Dateline – Rio de Janeiro

The last few days have been a tale of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I shall relate and let y’all make up y’alls minds as to which event belongs in which category as there is a certain amount of subjective categorization that comes along with the vagaries of my life. I’ve written enough about myself in recent years to have come to the conclusion that as much as I would like to think I try to live life with a certainly orderly pattern, the universe generally has other ideas. I assume this is true for others as well and that I can’t be the only one – or maybe I’m some sort of lodestone of my own making that attracts strange and unusual.

I entered the work week on Monday knowing that I would have to get everything settled in such a way that I could depart on Thursday and that things would run smoothly in my absence. I try to be a good colleague and not leave messes or undone tasks for my few remaining comrades in arms. We are all stretched so thin that anyone not pulling their weight can create issues for everyone else. The joys of being a cog in the rickety American healthcare system machine, especially one devoted to the aged as their numbers are skyrocketing due to demographic changes identified sixty years ago but about which no one has created a viable plan.

With all that deadline pressure, I did what I do best, and scheduled something in my performing life, being part of the pick up choir for the Alabama Holocaust Education Center event which had an endless four plus hour tech on Monday evening and a performance on Tuesday evening (which was mercifully not four plus hours or the audience would have either entered a coma or rioted). The choir were on for the opening and for the finale. Being mainly musical theater performers, we knew how to bring it with minimal rehearsal and I thought we sounded pretty good. The finale was ‘We Are The World’ in which I had the Daryl Hall solo. What’s that? You don’t recall the Daryl Hall solo? That’s because it’s seven words and two measures long in the refrain just before Cyndi Lauper starts wailing. The evening was only marred by some very interested curtainography. The drape was raised for the reveal, then would ascend and descend several times to various heights. It happened during both numbers and, if we weren’t in a Baptist performing arts venue, I would have asked just what the fly crew had been drinking.

Wednesday was a light work day so I had everything scheduled down to the minute. Clinic in the morning complete with cleaning everything up in the various boxes – mail, fax and electronic. Lunch appointment (which ended up being delayed an hour). Race around for a few last minute errands to pick up things on my packing list that I had run low on (insect repellent, sun screen, a new toiletries kit), get home, do the preliminary packing, then off to the opening show at the theater where I do most of my musical work as this final dress was my only chance to see a bevy of friends in Kander and Ebb’s ‘And the World Goes Round’. I race into the condo with my packages, drop one on the floor, bend over to pick it up, and the back goes into full spasm.

I’ve had muscle spasms in my back since my early adulthood. They usually come about every three to five years, get set off by nothing in particular, and take a few days to resolve, leaving me with a certain amount of incapacity and great pain while it does its thing. I usually have to take a day or two off work as I can barely move while it works itself out. In earlier times, I had a husband who could pick up the slack while I would lay stretched out on a heating pad, one who could bodily haul me around if I lost my ability to transfer unassisted, but I know longer have that luxury and I was under a huge time crunch. It was two hours to curtain and every move that bent my back was agony and, while I had hauled a few things out, I was not yet packed. The balletic moves I accomplished fetching things from low cupboards and shelves so as not to bend my back in any direction would have been a comic delight to an outside observer, especially as accompanied with a constant stream of curses at various pitches and tempi. I hadn’t realized I was quite so adept at picking so many things up off the floor by kicking them up with my feet.

I made the show (moving very very slowly and needing to constantly brace myself with my arms so as not to jar the back) and it was a delight. If you’re in Birmingham this weekend or next, head over to Virginia Samford Theatre and watch people I’m proud to call friends and colleagues in that other career strut their stuff. Came back, wrote progress notes for a couple of hours while standing at the dining room table, and then went to bed on a heating pad.

Things were better with the back Thursday morning. I was able to finish the packing, finish the progress notes, leave the condo in a semblance of order and head off to the airport. Fortunately it was a late flight and the torrential rainfall predicted from the outer bands of hurricane Francine never did appear. The back issues kept me from overpacking so my suitcase was well under weight. And I could kiss the inventor of the roller bag. In Atlanta, I boarded my overnight to Rio and had a bit of luck, alone in a pair of seats allowing me to stretch. Stretch or not, a nine hour redeye flight did nothing to improve the condition of the musculoskeletal system – neither did two nights of minimal sleep due to pain. So, when I hit Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 this morning local time, I was not really in condition to thoroughly enjoy it.

In the past, when I would travel somewhere, I would read all the guidebooks and bone up on everything well in advance. Now, I don’t. I just show up and immerse myself and read up on things that strike me as worth further study as I go along. It’s not like I don’t have a research library in my pocket these days. So, my impressions of Rio as we approached by air were its sprawl (I later looked up that it’s 6 million in the city proper and about 15 million in the metro area – so a bit similar in size to New York). Acre after acre of buildings stretch over the rolling foothills leading up from the beaches to the impossibly steep and green mountains that come marching down towards the sea. The wealth and popular image is concentrated in the beach areas of Copacabana, Ipanema and Flamengo but there are crowded favelas hanging off hillsides, secure middle class neighborhoods with tree lined boulevards, churches perched on the peaks of the lower hills, and various civic buildings which I have to guess at purpose from design.

The airport, while in the middle of urbanized area, is about 45 minutes from the beach, not far off a large semi-industrialized lagoon. The shuttle ride in was scenic due to the views of the sea on the one side and the mountains on the other. There was a very large police presence (I presume due to the presence of a large music festival – Rio Rocks – in town, preparations for the G-20 coming up, and left over political instability as the left and right wings are battling here as they are in the US) and a lot of walls along the highway hiding the favelas that creep up against the roadway. Whether that is to keep the inhabitants in or to hide substandard housing from visiting tourists and dignitaries is unclear. As I am still hobbling around like I’m ninety due to my back, exploring the local favelas is not on my list. I can’t run from trouble fast enough.

I arrived at The Copacabana Palace hotel a 1920s Art Deco fantasy with a banyan tree in front, to find I had been assigned perhaps the most decadent hotel suite I have ever had. Two large rooms, king bed, terrace overlooking the pool with ocean view, walk in closet large enough to be another bedroom. I could fit a half dozen friends in here comfortably so if you happen to be in the neighborhood. The back precludes any serious exploring so I spent the day in an exploring of the Copacabana area, admiring the eye candy on the beach, having a lovely risotto for lunch, drinking a bit too much beer. I did not go in the water. An urban area of fifteen million with an indifferent sewage treatment system made me decide that might not be wise. Besides, the divot on my thigh where dermatology took their over aggressive biopsy of my skin cancer is still healing and Vibrio vulcifinus is something I’d rather not deal with. I’ll stick to the pool. It being the tropics, night fell suddenly around 6 PM so I have withdrawn back to my suite of luxury and plan on a very long sleep and see how my back is doing in the morning. That is if the very loud concert on the beach which is going on outside my windows will allow.

And it’s T minus three days and counting. I’m nearly caught up with everything that must be done before I leave the country for a few weeks of R and R carrying out some Good Neighbor policy through Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The travelogue will start up on Friday sometime as my flights on Thursday are overnight so I can’t imagine I’ll have much to write about that day unless you really want to read a diatribe regarding the indignities of modern air travel. Now I just need to figure out what I’m going to take with me as the trip seems to span several distinct climate zones from subtropical to temperate mountain. Fortunately, I was raised in Seattle and one thing all Seattleites learn at an early age is how to pack for a long weekend taking into account that it can be anything from dreary rain to exquisite sunshine, usually within fifteen minutes of each other.

Binx, my remaining cat, now that he is in the alpha position, has completely changed his behavior. In the past, he would spend most of his time under the furniture peeping out, even if I was the only one at home. Now, he wants to be where I am and is leaping onto the bed or couch, snuggling up to me, head butting me and nibbling on my fingers with little kitty nips. This is not useful when I’m trying to type and he has had to be corrected a few times that there is a time and a place. If I add a second cat again, I imagine there will be yet another shift as I have long since figured out that the cats in multi-cat households have all sorts of rules they lay down and enforce with each other. As long as they use the litter box, it’s their business.

I had a rehearsal tonight with a pick up community choir for a benefit on Tuesday for the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center. It’s an easy gig. Rehearsal tonight and tomorrow night and performance on Tuesday. We’re singing Barry Manilow’s ‘One Voice’ (which I last sang as part of an on line chorus during the worst of the Covid shut down) and ‘We Are the World’. Neither is difficult. As I was looking around the room, it was as if my last twenty years of music theater performance were gathered round. People who were in the first musical I did locally back in 2004. One of the juvenile leads from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang earlier this summer. My Fraulein Schneider and ‘Married’ singer from Cabaret in 2020, the last show before the world spun out of control. Opera Chorus people. Symphony Chorus people. It was just a reminder of how thoroughly embedded I am in the life of this town. The program is at the Wright Center at Samford University on Tuesday at 6:30 PM if anyone local is interested.

I’m starting to hack out material for the next book, which is about how Covid has changed us. And it has, in so many ways, and we’re not going back. The only way forward is forward. It’s as if American society were a billiard ball rolling across the table and in 2020, another ball hit it and it’s gone careening off in a completely new direction. I’m trying to figure out what those changes are and what they are likely to mean for all of us moving forward. My publisher has lots of ideas of how to make this material live in a world of new media so it may end up being something more than just a book. Websites – ebooks – audio. I don’t completely understand what all he’s doing in the background but he seems to get it so I’ll let him work in his area of expertise and I’ll just continue to write. I figure my one small talent in all of this is a knack for explaining complex problems in an engaging and understandable way.

I’ve written some pieces but I haven’t put any of them up in this forum as of yet. I haven’t figured out if I should do so or if I should save them for the book project or if I should make them available on request or what. I’ll eventually figure it out. I may put one or two up just to get some feedback from my readers as to whether I’m going the right direction or not. This is a very different process than ‘The Accidental Plague Diaries’ and I haven’t quite figured it out. I’m going to try to do some writing while in South America. As I don’t have a travel companion, I’ll likely have some evening downtime after a day of touring and I might as well spend it constructively.

Speaking of Covid. It’s still out there and we’re still in a wave. It does not appear to be causing significant issues with hospitalization numbers but there are still about 5500 people hospitalized nationwide with about 500 in the ICU and it’s killing about 1,000 `people a week. Covid isn’t dropping out of the top ten causes of death in the US anytime soon. Some quick updates: the US is going to start requiring hospitals to report Covid admissions again as of November 1st. That requirement lapsed last year and, without it, we haven’t had very good data to determine what the real impact on the health system actually is. The newly formulated booster is out and available (I got mine this past Friday). The current recommendation is a booster once a year (delay if you have had an active infection in the last four months until that time has elapsed) – twice a year if you have significant immune issues or serious respiratory disease or are an elder in congregate living. The government is again providing four free Covid tests per household (COVIDTest.gov). You can also stock up from Amazon or at Walmart or Target. Those three seem to have the cheapest prices. Paxlovid remains available but is no longer subsidized so it is up the vagaries of your prescription insurance as to whether it will be covered or not and what the copay may be. Pfizer, the manufacturer, is pricing a five day course at about $1400. If you are under sixty and have a functional immune system, Paxlovid won’t do all that much for you so, unless you have gold plated prescription insurance, you might not need to cash in your children’s college fund for it. As always, avoid the obviously ill and keep those hands washed.

Oliver died this morning. It may have been late last night as he was OK when I went to bed but definitely as dead as the proverbial doornail when I got up this morning. Before there are further misunderstandings or rumors, Oliver was a cat, and a member of chosen family and not biologic family. Tommy and I adopted him and his sister Anastasia in 2008. He was about two years old at the time and we were at least their third home. He was, therefore about 18 years old which is a good long cat life. Anastasia died a couple of years ago. I’m not particularly sad. I’ve know it was coming. He’s been a frail and crochety senior cat with bad eyes and hearing for a while now. But, he was still getting around, yowling when he thought he wasn’t getting his due in kitty treats, and generally making a nuisance of himself on the dining room table every time I sat down to eat.

Some cats are loving, perfectly behaved companions. Oliver was not. From the moment he entered the Duxbury-Thompson household he let it be know he would be living there on his terms. He did not like humans. He would simply tolerate them as the source of food, water, and a clean litter box. Forget being snuggled up on in bed or on the couch and, if you were to approach him to try and pet him, he’d immediately zoom for cover. He did get along well and snuggle up to his adoptive brothers, Archie and Shadow, but he avoided his sister, Anastasia, at all costs even though they were litter mates and had always been together. The one time you could be guaranteed of seeing him was at meal times when he would plant himself in the middle of the kitchen and yowl until he was given what he thought he was owed in terms of treats. Tommy and I did not name Oliver and Anastasia but whomever did had a good eye. They lived up to their famous namesakes. Anastasia was always a very proper dainty princess. Oliver, when it came to food, was always asking for more in his own peculiar way.

I’m not really grieving for Oliver. He had a nice long cat life and seemed perfectly contented for the sixteen years he lived in my household. If anything, I am mourning the loss of one of the last living links I had with Tommy and the life we built together. Oliver was there for it all. Home remodeling, middle of the night fights, bedrooms full of wigs in various stages of styling, late night TV binges. He was a little stinker for most of it, but something happened later in his life. After Tommy’s death and my downsizing into the condo, he had an abrupt personality transition. He stopped isolating and, for the first time in our years together, he would not stalk out of the room I had just entered. He started getting up on the bed with me and snuggling up when I was sitting there writing or working on projects. He tolerated pets, belly rubs and would even let me pick him up on occasion. I have no idea what incited the change. It did mean the last four years with him were much nicer than the twelve that came before. I hope he and Tommy and Anastasia have all found each other somewhere in the beyond and are all cuddled up together having a nice nap

I am starting to plunge into material that will go into the new book I’m writing which is basically about how Covid has changed us. The current essay I’m in the middle of is on how the pandemic has impacted the performing arts world and what that means for me personally as well as for us culturally. It’s now flowing as easily as some other things I have written. I’ll get back to it later this afternoon and see what I can get going. However, my latest discovery regarding post-Covid change has nothing to do with performing or with arts of any other stripe. I have noted that when I get home from work or a rehearsal, I have to sit there in the car for a few minutes before I get out and head up the elevator to my condo. This is new behavior for me. i used to get where I was going, leap out of the car and move right into the next thing. I can still do that if I am time crunched or someone needs me urgently but when the pressure isn’t there, it takes me a few. I mentioned this to a couple of friends. They said they were doing the same thing. I asked a few more people. Everyone had the same response – they were doing some sort of variant on this but none of them had thought to wonder why. My highly unsophisticated polling system was batting nearly a thousand.

As this seems to be a change brought about by Covid given its timing (and I know correlation is not causation – all right already), I can’t help but wonder what with the pandemic would make us all need to take a little time we had never needed in the past. I have a feeling that it’s related to the overload on our nervous systems by all of the problems the pandemic required us to cope with over those few years. Now, when we reach a point in our day when we know we have to reset to deal with a new environment and new challenges, it’s taking just a bit longer for our brains to make all those transitions and the result is a need to give ourselves a few minutes in which to accomplish that process. I’m sure there are dozens of other things that have changed in our collective subconscious over the last few years and I’m going to start looking around to see if I can begin identifying a few of them.

The next ten days are devoted to getting everything off of my plate before I leave the country for two weeks. I’m nearly there. Just a few more items to check off. Nothing much theatrical, however. The Alabama Symphony Orchestra Chorus begins rehearsals for its new season tonight and I’ll be there hiding among the bass section. Next week there are a couple of rehearsals and a performance including a pick up choir for a Holocaust remembrance event. Again, hiding in the bass section…

The workers have finished with my terrace. I can bring back all of my patio furniture but that would mean manual labor and I’m just not into it on today, Labor Day. Perhaps sometime next week or, better yet, I’ll get one of my younger friends in need of some walking around money to do it for me.

And with today’s matinee, The Merry Wives of Windsor comes to its scheduled end. It succeeded in regards to what it set out to do. It was not intended to be a definitive production of a lesser known Shakespeare play. It did not have the budget and resources to be a theatrical event. It took the technical capabilities of a church cafetorium and a disparate group of performers and turned them into a solid entertainment, true to Shakespeare’s intent, and allowed audiences to escape for a few hours. Sitting in the back and watching performances, I could tell that audiences, even those unfamiliar with Elizabethan patois, were engaged and drawn into our cartoon of the town of Windsor and were interested in the foibles and follies of aristocrats, merchants, and servants as their lives entangled and the careened around through the somewhat ludicrous plot. And I can’t ask for any more than that.

I have nothing on the books theatrically for the rest of the year as of yet, just a couple of one off choral concerts. I need some time back for writing and to catch up at work and for my long planned vacation next month. I had a callback for a Christmas show on Friday which may or may not amount to anything. And that’s one of the problems with being a theater person. You get your self worth tied up with your most recent production or role and then impostor syndrome kicks in and you wonder if you’re actually good enough to keep it up. And so you go off to another audition sure that you’re going to be laughed off the stage and then all of a sudden you’re handed a part you really don’t want to turn down and the cycle begins again. There aren’t that many actors who sing a little of my type locally so I can usually snag something when I feel the need to be working on a production but there’s always that nagging little voice that says you don’t belong here gnawing away at the base of the brain stem.

I know that I have reached late middle age as I have had to wrestle with a number of annoying, but not overly serious health problems recently. One is a prolonged issue of paraesthesias and pain in my left upper arm. It’s been going on since May and has not been amenable to most of the usual tricks for relief of which I am aware. (And was probably a major contributor to my grumpiness earlier in the summer – chronic pain is no fun). Two weeks ago I went in to the neurologist and had needles driven into various nerves in my left arm and am happy to say that I am not suffering from any dire degenerative neurologic condition. I can’t say I recommend the procedure but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. This means, that the likely source of my issues is arthritis in my shoulder and neck area impinging on the nerves. The next step is an MRI for a really good look. It was requested in May. It has been scheduled for October. Our broken health system at work. I have no intention of having surgery for any of this but if there’s something amenable to physical therapy or the like, I’ll figure out how to make time for that.

The second is an examination of a number of odd spots that have crept up on the skin in recent years. Having had a few carved off me by the dermatologist this past week, one has turned out to be a superficial skin malignancy that will require additional carving in October. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about. It’s been there for a while and not the kind of thing that metastasizes or causes other significant problems. However, if you see me limping a bit more the next few months, you shall know why as there’s a substantial divot in my right thigh.

The next few months, outside of work, are to be devoted to writing and travel. (Travelogue will resume in this space somewhere around September the 12th). That is if covid manages to keep its head down and that’s hardly a sure thing. Numbers continue to remain high locally and nationally (although some wastewater studies are suggesting things have peaked and may be starting on their way down). Fortunately, serious morbidity and mortality are still relatively low. If you catch it, the chance of it putting you in the hospital is not terribly high. The biggest issue remains that of long covid. With every reinfection, the chance of even a mild case becoming a chronic infection with significant medical sequelae goes up. It is therefore in everyone’s best interest to try and avoid reinfections. The new booster, which has been reformulated for better activity against currently circulating omicron strains, has been approved by the FDA and should be out in the next couple of weeks. I’m hoping it’s available before I head off on international flights. I have no real wish to experience a hospital in a country in which I am not fluent in the major language.

What else besides boosters? Wash your hands. Gather in well ventilated areas. Avoid the obviously ill. There’s nothing wrong with wearing a mask when in doubt. I probably will on my flight to South America.

It’s definitely a Monday. My work schedule is set up so as to front weight my week with Monday and Tuesday being my two hardest days and things slowing down a bit the rest of the week. After tech week and having to put a number of things in abeyance in order to be at the theater every evening for a week and then up to all hours writing notes for cast and production staff, I am a bit behind in other areas of life. I came home fully intending to make a start on the backlog, sat down, opened the laptop, and promptly fell asleep for two hours. So much for noble intentions. Fortunately, none of the backlog is due tomorrow so I have time to make good on it all later this week. Assuming I don’t do the same thing tomorrow evening and the evening after.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is now half way through its eight performance run. I was a bit nervous about it a few weeks ago when our first couple of runs were wobbly and running very long. But it gelled during our three dress rehearsals as lines finally fell into place and the set and costumes were completed giving it the Jacobean cartoon look I was going for. (You have to be somewhat conceptual when you have a very limited budget). And, now that they have an audience, the actors are finally relaxing into their roles and giving them the physical component necessary to land the humor. Unfamiliar Shakespeare is not the easiest thing for an audience to understand but true physical intent and humor helps land the jokes even when words are missed.

As I sit at the back and listen to the audience response, my favorite bits aren’t the big set pieces like the stuffing of Falstaff into the laundry basket (with the contents of the chamber pot tossed in on top of him for good measure – my addition), but rather little moments that half the audience may miss but which I can hear at least one person get and react to. Dr. Caius having a Julie Andrews with the curtains in The Sound of Music moment. Mistress Ford and Page trading nautical metaphors. Pistol teasing a passed out Nym. Falstaff caressing Mistress Ford’s ankle. Fenton and Anne’s relationship deepening in a series of vignettes invented to keep the staging cinematic and to cover scene shifts. Thespis, like all the gods, is in the details. When I direct (or when I write for that matter) I throw in all sorts of jokes and humor and I put them in because I find them funny. I have no idea if anyone else will get them but I don’t care. They’re the right thing for that particular moment.

I owe a great deal to the cast and crew of Merry Wives. It’s not an easy play to tackle. It’s big in terms of cast and multiple settings (Shakespeare not feeling a need to be confined by Aristotelian unities). The comedy and jokes are dated by over four centuries. It has no famous speeches. Nobody read it in high school or even college unless they were an English Literature grad student. But, this group of volunteers from all walks of life have managed to take the ideas that poured out of my brain and turn them into something that takes an audience on a rollicking good time. A community building a community. In multiple ways.

I suppose I had better check in on the covid front as that’s what half my readers tune in for. We remain in a significant wave. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 150,000 to 750,000 new cases daily nationwide. It’s difficult to really know as there is no longer any systematic reporting system. Most of the data comes from wastewater surveillance but even that is hit or miss as it has no standardization. Hospitals are not reporting ER visits or inpatient admissions in the way that was being done a few years ago. The number 10 million cases is being floated around too – meaning roughly 3% of the population has been infected at some time this summer). I have no idea if these numbers are trustworthy or not.

Numbers that are being bandied about that I think we can trust. Test positivity rates in emergency departments are running around 20% (and Walgreens reported a number of 40% last week). This means somewhere around 1/5 Covid tests done for symptoms is positive. In general, a disease has to have a test positivity rate of less than 5% to consider it under control in a population. Total number of hospitalizations seems to be running around 5,500 inpatients nationwide of whom 10% require ICU care. It’s up significantly from spring but only about half the rate of last winter. Most healthy people are recovering without incident. Death rates are up some but nothing like we saw in the throes of the pandemic. Covid is now the 10th leading cause of death in the US (down from 3rd) at about 80 a day nationwide. The majority are in those with significant underlying health or immune problems. The kicker, of course, is that no one knows what this is going to do to long covid rates. The more infections an individual has, the more likely they are going to develop long covid and, given what I’ve seen of those problems and the disability they can bring, I’d rather not, thank you.

What to do? The advice is pretty basic. Keep those hands washed. Keep up to date on boosters as they become available and are tweaked to give additional immunity against the latest circulating strains (no, I don’t know when the promised fall booster will be shipped.) Stay away from people who are obviously ill. If you do get it, Paxlovid is a good idea if you’re over sixty. It doesn’t seem to do that much for younger people. Stay home until you’re fever and major symptom free for 24 hours, then mask in public for an additional five days. Pray to Hygieia and which ever other gods of health you believe in that long covid passes over your door.

I napped today. I don’t usually like to nap because when I wake up, I can’t get myself going again at the speed I feel I need to perform. But a nap was a bit of a necessity as this is the one day I have away from The Merry Wives of Windsor for a week. We teched the show yesterday. (Due to the iffy condition of the lighting system, lighting cues are minimal and sound cues are mainly Dowland songs and lute music to cover changes). Now we have three dresses in which to polish the whole thing up before presenting it for public consumption. We had a dress parade and the costumes look great and fit well with the cartoony set so I’m really quite pleased with the whole physical production. Now I just have to convince the cast that telling the story is far more important than getting their lines exactly right.

I’ve learned a lot about directing from life over the last few decades. When I began directing theater in my teens and twenties, I spent most of my time focusing on what was wrong and trying to fix it. Life lessons have helped me, as I have returned to directing in my later middle age, realize that I need to focus much more on what is right and help to elevate from a position of encouragement and allow each actor or designer or technician to become the best they can be by helping remove the roadblocks that are in their way, whether those are unfamiliar language, lack of resources, or trying to wrap their heads around situations with which they have no real life experience. I have come to recognize that with community theater, it’s the first word that is often the more important. Each show is an opportunity to bring people together, to get them to trust each other, to get them to work together in a positive environment to create something they could not create on their own.

The most important character to me, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is not Falstaff, who is usually regarded as the star of the show. It’s the town of Windsor. It’s this small community in the shadow of Windsor castle with its aristocrats, its professionals, its menials who all live and work together, tumbling in and out of each others lives. It’s very much an ensemble show. Some have more lines or stage time than others but each part helps build and enrich this world of some four hundred years ago that we’re still interested enough to recreate and put on stage and laugh at. Some of the jokes are timeless. Some are definitely dated. But when an ensemble of performers commit to each other, they can bring a town and its doings to life.

I have a cast of eighteen ranging from age 11 to age 85, of disparate backgrounds, abilities, and experiences. If I have done my job properly, they will enact a story that will hold a 2024 audience for roughly two and a quarter hours. That’s what theater is about at its core – the telling of a story. We tell stories for all sorts of reasons but ultimately stories are what connect us all. To other cultures. To generations past. To generations yet to come. IF we are all threads in the pattern, stories are the laying of the warp and the weft that allow the pattern to come into being. I am hoping that my cast and crew will come away from the experiences of these six weeks with positive experiences, new connections, and new stories to tell about the sometimes exciting and sometimes maddening process of creating a new show.

If you get theater people together, especially if a couple of drinks are involved, the stories begin. We talk about outrageous personalities we have worked with in our time. We relate the on stage disasters of malfunctioning sets, missing props. wardrobe malfunctions and all of the other things that happen during life performance, most of which the audience is blissfully unaware. We talk about out of town performance dates and the odd conditions we find in unfamiliar venues. We speak our own lingo of spikes and front of house and ghost lights which is incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Some stories come and go. Some become local theatrical legend, like the biker bar brawl that spilled onto the stage during a Theater Downtown performance of many years ago or a local actresses trip and sliding off the stage during a live holiday television broadcast.

Queen Elizabeth I, enamored of Falstaff from the Henry IV plays, demanded a play in which she could see Falstaff in love. Shakespeare, knowing that disappointing the sovereign was not a good idea, obliged. Legend has it the show was written, rehearsed and performed at court in a roughly two week period. And four hundred plus years later, in the basement of a Methodist church in Birmingham, Alabama, the same characters and same situations will be enacted again. And several centuries from now, another generation will do the same somewhere else as the human condition really doesn’t change. I think Shakespeare would be pleased.

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I figure I owe the world an essay this evening but I’m not sure what I should be writing about. The big topics de jour include all of the various human interest stories surrounding the Olympics. Of course we couldn’t go a whole week without another tempest in a teapot regarding trans issues. Last week it was transvestites in a tableau that may or may not have been inspired by DaVinci. This week its an Algerian boxer, phenotypically and culturally female and without a particularly distinguished career in the ring, of some years, who was called a man by a corrupt Russian sports organization and that was enough for the usual anti-trans brigade to bang the drums and create a pig-pile of epic dimensions with all sorts of people who should no better leaping to completely unfounded conclusions and half the interwebs pivoting from expertise in Graeco-Roman mythology to chromosomal biology before you could say ‘Drag Queen’.

What’s fueling the anti-trans fire? They are a very small and politically powerless community who have no more ability to recruit or seduce children than any other disparate group of human beings. I have pointed out for years that parents generally need not worry about their LGBTQ acquaintances and the safety of their children. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever met in a sexual minority community is keenly aware of the aspersions society casts on them and therefore they comport themselves with scrupulous care around other people’s children. It’s been a long standing rule in my home of many decades that minor children are not allowed without the knowledge/presence of their adults. We all know that even a vague rumor of misbehavior can destroy our lives. We’re not all that removed from ‘The Children’s Hour’. When those children become young adults, if they figure out that we are their tribe, they come looking for us. There’s no need for us to look for them.

Drag used to be considered a bit of oddball fringe humor and has been around as long as there have been cultural gender differences in clothing, appearance, and behavior. Milton Berle did drag on national TV in the 50s. Flip Wilson had his Geraldine in the 60s. Tom Hanks got his major break doing drag on Bosom Buddies for several years. Films like The Birdcage and To Wong Foo… entered the national zeitgeist without causing an uproar. RuPaul has been hosting Drag Race since 2009. None of these has caused the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. The ‘drag is evil’ and ‘drag queens are groomers’ and ‘transsexuals should be punished’ messaging appeared suddenly starting in the spring of 2022. I am always suspicious of ‘grass roots’ movements that are everywhere at once. That usually means there’s big money and meticulous planning afoot somewhere.

Now what else was going on in the spring of 2022 in terms of the various culture wars about which we all like to tie each other up in knots? The Supreme Court heard arguments in case now known as Dobbs in December of 2021 and a draft of the opinion in that case was leaked to the media in May of 2022 before being released in final form in June of 2022. The Dobbs case, overturning Roe v Wade and flying in the face of stare decisis and fifty years of settled law, presented a problem for right wing culture war politics. For decades, the antiabortion position was the plank that kept their culture warriors together and pulling in unison (and kept the funds flowing). All of sudden, that’s no longer the bludgeon it once was. There needed to be a quick pivot to another equally visceral culture war issue. (I’m sure drag and trans issues were identified years ago and kept in arrears for the time when Roe fell so, when it did fall, it was an easy roll out).

There are cultural and societal conversations that need to be held regarding trans issues in particular. Sex and gender do not exist in nature on the binary that people are taught in elementary school science (and anyone who has taken the most basic of college biology courses will know this). Knee jerk legal definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ based on overly simplified concepts are going to create enormous headaches for the courts to ultimately have to sort out. There’s a lot of bleating about ‘common sense’ but that’s not how the law works. The law says what the law says. The right wing culture warriors, of course, will not stop with the trans community or drag queen story hours. They’ve seen a wedge into the oppression of all sexual minority groups – and that includes 62 year old twice widowed professors of clinical geriatrics. I’ve come to the conclusion that you stand for the worth and dignity of every person, or you become a star bellied Sneetch.

Well, I guess that answers the question regarding what I’m going to write about this evening. Before I sign off, I figure we better look at what’s going on in Covidland. We are definitely in a summer wave. How high it is currently or is likely to get is unclear as we no longer collect standardized data nationwide but wastewater studies suggest that it is continuing to spread in the Deep South, New England, and the Pacific Northwest. The number of cases in the month of July nationwide was likely somewhere in the mid six figures but, again, nobody really knows. Hospitalizations and deaths remain relatively low due to natural and vaccine mediated immunity.

The biggest issue is that the currently spreading strains, KP.2, KP.3 and LB.1 are all descendants of strain JN.1 which emerged last winter. JN.1 has a number of mutations that make it more efficient at evading vaccine mediated immunity and its daughter strains have inherited this propensity. This is likely why, in part, we’re seeing this summer bump. It’s getting around our previous vaccine defenses. I have heard through the grapevine that the new formulation of covid booster set to be released this fall should assist with this so it’s not a bad idea if everyone put the idea of a covid booster together with their flu shot on their radar screen for the fall. I have no idea when it’s going to be available. I usually find out answers to questions like that the same way everyone else does, by reading the news.

Going to check my notes for tomorrow’s Merry Wives of Windsor rehearsal before kicking back with a bad movie for the benefit of MNM.

Wash your hands.

Last night was…something…I had not been feeling great Sunday and was fortunate to have minimal obligations so I hauled out the laptop and began working away on the part of the ‘To Do’ list that can be accomplished sitting up in bed in an old T-shirt and Space Jam sleep pants. I finished up the slides for a series of taped lectures I am doing for a geriatrics board exam review course, wrote up the weekly summary of progress on The Merry Wives of Windsor for the cast and staff, caught up on social media, started an essay that is to be part of the new book and wrote a Mrs. Norman Maine movie review as I have been sadly remiss at sending those in for the last few months due to being overwhelmed with life in general.

Around 4 PM, the thunderstorm rolled in. We’ve been having rain and storms all week but this one was a doozy, likely sent up here by the good citizens of Houston as they have been inundated for weeks. Sheets of rain, lighting flickering all over the skies. Huge claps of thunder. About half an hour in, the power went out. Without Wi-Fi or juice for the computer, I had to shut down what I was doing, but it was still light outside so I pulled out one of the four or five books I’m currently reading and did very little for the next couple of hours. The lights returned as the sun was going down.

There is a peculiarity about my building. When we lose power, the fire alarm goes off. It wasn’t a huge issue to have that obnoxious thing beeping every few minutes. I have two kinds of smoke detectors. Ones hard wired into the building and ones which are individual to my unit. Only some of them have a backup battery. I had recently changed those out so I figure it’s the hard wired kind that get confused when the power goes out. Just one more peculiarity of this place to be added to the master toilet that randomly fills with hot water. With power restored, I fixed myself something to eat and turned in early with bad TV figuring a good nights sleep would be best for whatever was ailing me. (Not covid, but something with rather unpleasant GI effects that I won’t trouble to detail).

I woke up at 1:30 AM to further storming, the power again going out and the obnoxious fire alarm doing its thing. Only this time, instead of beeping every few minutes, it decided to beep roughly every thirty seconds. So there I am in my jammies, flashlight in hand, in my pitch black condo climbing a stepstool to see if changing out the batteries again would shut them up. I was balancing on top of the step stool when whatever has been ailing me made itself known again, this time with vasovagal symptoms. When my gut goes weird, I tend to do that and have fainted in any number of inappropriate places over the years. I immediately scrambled down off the stepstool (shades of headlines reading ‘Local MD found dead in his condo after fall’ entering my mind), went back to bed and put my feet up and head down. There followed several unpleasant hours of continuous fire alarm, no CPAP so no good ability to sleep, and feeling under the weather.

The power returned sometime after 4 but by that time, I felt just awful so I texted work that I would not be coming in and decided to do next to nothing today in order to recover. I have something like seven months of accumulated sick leave so I figure I can take a day or two as I almost never do. I am feeling better after some sleep and some comfort food but I plan on continuing with minimal exertion through tomorrow so I will be ready for my usual ninety miles an hour pace on Wednesday.

The one thing I am doing today and tomorrow is attending rehearsal for The Merry Wives of Windsor (masked just in case I have something contagious) and sitting in the back and having my much younger assistant director do all the running around. The show is on its feet. It will be fully staged after the rehearsal tonight and now it becomes about polishing what we have. Merry Wives is one of those Shakespeare plays that everyone knows the title to, has some idea that it’s the comedy about Falstaff, but very few have actually seen or read. There’s good reason for that. It’s not one of his best efforts. Legend has it that he had to write the play and get it up on its feet in roughly two weeks. Queen Elizabeth explicitly asked to see a play in which Falstaff, a favorite character of hers from Henry IV part one (Henry IV part two was in process at the time but not yet completed), was in love. The Master of the Revels scheduled the royal command performance for the evening of the gathering of the most noble order of the garter at Windsor castle giving Shakespeare and his company very little time in which to work.

As a consequence, the play has more prose and less poetry than any other. I guess he just didn’t have time to put the speeches into iambic pentameter. This makes it a bit harder to learn and I feel for my actors who are struggling with lines as the rhythm and rhyme just isn’t there to help them the way it usually is with Shakespeare. While it ostensibly takes place in the time of Henry IV (early 1400s) all of the references are to the late Elizabethan court of two centuries later. There are subplots that go nowhere. Significant action and character development happens off stage. There are almost no famous or quotable lines.

I’ve taken out about 15-20% of the text to get rid of meandering subplots, repetitions, references that no one will understand, and jokes that lost their meaning sometime around the settling of the Plymouth Colony. I’ve instructed my actors to physicalize as much of their meaning as they can to help the audience better understand what’s happening, even if they don’t understand every word. I’ve told them to take a look at the American comedic acts that developed out of vaudeville and the music hall and went on to succeed on film: Charlie Chaplin, The Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. They’re still funny nearly a century later. Why is that? What can they use from those techniques to make a four hundred year old play funny. I guess we’ll see in two and a half weeks if my thoughts and cajoling are successful at all.

The big story of the week is the start of the Paris Olympics and the ensuing uproar over misunderstandings of the symbolism used in ‘the opening ceremonies. The French, never known for dumbing down their culture or beliefs for others, staged a spectacle that had an enormous number of people confusing pagan symbolism for Christian symbolism and therefore deciding it was blasphemous. I have two things to say on the subject. One – never confuse the physical symbol for the concept that it represents. A bible is just a book – a collection of printed pages bound within a cover. It’s the ideas and concepts that it represents that are important. If someone destroys or desecrates a bible, it doesn’t damage those in the least. A religious painting is one artist’s way of attempting to represent the metaphorical divine in a concrete form. How that painting will look will depend upon the artist, the society within which that artist works, and the economic conditions that allow the art to be produced. Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’ is masterpiece but was not greeted as such in its time. Issues with the fresco painting technique led to quick deterioration of the work and the monks that owned it thought so little of it that they cut a door through the wall it was painted on. It did not become iconic until four hundred plus years after its creation when the age of mass media began to disseminate images of famous art to the general public. In the 20th and 21st centuries, it has been parodied thousands of times and none of that has diminished either the genius of the painting or the spiritual concepts embodied in the gathering depicted. Two – yes, the tableau at the Olympics was not the last supper but a Dionysian bacchanal. However, pointing that out over and over again with smug superiority to people who have genuine issues of faith is not the way to win friends and influence people. Those who felt insulted are not necessarily less intelligent or less educated, they just see the world in a different way – as in the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s yet another case in this country of people talking at each other rather than to each other. It comes from the cynical divided politics we’ve allowed to develop. Now even discussions about imagery created by a completely different culture that has nothing to do with the US is invaded by the red/blue divide.

Given the nature of my life, most of my friends are of the more liberal persuasion, but I spend a lot of time with rural populations because of the work I do. I’ve probably spent more time in Appalachia than JD Vance and I go out into rural Alabama twice a week and have for years. The more conservative amongst us are just as worthy of respect as anyone else and this cultural condescension needs to end.

I’m still trying to make heads or tails of the rather insane political season in which we all find ourselves. And people wonder why I’m in no hurry to revive Politically Incorrect Cabaret. How on earth do you write political satire that can in any way compete with current political reality? It’s just not possible. Especially when you need a month or so to write, cast, rehearse, and otherwise prep a show. I can only imagine where we might be a month from now and it’s likely several light years beyond what I could possibly dream up and place upon a stage.

The last piece I wrote was on gerontocracy. No sooner do I finish that and get it out there for discussion when wham bam alakazam the 81 year old White male Democratic candidate has been replaced by a 59 year old Black/Indian candidate leaving the Republican candidate as the old guy all of a sudden and removing one of that side’s most effective campaign strategies. I cannot say I disagree with the decision. I’ve never thought that Biden at his age should run for a second term. I always felt he should satisfy himself with being a one term president and to use that term to correct the errors of the previous administration without one eye on how it might look in the next election cycle while at the same time grooming and presenting a successor. The speed with which this is all taking place and the closeness to the election if not necessarily the wisest choice as it gives the optics of desperation or closed door party maneuverings but it is what it is. It has taken all the wind out of the Republicans’ sails coming out of their convention and stolen the control of the news cycle away from Trump. He’s not fond of that so expect something to get him back on top of the headlines in the near future.

I cannot in good conscience support a party who are so blatantly anti-healthcare, anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman, and anti-pluralistic society as the current Republican party so my vote will be on the side of the Democrats. Am I fond of Kamala Harris, I can’t say I really know that much about her and that is, I think a major dilemma. Very little has been done to highlight her as a leader during the last four years. The bona fides may be there, but they are not widely known. I will have to do some poking around to see what all she has been up to. The veepstakes will also be interesting as the party attempts a balanced ticket that will appeal to swing voters. Whether we like it or not, there are very strong strains of both misogyny and racism in American politics and that will be part of the calculus.

In terms of thinking about the upcoming election, it is wise to remember that it’s not a popularity contest and that the plebiscite does not determine the victor. There are only 538 votes that count, those in the Electoral College. As the majority of states are fairly solidly red or blue at this point, it all comes down to six states that could tip either way: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Whomever captures the swing voters in those states will win.

There are a few other things that could happen. The Republicans are likely to try all sorts of novel legal maneuvers regarding the change in Democratic candidate and make arguments that she should not appear on the ballot for one technical reason or another. And they may make inroads with certain conservative judges. There are also all sorts of disenfranchisement schemes afoot. Check your registration so you’re not caught out on election day. If the race is too close to call in some of the swing states and neither candidate captures the required 270 electoral votes to win, per constitutional procedures the election is tipped to the House of Representatives in which each state gets a single vote. That would produce a Trump presidency as there are more states controlled by Republican delegations than Democratic ones. Such an outcome has never happened in US history and it would lead to even further polarization as it would be tough to see such a victory as the will of the people.

But then, the American political system, when it comes to presidential elections, has been broken for a quarter century. It ran off the rails in 2000 when the Supreme Court handed the victory to Bush despite his loss of the popular vote (and the Electoral Vote once all of the ballots in Florida were fully counted). Perhaps our current way of doing things, invented for an 18th century Enlightenment society is just no longer valid for a 21st century multicultural society that the founders could not have foreseen. Do we fix the system (difficult as it would require several constitutional amendments and we could never get the ERA passed). Do we replace the system with something else? Do we just coast along getting angrier and angrier with each other? I wish I knew.

Switching subjects, people have been inquiring about the current status of Covid. It’s still out there. Numbers are up in terms of diagnosed cases and hospitalizations. They are a bit higher currently than last summer, but nowhere near as high as they were a few years ago during the height of the pandemic. They appear to be highest in the Western states currently. It’s not quite so high here in the Southeast. It’s tough to tell, though, as there is no longer any systematic gathering of data in the way there once was. The circulating strains remain omicron variants and do not appear to be more infectious or more virulent than other omicron variants which have been bopping around for the last few years. The numbers are probably up because the various heat waves of the last month or so have been pushing people indoors together into airconditioned space.

What to do? Stay home if you’re symptomatically ill with any respiratory symptoms. If you test positive for Covid, quarantine until at least 24 hours afebrile and then wear a mask in public for at least an additional five days. Paxlovid is not of much benefit unless you’re over 65 or have significant chronic illness. If you’re healthy, treat symptomatically. Stay up to date with vaccines (the next one should be out in September). Healthy people should be fine with an annual booster in the fall. The very aged, the chronically ill, or those living in health facilities should probably receive an additional booster in the spring. Vaccines do not necessarily prevent you from catching covid but they definitely help keep you out of the hospital. They also significantly decrease your chances of long covid symptoms (10.5% for the unvaccinated compared to less than 3% for the vaccinated). Wash and sanitize your hands. It’s all pretty basic common sense stuff.

I am doing a reading Saturday evening from all three volumes of The Accidental Plague Diaries at 7:30 PM at Steeple Arts in Crestline Village. It’s a benefit for Central Alabama Theater and for one low price you get some wine, some snacks, some entertainment from me (including an update on new writing projects), and a copy of book of choice personally inscribed. I hope somebody shows up.

We live in a gerontocracy. The oldest Baby Boomers are about eighteen months away from turning eighty. The tail end of the silent generation, just above them. whence many of our current leaders are drawn are already octogenarians. Anyone with true adult memories of World War II is over the age of ninety-five. We all age at exactly the same rate, clocking up another birthday with every trip around the sun but something rather peculiar has happened in recent years. The Baby Boom generation has refused to allow itself or its icons to age.

I refer to this phenomenon somewhat facetiously as ‘The Cher Effect’. Cher has been in the public eye for pushing sixty years. During that very long career, she’s occupied a relatively stable cultural niche and has looked and sounded roughly the same as the decades have rolled along. She was born in 1946 and is emblematic of the first year of the Baby Boom and its message of eternal youth. Cher has had a number of advantages. The first of these is genetics. (The first rule of aging being choose your parents carefully). If you don’t believe me, take a look at a few photos of her mother, Georgia Holt as she aged through her 80s and 90s. She also has an enormous bank account and dozens of off camera assistants. All of this makes her an outlier. Unfortunately, her peer group, believing in an entitlement to the heritage of Ponce de Leon, have internalized this extreme outlier status as being the norm.

This is added to by the very long lived Silent Generation now in their 80s and 90s whom have blown all of the actuarial tables out of the water – which is the reason why long term care insurance is no longer available. It became actuarily unsound when the predictions of life span, especially for those with money and access to health care, no longer held true as they had in the past. The reasons for this continue to be debated but my money is on what is known as the semi-starved rat hypothesis. This was originally discovered in rats but has been shown to hold true in other species including primates. If the young are calorie restricted during their development, life span increases, probably because the developing organism becomes metabolically more efficient. The Silent Generation spent their youth in the Depression and World War II. No one was dying of famine in this country but no one could glut either. A side effect of this phenomenon is many Baby Boomers having a parent or parent in law living to a very great age. And how can one consider oneself old when the previous generation is still there?

The first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote was the election of 1980, in which Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, beginning a major trajectory towards social conservatism which continues to this day. Ronald Reagan was born in February of 1911, making him 69 years of age during that campaign season and at the time of his inauguration. He turned 70 several weeks later. I remember the discussions at the time amongst pundits and the general public about how he was really too old for the job. After all, prior to Reagan, the US had only ever elected two presidents over the age of 65, William Henry Harrison (who died of pneumonia after only a few weeks in office) and James Buchanan (best remembered for being replaced by Abraham Lincoln). Joe Biden is the first president to serve in his ninth decade and if Trump is reelected this fall, he will become the oldest inaugurated president ever, being about four months older than Biden was at the time of his inauguration in 2021.

No one has been talking about the age issue in presidential politics this time around until a few weeks ago when an 81 year old and a 78 year old squared off in a televised debate and it did not go in the ways the pundits had predicted. This geriatrician did not see one candidate that was really too old for the rigors of the job on that night, he saw two. I know a bit about the normal changes that age brings to the body and brain after the age of 75 and while older adults are can be capable and vital human beings, they do not have physiologies that are the same as adults in the 40-60 age group. They generally require more time to process cognitively, they deal less well with stress, both physical and psychological, they take longer to recover if knocked off their balance point, and they are often in the early stages of the multiple chronic diseases of aging.

Serious discussions should have been held in both parties several years ago regarding the rigors of campaigning and the physiologic capabilities an individual executing the office of POTUS should have. They weren’t. Apparently no one could do the elementary school math that would show what an individual’s age would be at a certain date in the future. So now we have one party rallying around a deeply unpopular individual of dubious qualifications who, to all appearances, does not enjoy the most robust health, and who will become the oldest man ever to be inaugurated to the office while the other seems content to commit political suttee, immolating itself at a time when the changing of candidate is not really possible given the structure of the laws regarding elections and the political system.

But they aren’t the only ones. Mitch McConnell (82) has just announced his imminent retirement. Nancy Pelosi (84) continues to plug away in her role. Clarence Thomas (76) shows no signs of vacating the bench. Bernie Sanders will shortly turn 83. Even the maverick third party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is over 70. The entrenched gerontocracy, occupying senior leadership, prevents promising younger leaders from moving up, representing newer generations and newer ways of viewing the world. The Millennials, as large a generation as the Baby Boom, has entered its forties with most of its emerging leaders blocked off from top positions, likely for another decade or two as the older Baby Boom start proclaiming in a year or so that 80 is the new 50 and 90 is the new 60 a decade after that.

This geriatrician can tell you that 90 is not the new 60 and never will be. That is wishful thinking. And just because you want to believe it is not going to reverse all of the changes to physical and biochemical processes that come with this messy business we call life over time. The gerontocracy will ultimately be handled by a combination of demography and chronology but what remains to be seen is how we are going to adapt and adjust to the inevitable.