail without being seen by the audience. The time with the show has been good to me. I’m hanging out with some old friends, have somewhere I need to be in the evenings, and the message of the show about reengaging with life is resonating.

Work is work. The current shape of my job is fairly structured with outpatient clinical work and that’s probably a good thing at the moment. I know where I need to be and what I need to do most of the time and structure is helpful to keep me moving forward. One thing leads to another in a weekly cycle and I’m able to operate effectively, even when I don’t really feel like it. There hasn’t been anything too unusual. The usual crazy patient/family stories but HIPPA prevents me from telling them here.

My slow clean out of the house is on hiatus until I get the show open. I leave around 7:30 in the morning and don’t get back until around 10:30 at night so I have neither time nor energy to do much around here. I did have a burst of steam that allowed me to get the laundry started. It was a necessity if I wanted to have clean underwear. The cats seem to be a bit put out by my absence. Anastasia, who usually sleeps on the bed with me has decamped to the media room. Archie and Oliver have been a bit more standoffish than usual.

I added them up the other day, and Dolly is my 15th musical on the Virginia Samford Theater stage since I started performing in Birmingham. A long run of servants, aristocrats, comic villains, and other supporting types. Someone asked me what my favorite role I’ve done there was. It’s a hard question to answer as it’s usually whatever I’m currently working on. However, looking back, the one I recall the most fondly is the one that’s most out of character for what I usually do – Herr Schultz in Cabaret. Dramatic/pathetic is not my usual wheelhouse and it was a part that made me stretch and go some uncomfortable places. I was 45 when I played it, and probably 20 years too young for the role and I hope I get to tackle it again when I am 60 something.

I’m trying to think of a story. The Virginia Samford brings up all sorts of memories of me and Tommy as we did so many projects there together, both onstage and off. It was responsible for his interest in wigs. That came from a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in early 2012. Tommy was recovering from serious respiratory illness and I was in the cast playing the mayor. Our dear friend Kim Rollins Dometrovich was doing the costumes and was also in the cast so she had a very full plate. Tommy was off work due to his recent illness and hanging around backstage during the tech process and Kim, who needed help asked him if he could do some finger waves to the wigs for the opening 1930s sequence. He graciously agreed to be taught, found he had a knack for working with artificial hair, and a career was born. He settled contentedly into the wig room while I pranced around the stage in a hideous powder blue polyester leisure suit. He approached the wigs like he did everything in life that caught his interest – pulling in disparate skill sets and learning as much as possible about the subject until he mastered it. Which usually took him about six months. Within about a year, he was wig master for any number of local productions. He always told me that he approached theatrical wigs not as hair, but as sculpture with hair as the medium and he had a unique way of envisioning the finished product and knowing exactly what sort of curling or cutting technique was going to get him there. Watching something like the wigs for The Little Mermaid take shape in his studio was watching an artist at work. Sometimes I go out to his studio and just sit there for a few minutes. It’s pretty much as he left it. I just close my eyes and smell the old hairspray and shampoo and for a minute I can pretend he’s there with me working away at some new creation and asking me to help with the washing or brushing out. I’ll have to clean it out and pack it up eventually. But not today…

It’s time for another long update. Why that should be, I don’t know. I just know that I was missing Tommy more than usual today; it wasn’t a prolonged longing or sadness, more a sense of going through the day and thinking ‘I need to tell him that when I get home’ and automatically wanting to call him around mid-afternoon to check in on his day and find out what he had going on and what I needed to put into my brain to keep all the balls in the air at home. It may be that we’re in the swing of Dolly rehearsals and as we did so many projects together over the years, rehearsal time often became family time for us. It may be that the weather has been miserably hot and humid and that always makes me irritable and start counting down the weeks and days towards fall. Fall has always been my favorite season with a crispness in the air and, having always lived by the academic calendar, it’s my season of new beginnings. Having grown up in Seattle, fall always comes with a special golden light in the late afternoons of September and early October that I have never really found anywhere else.

Everything is more or less back in the groove at work. I have all my clinical responsibilities that don’t vary much from week to week and a few extra projects going on, mainly some public speaking engagements. Why I agreed to do one this Saturday at 8 AM I’ll never know but at least it’s only a half hour on ‘Communicating with Your Aging Parents’. I can’t say that I’m an expert on that but I do have a few tips after nearly thirty years in geriatric medicine. There’s nothing wrong at work, but I am still feeling a bit detached from it, like I’m sleep walking through my days; I think it’s a deep psychological defense mechanism that’s allowing me to deal with the pain and grief of others without triggering my own too much.

Travel plans are set for the rest of the year. I’ll be in NYC from October 17-21, Seattle November 17-23, and out of the country December 15-30. (More details on that last one once everything is booked – I’ll just say that I think I’ve found a way to escape the holidays completely this year which is a psychological necessity. I’ll consider dealing with them in 2019).

Hello, Dolly! is going well. Rudolf is only in Act II so I’m filling out the ensemble in Act I. Let us just say that I am not a chorus boy, but, like most shows, there aren’t as many men as they might want so all hands on deck. I am learning my Gower Champion as filtered through Roger Van Fleteren of the Alabama ballet as well as I can despite being more than twice the age of most of the rest of the ensemble men. We had three hours of ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’ tonight. I came home and took a long hot shower. Having had rehearsal every night this week and all last weekend and this coming weekend, I am behind on MNM’s version of Dolly. I promise to get back to that soon and am likely to put some of my cast mates in her world.

The conversation at lunch today centered around concussions and traumatic brain injuries so that brought up a story that I haven’t told yet. This one is from my distant past, before Steve and Tommy. The year was 1988. I had just graduated from medical school and had matched for my internship and residency at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento so shortly after graduation, I drove down to go apartment hunting, staying with my old friend Vickie Rozell. I knew I wanted to live in the historic part of town, known as midtown so I called up a number of places in my price range and was driving from one to another to take a look. In the midst of the driving along unfamiliar streets, I was T-boned at the corner of 24th and K and bonked my head hard on the dashboard. I remember nothing about the accident, just being dazed and confused and loaded into the back of an ambulance and raced off to the emergency room where I was due to start work two weeks later. I started vomiting as one does after a concussion, as a nurse by the name of Diane got all my clothes off and I was checked for various fractures. Fortunately, other than the concussion and some superficial scrapes, I was fine, and Vickie was able to collect me from the ED and was kind enough to check on me in the middle of the night and make sure I wasn’t sinking into a coma.

There were three sequelae to the whole thing. One, a totaled car (my first car – a Ford Fiesta) which led me to purchase Vickie’s old one which had no air conditioning, highly unpleasant in Sacramento summers. That B210 later went to John Rambo so it had a lot of life in it. Two, a post concussive syndrome from which I had some mild narcolepsy for a couple of months. Not useful in an intern. Three, an ED nurse who must have seen something she liked as she pursued my relentlessly for the next year and a half despite my complete lack of interest. This continued until after Steve and I got together and it was rather bizarre when she showed up on the doorstep uninvited asking me out when Steve and I were both in our bathrobes and obviously quite domestic. What made it even weirder was she was seven months pregnant with an ambulance driver’s baby at the time. She stopped calling after that so I assume she finally understood the message.

No rehearsal tomorrow, instead dinner at a friend’s house. It will be a nice change.

Last night I wrote a very long post catching everyone up on the last few weeks and, of course, Facebook ate it before I could upload it. I was in no mood to redo it last night but I’ve mellowed a little bit this evening so, while I am binge watching season 5 of Parks and Recreation, here’s a quick update on life, the universe and everything.

I’ve been back at work for a month now. New patterns are starting to establish themselves. Work is work and going relatively smoothly, other than some computer issues on the VA side which are still being straightened out. Many of my patients read the obituaries obsessively and so figured out why I was out for most of the spring so I have returned to many hugs and condolences. When you’ve been caring for the same population for a couple of decades, you develop a bond. I have some people whom I have had since I picked up my original panel in the late 90s. They were 70 something then and 90 something now. I have the children of a number of my original patients who are now in their 70s and 80s. Yet another reminder of how I have become embedded in the fabric of this city.

Outside of work, arts stuff is starting to come back from summer hiatus. Church choir started last week and Hello, Dolly! rehearsals begin this Thursday. I did Dolly once before, thirty five years ago in college, when I assisted Lauren Marshall as director. Alex Kaufman and Elizabeth Bryantwere Cornelius and Irene and Marq T Laube was in the chorus. I wish I had a wonderfully entertaining story about that production, but, as I remember it, the whole thing went relatively smoothly. I do recall a rather endless production meeting that got bogged down on whether Dolly should wear black or tan character shoes. (I believe tan won). I also recall a couple of production numbers that refused to come together until final dress rehearsal when the usual magic of theater brought them home. There weren’t a lot of dancers in the men’s chorus so we staged the Waiters Galop and Polka Contest with a lot of tricks. Waiters on roller skates, waiters on rolling carts, juggling waiters, waiters tossing trays at each other… It worked. And of course the whole thing ended up with Rudolf getting a pie in the face. (One of my touches).

I still have empty hours at home which I am trying to fill. I’m starting to get some home projects done, such as decluttering. The master suite is essentially done and I am starting on the office/media room next. I packed up all of Tommy’s good clothes and sent them off to the University of Montevallo’s student clothing bank yesterday. It’s so starving college students can have dress clothes for interviews and the like. I thought he’d like that. I’ve kept the things that we both wore and I have his bow ties which I don’t wear, but they were his signature so I think I will bestow them as mementos.

I need to start organizing all my bits and pieces of essay and thought on aging and mortality and start organizing it together into something above and beyond Facebook posts. I’ve done a little bit but there is much more to do. I bought myself a new laptop as the old one was getting old and wonky and I’m hoping it will spur me into doing some writing in the evenings. Of course, I bought myself a new Xbox one on the same Best Buy shopping trip so I’ll have to put down the controller to do that.

Some days are harder than others but in general I’m OK. I feel like I’m sleepwalking through life and hope that as I get more things back on the plate as fall advances, that I’ll be waking up a bit more. I’m not going to journal daily like I did when I was travelling, but I do have some trips coming up, so I will write more as that happens. NYC again in October, Seattle for Thanksgiving and something exotic over Christmas that hasn’t been thoroughly planned out yet.

What do I need at this point? If you’re local, dinners out or an evening of cocktails and board games or some such. If you’re at a distance, just message or call or check in with me from time to time and say Hi. There’s just a huge hole and it takes time and other people to gradually fill it.

Well, the first routine weekend is over and done with. Was it productive? A little. I completed the majority of my CME for the year. One more course to go which I should finish this coming week, then I’m good until sometime in 2019. What I’ve noticed is that I can’t read those board style questions and make sense of them with my aging brain the way I was able to a few years ago. I have to get through one more of those exams in my life, my geriatrics boards recertification in 2024 (when I will be 62) and then that is it and I refuse to do more after that point.

What else did I manage to do? I wrote this week’s MNM column (which will be out midweek sometime). I went to a work related social event. And I went and saw two of my favorite actresses, Holly Dikeman and Carole Armistead in the play Well at Birmingham Festival Theater. I haven’t been on that stage for some years so maybe that should happen this season. They’re doing The Good Doctor this fall and that has parts for which I would be appropriate casting so I should get off my butt and audition. Going to have to brush off a monologue or two. And, I spent this morning at church teaching Sunday School – I’ve got upper elementary this year. I also got my laundry done so, all in all, not a bad weekend.

It still feels empty and slow paced without Tommy and his multiple jobs and projects. He had so much to do, far more than most human beings can handle, and it was my job to handle the overflow. I can’t say I’ll miss being pressed into service rolling wigs at one in the morning, but I do miss the hum of activity and the hours of busy companionship. I even miss being told that I’m doing it wrong.

The play, Well, is by Lisa Kron who wrote Fun Home and has a lot to say about health, illness, how that affects the body, family relations and communities at large. I nearly lost it when they got to the Chaka Khan scene (see my last story) but much of what was being discussed is what I deal with professionally on a routine basis.

Tonight’s story is one of healthcare. I don’t talk a lot about my job in this forum for HIPPAA and other reasons but this is from years ago with no identifying information so I’ll go ahead and do it. Most of you know that house calls have been a huge part of my career. I’ve been doing them since 1991, when I first figured out their usefulness in community based geriatrics. This particular house call, from some years ago, was a routine visit to a family of limited function and socio-economic means where daddy, who had severe dementia, was the patient, and mama had severe untreated schizophrenia. We arrived one morning to check up on daddy as he had repeatedly been in the emergency department with burned feet. What we discovered was mama would roll him right up to the space gas heater to keep his feet warm, then forget he was there. His dementia and his diabetic neuropathy kept him from recognizing that his toes were getting a little too toasty and burns would result. I and my nurse showed up, pulled his feet from the fire (literally) and went in search for mama. We found her in the kitchen of their filthy and decrepit house (we took bets as to whether someone on the care team would put their foot through the floor on any given visit) frying up a mess of something on the stove. She opened a cupboard to pull out some seasoning and the largest roach I have ever seen came flying out and landed in the midst of the pan. Without missing a beat, mama picked up the can of Raid and sprayed the roach, the food, and the open flame of the gas stove. I looked for a handy window out of which to dive in case the house went up but luck was with us and no explosion was forthcoming. Mama then looked at us and said with a grin, ‘Y’all want some?’. We politely refused. The visit ended with daddy peeing all over me as I did my physical exam.

No one ever said medicine was a glamorous profession. Now I’m going back to Season 2 of Queer Eye on Netflix.

And like that, the road trips were over, I was back in Birmingham, and it was time to get back to work. If I were a few years older, I might have toyed with early retirement, but 56 is just a bit too soon. I’d been through all this before, but with Steve’s death, I had had a couple of years to get used to the idea before he died and was able to do a lot of my grief work in advance. No such luxury this time around with Tommy who went from functional to deceased in just over a month.

And so I’m returning to my usual patterns with mixed success. The first UAB day back on Monday went well, thanks to the kindness of multiple colleagues who had handled most of the clinical issues while I was gone. I was more or less back in the saddle and up to speed by lunch time and there are no major issues on the horizon. The first day back at the VA today was not as smooth.

My biggest issue is trying to figure out how best to spend my downtime without Tommy and Tommy’s unending stream of projects that usually required a factotum to follow him around and lend the extra pair of hands to make sure it all happened on schedule. I do have a show coming up, but it doesn’t go into rehearsal for a few more weeks. I have a house to clean out, but I can only do so much of that so fast for emotional reasons. (I went through all his clothes and sorted everything out this weekend. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it might have been – except for the shoes. Those held a lot of memories. Tommy had tiny little feet (Mens 7 1/2) so fitting him in shoes was always difficult. When he found some he liked and that fit, he always bought them so his closet tended to resemble that of Imelda Marcos. But, it’s done, I just have to get things to where they need to go.) I’ve got some writing projects to work on, but I often don’t have the energy after a full day at work to get too intellectual. I’ll probably do that more on weekends. I can write these little epistles to the world and I need to get back to writing my MNM columns more routinely as well.

The current decision, so I feel like I am getting something constructive done, is to do my CME for the year. I have some computer courses that expire at the end of the month so I need to get them done and then I can forget about those hours for another year or so. I hate the years when I realize it’s December and I have another ten hours I have to get and I’m up late with the laptop trying to cram the difference between Eschericia coli and Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae into my brain. I figure if I can get an hour or two in on weeknights the next few weeks before turning on Netflix and becoming a vegetable, it will be a good thing.

The Chaka Khan story. This is another Steve story. Steve and I used to travel a lot with the gay travel group Atlantis Events and, in January of 1999, shortly after we had moved to Birmingham, we were booked on one of their first Caribbean cruises on the Norwegian Wind. This was before Steve became ill so he was in fine form, making sure he was noticed by the other guests and staff alike. The special guest entertainer on the cruise was Chaka Khan and one evening, she did her set. Later that night, there was a white party up on the deck and as it was a lovely warm night, most of the men weren’t wearing a whole lot. Steve decided to attend wearing a white sailor top and sailor hat and a white jock strap. The top was long enough to cover most of his rump, not that that crowd cared and he and I were dancing under the stars. Chaka came out on deck and sat at a table at the side of the dance floor to watch the dancing and Steve spotted her. He immediately took off his jock strap, tossed it to her (she nimbly caught it) and then proceeded to flash her. Her response was uproarious laughter and something along the lines of ‘Honey, a girl likes it when you leave something to the imagination’. He laughed back and she invited us to sit down with her. Steve and she were roughly the same age and knew some of the same people in LA and soon were having a high old time together, even if he wasn’t wearing any pants. He always adored African American women and they him. Once we moved to Birmingham, he would say the most outrageous things to African American women we would encounter and they would all laugh, and then fix him with an amused, but steely gaze and say “You’re so bad” to which his standard response was “I didn’t know any better” and they would all laugh again.

For those of you who were wondering, yes, I had my pants on, thank you very much. If I recall, I was wearing white jeans and some sort of sheer white top. Yes, there are photos. No, I’m not publishing them…

Dateline: Columbia, South Carolina – Birmingham, Alabama-

Well, the trip has come to an end. I have a three day weekend to gear myself up for returning to work on Monday. Sorry that there was no update yesterday, but as it was a holiday (and I may have had one cocktail too many), I decided writing last night was probably not the wisest of ideas.

Yesterday, the 4th, I left Asheville after poking around downtown for a bit and made the easy drive to Columbia. I was invited for the 4th to my dear friend Frank Thompson‘s house where I spent time catching up with him and his wife, Laurel Posey. They had a barbecue potluck for the Columbia theater folk so I finally got to meet such people as Kathy Hartzog, Ripley Thames, Bill DeWitt and Bill Arvay whom I have heard about for years but had never actually met in the flesh. Much food was consumed, many drinks were had, and all of the problems of both Birmingham and Columbia theater were solved.

Today, after a leisurely morning, I made the last leg of the trip driving back to Birmingham which requires about seven hours of I-20 with all of the Atlanta traffic in the middle of it. It rained a bunch, but was otherwise uneventful. I got back about 7 pm to find the house intact, (Thank you Melissa Bailey), the kitties somewhat fussy (but only Anastasia seeming to have missed me in the least), and a large pile of mail which I will deal with tomorrow.

So, what have I learned from all this gallivanting around ?(11,500 miles and 28 states over the last few months…)
-People seem to like my writing
-My storytelling seems to be improving
-All of this current writing is becoming something, I just don’t know what yet.
-You can get a single ticket to pretty much anything in New York without much notice
-Hampton Inns are the same everywhere
-Hampton Inn breakfasts are the same everywhere
-Ken Follett does not write good sex scenes
-A Prius does well on back roads
-I’m going to miss Tommy like hell

I don’t know what sort of FB writing I’m going to do now that I’m setting back into routine. I probably won’t write every night as I have been. I may continue to post personal stories as I think of them. I will write when I travel. (Nothing in stone yet, but the tentative plans for the next six months include NYC again in October, Seattle for Thanksgiving, someplace for Christmas, the Caribbean in February).

Today’s story is a me and Steve story and as you read it, you’ll get why I thought of it over the last couple of days. When I was brand new faculty at UC Davis, I won a major award for ideas in Wellness sponsored by the insurance company, HealthNet. It came with some money, a book chapter, an award lecture etc. My topic was that disease prevention and health promotion were two very different things and should not be confused with each other and that more emphasis should be placed on the latter. It’s the kind of award usually won by senior faculty, not by those just starting out and it made me one of the fair haired rising stars of UCD school of medicine.

As the medical center was in Sacramento, just down from the capitol, all of the lobbyists and other pieces of the UC system that interacted with state government were headquartered there so UCD faculty were often trotted out for various legislators in their attempts to butter them up for additional state funds. Steve and I were invited to the chief lobbyist’s home for dinner a number of times. He lived in a very nice house, right on the river, with a huge entertaining space. I was invited initially due to my award and as spouses were included, Steve tagged along and put on his best manners and charm and we became regulars in the rotation. The second or third time we were asked for dinner, the hostess knew enough about to Steve to know he was from Los Angeles so she put us at a table with a state legislator from LA who represented the district that Steve had lived in before he moved north. He, of course, knew who she was, they discovered some friends in common, and they had a high old time together. The other tables kept looking around to see what was so funny at our table. Steve always got along incredibly well with African American women, a talent that was to serve him well in later years. The legislator in question was, of course, Maxine Waters, long before her rise to national prominence.

Some day I’ll have to tell the story of Steve and I and Chaka Khan…