Dateline: New York, New York-

The laptop seems to have fixed itself, at least temporarily. Keeping my fingers crossed as I type this… which isn’t easy.

The weather has cooled off and it was perfect walking weather in the city today. Overcast with a bit of a threat of rain, but no actual rain drops until late night when I was safely ensconced back in the Gramercy Park pied a terre. After breakfast, I headed cross town on 23rd to visit Anne Devereux-Mills, a friend since elementary school who lives near where the Highline crosses 23rd. We caught up over coffee (and she added her voice to the chorus that these musings I have been writing need to become something. Message received. Something is swirling in the recesses of my brain and we’ll all have to wait and see what eventually pops out). Then, a walk down the Highline to the West Village, some window shopping, and back up through Washington and Union Squares.

After lunch, back to the theater district where I tagged along with the ‘Inside Broadway’ walking tour guided by the one and only Natalie Riegel. Natalie was a theater kid when I started my rejuvenated theater career fifteen years ago and I watched her go through high school, on to the U of A musical theater program, put in several years in regional and tour work, and now she’s in NYC working towards that first Broadway contract. She certainly kept her tourists enthralled and I will be happy to report to her parents that she is doing well.

As I had a couple of hours to kill, I went over to Don’t Tell Mama and listened to the piano bar and had dinner and then it was time for this evening’s theater going. It’s pride weekend in NYC which culminates on Sunday with the parade down 5th Avenue. Therefore, I headed to the new Broadway Production of ‘The Boys in the Band’ starring all of the out gay television actors you’ve ever heard of including Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Tuc Watkins, and Charlie Carver.

The play is now fifty years old and is sort of a long night’s journey into day about a group of gay friends who attend a rather ugly birthday party that seems to owe a lot to early Edward Albee. It was written pre-Stonewall and while the archetypal characters get some wonderfully bitchy lines to shoot back and forth at each other, the major message is one of sadness as these men are warped by a society that refuses to allow them to just be. It’s an important milestone in American gay drama in that it was the first play that showed contemporary gay men as they were with themselves rather than has tragic supporting figures in a straight world’s story. It was a major off Broadway hit in its original production, but this is the first time it’s actually played a Broadway house.

Did I like it? Parts very much. There’s a lot of talent on the stage and the casting of well known openly gay actors in all of the roles gives it a certain authenticity that might otherwise be lacking. They all try to find the human beings under the waspish wit and psychic pain and some succeed more than others. Jim Parsons’ isn’t afraid to be unlikable as his Michael manipulates his guests in nasty ways and Zachary Quinto, as the fey Harold, has some great moments. Matt Bomer is a bit of a cipher as Donald, but the role is severely underwritten. We do get the bonus of his taking all his clothes off and he is a very pretty man.

Whomever designed and OKd the set should be shot. It’s a mirrored and plexiglass two story Barbie’s Dream Apartment which bears no relationship whatsoever to something a gay man in NYC would have lived in in 1968. The styling and colors all suggest mid 1980s. All it was missing were a couple of Nagel prints. The costumes all seemed much too modern as well, as if the actors had wandered in off the street in whatever they had thrown on this morning.

Anyway, it got me thinking of New York apartments I have known over the years and tonight’s story takes us to one of them… Back in 1996 or 1997, I was invited by Cornell to interview for a position on their faculty to be the medical director of the Burden Center for Aging, an umbrella for various upper east side senior service programs. It was funded by Carter and Susan Burden (he was the long time publisher of the Village Voice) so as part of the process, Steve and I were invited to a cocktail party and dinner at the Burden’s apartment on 5th Avenue. Carter had recently died prematurely but Susan was lovely and she and Steve really hit it off as they were about of an age and had had some similar life experiences. As I was looking around this fabulous New York apartment, overlooking the Metropolitan Museum, I suddenly remembered that Carter Burden’s first wife was Babe Paley’s daughter Amanda so I had great fun imagining myself in the world of Truman Capote and his Fifth Avenue Swans.

I didn’t get the job (not enough East Coast connections) but the interview process was worth it for that party.

Dateline: New York, New York –

My laptop is acting wonky and I doubt I’ll be able to get it fixed until I get home, so I am typing this on my phone which is as annoying as all get out but needs must. Updates may be a bit shorter because of this. Ah well…

The run of late sleeping ended this morning with eyes open at 6:30. I got up, had a constitutional, and breakfast before doing some housekeeping and laundry. I’m about half way through this trip and starting to run short on clean clothes. I thought about buying some new ones but thought figuring out a strange washing machine might be more cost effective.

I spent the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I hadn’t been for a while as Tommy was not much of a museum goer. He liked sculpture and decorative art, but usually only if it had practical purpose and he did like going to galleries and studios and meeting artists and learning about their vision. Museums, not so much, he’s the only person I ever knew who went to Paris for a week and skipped the Louvre. I had to go to the two departments at the Met that he enjoyed. The costume galleries and the musical instruments collection.

That was followed by a ramble across Central Park, ending up at the Dakota (Rosemary Woodhouse was not in evidence) and then down to Lincoln Center for dinner and the new production of My Fair Lady at the Beaumont. Bartlett Sher has been reimagining the classics there in new productions over the last decade. I saw The King and I a couple years ago and caught South Pacific on tape, but not live.

This production hits more than it misses. Having A younger Higgins and older Eliza so they are of an age ups the tension and both are very good in their roles. Lauren Ambrose doesn’t have Julie Andrews’ miraculous voice but acquits herself fine. She just sounds thin compared against our collective memory of the original cast recording. An unrecognizable Norbert Leo Butz brings down the House with Get Me To The Church on Time and it’s always a pleasure to see Diana Rigg live.

The set is gorgeous, with a great coup de theatre in the ballroom scene (which was moved from the end of Act I to open Act II). I noticed a couple of trims in the book and in one verse of Let A Woman In Your Life. I saw the London revival with Jonathan Pryce about 20 years ago. This was better.

Higgins is a bucket list role. Heck, so are Doolittle and Pickering but I’ve never been on stage in it. I did one production 30 years ago at Seattle Civic Light Opera where I did props and set decoration. I’m still friends with a bunch of folk from that production (Ken Magos, Scott F. Arend, Teresa Mosteller, Paula Podemski, Daniel James Cole). My best memory of it was creating all of the book bindings for the study set. I titled them all and they were all not very nice jokes about the Seattle theater community of the day. Fortunately, they could not be read from the audience. I believe that was also the show where a squirrel ate its way into a major transformer blacking out a large portion of North East Seattle and requiring the rescheduling of a performance.

New adventures tomorrow

Dateline: New York, New York –

Yep, the sleep patterns are returning. I was able to sleep in again this morning for a while which felt awfully good. I did drag myself out for a big breakfast and then sat down and wrote a new MNM column as I am woefully behind in those. (Posted separately).

The rest of the day was more or less devoted to Harry Potter. I treated myself to center orchestra tickets for the theatrical extravaganza ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ currently playing at the Lyric Theater on 43rd. It’s the same production that had been running in London and the leads are all the original London cast. As the show has a nearly six hour running time, it is in two parts which can be viewed either on subsequent evenings or on the same day with Part I as a matinee and Part II as an evening show. I opted for the latter and took a dinner break for Mexican and margaritas in between the two halves.

So how is the show? The staging is stunning. There is non-stop motion as the cast turns relatively simple props and set pieces into all of the locales with a cinematic fluidity. There is also major music underscoring and a number of ensemble dance breaks which move story, theme and mood (and likely cover for lead costume changes). The visual look is based on the designs from the film series so we recognize the characters immediately (although the cross cultural casting of Hermione as black might have confused some, I liked it). The actors have enough of the mannerisms of the original film cast to be familiar but use those as a jumping off point to explore new ground.

The play starts where the movies end, with the families gathered on platform 9 3/4 19 years later waving off James and Albus Potter and Rose Granger Weasley as they leave for Hogwarts. Albus is a bit of a misfit, unlike his parents and is sorted into Slytherin house where he becomes best mates with Scorpius Malfoy, Draco’s son. This leads into a long and complex plot involving time turners, alternate time lines, attempts to resurrect Voldemort, and flashbacks to the past. It could easily have become a six hour theme park show but J. K. Rowling and her co-creators have a lot to say about accountability, generational guilt, miscommunications between parents and children, and the necessity of loss that help the material rise way above that.

And oh, what a magical production. Dementors fly over the audience. Actors actually swim. Wands shoot jets of flame. People appear, vanish, and change into others with the flash of a cape and a lighting effect. I could figure out a lot of the stage tricks (body doubles, flying harnesses, lighting), but there are still some I am uncertain how they managed.

Harry Potter entered my life soon after the publication of the third book in about 2000. I started hearing about them from various sources and, as one of the things that I did with Steve when he was sick was to read aloud to him at night, I bought the first one for that purpose. Steve loved it as did I and I read the first three to him and then the fourth, which came out shortly before he died.

The first film was released after Steve’s death and before I met Tommy so I went to see it with a friend and, after it was over, I thought – too literal. It was such a faithful adaptation of the novel that it wasn’t cinematic enough. I thought the same about the second one. Then Christopher Columbus released directorial control to others and I thought they improved markedly. Tommy and I went to see all the rest together as they opened and they remained among his favorites. If he wasn’t feeling well, or wanted something on the TV to keep him company while he worked, out came the set of Harry Potter DVDs. We always seemed to be traveling when they were released so we saw them on the big screen in such varied places as Orlando, Chicago and Seattle.

Tommy and my first trip to New York as a couple coincided with the release of the fifth book. We had been to the theater that night and afterward, we headed off to the huge Virgin Store in Times Square (alas, no longer there) and got in line for the midnight release, buying a copy along with a lot of folk decked out in full Potter regalia. We then repaired to the hotel where I read the first few chapters to him until we fell asleep.

We had talked about making a trip to New York to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child before he became ill,so this one was for him and I hope he has a way of seeing it through my eyes.

Dateline: New York, New York-

I slept in this morning, which was unusual. Most nights since Tommy died, I’ve been up late and woken up early and have been getting a lot less sleep than is normal for me. Maybe I’m starting to relax and my circadian rhythms are returning to normal or maybe it was an aberration. Time will tell.

Got up and had a leisurely walk though the flatiron district, and then headed up to the theater district for some lunch. Then took the subway back to Gramercy Park and put my feet up for a couple hours before heading out to dinner and a show. I had dinner at a restaurant called Pasta Lovers on 49th. It was Steve and my traditional pre-show dinner stop as we knew we could get in and out quick enough for an early curtain. It’s been majorly remodeled since those days but the carbonara is still good.

Tonight’s show was the revival of Carousel with Joshua Henry, Jessie Mueller and Renee Fleming. It’s never been a favorite show of mine (although I did love the 90s revival because of its brilliant staging). This one, a bit of a mixed bag. The show works; I know because I was in full mode ugly cry during the last scene and tearful most of the second act. Some of that is personal situation. When Billy dies leaving Julie a widow alone and Nettie sings ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, it hit a bit too close to home and the events of the last couple of months. On the other hand, the older I get, the more I appreciate what Hammerstein was actually doing in his books with archetypes, and descriptions of the human condition once you scrape away all the cornpone.

The dancing is phenomenal, much more balletic than one usually sees on Broadway with fabulous principal dancers and ensemble. The Carousel waltz and Louise’s second act ballet are highlights. The best dancer in the show is the guy who plays Jigger, an Indian American ABT danseur who is so good he walks off with the show and Blow High Blow Low, usually a bit of a throw away, is the best number in the piece. The three leads are all competent and each has their moments (Soliloquy in particular) but Jigger is still who you remember.

I’ve been thinking of New York stories. This one is about my first trip, which happened in the fall of 1987 when I was in my last year of medical school. I had longed to come to NYC all through high school, college and earlier in med school but I couldn’t afford that sort of travel. I finally had an excuse when I did my residency interviews and applied to some New York programs including Cornell and NYU and was invited for interviews. I flew into Newark and took the bus into Manhattan and will never forget my first view of the skyline across the Hudson. I checked into the Edison Hotel (it was cheap) and that first night went to the original production of Into The Woods at the Martin Beck which had just opened a couple of weeks earlier together with my old friend Bob Kummer who was living here at the time. I did my interviews and then took the train to New Haven to interview at Yale and Providence to interview at Brown and then it was back to New York.

When I got back, I found I had a free evening prior to my flight out so I went to the Broadway theater and stood in the cancellation line for Les Miserables which was the huge hit at the time and had been running for about a year. The guy next to me was involved in the theater scene. Three hours later, I had two tickets for second row center. I gave him one, and he got me backstage at Into the Woods to meet Bernadette Peters which I thought was a fair trade. I left thinking of NYC as a magical place and I still get a little frisson every time I first emerge from Grand Central or Penn Station into the city.

Dateline: New York, New York-

I fell asleep last night before I had a chance to sit down and write anything about the day so I’m making up for it by lying here in bed, listening to the street noise drifting over from Park Avenue and trying to make my little grey cells work before I’ve had my coffee.

Yesterday was uneventful. Relatively short drive from where I was staying in Massachusetts to my cousin’s house in New Canaan. The family were all out other than my uncle who is visiting them from Seattle so I chatted with him for a bit before I caught the train from the New Canaan Station to Grand Central. I had forgotten how hot underground New York can get in the summer but stepping off the air conditioned train onto the platform was like stepping into one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno, only with more people. Then came the lovely job of wrestling two suitcases through various turnstiles, onto the subway, up and down stairs, and around speeding taxis. Fortunately, It’s a task I’ve handled before.

My cousin, Jack, bought his apartment on Gramercy Park nearly twenty years ago when he and his wife Betsy began to have success in New York (he’s a finance guy who is now CEO of a railroad company and she’s a high powered attorney). Later, they bought the house in New Canaan so there would be plenty of room for their growing family but they kept the apartment as a pied a terre and as a stopping off place for friends and family when they visit the city. It’s the rear half of the ground floor of an 1840s brownstone and includes the old stable courtyard, protected by a wall and the bedroom I currently occupy was originally the stable and carriage house. Every time I come down the entrance hall, I feel the ghosts of Henry James characters brushing past as they’re on the way to Delmonico’s .

I didn’t do much yesterday afternoon and evening as I was tired. Ate a couple of decent meals, walked around the neighborhood, dodged a rain shower under a construction awning outside the local CVS. Monday night is dark on Broadway so no theater. That starts this evening with the revival of Carousel.

Both Steve and I and Tommy and I made a number of trips to New York together and I’ve made others before I met either of them and during the period when I was single between them. Therefore, I have lots of New York memories over thirty some years. I’ll try to see what comes to mind as I wander through the city over the next couple of weeks.

Dateline: Sturbridge, Massachusetts-

I left the DC suburbs this morning and decided to avoid the constant urban traffic on I-95, so I went the other direction on a loop that would keep me out of most of the major metropolitan areas. After crossing the Maryland panhandle into Pennsylvania, I found myself in Gettysburg, so I had to stop for a bit at the battlefield. I had been there before about twenty years ago but it’s one of those places that you have to stop at if you’re in the area. Looking out over those fields, split rail fences, and 18th century farm houses, it’s almost possible to see and hear the men from 150 plus years ago. But I seem to see them in sepia tones, rather than living color. Curse you Ken Burns…

From there, up through Southwestern Pennsylvania past Harrisburg and Hershey and then down into the Delaware river valley and up over the Poconos and down across the Hudson River and across New York into Connecticut, stopping for the night in Massachusetts because the hotel was thirty dollars cheaper than on the other side of the border. Who knows why. Tomorrow, I end up at my cousin’s house in New Caanan where I will leave the car so I don’t have to deal with it in Manhattan and where I will collect the key to the NYC apartment. Not looking forward to manhandling the luggage onto the commuter train, but that’s ok.

I was actually born and spent my earliest years in this part of the world. My father was on faculty at Yale from 1960-64 in the oceanography program (and would have stayed longer had Kingman Brewster not axed it forcing him to find another job). So I was born in New Haven and did not move to Seattle until I was two. I have only two memories of my early years in Connecticut. I didn’t have the neural wiring yet to lay down any more. The first is of the girl next door. She had had polio in the 1950s and had large bulky leg braces which I remember quite well. The second was of being unable to find my mother in a very dark, strange house, which I am told was a 17th century saltbox cottage that belonged to friends of my parents.

My parents lived in Connecticut during the era of Mad Men and, when I watched the series a few years ago, I could recall a lot of their descriptions of the kind of people they lived among when they talked to each other about those year after we had moved back to the west coast. The details of the TV show struck me as exactly right and I finally understood why they had been so happy to move. They were not cut out for New England life. My mother the Californian and my father the Washingtonian belonged on the West Coast.

Dateline: Silver Spring, Maryland –

Today was a trek up I-95 from rural North Carolina to Washington DC. Once I started to hit the Northeast corridor megalopolis, which now begins around Richmond, Virginia, things slowed to a crawl and convinced me that I am not taking the direct route into New York and Connecticut tomorrow, but rather bypass around through rural Pennsylvania, the Hudson Valley, and come back down through Massachusetts or some such. I’ll figure it out. I’m not due in until Monday lunch sometime so I can wander a bit.

I stopped in DC to see old colleague Ali Ahmed. He was a second year fellow when I first joined the faculty at UAB 20 years ago, and then was on the research faculty for some time before moving on to a research job at the Washington DC VA a few years back. We’ve always stayed in touch so we had a long and wide ranging conversation of some hours capped with a delicious dinner. As there was beer involved, I decided not to get back on the road, but rather found the Hampton Inn right around the corner from the restaurant for the night where I attempted to watch a movie so I could write a new column but kept falling asleep. I’ll try again tomorrow.

As I am in DC, I am, of course thinking back on various other trips to the capital over the years. Back when I was first starting my career in the early 90s, I was involved with a large national research program called the cardiovascular health study. I was part of the adjudication committee where we reviewed all the medical records as they came in on participants and decided whether they met any of the research endpoints such as heart attack, stroke or congestive heart failure. We had quarterly meetings in DC so I spent a lot of time here for a number of years.

When Tommy and I first got together, he was the chief nursing officer for Birmingham Health Care and was involved in a number of federal programs and grants and he was always flying off to DC for meetings so we spent a lot of time here together during our first few years. He was not much for the monuments or the museums, but was very fond of the restaurant scene, especially in Adams Morgan and Woodley Park where he first introduced me to Ethiopian cuisine at a restaurant called Meskarem, a place we had to eat at at least once on every trip.

My story for the evening, however, is a Steve story. When I first went to work on the Cardiovascular Health Study, I was still a fellow and we didn’t have a lot of extra money so we couldn’t spring for him to come with me on my DC jaunts. When I was promoted to faculty and started being paid a real physicians salary, our financial position started to change and he came with me to DC for the first time in November of 1992. It was his first trip there so I added a couple of days so he could see the sights. It was just a few days after Clinton won the election and the day he was scheduled to go to the White House for the first time with Hilary to see the residence. We were on the mall, coming out of the Natural History Museum, when all or a sudden a motorcade comes by and in the back seat of the limo, a grinning Bill Clinton could be plainly seen bouncing up and down with excitement waving to everyone. Steve wanted to see the rest of the story so we walked up to the White House. (Pre 9/11 so far less security) where a crowd had gathered. About half an hour later, the limo came out of the drive with Bill and Hilary and roared away. The next day, there was a photograph of the crowd waving goodbye to the Limousine on the front page of the Washington Times with Steve smack dab in the middle of it. He’s the only person I’ve ever known who could make his first trip to a strange city and end up on the front page of the local paper within 48 hours.

Dateline: Fayetteville, North Carolina-

I headed into downtown Columbia this morning and had breakfast and conversation with Frank Thompson. He, as much as anyone else, is responsible for my Birmingham theater career. We met doing the original Politically Incorrect Cabaret in 2004 and we took our Ansager/Serenissimus schtick through various other incarnations and did a ton of musicals together until he relocated to South Carolina around 2010. It was nice to catch up on various subjects for a couple hours.

From there, I headed into Charleston, a city I had never been to. My impressions of it are all from the literary works of Pat Conroy (I remember reading The Water is Wide for the first time in 6th grade and have read a number of others over the years) and it looks pretty much like the pictures, only with more tourists and boutiques. It was about 95 degrees with 95% humidity so I didn’t spend a whole lot of time walking and eventually turned North on US 17 over the gorgeous new bridge. The road led me to Myrtle Beach, a less attractive variation of the Redneck Riviera full of T shirt shops and mini golf, where the heavens opened and it rained like crazy. In an attempt to get out of the gullywasher, I turned inland and found myself winding through rural eastern North Carolina – Dawson’s Creek country; and when I got tired of driving in the rain, stopped for the night in Fayetteville just outside of Fort Bragg.

Getting together with Frank always takes me back to early Birmingham theater days. He was running a musical theater company, CenterStage when we first met. Having worked with me in Politically Incorrect, he thought I had some talent so he asked Melissa Bailey, who was directing their next show, Me and My Girl, to find a spot for me and she cast me as the butler. I started rehearsals, but Tommy all of a sudden needed back surgery so I had to drop out and get him through that process. I came back a few months later for their next show, Jekyll and Hyde, where I was again cast as the butler. (Need a servant, an aristocrat or a drunk? Call Andy) At my first or second rehearsal, there became an obvious need for more tenors in the ensemble so I called up Tommy and told him to come on down and so our association with CenterStage was born and a number of my key friendships began to develop. That show was not only our CenterStage debut, but was also the first show with the company for Leah Luker and Donald Garrett. Fourteen years later, we all still work together and enjoy each others company.

And then it was time to leave on the second major road trip of the summer. This one didn’t cover as many miles, but had its share of interesting adventures.

Dateline: Columbia, South Carolina –

Well, I am off on part 2 of Andy tours America. The distances aren’t as great this time around as I am staying around the eastern seaboard so no 900 miles across the Texas plains or anything of that nature. The destination this time is New York City, where I plan to stay for a couple of weeks, catching up with a couple of folks and playing in the city. I should be in residence starting next Monday until roughly Monday the 2nd when I will start heading back south. This is all liable to change depending on mood and other vagaries.

I did not get moving this morning so i did not leave Birmingham until after one and have stopped in Columbia for the night. I am having breakfast tomorrow with my old Birmingham theatre partner in crime, Frank Thompson so we can catch up on various things, than I think I’m going to head for Charleston and the Carolina coast as I have never been there.

Today’s drive was uneventful and dull, other than navigating the usual Atlanta traffic and did not bring any specific stories to mind so I’ll go back to Sweeney Todd from the other night.

Sweeney opened on Broadway when I was a junior in high school, but I didn’t discover it until a couple of years later – I bought the double LP cast album for myself for Christmas my freshman year of college and immediately fell in love with the show and the score. I’ve seen a dozen or so productions including the original on tour, NYCO’s recreation of the original with Elaine Paige; Brian Stokes Mitchell and Christine Baranski at the Kennedy Center; The Patti LuPone/George Hearn SF Concert on tape; The Emma Thompson Concert on tape; college productions; community productions and I’ve never seen it fail as long as it’s cast with actors who can sing the score. Sweeney is a bucket list role for me. I’m the right type and voice type but I’m realistic enough about my talent to know that I don’t have a powerful enough voice to ever actually do it – except in the shower where I have a killer Epiphany.

My favorite Sweeney memory comes from 1985. The Stanford University student musical theater group, Ram’s Head, did a production for their spring show (naturally the year after I graduated) but I was able to take some time off during my first year of medical school to go back to the Bay Area to see it My old friend Marc Fajer directed it and did some interesting things with the staging so that it was not the carbon copy of Hal Prince that so many productions are. Macall Dunahee Gordon was a wonderful Mrs. Lovett and Elizabeth Bryant was the beggar woman. I do not recall who played Sweeney. Anyway, my cousin, Jenny, who was in her senior year, was the costume designer for the production and I arrived to find her behind in finishing Mrs. Lovett’s second act dresses. We spent the better part of the day and evening sewing and hot gluing frills and furbelows as we caught up with each other. It’s just the kind of thing I would do with Tommy. He would be behind on wigs and all of a sudden I would find myself having to roll wigs with no talent or knowledge, but needs must.

Twenty years from now, I’m sure I’ll be sitting on a floor somewhere readying some last minute prop for some production to help somebody out. It’s what I do.

I was too sleepy to write last night, so I’m laying here in bed, thinking about finishing my packing for road trip, part 2 and writing this instead of actually doing that. I have procrastination down to an exact science.

The day after the memorial, I said goodbye to the family who headed back to their lives in Seattle and I decided I needed to do something for me and get out of the house so I got on line, bought myself a ticket in the front row of the mezzanine for Atlanta Opera’s production of Sweeney Todd and headed off to the ATL. I decided to spend the night so I wouldn’t have to drive home late night. The production was well cast, well sung, and to hear that score played live by a full orchestra is always a huge treat. Michael Mayes, who sang Valentin when I was in the chorus of Faust, some years ago, was great in the title role. He’s made quite a career out of DeRocher in Dead Man Walking the last few years and he’s superb at projecting menace on stage. He’ll be back in Atlanta this spring for Dead Man Walking and I’ll have to make sure I get over to see that. I’ve wanted to see a production for years. Leah Partridge, who was Ophelia in the Hamlet we did a few years ago, was The Beggar Woman. She was obviously having fun and was in great voice.

Seeing Leah on stage made me think of the winter of 2014-15, a time which ended up transforming Tommy’s life although we didn’t know it at the time. Tommy had finished his music education and speech pathology degrees in late 2011 but had developed some serious pulmonary issues that knocked him out of being able to do much activity until the spring of 2012. He started looking for a teaching job in elementary music education but, as he was entering the field in his late 40s, he wasn’t having a lot of success competing against 20 somethings so he did what he always did and created his own little niche. He began the children’s music program at our church, he taught at the UAB Arts Extension Program, he worked with private voice students, and he became the go to substitute for a lot of the public school elementary music teachers in town. It kept him busy, but having nothing but piecemeal jobs wasn’t sitting too well with him. He also fell into theatrical wigs and makeup at this time, but that’s another story.

In the fall of 2014, the long time head of Opera Birmingham, decided to move on and, after a search, Keith Wolfe was hired from Fort Worth Opera to come in and take over the company the following spring after some transition period. The previous office manager had also left so, knowing that he was underemployed, the company asked Tommy if he would come in for some temp work that fall and winter. Tommy started showing up that fall as they were getting ready for the January production of Thomas’s operatic version of Hamlet. In December, all hell broke lose and Tommy found himself as pretty much the only employee on staff with an opera going up in six weeks. Never one to back away from a challenge, Tommy kept the company running, and the pieces fell into place with Corey McKern and Leah Patridge starring under the direction of Dona Vaughn and baton of Craig Kier.

When the dust settled, Tommy found himself permanently employed as the Company Manager of Opera Birmingham. It wasn’t what he was intending, but it was a job that allowed him to use many of the skill sets he had developed over the years in administration, organization and management. Production management fell under his purview, and I was pressed into being his factotum, and the two of us found ourselves sewing table cloths, making cafe tables, or shopping for just the right Lily Pulitzer for a leading lady at all sorts of odd hours in the ensuing years. I can’t say I’ll miss spray painting props in our garage at one in the morning.