Dateline: Huntsville, Alabama

So I was lazy today. I slept in and didn’t do a whole lot this morning and I decided to keep driving to a minimum and return home via Huntsville. The rain and wet have passed and been replaced with an arctic cold front so, while it was a much nicer day to get in a walk in Nashville, it was much too cold to do so other than to the local Starbucks for a hot caramel macchiato. And what is with their asking if it should be iced or hot? Are they completely ignorant of the frigid temperatures behind the bar? I suppose it’s protocol Tawny Stephens could tell me.

Last night, at the behest of Ellise, I did make it to the Nashville Rep’s production of the curious, but ultimately uplifting theater piece ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ – a one man monologue about mental health, maintenance of sanity, coping with mental illness in loved ones, and the making of lists of all of the little things that make life worth living. Kudos to Mark Cabus for lovely performance. He’s an old friend of Ellise‘s which is why she wanted me to go. I was unaware as to the amount of audience participation going into the evening and Mark, not having yet met me, randomly selected me to play his father in a few scenes requiring relatively simple direction. Thank heavens for Jeanmarie Collins and Spolin classes and years and years of Politically Incorrect Cabaret allowing me to think on my feet and I felt I acquitted myself rather well. The people next to me were sure I was a plant. My additions to the list of brilliant things in the lobby as i departed included audience participation theater, public speaking skills, and Viola Spolin’s improv technique.

Today, after the relatively short drive to Huntsville, I spent an hour or so walking through downtown, the Twickenham district and the park near the Von Braun Center. It was still quite cold so that was plenty of outdoor activity and I retreated late afternoon to the hotel for a nice hot shower, central heating, bad television and a session with my lines for Dear Brutus. This is not going to be an easy script to learn due to the rather flowery Edwardian language. Fortunately, almost everything I have is two person dialogue and that does make the task a bit easier.

The last time I was in downtown Huntsville around the courthouse square, Tommy and I had come up for one of Susanna Phillips Huntington‘s classical music programs for her home town crowd. Central Huntsville looks about the same, but the city seems to be spreading into more and more suburbs and exurbs. Most of my experience with the town has been with the Politically Incorrect Cabaret. We’ve brought the show to Huntsville four times over the years, each time in a new and even more interesting venue. Our first trip was with the original show back in 2004 (and a lunch stop at the Waffle House on our way up led to the birth of the Waffle House Lady character who continues to live on). We played the Flying Monkey Arts Collective which at that time was in a metal Butler Building. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it was June in Alabama and there was no air conditioning and we were all suffering from heat exhaustion by the end of the performance. Tommy had had back surgery only a few weeks before and my cousin Jenny, whom I talked about yesterday, came down for a few weeks to help while he recovered and was here for this show. While hanging out, she made a few of the costumes that still exist including my finale Lederhosen and Ellise’s finale dirndl – the number being ‘Springtime for Homeland Security’ to the tune of Springtime for Hitler from the Producers.

A year later, we were back at the Flying Monkey, which, in the interim, had moved to an old boot factory. A cavernous brick building full of dirt and decay and with no heat. This also would have been fine, but it was February and down around freezing and it was a show in which a couple of my costumes were next to non-existent including the infamous emperor’s new clothes outfit that consisted mainly of body paint and a strategically placed bunch of grapes. Fortunately, I don’t believe any photos survive. I was a good deal younger and in better shape. I wouldn’t want to pull that one off these days. The third trip was a few years later where we were actually in a sort of theater space built into an old house. Little exciting happened that time. Our last trip was back to the Flying Monkey, which has finally moved into a space in a sort of alternative arts mall and which comes with climate control and working plumbing. That show is most famous for my completely going up on my lyrics in the opening number. (The tech people hadn’t turned up for the tech rehearsal so the first time we had lights and sound was the performance. They hit a light cue, I was unexpectedly blinded by lights that I hadn’t known were there, and every lyric flew out of my brain.) As I approach sixty, it’s just getting harder and harder to learn roles. I suppose it’s good brain work and practice but it is torturous. I can already wait to age to the point where I have an earpiece and stage management can feed me all my lines.

Tomorrow, I am meeting some friends here in Huntsville for lunch before returning home. The rest of the weekend shall be devoted to housework and more line learning. Now it’s time to settle in to The King and I on PBS with Ken Watanabe and Kelli O’Hara. Tommy and I saw the production in New York a few years ago and enjoyed it.

Dateline Nashville, Tennessee:

And another quick jaunt, this time for business purposes. I was hired as an expert witness to defend a large Nashville academic institution in a legal matter which I cannot go into the details to in public forum so, if you’re really interested, you can ask me next time you see me. I drove up last night, fortunately ahead of the storm and became ensconced in my hotel room (yet another Hampton Inn…) on West End Avenue which sounds like it should be in Manhattan or in London, but isn’t. I conked out relatively early and there were router problems so I wasn’t able to get on line and write things up.

I got up this morning to a blustery day. Cold, wet, windy, and definitely not the type of weather conducive to city touring. I felt in need of exercise, so I walked the mile or so to the attorney’s office under Tommy’s University of Montevallo golf umbrella that I keep in the car for such purposes. I got a number of dirty looks as I think the locals assumed it was LSU (same colors). The Vanderbilt campus was grey and wet. Centennial Park was grey and wet and the Parthenon was hidden behind a large construction site. I did eventually find the attorney’s office, got checked in, transported to the courthouse, and then spent several hours on a bench outside the court room as the trial was running long and my 10 am testimony was delayed to sometime in the afternoon. Then another grey wet walk to lunch and back to the hotel where I should be working on my lines for Dear Brutus but am reading Stephen King instead. Priorities. Tonight, I am off to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center to see a good friend of my good friend Ellise in a one man play called Every Brilliant Thing.

I was going to spend an extra day or two in Nashville, but the hotel prices are ridiculous so I am leaving tomorrow. I don’t need to be back until Saturday so I’ll make a side trip somewhere for Friday night. I was thinking Huntsville. I haven’t been for a while and it’s apparently been growing by leaps and bounds. My other thought was Memphis where I also haven’t been for donkeys years. I would just need to make sure I got there in time for the march of the Peabody Ducks. When in Memphis…

My first visit to Nashville occurred when I was two and I have absolutely no recollection of it. It was to meet my cousin Jenny as an infant. My mother, Alison Saunders, had one younger sister, Margery. They were close their entire lives and both eventually ended up in Seattle where my mother’s three children and Marge’s three children, my first cousins, all grew up in a tumble together. In the early 60s, as Marge’s husband, my uncle Don, was establishing his career, he spent a brief time on faculty at Vanderbilt which is why Jenny, the oldest of the three Hellmann kids, was born there. Jenny is two years younger than I, but skipped a grade so was only a year behind me in school and we followed many of the same patterns in adolesecnce and young adulthood, going to the same high school and to Stanford together. Life sometimes throws us together intensely for a while. Sometimes we barely see each other, but whenever we’re together we always pick up exactly where we left off. We look very alike and had a standard joke that someday we would play Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night (she is as tall as I am in heels). Fifteen years ago, I did play Sebastian but, alas, Jenny was in Seattle and Karla Stamps had to fill in as Viola. I’ve always suspected that late in life, the two of us will end up living together for mutual support and family convenience, a pair of distaff relatives in Edwardian eccentricity, sort of like supporting characters in one of the lesser novels of E. M. Forester.

Jenny and I, as the two eldest, have very strong memories of a trip to San Francisco together when she was two and I was four, to visit our mutual grandparents. Our grandfather, who at the time had been recently fired from the chancellorship of UCSF after running afoul of UC politics, was in no mood for toddlers underfoot and the two of us had quite a time exploring our mothers’ childhood home under the indulgent eye of our grandmother who, as a pediatrician, knew quite a lot about the healthy development of children. There is a famous photo of the two of us sitting in the pot cupboard under the sink in the kitchen, having taken out all the pots for very important childhood reasons. I’ll post it if I can find it.

I didn’t return to Nashville for some years. Steve and I came up for a long weekend sometime in the late 90s. I think it was in that brief window between our move to Birmingham and his illness which precluded travel. There was some sort of geriatrics meeting which I went to and he saw the sights. I remember making a trip to the Hermitage with him (he always wanted to go to anything that connected with 18th and 19th century American history) and I think we went to the huge Opryland hotel for some reason which had nothing to do with American history and more to do with American excess. Tommy had a professional meeting at Opryland for one of his music conferences about ten years ago and came up for a week and I joined him for the weekend portion. We stayed across the street from the Opryland hotel for a fraction of the cost. He want to music educator stuff. I went to the outlet mall and bought polo shirts. I really don’t recall anything else about either one of those trips. I might recall more if I got out into the city, but not in this weather.

One of these days I’ll go to the Grand Ol Opry for a show. Modern country really isn’t my thing but I do like the classic country of the 50s through the mid 70s. I was once in a burlesque of the Grand Ol Opry – a show within a show called the Down Home Opry from The Phantom of the Opry. (Phantom plot – classic country music. My character was the Fermin equivalent). I was in the World Premiere cast. To my knowledge, it’s never had another production. I’ll leave it to you, gentle readers, to determine why.

My head is a whole jumble of things tonight and, as I have an extra hour courtesy of our 19th century agricultural time change system, I might as well do a little writing to sort things out. Anastasia the cat is snuggled up and not being too demanding and the house is quiet. It’s too cold for the teens to get raucous in the park across the street as they are want to do on Saturday nights when the weather is fine.

The first feeling is one of a deep tiredness. I’m not sure if it’s physiologic or psychosomatic. It’s been going on for a month or so now and seems to come over me in waves. It’s never bad enough to keep me from meeting all of my obligations but if I stop and sit down and do nothing, I have an unnerving tendency to fall asleep rather quickly for about half an hour. I have to keep going and keep moving or I am just no good. I’m sleeping reasonably well and getting enough so I don’t know what the trigger is. The biggest issue is choral rehearsals after a long day. If I sit still and try to focus, it just doesn’t work so my mind tends to wander and off I go. Perhaps I have new onset ADHD at the age of 57. The second feeling is an odd one of time being compressed and the past and the present starting to coexist. I think this was started up by the reunion last week which brought up a whole lot of who I used to be stuff so now my various past selves have taken up a little bit of real estate in my central nervous system and are competing with my present self. I can do something as simple as drive down University Boulevard coming home from work and I suddenly feel like it’s 1998 and 2004 and 2019 all at the same time. It’s very strange. Memories of the same activity or the same surroundings just seem to be layering one on top of the other. It’s an interesting texture but I expect it will fade some over the next few weeks, at least until I go to my 40th high school reunion next year, presuming it’s held a weekend I can actually go.

The major project of the week was singing with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra Chorus – we had a Brahms piece, Nanie and Borodin’s Polovstian Dances with the rest of the evening being made up of Grieg’s Peer Gynt. About five years ago, Tommy more or less twisted my arm and made me go audition for the group. I hate auditioning, especially musically. I always feel horribly self conscious and like I have absolutely no talent whatsoever and my Impostor Syndrome takes over like nobody’s business. Tommy had faith and, as I sang for Philip Copeland, he at least didn’t stop playing the piano and stare at me and I got an email a week later saying I was in. I enjoy choral singing. It’s the one time I feel like I can sing just as myself. I don’t like singing solo as myself as I feel so inadequate. The one exception is singing in character. Give me a role to play and I can sing whatever. When I pack myself away in order to act, I seem to be able to pack the Impostor Syndrome away along with that piece of my ego. Strange, but true. The concerts went well, especially the Borodin. The bass part seems to consist mainly of screaming high Ds and E flats fortissimo but when you have fifty guys doing it together, it sounds pretty good. There was a small boy of about five sitting up in the balcony with his family tonight. When the orchestra played ‘The Hall of the Mountain King’ section of Peer Gynt (you know it – it’s used in every other movie trailer), he jumped to his feet, was crashing his fists together with the timpani and the look of pure joy on his face was amazing and a good reminder of why we do what we do and how important serious music is. I have to give a shout out to Chris Confessore who conducted this concert. He is one of the easiest conductors for a chorus to follow and its very simple to stay with him and give him what he wants. While watching him at work, I also noticed how much he conducts with his mouth. It’s unusual but it works and something the audience will never see. (Sorry if I’m giving away a trade secret).

I was a judge today for the Trumbauer Competition, the Alabama High School Theater competition – sort of like the playoffs for the team sport for those who are not athletically inclined. I’ve done this off and one for over a decade. The people I was doing theater with fifteen years ago have now become respected high school theater teachers and they rope their friends into judging. Melissa Bailey called first so I showed up at Mountain Brook High School at 8 am for District 6 semi-finals and was assigned to men’s dramatic and comedic monologues – both novice and varsity, for the next six hours. Some very talented kids, and a good reminder, now that I am old enough to be their grandfather, of the urgency and angst and emotions of adolescence. Over the last couple of years, I have really started to feel myself settle into elderhood and the natural role of mentor, counselor, and storyteller to the young. This was just an extension. It was also interesting to hear monologues from plays that were new in my era being treated as venerable classics. Let’s face it, the 1930s were the same distance away from my high school years as my high school years from today so the world of my youth is as ancient to them as Bonnie and Clyde was to me.

The general tiredness has kept me from moving ahead on some projects as fast as I would like. I have to get cracking on my lines for Dear Brutus. (I have a good sense of the character and the shape of the scenes but the words, not so much). I have two chapters of the book I’m working on, one on dementia and one on death, that I’ve started but which I can’t seem to break the backs on. They don’t want to flow the way I want them to. And, per usual, I need to knock out an MNM column or two. I have been working on this year’s CME and nearly have that done. I’ve also been preparing for a trial I’m testifying in next week up in Nashville. (Prepare for some brief travelogue moments). I also got all of Tommy’s vocal and piano music that I have no real use for boxed up and down to the University of Montevallo for distribution to the faculty and students. It’s not easy watching pieces of him go but it’s better that things like that get out into the world where they will be appreciated and used rather than sit on shelves gathering dust in some sort of silent shrine. I still have a lot more decluttering/downsizing to do but I figure if I get one project done every couple of months, I’ll remain on my schedule of being prepared to move into a condo in a couple of years.

A couple of last thoughts about the Stanford Reunion before I close up shop. The first is how the bell curve starts to spread with age. I know this well theoretically professionally but it was in such evidence when I looked out over hundreds of class of 84 gathered together. We’re all roughly the same age but we looked like we covered a twenty year span of mid 40s to nearly 70. We all have had relatively soft lives, as lives go in the upper middle and upper classes with access to health care and reasonable nutrition so I think a lot of the variability is genetic chance. The first rule of aging, as I have told my patients for decades, is to choose your parents carefully. The second was how much physically smaller many of them were than they were in my memories. I’ve been thinking about why that is and I think I’ve figured it out. I was a very small child. Not only was I small, but I was also a late bloomer. I was the smallest boy in my grade up until about 7th or 8th and I didn’t hit five feet until I turned fourteen. I then proceeded to put on five inches the summer between 8th and 9th grades and another four over the course of the next year. By the time I got to college, I was just under six feet (topping out at just under six foot one) but I still considered myself a very small person as I had been one for most of my life. I didn’t really start to embrace my adult size until my mid 20s, after I had left college, so I think my Stanford years and the people I knew there are seen through a lens of feeling small that no longer exists. Running into them again without it, I can see their physical sizes more clearly.

I will tell one story. When I was a sophomore in high school, my school, The Lakeside School in Seattle, went through a capital campaign and expansion which included building a new theater which opened in the middle of my junior year. The first time I walked into the building and looked up into the flies, I knew I wanted to learn how to use the space and I volunteered for tech theater. The first show I worked on was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with a guy named Graham Winton as McMurphy. Graham went to Stanford with me and then off to Julliard. He had a role on a soap, some stage success and a couple of films. I helped build the set, ran sound, and was a general stage hand. By the end of the run, I was hooked and over the next year and a half, did pretty much every backstage position there was. I found that I was best suited to stage management, rather than design or carpentry or electrics and moved from there into directing. I looked at people like Graham who had talent and were magnetic on stage and was sure I could never do that – I’d leave acting to actors, besides which I had colossal stage fright. I had no idea that in my maturity I’d have that conquered and be able to hold my own with the truly talented.

It’s late and so, in the immortal words of Samuel Pepys, to bed.

Dateline: Stanford University

What’s going through my head is a line from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies from early in the show as the ex-Follies girls gather for their reunion among the ghosts of their past selves. Dimitri Weissman, the producer says ‘…a final chance to glamorize the old days, stumble through a song or two and lie about ourselves a little. I have, as you can see, spared no expense. Still, there’s a band, free food and drink, and the inevitable Roscoe, here as always, to bring on the Weissman girls’. I’ve gotten old enough now to understand that show, the double meaning in the title and, as I finish up my long weekend on Campus for my 35th college reunion, understand more than ever the idea of the ghosts of our past selves occupying the same temporal space when a reunion occurs.

I’ve spent the last few days in a bit of cognitive dissonance. Surely my Stanford years were only about ten years ago rather than nearly forty. It doesn’t seem like it could have been that long. How can the campus have changed so much? Where are some of my familiar landmarks? As I wandered the campus looking at old dorms, old classrooms, and all sorts of other things firmly imprinted on my past, I was operating with a mental map that’s decades out of date. The east side of campus in particular has been wholly redone – no physics tank, no Albers wall. The chemistry building in which I did my undergraduate research completely gone. The main chemistry building, which was an island in a sea of green lawns, now hemmed in by any number of new massive structures devoted to advanced sciences and computing.

There’s something about the air and the light of the mid-Peninsula that is unique. Everytime I’ve ever been back I’ve felt it. There’s a mild golden haze, an undertone of eucalyptus in the air and the breeze coming in off the bay with the promise of saltwater and the slight decay of marshes that takes me immediately back to my younger self. Standing in the quad, I could close my eyes and breathe and suddenly feel the person I used to be once upon a time, back when the world was full of infinite possibilities, back before roads were taken, partners met, and age began to take its toll. Maybe I can bottle it somehow and keep it at home and when things get to crazy, just breathe it in as some sort of primitive aromatherapy.

Stanford has changed how they do alumni reunions. It’s no longer an every class for itself kind of thing, it’s now a big blow out weekend every year and all the classes get invited back every five. So, this year, it’s all the class years ending in four and in nine. Huge parties, pavilions everywhere. Lots of food and drink. For the class of 84, lots of late 50s on the cusp on retirement and grandparenthood coping with elderly parents and the existential questions of did I make the right choices? Am I happy in my life? What did Stanford as a launching pad mean for me and my life? Sitting around tables, drink in hand, listening to snatches of conversation ‘running the American division of multinational conglomerate’…’senior hedge fund manager’…’redoing the vacation house in Vail’ it’s easy to feel entirely inadequate and then people ask about you and your life and are amazed that I’ve been able to find a balance between medicine and theater and that I’ve continued to write in one way or another and a few, who are Facebook friends tell me that my musings over the last year and a half have really helped them understand their issues better and you feel maybe you did make some good choices along the way.

I’ve run into a lot of people I haven’t seen since the 1980s and have gotten my spiel down to an elevator speech of ‘medical school, academic clinical geriatrician, two husbands, widowed twice, no kids, back to theater in my 40s’ which seems to cover most of the basics. It’s interesting to hear other peoples variations on this, compare it with what you thought might have happened to them over the years and then move on to the next. The alumni folk, having it down to a science, equipped us all with very large font name tags so we don’t have to guess. I’d say my friend/peer group is mainly not here as I seem to only know about 10% if that of the 84s. Must be the Econ majors that have turned up in full force.

I registered and got my swag on Thursday morning and then met Craig Mollerstuen for lunch. We were roommates three out of four years. (The fourth was the year we weren’t guaranteed on campus housing so we had some very odd wandering around…) The two of us went on a nostalgia walking tour looking at old dorms and the like and catching up on each others lives. Then it was the big fancy dinner party for everyone in the main quad. Boeuf Bourgingon, Salmon, Roasted Brussell Sprouts, too many drinks and joined by Elizabeth Chavela Bryant. She’s actually class of 85 but she wanted to hang. Friday, various reunion panels. mini lectures highlighting what the University is up to, dinner with Vickie Rozell and then the class of 84 party at a restaurant in Palo Alto. This morning, after breakfast where we added Renee Fallon to the mix, the theater folk all got together on stage at Memorial Auditorium. It was nice to see some of the old time faculty and staff who are still around like Bill and Barbara Cleveland and Paul Strayer. Bill Eddelman, who was my musical theater professor back in the day, turned up and I got to thank him for my life. He wrote the letter of recommendation that was probably the one that was most responsible for getting me into medical school.

I did not go to the football game this afternoon. Sitting in the sun in an open stadium for hours just didn’t appeal. Instead, more walking, a trip to the Stanford Museum and Shopping Center and then back to Vickie’s house where I’m busy typing away at this and a couple of other projects.

I won’t tag everyone I ran into this weekend or sought out as it would take me too long and I would inevitably forget someone important. You all know who you are and I’m grateful to have seen you and hope it’s not quite so long until our paths cross in person again.

Dateline: Palo Alto, California

Actually, I’m just across the city line in Menlo Park, a few blocks from the great wall of Facebook headquarters, staying at my friend Vickie Rozell‘s house. I decided this year to return to my Bay Area roots and attend my 35th Stanford class reunion. The only other one I ever went to was the 10th and I was still in California at that time, living in Sacramento so it wasn’t that big a deal to go down to the city for the festivities. Steve went with me and was having quite the temper tantrum that evening about something which I’ve totally forgotten so I don’t remember a whole lot about the party other than dinner with David Kudler at a restaurant that had seen better days.

The journey here was uneventful. Planes were on time, the weather was fine, I paid extra for a Delta Comfort+ seat so I didn’t have to sit with my knees tucked under my chin for hours on end and I watched a couple of movies so MNM will have something to write about later this week. The San Jose airport is a good deal larger than it used to be back in the 80s and south Bay rush hour traffic is worse. I didn’t get in until mid evening so I haven’t made it to Campus yet to see who else turned up. That happens in an hour or so.

My memories of my four years on the farm are vivid and it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s been more than a third of a century since I was here spreading my wings as a young adult. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had not gotten into Stanford and had gone to college elsewhere. How different would I be? The education, while good, was probably no better or worse than I would have received elsewhere. The biggest difference being a smaller student body than a big state school so big enough for a full immersive college experience and small enough not to get lost. Of the roughly 1500 incoming Freshmen in the fall of 1980, I got to know about a quarter over the course of my four years. (I’m OCD enough to have kept track). Some of them have gone on to have brilliant careers and recognizable names. Most are living relatively anonymous upper middle class existences somewhere. There are a half dozen or so who remain part of my life and who will always be part of my life, no matter where we live or what paths life takes us on. We were all thrown together in that brief period between the aftermath of Watergate and the rise of HIV for some golden years in the California sun of a nascent Silicon Valley. I think I ended up the better for it, even if I have to have the occasional skin cancer removed as payment later in life.

My mother saved all my letters home from college (and I have all of her letters to me from that time period in a box somewhere). The Stanford archives was looking for this sort of paired correspondence from various eras so I think I’ll dig them all out and send them along. It amuses me to think that some scholar in a couple hundred years might try to use them to reconstruct everyday life in the Reagan years. My contribution to history from being a pack rat.

I do have a little trepidation at heading off to campus. My memories of most of these people is of young adults, full of life and possibility and the imaginings of youth and I’m going to find a lot of folk who are on the cusp of their Medicare years, thinking about retirements and grandchildren. But that’s the way the world works and railing against it doesn’t change the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. I have a feeling I’ll come out of this weekend either enthused and enlivened, or melancholy and regretful about the roads not taken. It remains to be seen which one.

I went to the theater tonight to see David Strickland and Caleb Clark in Terrific New Theater’s production of ‘The Story of My Life’. It’s a two person chamber musical about which I knew next to nothing but I always enjoy watching both of them on stage (and I’ve been sharing the stage with David since he was twelve) so I knew I couldn’t miss it. It’s the story of Tom and Alvin, childhood friends who grow up, eventually grow apart but who always remain part of each other’s lives and stories. Tom, the more traditional one, becomes a famous author. Alvin, the more eccentric one, stays in the small town running his father’s bookstore. The book and the lyrics are structured around the stories of their time together, and separate and how their young lives cast long shadows on their maturity. It ended up being very moving for me as it rang all sorts of personal chords. How do you compose an obituary for someone who is the other half of your story? (I’ve had to do that twice). Why is it necessary to tell our stories and what do they mean to us? (Which is I suppose what I’ve been doing with my infamous long posts over the last eighteen months). What is the process of writing and what do books mean? (A big question for me who has always been affected by tsondoku (google it if you don’t already know what it means)).

The performances were superb. (I could never handle a two person musical. We’ll see if I can handle a two person play this spring). Tam DeBolt‘s direction and Sam Tumminello‘s music direction were both spot on. I just wish the score had been a bit stronger. Way too much was cribbed from better pieces – mainly Sondheim (a lot of Sunday in the Park and Pacific Overtures) but also Stephen Schwartz (with a big ballad straight out of Meadowlark). It will have a long shelf life as it’s a showcase for two strong male talents that has minimal technical requirements. If you’re in town and free either this weekend or next, by all means go.

I kept tearing up at odd times, not at the moments that script and score was telegraphing, but at quiet things where two male characters were just comfortable with each other and enjoying each others company. I think it’s because it would bring on flashes of times spent with Steve or Tommy or maybe with a number of other close platonic male friends I’ve had over the years. I don’t really have one of those at the moment and really haven’t since Thurston Howell III moved to South Carolina and I think my psyche misses having someone around to fill that role.

Today, October 11, is National Coming Out Day. The first one was in 1988, just before I officially came out. I think I was aware that it was happening and I was, at the time, grappling mightily with whom I was. I had moved to Sacramento to start my internship the previous June and, with being, in a new city, was dabbling with dating men. At the time, I was hopelessly smitten with a man I had met in New York City a year or so earlier but whom I had recognized as a pathologic personality. I had sent him packing, but we had corresponded some by mail and then, in that October, he had suddenly turned up in Sacramento on a Greyhound bus. When i did not welcome him with open arms, he immediately joined the navy, washed out of basic training within a month,and then turned up on my doorstep again around Thanksgiving. I ultimately bought him a bus ticket back to NYC after his pathologies continued to rear their ugly heads and never saw him again. (He did pop back into my life briefly several decades later looking for money. To date, I think he’s the only person I’ve ever had to block from my Facebook. Some things never change.)

By the new year, after that whole experience, I was emotionally exhausted, confused, starting to come out socially but still firmly closeted at work, and in the middle of internship in an era before the rules on work hours took effect. Not a good combination. In short, I was a mess. That is how Steve found me when we met in February and his force of nature personality helped free my emotional self and allowed me to put all the pieces in place to live an authentic life as an out gay man. By the second national coming out day on October 11, 1989, we were a couple, I was out in every facet of my life and finally on my way to becoming a whole adult. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had not met Steve and I shudder.

One of my biggest problems regarding my coming out process was a significant lack of role models. In the late 70s disco era of my high school years, I was aware of gay society in Seattle and where to find it on Capitol Hill but it was full of, to me, much older men who were only interested in superficial things. There was no one, to my knowledge, at my high school or in my group of friends who was LGBTQ or whom I could confide my confused feelings about such things. College wasn’t much better – there were gay men involved in theater but I had this studious double science major side to me that didn’t gibe with them particularly and then, being in the SF Bay area at the beginnings of the HIV epidemic, really clamped down my feelings further.

Medical education comes with an enormous unwritten curriculum about what a doctor is and should be. Everything you do is scrutinized as the system tries to mold you into a certain type. I don’t cotton well to such treatment and rebelled in lots of little ways. This led me to a lot of unhappiness (and the worst depression of my adult life – there was a time in my third year when I could barely get out of bed) med school sponsored therapy sessions with a very nice counselor (with whom I never mentioned my sexuality – I wonder if he guessed that was the elephant in the room), and a feeling that if I wanted to be a success in my chosen career field, I would need to remain closeted. Or, if I should happen to come out, I would have to go into HIV medicine – that was seen in the late 80s as the only really acceptable choice for openly gay men. Residency, when I got there, wasn’t much better. There were a few faculty I suspected were LGBTQ but they were firmly closeted.

Then, everything changed. The early 90s brought new visibility. I came out. Several med students arrived who were open from the get go. A faculty member friend came out. I wasn’t alone. I had Steve at home who believed in me. I fell into the correct career path. I no longer hid who I was, I decided to live a complete and authentic life and let the chips fall where they may. I’ve lost out on career opportunities as a gay man that a straight man would have been offered and, especially early in my career, I realized I would have to be twice as good to receive half the credit, but the ability to live and breathe and just be one flawed but striving human being has more than made up for that. These days, when I am lecturing to med students, I’ll usually casually drop in a reference to the fact that I’m a gay man. I think it’s important for them to hear that. And I know there’s a student out there who needs to know he or she will be successful despite what they are feeling about themselves. If I’d had role models and encouragement in my early training, life might have turned out different but it’s meant that in a lot of ways I am one of the pioneers of out gay medical faculty and maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Dateline: Atlanta, Georgia

I should have written this last night but by the time I came in and got myself settled, I just wasn’t in the mood for some reason. I had a lot to say but the actual physical act of getting out the laptop and letting my fingers dance across the keyboard just didn’t appeal for some reason. Writing when I am out of town is good discipline but I have a feeling that my psyche needed to turn that part of me off last night, at least temporarily, for some reason.

The cooler weather began to descend on the Southeast yesterday with a light breeze full of the promise of fall so I did some walking through this section of Atlanta. Atlanta has never been one of my favorite cities. It has no real sense of place or purpose and everything feels like it was created out of whole cloth starting in the Reagan 80s and exists primarily as a gathering spot for people to make money. Buckhead is full of shiny upscale buildings and hotels and shops but it’s missing a soul.

I ended up at Lenox Square mall and hit the Apple Store. Back when we were first together, Tommy and I would make pilgrimages here before Birmingham had its own and Tommy would emerge with the latest and greatest iPhone/iPad/Mac and I would emerge with a bill. My phone has had battery problems so I had it replaced while I explored Brooks Brothers, Nieman Marcus, Bloomingdales and other quality retailers. I bought nothing. I can’t say much for men’s fashion at the moment. There were a couple of Versace shirts that I liked but for $900, Donatella better be hand delivering to the house and she was not in evidence.

Phone repaired and lunch eaten, off on another walk and then a mid afternoon nap before heading down to midtown for the evening. A shout out to those who suggested a performance of ‘Becoming Nancy’ at the Alliance which I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s not quite ready for Broadway (the second act is too long,the whole thing needs to be tightened, the first act climax is not well staged, and the scenic design is uninspired) but it’s got the makings of a good show and has one of the better scores I’ve heard in the last few years.

‘Becoming Nancy’ is based on a British young adult novel of the same name and takes place in East Dulwich, a London suburb that’s a lot like its name. The time is 1979, the disco era is about to give way to Thatcher/Reagan capitalism and we meet young David Starr – a theater kid obsessed with music and musicals who desperately wants the role of Fagin in the school production of Oliver. To his shock, he’s given the role of Nancy as he’s the only student who can sing her big ballad, As Long As He Needs Me, effectively. He decides to rise to the challenge, and finds that unleashing his inner Nancy leads to family complications with his traditional parents, loving aunt, loutish sister… and then there’s the gorgeous footballer Maxie who has been cast as Bill Sikes, the love interest. Anyone with any knowledge of cultural history, the construction of musical comedies, and the current vogue for LGBTQ empowerment stories can see where the show is going to go and it ticks off the plot points one by one but the energetic and talented cast carries us along on a feel good ride. It’s a bit similar to last seasons The Prom (which also originated at The Alliance) and has echoes of Love, Simon (which takes place in Atlanta).

The show connected with me in some unusual ways. Young David, the lead, is played by Zachary Sayle who was a Birmingham theater kid back when Tommy and I were getting our start. I never did a show with him. He was Ralphie in Center Stage’s production of ‘A Christmas Story’ back in the day (one of the few CS productions I wasn’t a part of) and shortly after got the part of Ralphie in the musical version in its pre-Broadway try out and hasn’t looked back. Watching him, made me think back on all of the other theater kids I’ve seen grow up over the last fifteen years, especially the boys who are committed to doing good work in a culture that denigrates performing arts (and elevates football to a religion). David is seventeen in 1979, making us exactly the same age so I found myself reflecting back on my confused and angst ridden and hormonal teen years. Theater ended up saving me the way it saved him; it was finding my tribe, the people with whom I fit and who gave me acceptance. I wasn’t able to be open about myself for some years but I hesitate to think what might have happened had I not had that community giving me constructive support and encouragement. Of course, I was backstage during my youth; the performing didn’t come until much later.

There’s one number partway through the first act where the football (European style) team and the drama kids are both showing themselves and the audience that they aren’t that different. Both activities are about learning to work together as a team to create something more than any of them could do as individuals. I think that was my favorite message moment in the show. Some of the other messages are a bit heavy handed. David’s best friend, a young black woman, has a great power ballad to her childhood friend who has joined a nativist/racist movement lamenting about how all he can see now is the color of her skin. That whole subplot, where neo-Nazis turn on the ‘others’ and there’s a riot at a Rock Against Racism concert, carries a lot of baggage in Trump’s America but I’m not sure that a musical comedy of this nature can carry all that weight. The end of the show, where the school finally performs Oliver (with nods to the original score, and the costumes and staging from the film version) is a hoot, especially to those who have some idea how musical theater actually works. We see it mainly from a backstage perspective and I was giggling throughout.

This is its last weekend, but I think it’s got a future. Give it another try out run or two to tinker and they’ve got a show.

Dateline: Atlanta, Georgia

And it’s time for a quick weekend getaway. I’ve been tethered to the house most of the last few months and this was the first weekend since returning from Europe that didn’t have a bunch of stuff that had to get done. I was originally going to go to the beach, but then the HVAC died and the only time I could be home for a prolonged period of time for it to be replaced during business hours was Friday afternoon. They didn’t finish it up and ask for a very large check until nearly 6:30 and I wasn’t going to drive until Midnight or one am so that meant retooling plans to somewhere somewhat closer to home. Therefore, I threw some things in a suitcase, hopped in the car and decided to spend a weekend in Atlanta, something I haven’t done in a while. It’s not my favorite city, especially in this sweltering weather, but it’s urban, close by, and I got a deal on the Buckhead Hampton Inn.

I think I’ll look for something at the theater or a film that will never come to Birmingham for tomorrow evening, and I am walking distance from Lenox Square so I’ll do some upscale window shopping while I’m here as well. I’ve also made a Sunday brunch date with an old high school friend whom I haven’t seen in decades so it should be a relatively pleasant weekend away from the world of geriatrics and the world of theatrical rehearsals.

I went down to the Pizitz (an old downtown department store redone as yuppie condos and an international food hall) last night for dinner and to check out the new movie theater in the basement. Around the same time that Steve and I moved to Birmingham, a gang of crazy locals started up a local film festival known as Sidewalk. It’s grown in size and prestige over the years and they have just built a two screen theater in the Pizitz basement so that Birmingham finally has a place to see films other than the ones that open wide at every cineplex in the country. The space is great, reminding me a bit of an updated Harvard Exit (one of my high school hang outs in Seattle during the heyday of revival houses) and I was able to have cocktails, Chicken Shwarma from Eli’s Jerusalem Grill, and enjoy the film all without leaving the air conditioned environment. (A plus when it’s over 100 degrees in October). The movie was ‘The Death of Dick Long’ which was filmed locally last year and several friends are in the cast. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It reminded me a lot of early Coen Brothers and MNM will be weighing in on it soon.

I’m planning on lying in tomorrow morning before going out to explore. If I get a burst of energy, I have two projects with me – the next chapter of the book I’m writing and my lines for ‘Dear Brutus’. It remains to be seen how constructive I’ll actually get. I’m going to wrack my brain and see if I can come up with an Atlanta story for y’all from my past as well.

Time for another long post I suppose. It’s been a few weeks. I’ve had some ups and some downs – last week in particular was rough and I’m not entirely certain why. I just know that life’s minor annoyances were getting to me and causing some major emotional swings. I think it’s because I don’t have anyone with whom to share them and let off steam. It’s caused me to be a bit short with people (sorry if I’ve been rude to any of you). In the past, when I would get like this, it was usually a sign that I needed some time away. I actually have a free weekend coming up so I’m thinking I should use it to escape somewhere for a couple of days but I’m having a hard time getting myself out of a rut to plan anything.

It’s at least partly the weather. Here we are the first week of October and it was about 100 degrees out today. We’ve had week after week of hot and humid and no rain. Everyone in North Central Alabama is miserable. Things are finally supposed to start cooling down this weekend but I’ll believe it when it actually happens. The never ending July has put a huge stress on my HVAC causing the downstairs unit to more or less give up the ghost. (It is cooling down to about 80, but no lower). It is due to be replaced on Friday and I will be many thousands of dollars poorer. Having to write that check makes me not want to spend too much on myself at the moment. It’s my Scottish heritage showing. The heat stress is also wreaking havoc on the landscaping and lawns, despite my remembering to water (and having the water bill to prove it). I’ve never been much of a yard person, and this climate makes that even more so, and I’m more than ready to downsize into a condo on that score. It’s going to take a while to get my life in order in other departments though.

A lot of the energy over the last couple of weeks went into this year’s Politically Incorrect Cabaret – Demo-loution which we performed last Saturday evening to a sold out crowd. I wrote the show over Labor Day weekend but in the three and a half weeks between first draft and performance, so much insanity has erupted in DC that it was already somewhat out of date by the time we got it on stage. At least we had made the wise decision to focus more on the Democratic side of the coin this time around because there’s no way I could have written a satire on what’s happened to the Trump administration over just the last week. Instead, we had Elizabeth Warren doing ‘Imagine’, Kamala Harris doing William Finn’s ‘Change’, a ‘September Song’ sung to Bernie Sanders, and Marianne Williamson with her version of ‘The Rainbow Connection’. My opening number was a rewrite of ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’ rewritten as ‘Thoughts and Prayers’. With luck, we’ll do another date or two of this show somewhere but it will need some retooling for political changes which, if anything, seem to be speeding up.

I’m having a dispute with the management of the storage company where Tommy and I stored all of our theatrical crap including the physical assets of CenterStage productions. The overhead lights (cheap fluorescents) have burned out and, when I asked that they be replaced so I can see what I’m doing in there, I was informed that it would be too expensive for them to do so (high ceiling) and I should just bring a flashlight. This is not sitting well with me and I haven’t decided what my next response is. They’re part of a national chain so I suppose I could call their corporate and complain. I could always just move out but that’s going to be a job and a half. I need to come up with a long range plan for all that stuff as part of my downsizing but I don’t know that anyone else has adequate storage either. If anyone from the Birmingham theater community has a brilliant idea or two, I’m willing to listen. In the meantime, I guess I bring a flashlight.

I don’t have a theater rehearsal for the next three weeks. My next project, Dear Brutus, has first read on the 21st. The only thing on the docket outside of work is Symphony chorus rehearsals (a Brahms piece and Borodin’s Polsovetsian Dances ) for a concert right after Halloween and church choir. I suppose I better start working on my Dear Brutus lines. It’s a play I hadn’t encountered before. Sort of an EM Forester cast of characters gets caught up in A Midsummer Nights Dream fantasy written by JM Barrie of Peter Pan fame. My character, an artist, is dissipated and unhappy, but comes alive when he meets the daughter he might have had in the enchanted wood. I’ve also set a goal for myself of completing two chapters of the book I’m working on over the next few weeks as I have less on my plate. I’m tackling some of my ideas around aging and dementia.

Two relatively brief trips coming up: SF Bay area from 10/23-27 for my 35th Stanford Reunion. (I’m trying to decide if I bring my red sport coat). Then Seattle for Thanksgiving week. I’m here for the holidays and toying with the idea of reviving Tommy and my famous Sunday after Christmas open house but haven’t fully decided. If I do, it will be a different kind of party and I don’t know yet what that would look like.

I haven’t told a story for a while. I’m trying to think of a good Stanford one that I haven’t already written down. The early 80s were a transitional time socially with the rise of Reaganism and it was very much reflected in my college experience. When I arrived at the tail end of the Carter presidency, the upper class people (sophisticated older adults of 20 and 21) took classes based on interests and trying to be well rounded individuals. When I graduated three and a half years later, the under class people (impossibly naive children of 18) took classes based on how they might impact their earning power later in life. It was a huge cultural sea change brought about by the rise of the Yuppie. I did a combination. I was a double science major in chemistry and biology but I also took at least one course a quarter that was something different – Japanese religious traditions, History of the Roman Empire, Introduction to Petroleum Engineering, Shakespeare, History of the American Musical Theater. I think I had courses in 19 different departments by the time I graduated. I remember my first quarter. My father drove me down and dropped me off at the dorm for Freshman orientation along with two suitcases of clothes, four boxes of books, a bicycle, a typewriter, and a box of miscellaneous school supplies. The internet was in its infancy, there was no web, there was no word processing and registration required thousands of us milling around the floor of the basketball arena doing everything by hand. I loved it.

Most of my college life was based around classes, dorm life, and theater. I didn’t leave campus too often. I didn’t have a car and the Stanford campus is huge, requiring a couple mile walk just to get anywhere. I did partake in a lot of the usual rituals, including football games. I have one college football claim to fame. I was at Stanford in the fall of 82 when Big Game (the rivalry game between Stanford and UC Berkeley) was played at that other school. I had stage managed the Gaieties that year (a theatrical spoofing campus life that is produced every year at Big Game weekend) and a bunch of us from the show went up to Berkeley together to see the game. At the end of the game, Stanford had won. Hooray! However, in one of the most famous plays ever, the ball not having been whistled dead, was carried back by Berkeley for a last minute touchdown through the Stanford band which had prematurely rushed the field including a poor tackled trombonist. We were sitting just above that end zone but couldn’t follow the whole thing and sheer pandemonium broke out in the stands as no one could quite figure out just what had happened. It wasn’t until we could get out of the stadium and see the newscast and replays that we were able to fully figure it out. I’ve been to a few college football games since that one but I am unlikely to ever witness anything quite like that again.

It feels like it’s time for a long post. It’s been a few weeks since I last checked in. There isn’t a whole lot going on. I’m in a fairly decent frame of mind. I don’t think I need to exorcise any demons tonight so this may be less exciting than some of my other missives but once I start writing, you never know where things might end up.

The theatrical life at the moment is about Politically Incorrect Cabaret. I’ve been the headwriter and emcee since the show was invented in 2004 and, to my knowledge, I’m the only cast member that’s been in every single performance of every single edition. I’ve become quite fond of the Ansager as he allows me to let my id play and I get to say incredibly inappropriate things in public. The shows are semi-improv so I get to riff off the audience and pick on them in various ways – always fun when they’re full of people you know. I pretty much locked myself in the house Labor Day Weekend to write this latest edition and it’s the usual hodgepodge – Capital Steps type parody, serious Brecht, improvisational dance, political barbs, and the Ansager and the Waffle House Lady trying to hold the whole thing together.

We’ve got two weeks to finish everything up and get it on stage. One show only on Saturday night, the 28th. We usually do another performance or two out of town once a show has been put together and rehearsed, but that hasn’t materialized yet for this one. It may still happen. I’ve never quite figured out why PIC works as well as it does. It always feels like a bit of a mess in rehearsal, but then you get it front of an audience and it just gels. I guess that’s because of the semi-improv nature of the beast. It has to have an audience or it just doesn’t work. We rehearse the music fairly tightly to keep that together, but the rest of it, while there is a script, tends to wander far afield from anything on the page during performance.

It’s been unbearably hot and sticky the last few weeks. Well in the 90s and 90% humidity. Usually by mid September things start to cool off but not this year. Both the electric bill (A/C) and water bill (sprinklers) are way up. I suppose this is the local version of climate change. I don’t think the human race is on its way out. We’re quite resourceful, but I think the next fifty years or so are going to be awfully interesting as eight billion people start competing for water and food resources.

I have two quick trips to the west coast coming up. To the SF Bay area in late October and to Seattle for Thanksgiving. If you’re in either of those areas and would like to get together, let me know. I thought about a trip for the holidays again, but I’ll be in rehearsal for Cabaret so that’s out. The way things are going, it looks like I’ll be booked pretty solidly for stage work all season. The next project after PIC is J M Barrie’s play Dear Brutus for Belltower Players, then Cabaret. I’ve also agreed to do The Gin Game next spring. I haven’t decided yet if I’m flattered or terrified. However, the way to get me motivated and intensely interested in something in life is to hand me a challenge. The woman I’m cast opposite has impressive Broadway, London and film credits – I met her tonight for the first time at her Birthday party. I think we’ll get along quite well. She’s African American and part of the goal of the production is to get black and white Birmingham theater working closer together and being more mutually supportive. I’m still not sure how someone like me gets cast in a two character play opposite the woman who had the Nell Carter part in the original London production of Ain’t Misbehavin’.

Not much happening at work. UAB is tranquil, at least in the Geriatrics Division and most of my patients seem to be rocking along in the ‘getting older, but stable’ category. One of my patients, whom I have had since I first got here 21 years ago, brought me a present last week. She was cleaning things out and she found the clipping from the UAB paper announcing ‘Duxbury joining Geriatrics Program’ that she cut out before I first arrived and when she made initial appointments for her and her husband. There I was, early 30s me staring out from a UC Davis headshot decorating a yellowing news clipping from the last millennium. The office staff found it amusing. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was the young whippersnapper around the division but now I’m the old man and the institutional memory.

I went to see The Goldfinch on Friday night. I enjoyed the book immensely and was curious to see what sort of film they made of it. It’s gotten some fairly nasty reviews but it’s not that bad. It has some crucial miscasting and it’s about twenty minutes too long and suffers a bit from its non-linear storytelling but it doesn’t deserve the pigpile of vituperative prose that seems to be coming at it. MNM will weigh in shortly. I’m not completely sure what to do with her. Usually I have a bit of a storyline or an idea mapped out in my head of where her life is heading, but at the moment I don’t have much. Something will eventually come to me. Something always does.

Nothing terribly cathartic tonight poppets, and I can’t think of any terribly intriguing stories either. I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. I’ll check in again around PIC time if not before.