Dateline: Birmingham, Alabama –

A brief entry to let everyone know that I have returned safely from across the pond and will be settling back into Birmingham life over the next few days. I return to work tomorrow afternoon, just in time to pack my things so that the UAB Geriatrics Clinic can move from the 3rd floor to the 4th floor at the end of the week, replacing the Family Practice Clinic which moved from the 4th floor to the 3rd floor. No one has been able to explain to me why this change was necessary for financial, patient care or aesthetic issues. I have a feeling an administrator, working at home during the pandemic came up with the plan as part of a reason to justify salary. I’ve also going to have to get cracking on A Midsummer Night’s Dream if we’re going to begin rehearsals in two weeks.

Yesterday, the last full day in London, was a low key day. Vickie went off on the Harry Potter studio tour to look at the sets and props and costumes from the movie franchise and had a great time. I didn’t go as I’m still working out my rather complicated relationship with the Potterverse and just didn’t feel it was the right time for me to immerse myself in that. Both the books and the films are very bound up in my memories with Steve’s and Tommy’s illnesses and other issues and I didn’t want to pick the scabs on those wounds at this point. I got up, and headed over to Carnaby street and Covent Garden to have breakfast with Natalie Riegel whom I have watched mature from a theater kid to competent young woman over the course of the last couple of decades. She’s currently working for the National Theatre in their production department in an outreach position and loving it. We had a long conversation about theater, reminiscences, and what it’s like to be an American expatriate living and working in London. (She loves it).

After breakfast, I did some shopping, wandered the West End a bit, an then decided a nap was in order and headed back to the hotel for a bit to snooze and rest up for the grueling travel day to come. I then had a wander around Kensington and Knightsbridge, enjoying the first break in the weather all week with a smattering of raindrops and the temperature descending out of the 80s for the first time in several days. While the hotel had air conditioning, it was having difficulties keeping up with multiple days running of weather in the 80s, something that used to be a rare occurrence in the UK but which is becoming more routine with climate change.

Vickie returned from Hogwarts and we headed back to the West End for dinner and a show. (Dinner – Vietnamese convenient to the Theatre Royal on the Haymarket – edible, but not anything special. ) Our choices of play were somewhat limited as it was Monday evening and that’s traditionally a dark evening for most productions. After seeing what was available, we chose the first public performance of a new production of Dario Fo’s ‘Accidental Death of an Anarchist’. Fo, who was all the rage when I was in college, and eventually won the Nobel for literature for his mordant satires of capitalism and his laceration of Western thought processes. This play, which premiered in 1970, and which centers around the death of a likely innocent suspect while in police custody, is topical and timely to our present day. Fo’s theatrical techniques, which harken back to the Commedia Del Arte, require a lot of improvisation, physical comedy and topical references to have the intended impact so the current London production is, in some ways, an adaptation of the original script rather than any sort of faithful remounting. I haven’t seen a lot of Fo staged, and it has usually been in college productions that have been quite deadly so it was interesting to see a full West End mounting which uses a lof of fourth wall breaking, Brechtian alienation techniques, and societal mirroring to get the points across.

I ended up liking it a lot, but not loving it. It may be, as this was the first public performance, that the piece hasn’t quite gelled yet. The female lead had a bit of an impenetrable dialect and no concept of how to hold for laughter which should be corrected by the end of the week. The male lead, while very good, starts his performance at a nine and then dials it up to eleven. It needs more rhythm and build. I’d tell you who the actors were but London theater has abandoned physical programs and I’m hopeless with name retention unless it’s someone I know from other context. The director seems to have found a blend of The San Francisco Mime Troop, Agitprop, Monty Python, and Joe Orton which holds the piece together and the audience was laughing and recognizing it as a comedy, but with very serious themes underlying.

This morning, we got up, packed out bags and boarded a bus for Heathrow. And so began a very long process by bus, foot, airplane, second but, and Uber, dropping us off at the Condo roughly 16 hours after we began. It was better than the 24 hour process from the last trip as we weren’t routed through Amsterdam this time around. During all of this, my travel agent called and I now have a firm booking on a fall trip for me. Expect more travelogue in October.

As for now, I am heading for bed and trying to reorient myself to the Central Time Zone.

Dateline: London, England –

As I did not return to the hotel until sometime after 1 am last night, I was in no condition to write the usual travelogue. The two glasses of wine with dinner and the glass of champagne as an hors d’oeuvre likely did not help. Therefore, I need to condense the weekend into one entry. I hope you will bear with me. I do wonder sometimes who reads these things. The ASO Choir director Philip Copeland told me that he is an avid follower, and as he is the ringleader of this trip, I figure I owe it to him to not peter off just as things are getting interesting from his point of view. So I have at least one fan out there…

The weekend has been quite warm for London with temperatures yesterday and today both ascending into the 80s. It has been clouding over this evening so with luck it will be a bit lower tomorrow. It’s not that hot by either Alabama or even Central California standards but it’s quite warm for a climate that does not have air conditioning has a standard accoutrement. And those places that do have it, it’s not really keeping up with the temperature and the numbers of people occupying them. A few spaces have been sweatboxes. The same thing happens in Seattle when there’s the occasional summer heat wave. It’s likely these are going to become more common due to climate change and HVAC will become more standard in the northern temperate climes that have been able to avoid it in the past.

Saturday morning, I slept in. It had been a busy few days and I felt a bit of a need to recharge the batteries, especially as today was performance day. I did get up midmorning, wander a bit around Kensington, the part of London where our hotel is situated, and finally found some decent coffee at a local Starbucks. It certainly does not exist at the hotel. Vickie was off at the National Gallery and the National Theatre for a matinee of a new play about John Gielgud and Richard Burton and the interpersonal troubles they had creating Burton’s Broadway production of Hamlet in the 1960s. I put on my concert blacks, not the outfit I would have chosen for one of the hottest days of the year locally and eventually made my way to Southwark cathedral for our dress rehearsal with the orchestra.

After some milling around figuring out lineups (the bane of every choral concert – how do you get a hundred people on stage so they look professional and everyone is in their proper place), we were finally able to rehearse our piece with the full orchestra assembled for the occasion. The orchestration, which I had not previously heard, was exquisite and brought new power and nuance to the work. I wasn’t expecting it, but being in a Gothic church (dating back to the middle ages) which was constructed as part of a wealthy priory originally (until Henry VIII had other ideas) and singing the text of the Latin mass gave me a visceral feeling of connection to the space and all of the other people over centuries who have lifted their voices in song and celebration in that sanctuary. I hadn’t really expected to feel that.

Southwark cathedral has a long and varied history which I will not repeat in its entirety but its origins as a religious site go back as early as the 7th century and the original priory appears to have been under the control of William the Conqueror’s half brother Odo after the Norman Conquest. The current church was constructed in the 13th century sometime after the original was destroyed in the great fire of 1212. It was improved and enlarged in the centuries that followed but was falling into ruin by the early 1800s when there was a major restoration. It was damaged by bombs in the Blitz but not destroyed. There are shrapnel scars still visible on the exterior walls. Shakespeare’s brother is buried there and parishoners have included everyone from Geoffrey Chaucer to Charles Dickens over the years. It’s most famous current resident is Hodge, the cathedral cat, who made appearances both at rehearsal and the performance but wisely refrained from entering the stage area.

I can never judge how a performance I am involved with is perceived by an audience. The viewpoint from stage is so strange and your mind is so occupied with technical issues regarding vocalization, blocking, and being aware of other performers, that you can’t possibly just sit back and enjoy it. However, I was fortunate enough to have some friends turn up. Besides Vickie Rozell who has been my companion for the week, Richard Polley who was our tour guide when I was here six months ago came and then David Pohler and Sophia Priolo also made appearances. David had spent the day on the coast swimming in the English Channel and had quite the journey back to London as many trains kept getting canceled out from under him. But he did make it. Their feedback was that the piece we sang was marvelous and the acoustics of that centuries old nave were absolutely wonderful.

Afterwards, following a bit of a yackfest, Vickie and I headed off to the celebratory dinner for the concert participants. I thought the name of the restaurant sounded familiar and, when we arrived, I recognized it as being the same restaurant in which David and I and the rest of the Alabama seven had had our celebratory New Years Eve dinner six months ago. What are the chances… There is a story about that dinner, David, and a bottle of Dom Perignon but that one’s not my story to tell. You’ll have to ask him. Much drinking was had that night. Maybe not quite so much, but enough drinking was had last night.

This morning, Vickie and I got up and had a stroll up to Kensington Palace and through Kensington gardens. We found the memorial plaque to my great-great-uncle Maury Meiklejohn on the wall of the Hyde Park Barracks. He was a military officer who had won the Victoria Cross in the Boer War (and lost an arm in the process). He remained on active duty with the army. He was killed in 1913 when the horse he was riding in Hyde Park spooked and ran. He was having difficulty controlling in with only one arm and the horse was heading for a nanny with a pram and other small children. In order to save the children, he managed to turn the horse but in doing so, was thrown, suffered a head injury and lost his life. He was regarded as quite the hero in Edwardian London for that act. The family has a scrapbook with all the news clippings from the time.

From there, we headed to Regents Park to see the rose gardens but the day was becoming entirely too hot for that much walking so we cut that short and headed off to tea at Fortnum and Mason’s with David Pohler and his partner Jonathan Uday Ramteke. A lovely two hours of champagne, many pots of tea, finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream, petit fours in the elegant surroundings of Fortnum’s Jubilee tea room (completely redone for Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012). I hadn’t had a proper British tea in some years and it was tres elegante. The four of us then wandered through the West End for a while before catching a taxi for the other major event of the day.

We went out to the middle of nowhere East London where a prefabricated arena seating 3,000 people has been erected to host a show unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Entitled ABBA Voyage, it is a holographic recreation of the group in their heyday performing a concert mixed together with live music and enough technical wizardry to make us hardened theater geeks keep looking at each other going ‘How did they….?’ Most of the greatest hits are there (but each of us missed at least one favorite song that was not included). There was much dancing in the aisles. Many of the aging boomer attendees were dressed in ABBA 70s-80s garb. It was an experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it and sang along with thousands of my best friends. The entire arena can be dismantled and the show moved to other places. The original plan was for it to run in London for a year, and then move on, but it’s been so wildly successful here that it’s going to stay until at least next spring. In a few years, it may be coming to an industrial wasteland near you.

This is the first iteration of this sort of technology in entertainment. One wonders what will come in the future as it continues to be perfected and expanded. A Rolling Stones concert as it would have been in 1968? Elvis Presley with a first act of young Elvis and a second act of Vegas Elvis? Judy Garland singing her Carnegie Hall concert eight shows a week? As long as enough archival footage exists, they should be able to create something using current techniques. Is this a good thing or not? I haven’t made up my mind. It can let others experience the ephemeral moment of entertainers from the bast, but isn’t that what’s special about live performance? That it is never the same night after night. It always responds to the energy and cues from the audience and, if the entertainer is only so many bits and bytes, doesn’t that subvert all of that? It will be interesting to see what happens.

Dateline: London, England

Today was another low key, but busy day. It started with a morning rehearsal of the piece for tomorrow night. It just keeps getting better and better and I think we’re going to be proud of the end result. The composer was in attendance at the rehearsal and seemed pleased and he will be at the concert. It’s a new piece, having only been written in 2019. It’s been recorded but not yet released due to Covid delays. It’s been done in Belfast and Kent and some other places in the British Isles but this performance will be the London premiere. Fingers crossed that there won’t be any major hitches tomorrow but the folks behind Vox Anima seem to know what they’re doing and everything has been efficient and well organized so far.

After rehearsal, as it was another day of simply glorious weather, I wandered down past Buckingham Palace and St. James’ Park to Westminster where Vickie had spent her morning. We met up and headed over to Westminster Pier and took a brief cruise down the Thames from Parliament to Tower Bridge and back. It gives another perspective on the city which would not exist were it not for its vital, navigable waterway. The Thames has been a water road between sea and countryside since the ancient Celts and Britons. The Romans used it and constructed their town of Londinium around what is now Tower Hill. Then came the Angles, the Saxons, the Danes and the Jutes each adding a layer, culminating with the Normans in 1066 with William the Conqueror who began construction on his great fortress, the White Tower of the Tower of London in 1075. And here we are nearly a millennium later, the Tower stands. The monarchy William founded stands, although greatly changed. The English people stand despite some of the recent idiocies of their government.

Apres boat tour, we grabbed a quick snack and rode the London Eye. Vickie had never been on it and I had never been on it during daylight hours. The weather was perfect, the views panoramic, the crowds somewhat dismaying. Fortunately, we had had the good sense to pay extra for Fast Track passes and were able to jump the queue. We eventually descended to earth, after sharing our pod with, from what I could tell, was an extended family of Germans, and several French couples, and ambled up the south bank toward the National Theatre where we had our show for the evening. We were several hours early, so we found a table in the shade outside of the NT where a riverside stage was occupied by the London company of ‘A Strange Loop’ who were having a tech rehearsal prior to doing some preview work for their opening next week. I haven’t yet seen the show but I quite liked some of the music we heard.

This evening’s show, Dixon and his Daughters, at the National Theatre was a compact play about the effects of domestic violence and sexual abuse on family systems. The six actresses in the cast were all fantastic. The script is tight and nuanced, but it’s not the most comfortable of things to sit through. I’m glad I saw it, but it’s not a feel good night at the theatre. It was in the small house in the complex formerly known as the Cottlesloe and now known as the Dorfman. Vickie and I, being theater people, immediately assumed that it was named after Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean/American academic and playwright of Death and the Maiden. We couldn’t figure out why the NT would be honoring him so. I then looked it up and it was renamed in honor of a Lloyd Dorfman who gave the NT a rather enormous sum of money. Oh well…

The show was not long so we had dinner after at a South Bank eatery called Giraffe. Why I could not say as there was no giraffe on the menu nor was there anything about the decor to suggest the savannah. Forty years ago, nay even twenty years ago, the South Bank was pretty much a desert. It’s been transformed into the place where young Londoners go to relax and party and avoid the tourist crush in the West End. Restaurants, bars, musical entertainment, and lots of Gen Z and aging Millennials doing what young people do. At times I miss being that age and not being able to keep up with them but then I remind myself that I’m exactly the right age for one born in 1962 and I had my chance to be a twenty something in the 80s and it’s somebody else’s turn now.

Some thoughts about London today: There is construction everywhere and the skyline is dotted with construction cranes promising more and more large buildings and public works. The service workers are cheerful, kind, and really want to help. I presume that this is because those sort of jobs are paid better and the pandemic hasn’t decimated the workforce as it has in the US so those remaining in the sector aren’t overly worked and stressed out. They also don’t have the issues of employment based health insurance here which lead to so many problems on our side of the pond. It’s a cosmopolitan and welcoming place. It’s June and there are pride flags everywhere and no one seems to care at all one way or another. I am reminded of Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s famous quote regarding homosexual relationships. ‘My dear, I don’t care what they do, as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses’.

Long day tomorrow… and so to bed….

Dateline: London, England:

No out of town trips today as it’s the first of three days where the major order of business is musical performance and the whole reason I’m here this week. The ASO chorus (at least those who wanted to come, are joining together with other groups (Birmingham, Oxford MS, Fort Collins CO, Wales, and England) to perform a concert at Southwark Cathedral on Saturday evening. The work we are doing is a recent setting of the Latin Mass by Philip W. J. Stopford called Missa Deus Nobiscum – a hundred or so voices and full orchestra. It’s a relatively easy sing, melodic, and, judging by this afternoon’s first rehearsal with the maestro, going to be very very good. It was coming together quite well at the end of three hours. We have another rehearsal tomorrow and then dress and performance on Saturday.

The rehearsal was in St. Peter’s church, a small parish church in Belgravia on Eaton Square. It has marvelous acoustics in the sanctuary which made even some of our more lackluster moments sound quite good. It’s a relatively new church. The original building took a direct hit during the Blitz destroying most of the sanctuary and killing the then rector who was on the front portico doing fire watch that night. (During my wanderings later in the day, I ran across the monument to the firefighters of London killed in the bombings of World War II. The list of names is extremely long and a sober reminder of what the city endured not all that long ago.)

Rehearsal wasn’t until one PM so Vickie and I got up this morning, had breakfast and headed for the Tate Britain for a museum fix. it wasn’t at all crowded (the National Gallery has been a mob scene when I’ve walked past) and filled with five hundred years of British art including an enormous number of Turner paintings, drawings, and sketches. I’ve always admired his later work which seems so modern and far ahead of its time. I’m not so keen on the modern stuff. Damien Hirst’s animals suspended in formaldehyde tanks do nothing for me. I do, however, like Hockney and find Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud both interesting and disturbing. I left the museum around noon to get to rehearsal leaving Vickie to amuse herself for the afternoon and then met up with her later at St. Paul’s where she sat with her bag full of gorp, rather than crumbs. The pigeons weren’t interested.

We headed across the Millennium Bridge to the South Bank, admiring the views as the day had morphed into a perfect sunny day full of golden hour light, and had dinner at the Swan Pub attached to The Globe theater (fish and chips for her, shepherd’s pie for me without actual shepherd peppered on top) before taking our seats for A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the Globe stage. I picked up some ideas for staging and line delivery for the production I’m directing starting at the end of the month (and also picked up a few things that I know I don’t want to do). The company was strong. The production interesting. But there were no real standouts in the cast other than Hermia – who was played by a woman with dwarfism who could both act and do physical comedy. And, with her size, she dominated every scene she was in.

Sometimes I wonder what Shakespeare would think if he could time travel forward four hundred and some years and see his plays are still being performed, with his original ideas and language relatively intact, and that they’ve even built a full reproduction of his original theater for them. I think he’d be pleased but also a bit confused, given that he wrote them as popular entertainments and not as literature to last. I’ve been telling my cast that Midsummer is a sex comedy, sort of a 1590s American Pie and it need not be approached too reverently.

Rehearsal again in the morning. To bed! To bed!

Dateline: Portsmouth and London, England

Up early and off to Waterloo station for the train to Portsmouth. I love catching trains in the UK. It’s always so 1930s Agatha Christie. ‘I say old chap, I’m off to Waterloo to catch the 9:08 for Portsmouth via Stepney on Green, Twickenham and Tooting Bec.’ I know what I just wrote is a geographic impossibility as they are stations on different rail lines, but let me have my fun. I hadn’t been to a British seaside town in some years, the last having been Brighton in 1984, and it was nice to see that rural towns in the UK look about the same as they always have, either from the window of a railway carriage or from walking along the high street.

The trip to Portsmouth was uneventful. The ASO gang that went headed off en masse to the D-Day museum which was very well done. The centerpiece is an 83 meter long embroidery in 34 panels which tells the story of the Allied Invasion, inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry which detailed the Norman Conquest. I suppose D-Day was sort of the reverse of that on some level. I had never heard of the Overload Embroidery before but I’m glad to have seen it. From the museum, we headed off to lunch on the harbor. The lunch was good but the restaurant’s organization of a large party was not so that curtailed a visit to the historical docks as Vickie and I had to get back to town as we had theater tickets this evening.

Tonight’s show was the new environmental/immersive production of Guys and Dolls at The Bridge Theatre that has received a great deal of positive press. We snatched a couple of last minute tickets, not the best seats, but good enough for the small theater in the round. Much has been made of the three hundred tickets for standees who surround and become part of the set moving from place to place as the set shifts around, directed by stage crew marshals costumed as New York City’s finest. We decided that our sixty plus year old knees were not up to three hours of standing, no matter how good the show, and opted for seats up in the gallery.

Guys and Dolls is an old chestnut but this production is brilliant in terms of its staging. I’m not going to give away all of the tricks in the set and the stage and how new life has been breathed into a seventy five year old show but I was captivated from Runyonland on. And I have rarely seen a show that creates such an atmosphere of exuberant joy in an audience which makes the post curtain call dance party seem like a necessary expression for both cast and audience. An understudy was on for Sky who probably doesn’t have the voice of the principal but otherwise the performances were top notch, especially Adelaide who was funny and endearing rather than annoying. Arvide remains a bucket list role for me so if anyone reading this is planning a future RMTC or VST season, keep that in mind.

The Bridge Theater is just below Tower Bridge so we got to walk across it once in the late afternoon golden hour light, and once in the dark with the city lit up. Movie London would have you believe that Tower Bridge is just downstream of Parliament. It’s actually about three miles away. I think we’ll be down in Westminster tomorrow and we’ll see if the weather continues to hold and there’s a possibility of some good pictures of the houses of Parliament then. Both Vickie and I have been to London multiple times so we haven’t felt a particular need to hit the usual tourist spots but we’re picking up some of the classic views on the way to and from theater. The weather remains perfect for walking. Mid 50s in the early morning warming up to the 70s as the sun comes out. It warms the cockles of my Seattle heart. I (and my pedometer) are happy.

Dateline: London and Taplow, England

I slept hard last night for something over ten hours and feel like I am starting to become time adjusted. At least I don’t feel like I’m in a fog, although I did fall asleep several times while sitting in railway and underground carriages when I didn’t move for more than ten minutes. Today’s agenda, after the typical tourist hotel breakfast buffet (meh – everything was edible but nothing was really good and the coffee was pretty awful in general), was to catch the train for Taplow, a village in Berkshire. It’s not a lot more than a wide spot in the road and a pub but it is the train stop for Cliveden House, home of various notables, most recently the British branch of the Astor family. Those of you of a certain age will know who Lady Astor, the first female MP in the House of Commons was, and others will know of Cliveden from its supporting role in the Profumo affair (which involved Lady Astor’s son and the swimming pool).

Both Vickie and I have a connection to Cliveden. Back in the 70s and early 80s, it was the site of Stanford’s British overseas campus and she lived at the house for six months. She had not been back since graduating and wanted to see it again. My connection is more slender. Back in the days when the Astors were in residence, my grandfather, being tall, athletic, charming when he so chose, and single at the time, was in demand as an ‘extra man’ at weekend house parties and he was invited to Cliveden several times as a guest. How he knew the Astors, I know not but he was of good and social climbing family, had an uncle who was a national hero, and other connections so someone pointed him their way. He had stories of T.E. Lawrence tearing up the drive on his motorcycle and through the front door, various politicians grousing around the dinner table and Mrs. Astor trying to give him life advice (which he took from no one).

The house is now owned by the National Trust but leased out as a boutique hotel. We were able to go into a few of the larger rooms with a tour (which Vickie says are similar to what they were on her sojourn but now with nicer furnishings) but could not wander willy nilly as it is a working hotel and the guests are paying rates equivalent to my monthly salary to pretend they are the super rich of a century ago. We spent most of our time exploring the grounds, including formal gardens, woodlands, and a walk on the bank of the River Thames, far upstream from London where it is a placid country river. The views of the west country from the house, on a bluff above the river valley were gorgeous. Thomas Hardy eat your heart out.

After several miles of walking, our feet were tired so we hopped the train back into town and rested briefly before dinner and show. The dinner? We both had duck l’orange at an Italian Restaurant off the Embankment and then went to see the new production of Cabaret. I had seen it on the previous trip but Vickie had not and I thought it innovative enough to be worth a revisit. The leads have changed from six months ago. (The MC is better, the Sally is not as good) but the who remains pretty phenomenal and really a must see. Vickie and I owe our forty plus year friendship to that show. A misadventure of a production at Stanford was how we originally met each other and started to get each other. I’ve started to realize how lucky you are in life to find even a handful of people who get you and with whom you remains sympatico year after year and she is one of them.

We have to get up to catch a train again in the morning. I’m trusting her to wake me up.

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.