Dateline: London, England

And so I have returned across the pond to the motherland, less than six months since my last jaunt. It was never my intention to schedule two weeks in London in such close proximity; it’s just how life worked out, what with the winter trip having been postponed a year due to Covid and this summer trip a pleasant add on to my singing with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra Chorus for the last seven or eight years. The ASO folk are joining together with a number of other choral groups to present a program at Southwark Cathedral this coming Saturday night the 10th. I have a couple of friends coming, whose lives have led to them being in London on the correct date. I hope we sing pretty. (I’m pretty sure it will go well as the piece we are singing, a modern setting of the Latin Mass, is melodic, and neither harmonically nor rhythmically terrible challenging, unlike other recent pieces we have faced.

I am accompanied on this trip by my old college friend, Vickie Rozell, a friendship that extends back more than forty years and has encompassed times of being roommates, official and unofficial, other theater trips, kibitzing on each others theatrical projects, and just general camaraderie. The third member of our little college troika, my dorm roommate Craig Mollerstuen, was supposed to turn up as well but the state department had other ideas and delayed issuing his passport renewal. We will make do.

The trip has, so far proved uneventful. I spent the end of last week desperately trying to clean up various undone things prior to departing and, as far as I know, I managed to get them all done and the notes written and the various people on non-profit boards communicated with and the writing that needed to be done completed. This, of course, means that I have forgotten a minimum of three significant things which will be highly overdue on my return and I’ll arrive to a series of panicked emails and text messages. Vickie arrived from California on Saturday afternoon, on time and none the worse for wear for her early start from San Jose airport. We had a barbeque dinner, nice conversation, and then I went home to finish my much delayed packing for our departure for London the next day.

We Ubered over to our local dead mall at Brookwood the next morning early to meet the bus to ATL (cheaper by far than flying us all out of BHM). The bus ride was only marred by someone being left behind as they were checked off as being on board when they obviously were not. We took a little stop at the Alabama/Georgia border allowing him to catch up and get on the bus with a somewhat higher blood pressure, but otherwise, none the worse for wear. Then on to Atlanta, the Southwest quadrant of the belt way, and the international terminal of ATL which was not overly crowded on a Sunday afternoon. We had plenty of time before boarding so we opted for the Concourse F Chinese fast food place… don’t. It wasn’t that the food was bad – it’s no better or worse than any other fast food Asian, but the inefficiency of the five people behind the counter resulted in nearly an hours wait for my plastic tin of orange chicken and defective fortune cookie. Just another reminder of the decline and fall of the service economy post pandemic.

The flight was the usual – wedged into a seat much too small for my build whiling away the hours with the in flight entertainment system. I caught up with three films that I had meant to see: Damian Chazelle’s opus Babylon about the early days of Hollywood, which I truly despised. Up second was Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical ‘Meet the Fablemans’, which I quite liked, and Billy Eichner’s comedy ‘Bros’ which tried too hard do be a crowd pleaser while requiring a niche understanding of the jokes about gay life and relationships. It missed more than it hit. I had just switched to a Bollywood movie about ghosts that seemed to involve a lot of singing and dancing in skimpy clothes in a Himalayan snowbank. I hadn’t quite figured all that when bang crash and we were down on the ground. More minor dramas, this time a missing passport, and we headed to the shuttle bus which delivered us to our hotel.

No early check in, so Vickie and I dropped our luggage and headed up Glouscter Road to Cromwell Road, passed the Natural History Museum and popped into the Victoria and Albert for a dose of art and history We then continued on up into Knightsbridge and went to Harrod’s. It was no where near the zoo it was at New Years. I looked at the souvenir sets of Charles and Camilla tea bags and biscuits in the Food Halls and decided not. Vickie went back to get some rest before dinner, but I sallied forth again and went for a walk in the West End. The temperature is low 70s and sunny. Perfect walking weather. We then got together for dinner at a Portuguese chicken place near the hotel. We have opted not to theater tonight as we are both running on fumes and would just sleep through whatever.

Tomorrow and Wednesday are side trip days and theater nights. More to come… But now, to bed.

The woods are just trees. The trees are just wood. Would it were so simple. My life is full of woods at the moment. Artistic, spiritual, philosophical… the only thing that’s missing is an actual ramble through a woodland. Perhaps I should take a mental health day and schedule myself some time at Ruffner Mountain or Oak Mountain or Red Mountain. For those of you not of Birmingham, they are three great urban wilderness parks covering the slopes of the tail end of the Appalachians here in the metro area. The ultimate plan is to connect the three with walking paths, bike trails and greenways. When those come to fruition, there will be something truly special here.

The first woods were recreational. I took the Saturday of the long weekend off from my ‘To Do’ list and I and my long time friend Mackey Atkinson road tripped it up to Nashville. We had tickets for the evening performance of the National Tour of the new production of Into the Woods. As we arrived in Nashville some hours before show time, we decided to continue the fairytale theme and went to the immersive Disney animation exhibit. It’s another of the son et lumiere shows that have become popular in recent years, beginning with Van Gogh five or six years ago and now reaching out into all sorts of visual media. Classic Disney moments, both old and modern projected on enormous screens, animated floor coverings that responded to your movements, familiar songs, it was quite enjoyable. I am not a Disney fanatic but I do like letting my inner child out to play from time to time. And Jiminy Cricket singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ gets me every time.

I can’t say much for Broadway and honky-tonk country music Nashville. Rubbing elbows with drunk examples of Fraterniticus Memberus has never been my idea of a good time, even when I was that age. The other major sighting were of gaggles of Bachelorettia Celebrationes, all dressed alike, three sheets to the wind, and wearing little pink cowboy hats and boots stolen from the Ron DeSantis collection. At least a lot of them had the good sense to stay aboard their various party busses, party minivans, and party tractors so you didn’t have to dodge their stumbling on the sidewalks. Apparently a sunny Saturday afternoon in Nashville has become the new Bourbon street, just substitute country for jazz. We poked around downtown, had a surprisingly good dinner at a restaurant/coffee bar improbably named The Frothy Monkey, and headed over to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center for the show.

I have long had a soft spot for Into The Woods. Not only is it a Sondheim show, it’s also the first Broadway show that I actually got to see on Broadway (third week of the run with the original cast). It was my first trip to NYC (I was there for residency interviews) and my vivid memories of sitting in the Martin Beck theater and watching the show unfold and not really knowing anything about it other than ‘fractured fairy tales’ remain strong. The indelible performance of Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s Wife. The audience gasps at the unexpected deaths. The applause when Rapunzel’s tower appeared. Bernadette Peters’ witch transformation. I can still feel that emotional state when I think back. I was 25 years old then. Steve, Tommy, my career – they were all still in the future. I remember not being very impressed with the second act, feeling that James Lapine had bitten off far more than he could chew. Now, 35 years later, I read very different things into the show than I did then and I realize that I often have to venture off the path and into the woods for the things I require to succeed – and they’re usually not so simple as the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold.

A different magical forest is taking over my summer. In a fit of temporary insanity I agreed to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Belltower Players. We had preliminary auditions last night and this evening and have run into the usual problem with plenty of women and a short supply of men. I can do some fudging with gender from Shakespeare’s original casting but I will still have to beat the bushes for a couple of parts. If you’re male, comfortable on stage, and owe me a favor or two, expect a call….Given budgetary constraints, full Elizabethan is out of the question but I think I have come up with some design concepts that will work and will make the show interesting and a bit more immersive than that space has usually done. There goes July and the first half of August…

The metaphorical woods are those I am hacking my way through in trying to finish up the third volume of The Accidental Plague Diaries. I feel like it should come together relatively easily over the next two months and we should be able to have it available in August. So there is light peeking through the trees there. The big question becomes, of course, and then what? Do I keep working on it by trying to raise its profile through PR? Maybe more appearances like this one… (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Nt_TASNGRY&t=132s) Do I find the money to get electronic and audio editions out? (And would anyone buy them?) Do I go back to the idea of turning it into a Spalding Gray/David Sedaris type monologue? I have this fantasy of workshopping it locally, getting quite a good piece out of it, taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it’s a sensation and it then becomes a success d’estime off Broadway. As if any of that will ever happen. Or do I just say ‘Done’ and cast about for some new project to fill that particular creative void.

And then there’s the thicket of briar which is the American health care system and all of the issues which continue to dribble down onto geriatric care – the decline in professionals with geriatric care skills, the lack of support staff. the aging of the population, the generational characteristics of the early boomers, now in their 70s who have unreasonable expectations regarding biology and human experience. There are days when I truly love what I do professionally. There are other days when I want to drop kick the computer terminal off the third floor into the atrium, and then tear off all my clothes and run screaming out of the building. There are days when a 72 hour involuntary psychiatric hold sounds like a much needed vacation.

Speaking of vacation, three more work days until I depart for my second trip to London in six months. My next long posts will likely be back to travel diary mode for a while. Given the people I will be there with, shenanigans will be had.

I just finished writing the last major piece of text required for the third and last volume of The Accidental Plague Diaries. The book isn’t done. It still needs one more round of edits, a bit of reordering, a major proofread, and layout before it can be considered finished. We should be able to accomplish all of that by mid July and have the book out in August. At least that’s the current plan. There are always unforeseen issues and delays.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about completing what amounts to nearly a thousand pages of book over the last three years, especially as I never had any intention of writing any of it. Life and COVID had other plans. I guess the next step, after the last volume is released, is to get on the stick and try to sell some more copies and increase my readership. My immediate circle of acquaintance seems to have read and enjoyed it so far but if it’s going to have any staying power, it needs to reach beyond those who have actually met me.

I was a guest on a podcast this past weekend. One of the hosts is an old friend and the other is a man I have never met. He read the first volume prior to the recording and I found his response to the book fascinating. He told me that reading it brought back all of the emotions he felt in the first few months of the lockdown. Even though the particulars of my experience were very different from his, my reactions to the changes in society and health care felt very similar to what he was feeling in his world. Those feelings may still be too fresh and raw in many of us to want to revisit them but in a year or two, we may all want to have a better understanding of what happened to us and then the books may really speak in ways that they have not yet had a chance to do. I’ll post a link to the finished podcast when it’s up.

Somebody tell me I’m crazy, but I have agreed to direct a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream this summer for Belltower players. Rehearsals begin June 26th and the performances are the second and third weekends in August. Now that I’ve said yes, I’m sitting here with the script trying to decide on cuts, concepts, staging ideas, and how to make the show work on a limited budget. Any Birmingham performers who are free July/August and have always wanted to do Shakespeare with me at the helm, drop me a line. I have tickets to Midsummer at the Globe in London in a couple of weeks. I hope I pick up some good ideas and don’t leave wanting to slit my wrists because I can’t possibly equal what they do. I just wanted to play Bottom. (No bad innuendo jokes please…)

I trudge through my work life. The NP I have relied on the last few years leaves at the end of the month. I’m sorry to see her go as she has done a phenomenal job holding the UAB ambulatory clinic together. We have new people coming in to replace her who promise to be equally as good once they have a bit of seasoning. It’s not the first time I’ve lost my right arm for my clinical care. It’s happened over and over again in my career. A social worker, an NP, a trusted colleague has moved on to something new or better and I remain, day after day, year after year, older and older trying to do the best I can by my patients. I’ll keep doing it a while longer. I want to make sure the clinic can survive my retirement and we’ve got new staff and a physical relocation coming up so things won’t be stable for a while and I’ll keep on keeping on. After 25 years, there’s little that can be thrown at me that will topple me off my balance point. I don’t know what that says about me. Am I a chump for having stayed this long or am I some sort of folk hero? Almost no one else has been able to make it past 7-10 years.

On the VA front, the rural house calls program continues to work well. There’s definite changes brewing though. The World War II vets are essentially gone and the Korean War vets are going. Most of our new admits are Vietnam War vets and even some Gulf War vets. They tend to be sicker than their elders, more difficult to care for, and less able to change ingrained habits for better health. I don’t force anyone to do anything. I simply provide expert advice based on my training and knowledge base. What people do with that advice is up to them. The newer admits want miracle cures and quick fixes as they believe that’s how health care is supposed to work. The idea that when you have chronic disease, you need a long term partnership to work to stabilize you at the best you can be, rather than restoring you to age 25 in a week seems alien to them. I have my work cut out for me. Fortunately, I can keep my cool in most situations.

I’ve been tired this week. I think I’m going to put on some bad TV and go to bed early. I’m trying to finish up the last season of You on Netflix, but I keep losing interest. I think it’s gone on a season too long.

I had one of those wake up at 4 am, brain churning and raring to go mornings. I have no idea why. Usually when that happens, there’s something going on up there that’s trying to get out and some writing helps free up whatever the psychological issue is that’s rattling around the darker recesses of my brain. But whatever it is seems to be eluding me this morning. I’ve started this piece a couple of different times and it’s petered out after a paragraph or two. Am I approaching writers block after vomiting up three volumes over the last couple of years? Is a return to more normal social patterns taking energies that were going into writing when life was more isolated?

The conversations among the family when I was back in Seattle for birthday weekend centered around this being a time of transition. The political and social upheavals fueled by the pandemic and other recent events are rolling over my generation of the family in profound ways. For myself, I am having to consider retirement and what my legacy to the world of geriatric medicine is going to be. I know I’ve touched a lot of lives, inspired a few people to make career shifts this general direction, built better ways of handling older people into our local health systems but is there anything I can do to ensure that this work survives my day to day presence and constant attention? Do I phase in retirement over a few years slowly reducing responsibilities or do I just walk out the door and not look back? Will my financial plans actually work in a world where congress keeps threatening to torpedo the world economic system in a fit of pique as the most extreme (and ignorant) elements are given outsize platforms for media ratings? Do I continue to function as a physician in retirement (which will mean figuring out things like licensure and malpractice insurance without a large institution behind me)?

My brother, six years younger, retired early last year after thirty years of teaching high school English and is now working as a paid soccer coach for the high school premiere leagues in Washington. He seems happy. His athlete’s body will probably hold up to this for a decade or so but is it enough? My sister in law sold her athletic wear company she had built over the last fifteen years or so. The changes of the pandemic on retail made her feel it was the right time to get out. My first cousins who are quasi siblings are dealing with elder caregiving issues, adolescent children and empty nest syndrome, career changes, and all of the other issues that come with middle age. My sister, who moved her tattoo business to a home studio a year or so before the pandemic, seems to be moving serenely through life but she has been coping with some extended family eldercare issues which are rattling her usual nonchalance.

Perhaps this is the new norm for those of us in the middle age of the 50s and 60s. The trends towards later childbearing, divorce/remarriage and expanding family networks, fewer children to support aging parents, natural processes of aging leading to body betrayal, financial strains of higher education for the younger generation and care for the elder, and continued political uncertainties are pushing all of us in the late boom/generation Jones/early generation X into feelings of things are in a state of flux. Personally, I don’t do well with unknowns when it comes to change. I’m fine when I can see the path ahead or the other shore coming closer but when it’s all terra incognita out there, I tend to start futurizing and the anxiety level starts to increase and that’s never good.

So I guess I better hold on to the vague certainties in life. I have enough money to meet this month’s bills. I’ve more or less been told by my employers that I have a job for as long as I want to work. I am off to London for a week next month with good company (and a few theater tickets are bought). Rosy fingered dawn is showing outside my bedroom window so the sun is coming up again as it has for eons. I can hear Binx busily clawing away at the living room couch as he does daily. No matter how many scratching toys I provide, he prefers the furniture. There will be people in my waiting room this morning whom I will be able to make feel better by putting on my doctor persona and giving them some basic information that will help them cope better with the problems of aging.

As for all those existential issues and problems out there. I can’t fix them. I really should stop worrying about them. I need to focus on the little bits that I can do… Calling my legislators about particularly heinous bills pending in the statehouse, a few well directed dollars to economically troubled arts organizations, being there for a friend, a little self care (something I’m not especially good at). And perhaps that will give me the spurt of energy I need to complete a few projects this weekend to help with my own transitions.

Dateline: Seattle, Washington

I’m spending my birthday weekend with the family in Seattle. I hadn’t been up here for six or eight months so it was time to check in on everyone, especially my 90 year old father and my uncle who also turns 90 in just a few weeks. Geriatric assessments are done. Advice has been imparted to various family members. There are no major looming disasters and I just have to get through my usual talk to the residents of my father’s senior living community in order to complete my busman’s holiday. I haven’t done much the last few days other than be with family. Not strictly true, I allowed my sister to give me a second tattoo as a birthday present. When the cover artist for your books is also a tattoo artist and a close relative, it was only natural to have the cover character emblazoned on my left shoulder in celebration for having actually completed somewhere around1000 pages of accidental published writing over the course of the last three years. When the last volume comes out this summer, it will have been less time than I spent in high school, college, or medical school from the time I wrote the first words of what became The Accidental Plague Diaries until the completion of the project. And that is with working full time and all the other things I do. I figured a celebratory tattoo was worthwhile. I’ll post a picture when it’s healed up a little.

I would be remiss if I did not send out a huge message of thanks to all of you who reached out by phone, text, message, Facebook etc. with birthday greetings. (Something over 600 at last count). Having been raised to acknowledge some things, I did try to thank everyone individually. Of course, by typing Thank You many hundreds of times, I fell afoul of some Facebook algorithm and was blocked from posting anything for 24 hours for ‘violating community standards’. I’ll remember to tell Zuckerberg that apparently thanking people is verboten and not to be borne next time I see him. It’s always interesting to scroll through the greetings, no matter how brief, and see the names of those who sent them and then recall how and when they entered my life. Elementary school playmates, high school and college classmates, old colleagues, performers I’ve worked with, internet buddies – they’re all there. When I get grumpy and down and worried that my efforts in life have not been particularly worthwhile, I need to go back and look at that list of how many lives of how many kinds have intersected with mine and realize that yes, each of us is a thread in the pattern and every thread is important for the tapestry’s picture to be whole.

Seattle is having lovely weekend weather. I’m going out for a walk to enjoy the sunshine in a bit. And then, after my talk, the family gathers for grilled salmon and conversation and catching up on everyone’s life. I am fortunate in my family. We all seem to have matured into adults who are friends and we don’t fall back into traditional roles from childhood when we get together. There were some family traumas in the late 80s/early 90s that forced us all to confront each other as mature adults and reforge relationships. I can’t recommend that particular method of learning to get along better with siblings and parents but the end result was a positive one. No, I’m not going to go into specifics on what all happened as much of it is not my stories to tell. I try to tell my stories (or dead husbands stories as they no longer have their own voice) but not the stories of other living people. That’s their business, not mine.

The flights out were uneventful. I was seated next to a very nice couple on the cross country flight who were traveling with two small dogs, a maltese and a bichon. Both animals were very quiet and well behaved in their carriers and I didn’t hear a bark all flight. They did come out and were lap dogs for a bit midflight. I have no objection to other people’s animals and they both gave me a bit of a tongue bath. With all my house calls, I have been around other people’s pets in close proximity more times than I care to count. I am fine with being sniffed, jumped upon, licked, but I draw the line at biting. Those that bite must be put up before I’ll come in the house. I’m even OK with the occasional ferret, parrot, and snake (as long as it’s not going to wrap itself around my neck).

Flying in these post pandemic days isn’t the most pleasant. The airports cannot hire enough people to staff its services so lines for food and coffee are long and slow. The planes are stuffed to the gills with minimal service. I’ve taken to paying extra on Delta for their Comfort plus seats so that I’ll at least have a bit of leg room for my longer shanks. I wedge myself in my window seat, put on bad movies, or read a page turner and hope for it all to be over soon. My current plane book is an alternative history novel about modern America had the Revolution been lost and the scientific method regarding medicine never developed. A cholera epidemic has started and is spreading. It’s a prepublication proof sent to me by the publisher who have asked for a cover blurb from the author of The Accidental Plague Diaries. It’s not bad so I will oblige. Someone somewhere is reading them…

I was sidelined this weekend by a medical issue (relax – it was just a routine colonoscopy and I’m fine) and a couple of days of enforced inactivity for prep and anesthesia recovery did not sit at all well. It made me wonder if retirement will be good for me. I get very antsy after just a few hours of doing nothing. There’s a part of my brain that feels its necessary to be productive during all waking hours and that leisure, vegging, and wasting time are not to be borne. Culturally, I received the protestant work ethic but I think it’s been magnified in me by life experiences which have had me call into question the ability to ever have enough time to accomplish everything in life that one should. Tommy, years ago, was a member of the IATSE crew that worked the touring shows that come through town and when The Lion King came in the early 2000s for a five week sit down, he was the wardrobe laundry person eight shows a week – forty loads per show plus all of the hand washing of the beaded and specialty pieces. His souvenir T-shirt read ‘The Lion King Crew – More To Do Than Can Ever Be Done’ which is a lyric from the opening number, The Circle of Life and was certainly one of his mottos and he passed that style of living on to me during our years together.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, working in a primary care discipline during the slow, but inexorable collapse of the American health care system has certainly left me with a continued scramble to keep all of the work tasks up to date and the clinical systems for which I have responsibility, in a vaguely working order. But if I were to remove all of that from my life, just walk away (which I am occasionally tempted to do…) what then? I say I would put that time and energy into the performing arts here in the greater Birmingham area (and I have a few ideas as to what that might look like) but would I really? I have a feeling I had better take a more measured approach to retirement and a more gradual slow down over several years rather than something abrupt – health permitting of course. I’ve worked in medicine long enough to know there are absolutely no guarantees in that department. Body betrayal can happen at any time, usually when you’re busy planning something else.

I’m in the process of editing the last part of the manuscript for Volume III of The Accidental Plague Diaries. If all goes well, it will be out in late July or early August. I am, again, looking at material that I wrote less than a year ago and it feels like I was writing about a completely alien time and place. The end of the pandemic has had ‘normalcy’ spring into place like a bear trap, and its making me feel like I’m being detached from my recent past in peculiar but very real ways. The three years from March 2020 to early 2023 is starting to feel like a bad dream and it’s certainly messing with my perception of time. It’s almost like that period has become nonexistent in my calculations so 2018, which was five years ago, feels like it should only have been two years ago.

I’m trying to write a fitting epilogue to Volume III that will sum up the whole experience of the pandemic, not just for me, but for our society. I haven’t been able to find the right words yet. The attempts so far? Maudlin and trite are the words that come to mind and they’re really not what I’m going for. And how to acknowledge that even though the acute phase of the pandemic is over that Covid remains a significant and continuing cause of morbidity and mortality that is likely to remain throughout our lifetimes? And how to honor the over one million dead in the US and the millions more whose physiology has been irreparably harmed?

Two local journalists of my acquaintance, John Archibald and Kyle Whitmire were awarded Pulitzer Prizes this week, John for reporting and Kyle for commentary. Once I get the third volume done, I’ll submit the whole thing for Pulitzer consideration next year. And I won’t even make the short list. I have to keep reminding myself that those two have been writing for decades (I’ve been reading their stuff for 25 years, since I first moved to Birmingham) and I’ve only been published for two. I’m thrilled at their success. I love it when good things happen to deserving people. And it’s nice to know that even though Birmingham no longer has a daily newspaper (thanks to the greed of the Newhouse family), we still have a tradition of top notch journalism that finds a way to shine a light on the more corrupt elements of our society.

Thirty-six hours from now, I’ll be on a plane heading for Seattle for a little family time. I may write while there, I may not. I will most certainly try to get some more editing done as, once again, enforced down time is not my forte. It’s going to be a bit of a working weekend as I have some private geriatric assessment to do and I’m giving a talk on aging issues at my father’s senior living community as I usually do. At least I’ve gotten smart enough in recent years to make those off the cuff Q and A so I don’t have to spend a lot of time preparing in advance. Thank god for Jeanmarie Collins and the improv training over the years. It may not be what Viola Spolin envisioned when she was putting her technique together but I’ve been able to use it to impress a lot of senior adults.

It’s the fifth of May, Cinco de Mayo, that totally made up Mexican holiday which was developed to popularize Mexican beers some decades ago. I like Mexican food as much as the next person but I am staying well away from my usual Mexican joints today as I don’t particularly care for the species of young Alabama male who has imbibed entirely too many beers and margaritas. I’ll have my chimichanga some other day. Instead, I am home from work a bit early, looking at my ‘To Do’ list which seems to have tripled over the last week, and despairing of ever getting to the bottom of it.

The WHO today declared that Covid is no longer a world wide health emergency. This will bookend neatly with the upcoming expiration of the US public health emergency status upcoming on the 11th. Mind you I don’t think that Covid is done with the human race yet, not by a long shot (and I was reading somewhere earlier today that some authorities think that the chance of another omicron type wave arising within the next two years is somewhere around 20-25%) but we are more or less at a point where we can pretty much resume where we were pre-pandemic, at least as long as we have functional immune systems and have taken advantage of vaccinations. When I last checked, we’re still losing about 1,000 people a week in the US to the disease and that number has been holding fairly constant for a while so I don’t imagine it will drop all that much in coming months. Of course it will be tough to tell. The ending of the public health emergency will mean the ending of federal funding for appropriate data collection so we won’t be able to track things in real time the way we have been.

I think, at least in part, my burgeoning ‘To Do’ list is a side effect of journey’s end. As more and more people feel more and more comfortable doing the things they were used to doing pre-pandemic, the social obligations begin to mount and the projects with deadlines start to multiply and they all seem to end up in a neat little list on my dining room table. I’m keeping up so far, although those things without specific deadline tend to slide further and further down the list with time and there are a few that are unlikely to be crossed off until at least 2025. I’d like to say that this is an OK state of affairs but a trained physician with a protestant work ethic is never very happy at seeing tasks unaccomplished.

The problem is, of course, that while the world wishes to go back to 2019 as if 2020-2022 never happened, it can’t. The second law of social thermodynamics prevents it. We are all fundamentally changed by our experiences of the last few years and trying to lay a 2019 life on top of a 2023 reality is doomed to failure. It’s a variation on You Can’t Go Home Again (unless you’re Thomas Wolfe). I’m still trying to tease out the differences between who I was then and who I am now. I just know I can’t pick up the same burdens and shoulder them in the same manner. I’m trying to do so but it just doesn’t feel right somehow. I think my capacity for multitasking has just lessened. Is it my personal aging? Is it the still unknowable mental/cognitive changes that years of stress have caused to happen? I just know that at times there’s a sense of deep exhaustion that I did not have in the past. And it’s not something that can be alleviated by a nap or an afternoon vegging.

I’m continuing to edit the final volume of these Accidental Plague Diaries. It will run from Thanksgiving of 2021 through September of 2022. In looking back over my writings, last fall was a major inflection point regarding how I and society as a whole were dealing with the pandemic and pandemic issues and little I wrote after that would be of much interest to future readers trying to puzzle through just what was going on in the US during this period. If anyone wants to read beyond that, there’s always the blog where these posts are archived and will likely dance around in the electronic ether long after I am gone. I’ve been trying to figure out what the third volume is really about. The first is about the failure of our government to do the first job of government, protect the citizenry. The second is about the failure of our society to care for each other. I think the third volume, in some ways is about my own failures – mainly my failure to be the person I conceive of myself in my brain. I have to settle for the messy contradictory human being I am over the idealized version I try to construct for myself and for public consumption.

Theater is creeping back into full swing locally. I went to see a production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap at Belltower players last night. I’ve seen a number of productions over the years (but never the original which is still running in London’s West End 70 years later… maybe I should fix that when I’m there next month). I therefore, of course, knew whodunnit going in so it was more of an exercise in cheering friends in the cast on, admiring the construction of the play itself (whodunnits and thrillers are amongst the hardest plays to write which is why few playwrights have ever managed more than one classic in the genre. Christie is unusual in that she has three – the other two being And Then There Were None and Witness For The Prosecution), and admiring the absolutely terrific set Greg Boling and Ichabod Temperance skillfully constructed and decorated. By all means go see it. It runs this weekend and next.

I’ve been a huge fan of the classic British mystery for decades and worked my way through all of Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and others while in high school. They fit in with my general love of puzzles. I’ve written a few interactive mysteries for fund raisers over the years so I’ve figured out a thing or two about putting them together. I did one as a Halloween game for my college roommate’s tech company back in the late 80s. We created a number of fictious employees, had them assigned offices and voice mails and other such things and let the several hundred real employees try to puzzle it out at work that day. Somebody did solve it so I guess I made it not too difficult. I don’t remember all that much about it other than the big clue was a missing fake red fingernail that was among a bunch of spilled peanut M&Ms. A few years later, I did my first that required live actors where there was skullduggery among turn of the century residents of Sacramento with everyone having a whole lot of sordid secrets they were trying to conceal. Steve played one of the suspects, a local businessman who secretly ran the local brothel. He had great fun trying to entice some of the players into visiting his wholly fictitious establishment. Steve would have been brilliant on stage. He was a natural performer. Unfortunately, he was also totally undisciplined and you would never have gotten the same performance (or set of lines) twice out of him so improv murder mystery was about right for him.

I will continue to ponder the changes Covid has wrought as I launch into my sixteen unwritten progress notes for the week. Pray for me.

It’s the first of May. I suppose I have my choice of putting some flowers in a basket and leaving them on a neighbor’s doorstep, donning a red arm band and marching down Arlington Avenue, or putting on the Original Broadway Cast album of Camelot and singing along with Julie Andrews. But, alas, I am likely to do none of these things. I had a doctor’s appointment this morning so I took the whole day as sick leave and spent this afternoon catching up on work paperwork and taking a nap. I don’t get a lot of those these days and they can be salubrious in the right circumstances.

I haven’t written for a few days. Some of that was due to various and sundry things going on such as rehearsals and some of that was due to not having a whole lot to say. And some of it was due to the calendar. Last Friday marked the fifth anniversary of Tommy’s death. Five years feels in some ways like an eternity and in other ways like yesterday. The pandemic has played a lot with my perceptions of time in recent years. A couple of years of standstill in my usual patterns and it now feels in some ways like those years have ceased to exist and things from five years ago should only be a year or two in the past. And then there’s the scary thought that we are nearly a quarter of the way through this new century. And it’s the century that will encompass my death as I’m highly unlikely to make it to age 138. I really should go out to Parrish and visit his grave. But I don’t feel like going alone. If anyone wants to take a day trip to the wilds of Walker county sometime, let me know.

The big activity of the last few days was my fetching my drag persona of MissClairol Channing out of mothballs in order to let her MC my church’s drag fund raiser. Alabama, like most of the other Southern states is in the process of passing anti-drag laws under the ridiculous premise of it’s damaging to children or some such. It’s really about trying to put the LGBTQ community firmly back in their place and it’s not going to stop with transgender bashing or outlawing drag shows. More is coming and from what I can tell the big national advocacy groups have more or less written off the red states and are doing very little to prevent this. Given that national surveys have shown that there are more LGBTQ people living in the Deep South than in any other region, this strikes me as being a rather stupid strategy but I noticed some decades ago that the national LGBTQ organizations, after their major wins, more or less became more interested in building K street lobbying offices and the DC cocktail circuit than in actually doing grassroots work where people are suffering.

The Alabama Law, which hasn’t been signed yet but certainly will be when it hits the governor’s desk will ban the performance of drag in public places where minors may be present. The bill mentions schools and libraries but does not mention churches so I suppose the UU Church of Birmingham can continue to put on a family friendly drag show going forward as an annual event and flout the law as it won’t be applicable. Personally, I think a good police raid on a local conservative academy’s elementary school production of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ when the male wolf appears dressed as grandma would be just the ticket to show everyone how ridiculous and wrong headed the whole thing is. These laws are written so vaguely and are so punitive that they’re really designed to make entertainment producers stop and think twice about doing certain kinds of material just in case it might fall afoul of the law. One of our local theaters is doing Peter Pan this summer. I wonder if that will be allowed as the title role is traditionally cross gender cast as it comes out of the British pantomime tradition.

MissClairol was a success, but let me tell you, two and a half hours in those shoes and doing her voice was enough to leave me in need of a quiet weekend with a dish tub full of epsom salts for a foot bath. There was nothing risque in my material or in any of the other performers, mainly lip synching to female diva ballads, and I can assure you that none of the children in attendance came to any harm and had a great time dancing along. As a bit, I asked one four year old if he had had his psychosexual development permanently damaged by standing and talking to a man in a dress. He didn’t understand the question. Kids understand dress up. They love doing it. They aren’t in the least bit confused by men dressing up in traditional women’s costume or vice versa. It’s just an extension of ‘Let’s pretend’ and, after all, isn’t that what all theatrical performance art boils down to?

I’m back into editing mode for Volume III of the Accidental Plague Diaries and hope to get the majority of it done by mid-month. Then I can start thinking about what comes next. But first perhaps, a few weeks of down time. I haven’t had a lot of that in recent years and maybe it’s time.

We’re now well into the fourth year of Covid. It’s still out there. I’ve had two friends come down with it in the last few weeks. Fortunately no one I know has been sick enough to require hospitalization in recent months but I’ve had a couple of patients who have done badly and at least one where the additional strain on the body and physiology was likely what caused their death. We remain around 20,000 hospitalizations and 1500 deaths a week in the US. And we’ve decided that we’re just going to live with that as background noise as our lives careen along. That’ll come out to about 75,000 annual deaths assuming we have no additional surges or mutations. That’s slightly more than double the number of US deaths in motor vehicle accidents. Speaking of those, since the pandemic began, traffic accident deaths have spiked up about 20% over where they were in 2019. I wonder why that is? I doubt Covid is causing brakes to fail or engines to explode. I suspect it has to do with the significant uptick in mental health issues as we have all had to cope with the pandemic and its associated social changes. There’s probably a higher prevalence of distracted driving and possibly some increased willingness to take risk.

I’ve been fielding a lot of questions regarding another Covid booster. Here’s my latest advice. The bivalent booster which is more active against omicron has only been available since September so, if you haven’t had a booster since then, getting one to get a bivalent dose is not a bad idea, no matter who you are. If you have had a bivalent booster, the word out of the FDA is that a spring bivalent booster is reasonable if you are over 65 or if you have a condition that compromises your immune system. They aren’t pushing hard, but it’s an option and you’d be covered by federal payment should you trot on down to your local Walgreens. The caveat is that the federal public health emergency will expire on May 11th of this year. After that date, the federal government is no longer guaranteeing payment for shots or tests. It’ll be up to you and your health insurance company to cover the costs (and we all know how much private health insurance cares about public health).

It’s been a weekend of theater around here. Thursday night, Steel Magnolias at The Virginia Samford Theater. I remember the first time I saw it on stage, sometime in the later half of the 80s and being impressed at how Robert Harling built a whole small town world in the confines of the beauty shop and the words of the six women who worked or patronized it. I’ve never really cared for the film (sacrilege for a gay man living in the Deep South) but I thought that the material lost something when it was opened up and we met the men in the women’s lives rather than simply seeing them through their eyes. Anyway, the production was quite good, well performed and designed. My old friends Celeste Burnum as Ouiser and Jan Hunter as Clairee walked off with the show as they always do. I can’t wait to be onstage with either of them again.

Friday night was Hansel and Gretel at the Day Theater produced by Opera Birmingham. As president of the board, I am obligated to say nice things but I would be saying them anyway. The music was spot on between the singers and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Cris Frisco. The singers were in excellent voice and I find that the size of the Day is such that it’s easy for a smaller scale production to seduce you into its musical and artistic world, letting you forget yourself for a couple of hours. There was an unexpected entrance during the prelude that I will not soon forget which greatly added to my mood of enjoyment.

Last night, my friend Holly McClendon and I went to Shen Yun, one of the seven wonders of the PR world. I’d always been at least mildly curious, having been bombarded by their advertising for some years. I can now say that I have seen the ‘Chinese Mormon Space Cult Dance Show’ (Holly’s words, not mine, which seem to perfectly encapsulate the experience). The aesthetic is Mormon church pageant. The production numbers reminded me of The Ice Capades, only without the skates. The costumes are gorgeous, if occasionally wrong headed (like the pale green ones with the long sleeves which made the ensemble look like dancing celery sticks). The set is a huge LED screen on which they project computer generated backdrops which seem to have been done by the same artists that do videogames. The big trick is having dancers run up a set of stairs towards the screen, drop down behind them, and be immediately replaced by a digital counterpart which can continue on in an animated way. It was fun the first four or five times. There’s nothing wrong with the big dance numbers, although they’re a bit repetitive. There are a few times where the descend into Falun Gong cult propaganda (if you don’t know who they are, look them up. Shen Yun is an outreach program of theirs). And there was a bass solo of some sort of Falun Gong hymn by perhaps the worst professional singer I’ve ever had to suffer through. I can now say I’ve seen it. I have no desire to return.

Heading off to the other performance of Hansel and Gretel. When you’re the president of the board of directors of the opera, you do these things.

The performances of Carlos Izcaray’s Requiem are over and done. It appears to have been well received by Alabama Symphony Orchestra audiences, but then the story of the loss of his wife a few years ago which prompted the composition is well known locally so there was understanding of the emotional impulses underlying the music by the listeners. I think this is the fourth Requiem I’ve sung as a chorister since Tommy immersed me in the classical musical world a decade or so ago. This one felt more personal than the Verdi, the Mozart or the Cherubini. With my personal history, I suppose I’m always going to feel a sense of underlying sadness when visiting those works, born as they are out of a place of grief and deep emotional pain, religious, historical, and personal on the part of the composers. I have heard rumors that both the Faure and the Brahms are on the calendar for next season. If that is so, I’ll just be missing the Britten to have hit the top five. Speaking of Faure, this concert opened with a brief piece of his, Pavane (Opus 50) which, after listening to it in rehearsal and performance, makes me understand whence Jerome Kern cribbed ‘All The Things You Are’ .

I wonder if this piece will get much play outside of Alabama? It requires full symphonic orchestra and chorus (and I can tell you from experience that a piano reduction just isn’t going to cut it. None of us cared much for the piece in rehearsal with piano accompaniment but when we were able to hear the orchestral parts, it all of a sudden made musical sense and the piece solidified very quickly after weeks of ‘Huh?’) It’s short for a requiem, only about 25 minutes long. It has some traditional Latin text, and some colloquial English. I don’t know how the symphonic world learns about new pieces or how they get added to standard repertoire these days. Do they trade bootleg recordings over back channel listserves? Are there international associations which review and rate new pieces and suggest them to major orchestras? I haven’t been able to figure out how to sell my books to a wider audience and they’re relatively inexpensive and simply require one click ordering from Amazon, not weeks of rehearsal and several hundred musicians working together in concert.

I returned to the Alys Stephens Center (site of the Jemison Symphony Concert Hall) again today to attend UAB Theater’s production of Into The Woods. The Alys Stephens Center has multiple performance spaces and the Theater Department uses the Sirote (proscenium) and the Odess (black box) spaces for their productions throughout the school year. It was a last minute decision. I wasn’t going to go as I have a bunch of other things I needed to get done but the siren call of Sondheim proved to be irresistible so I ran down the hill half an hour before curtain for a last minute ticket. (And I implicitly trust any musical that has Carolyn Violi as musical director – she is a genius). I have a soft spot for this show in particular as it was the first Broadway musical I actually saw on Broadway on my first trip to New York (original cast – second week of the run). I ended up seeing it a number of times (thank you Billy Livsey) including a couple of second acting episodes when such things were still possible. That original cast had one of the best and most affecting performances I’ve ever seen on stage, Joanna Gleason as The Baker’s Wife. I still hold it up as a yardstick by which I measure others on stage.

This production made some interesting, but unified design choices, throwing out Disneyana for a steampunk aesthetic. The set was inspired by the late 19th century cast iron and rivet behemoths of Sloss Furnaces, familiar to all residents of Birmingham and environs and perfectly in keeping with the Jules Verne look of the costumes. While there were some individual choices in terms of look that I wasn’t especially fond of, the whole production under the direction of Valerie Accetta reached out and grabbed the audience and held their attention for nearly three hours. I’m often a bit non-plussed at college productions as young performers have such a difficult time portraying maturity and middle-age but I had no such qualms this time.

For those unfamiliar with the musical, the first act is a comic romp of fractured fairy tales in which familiar characters such as Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Little Red Riding Hood end up playing parts in a new quest involving a childless baker and his wife who are determined to break a curse. All comes right at the first act curtain, but then the show continues into act two where we learn there is no such thing as happily ever after as life does not end. Deceptions and actions from the first act, seemingly innocent at the time, have enormous repercussions in the second as the fairytale characters are threatened by a crisis that is too large for any of them to handle as individuals.

The show was created in the later 80s, during the Reagan administration, and much was made at the time as to the disparate natures of act one and act two (and the show is often done in schools with just the first act as a rousing good time). I remember having huge debates with my theater friends at the time about the second act and its meanings and themes and whether book writer James Lapine had failed to contextualize his ideas in the drama as it unfolds. The Act II giant who wreaks havoc was considered, at the time, as a metaphor for the cold war (rapidly drawing towards its conclusion but still very real in 1987 when the show premiered) by some. Others considered it a metaphor for the HIV epidemic which was decimating performing arts communities at the time. I could have gone either way but, through the intervening decades, during which I have seen multiple productions of the show of various size, scope, and quality, I’ve come to the conclusion that the question of what the existential crisis is is immaterial.

Societies of all types face crises all the time and they always will. We’re certainly dealing with a number of them currently including the pandemic and its after effects, the devolution of our politics into two armed camps operating in somewhat separate realities, and the slow collapse of public sector health, education, and welfare. None of these was especially prevalent in the 1980s but they are uppermost in our mind now and we can revisit this theater piece with those ideas rocketing around our brains and learn something about ourselves and our approaches to problems from watching these characters grapple with theirs. And that’s what makes a play immortal. It can act as a mirror for each new audience allowing them to see themselves in a new way. It’s the Sondheim show that’s most likely to still be produced a century from now because of this.

Traditional fairy tales have a role in society. They always have. They help us teach our children who they are. They teach about right and wrong. They teach about social roles. They teach that the world is a dangerous place. They are used, as they are so familiar, in propaganda, in mass media, and in attempts to enforce gender conventions that may not be as healthy as we would like to believe. When the brothers Grimm set about collecting up the German versions of these tales for publication in the 19th century, there were ulterior motives in terms of using the impulses of German Romanticism toward unifying German culture (which eventually led to a modern nation state in 1871). We do somewhat the same thing with our Disneyfied versions of the tales which push for mid-20th century American ideals of a golden age that never truly existed.

What has become important to me, and why I now find the show as affecting as I do, is not the fairy tale aspects, nor the banding together to face danger aspects. It is rather the narrative aspects, the understanding of the power of story and how telling the story of what happened and passing it along it perhaps the most important thing we can do as human beings in regards to our posterity. Every generation will make mistakes. Every generation will forget to look back with the understanding that those in the past were just like us and that if we would take the time to understand their stories, we would be a few steps further ahead on the road to enlightenment. I don’t and won’t have children. But I have created and collected enough story, especially about the pandemic, and made a vessel for transmitting it forward with The Accidental Plague Diaries. And someday, far in the future, someone may pick them up thinking once upon a time, there was a middle aged doctor, and his world was falling apart and he was afraid… and here is his story and hopefully children will listen.