Dateline: Seattle, Washington-

Got up at the usual time this morning, through things out of the suitcase from the quick South Carolina trip and repacked it with some heavier clothes for the Pacific Northwest. I may need to make a trip to the mall for some long johns before the week is over as the weather report is now suggesting arctic air may descend on us by Thursday and I didn’t bring a lot of wool and down. I’ve lived in much more southerly latitudes the last thirty years and most of those items have long since left my wardrobe.

The trip, consisting of planes, trains, and automobiles, was uneventful. All the flights were on time. The luggage did not get lost (which has happened repeatedly on flights to Seattle in the past). The airports were not yet overly crowded. I knew there was a reason I flew on Monday rather than Wednesday. The biggest issue is the inching together of the seats in economy so that I now have to stick my knees up my nose in order to fit in my own little corner. I usually sit in the window seat so I don’t have to get up but with the contortions I now have to undergo, at the end of a five hour flight, my knees are incredibly sore and they may take a day or two to come back to their usual baseline.

They have finished the light rail from the airport into town. When the northern line is finished, I’ll be able to take it to within a block and a half of my father’s senior living facility, but it still dead ends at Husky stadium. My brother met me there and took me the last leg and we got to start catching up with each other. I spent a little time with my father, Alyn C Duxbury, then went over to my sister’s house to spend time with her, her boyfriend and her biological mother Jennifer Chapman. My sister was adopted, reunited with her birth parents twenty years or so ago and, in the manner that my family operates, they’ve been pulled into the family circle along with the rest of the motley crew and it’s always good to see them. I first met my sister Jeannie’s birth parents at her wedding in the summer of 1999. The marriage didn’t last, but the expanded family has.

I don’t think I’ve written a lot about my siblings. We love each other, we’re friends, but we’re all very different sorts of adults, each marching to a different drummer. I’m five years older than my sister and six years older than my brother so I was in a different generation of kid-dom from them and I was out of the house when they were in middle school. Of the three, I’m the academic, my sister the artist, and my brother the athlete although we cross pollinate in various ways. They also call me things that no one else in the family uses. My sister calls me Drew and my brother calls me Buzz. The origins of this come from when they were around four or five years old. They decided one day that it would be incredibly funny if Andrew became Androopy and, as they saw it irked ten year old me, they kept at it. My sister shortened it to Droopy which ultimately became the more normal Drew. My brother, the future English teacher, showed quite the way with etymology as he somehow changed Androopy to Buzzoopy which he ultimately shortened to Buzz. Neither one ever caught on beyond the sibling that created it.

Now, as my knees hurt, and I’ve been traveling all day, I’m going to sign off and find some bad television before falling asleep. More tomorrow.

Dateline: Birmingham, Alabama –

I must have felt safe and comfortable at Frank and Laurel‘s house last night as I slept for more than ten hours and could easily have slept a few more if I had tried. Given the fact that I am in general having trouble sleeping more than six these days, my relaxed physiology is the greatest compliment I could give to my hosts. As it was after noon by the time I was up, moving and breakfasted, there wasn’t much else to do with the day as I had the six and a half hour drive back to Birmingham to contend with.

My initial plan was to stop in Atlanta for dinner with an old friend, but those plans were derailed by a sick horse (a long and tangential story which does not bear repeating here…) so dinner ended up being fast food Bojangles fried chicken near the Pilot Truck Stop outside of Carrolton, Georgia. Bojangles always reminds me of Tommy. He was very fond of it and when he didn’t feel like cooking, I would often pick up a Bo-box on the way home. The one thing of theirs he could not stand was their iced tea. He was always very particular about that beverage. He drank it unsweet, unusual in a southerner, but had very definite feelings as to how it should taste. Tommy was one of the 1/1000 people known as a super taster. Their taste buds are wired differently than most and they can pick up very subtle flavors and combinations that most of us cannot imagine. In addition, Tommy was a synasthete with crossed taste and visual senses. Tastes had color and, when he was cooking, you could often hear him muttering things like ‘this tastes too brown’ and then the spice and herb jars would start flying. We always had a big spice cupboard, but once he discovered Penzey’s Spices in Homewood, he laid in enough to be able to season anything and everything.

I got back about 8 pm and got the suitcase ready to pack again in the morning after doing some laundry and taking care of the cats. I don’t think the cats had even noticed my absence. They’re like that. As long as the litter box stays scooped and there’s kibble in the feeder, they’re content. Up tomorrow to catch the plane to Seattle. As it’s Monday of Thanksgiving week, it shouldn’t be too horrible a trip. Looking forward to some family time.

I’ll start thinking of some stories to tell and get a couple of columns written while I’m on the West Coast.

Dateline: Columbia, South Carolina-

Ten minutes after leaving Oxford this morning, I ran into another massive slow down on I-20. I had visions of a repeat of yesterday’s adventure, but fortunately this was due to garden variety construction work and it cleared up after a couple of miles. The rest of the drive was uneventful. Other than passing through the middle of Atlanta- navigating that freeway system is always a joy what with six million people living on infrastructure built for two million.

The purpose of this trip is a visit to old friend Frank Thompson and his lovely wife Laurel Posey. He’s been busy with a production of Mamma Mia! that he directed and in which he plays Sam (the Pierce Brosnan part). About an hour outside of Columbia, I get a text from him that the actor playing Bill (the Stellan Skarsgard role) has been unwell and, in looking at all his options, he wondered if I might be able to step in, book in hand. I have visions of the actors nightmare come to life but fortunately, William Arvay was well enough to perform so I could relax a bit. Chatted for a bit and then Frank, Ripley Thames, and I headed for Camden SC and the Kennesaw County Fine Arts Center.

I enjoyed the show and post show drinks with cast and crew at a local watering hole before heading back to Columbia for more conversation. All the usual topics of chatter: memories of shows past, dissection of show present, dreaming of shows future. It’s been decided that I need to play the John Lithgow role in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I’m available if someone will produce it.

No story tonight as it’s two in the morning and I’m tired and typing on my phone which I still find somewhat difficult.

Dateline: Oxford, Alabama-

Time to pick up the travelogue as I will be doing the planes, trains, and automobiles thing for the next week or so. I’m not off to the most auspicious start. I left Birmingham last night late after my concert planning on spending the night in Atlanta somewhere. However, a major traffic accident that completely shut down I-20 East bound had other plans and, after something over three hours when I had only made it as far as Talladega, I decided to give up, call it a night and stay at the next available Hampton Inn which happened to be here in Oxford. Hampton Inn is my go to when I’m on the road. It’s left over from all my trips to rural West Virginia and Kentucky where it was the nicest hotel in town so I’ve been racking up the Hilton points for decades. I figure I have enough for a free stay at some posh Hilton in some world capital one of these days.

As I was sitting there in stop and go traffic, I couldn’t help but think of the hellacious traffic that must have existed as people tried to get out of Paradise, California last week. I lived for ten years in Sacramento when I was in my 20s and 30s and so I’m familiar with the gold rush towns of the Sierra Foothills and the roads in and out. I don’t think Alabamians have a clue as to how big a small town it was. Paradise was roughly five times the size of Jasper, the closest mountain town to Birmingham that would be an equivalent. (For the Seattle folks, five times the size of North Bend). I spend a good portion of my professional time these days doing rural house calls for the VA. Between that and all my years with the mine workers in and out of small town Appalachia, I have a pretty good picture of who lives in these areas. They are full of people with poor health, limited mobility, and straitened financial circumstance who cannot afford to live anywhere else. The ultimate death toll is likely to be in the hundreds.

I’m writing this on Saturday morning as I was in no mood to write last night after idling on the interstate for hours. It did bring my one and only experience with mass evacuation to mind. The year was 2008. Tommy and I, as we often did, decided to go to New Orleans for Labor Day Weekend. Labor Day Weekend in NOLA hosts a large festival for gay men known as Southern Decadence. Cheap drinks, street parties, lots of eye candy, a parade, and more. We arrived on Friday night, only to find out that Hurricane Gustav, which had been idling out in the gulf, was heading towards town. It was only three years after Katrina so everyone was on edge and the powers that be decided to close all the hotels as of Saturday at noon. Having just got there, we decided not to immediately head back (as the earliest landfall was predicted was early Monday morning) but rather to enjoy our Saturday as planned (and we had a place we could crash on Saturday night). Then, on Sunday morning, as we were finishing up brunch, the mandatory evacuation order for NOLA went out. Ah well, time to head home anyway and we had a full tank of gas. A little caravan of Birmingham friends headed off together for I-10 east bound across Lake Ponchartrain and then up I-59 through Mississippi. Unfortunately, we were joined by the entire population of the greater NOLA area. Even though all six lanes of the freeway were directed outbound, traffic came to a dead stop by the time we hit the Ponchartrain bridge and continued at a slow crawl through Slidell, Hattiesburg, Laurel. We eventually gave up and decided to try some back roads and became hopelessly lost for a while in the wilds of rural Mississippi. Sometime after midnight, we found I-20 near Meridian and were able to make it home. The trip which is usually between five and six hours had taken eighteen.

What I remember most vividly about the trip, other than Tommy and I sniping at each other out of boredom and because we had finished all the audiobooks we’d brought (pre downloading from Audible), was the relative good humor of all the evacuees. I didn’t see a lot of impatience or road rage. I also recall images of cars full of chronically ill and infirm people. We carry a hidden population of those who can’t do well for themselves in this society and we aren’t very good about helping them out in crisis situations. I wonder sometimes what sort of impact the inevitable aging and decline of the boomer is going to have on this particular piece of public policy. It’s a generation that has demanded and gotten what it’s wanted because of it’s size and demographic placement. Things are going to get awfully interesting starting in the 2030s when they hit their mid 80s. I should be retiring in the nick of time. God help my younger colleagues.

Time for a long post tonight. It’s been a few days since I made one and there’s a lot rattling around inside my brain so I’m going to do my usual therapy of starting to write and see where it leads. It just feels right to let some of my, well not exactly demons, maybe more just excessive bits and pieces of emotional experience out to play and let the world make of them what it might.

What’s been going on? Last weekend was all about church. For those of you who haven’t figured it out, I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham and have been for nearly twenty years. Steve and I joined when he was ill and we had no local support system and I wouldn’t have made it through the whole process of his sickness and death without the people there to fall back on. Then it became instrumental in my and Tommy’s courtship and our lives together. Over the years, I’ve had lots of different roles there. I’m on my third go round on the Board of Directors. I’ve served on more committees than I care to count. Ellise Pruitt Mayor and I got up to all sorts of hijinks with stewardship dinners. When I first started to sing, I joined the choir and am still there fifteen years later. Tommy’s involvement was even deeper than mine. He sang in the choir, acted as cantor, and founded the children’s music program, The Flames of Harmony.

When Tommy went back to school at the University of Montevallo in his 40s, he knew he wanted to work in music. He ended up with degrees in choral education and speech pathology but, at pushing 50, a gay man in Alabama, and with deep roots in Birmingham that kept him from going anywhere else easily, he wasn’t exactly catnip to the public school system. He had figured out his niche was working with younger kids and he did a lot of pick up jobs in elementary music education – long term subs in Birmingham area schools, teaching parent/infant/toddler music classes at the UAB arts extension, and eventually putting together the children’s choir at church.

The children’s choir came about starting in 2011 when he was asked by Rev. Lone Broussard to help with an intergenerational service for the holidays based on the Las Posadas traditions of the southwest. (Her previous church had been in Arizona). That was the beginning of Andy and Tommy productions presents the UU Children’s Holiday Pageant which continued up through last Christmas. At the second one we did, Tommy put together a pick up choir from some of the younger kids with an interest in music and a program was born. Early December would get wild at our house. The dining room would disappear under Tommy sewing nativity robes. Andy would be pressed into service making props. The year we had to move into a motel for a week and take all of that with us as the house was being painted was truly special. Yes, you can do theatrical production out of a second floor room at the Lakeshore Candlewood Suites and live to tell the tale…

He was eventually given a room in the church for the kids choir and music education. We spent three or so years furnishing it with instruments, various musical education books and projects, storage space, a piano. We had one whole long wall painted in blackboard paint for a combination of education and creative doodling. Tommy wanted the best for his kids. He remained active in the state music educator’s association and we went off together to a number of national conferences over the years. He was very into solfege (Do a deer…) and the Orff method of music education and we would wander the halls at the national Orff association meetings looking for good deals on xylophones and glockenspiels.

The church didn’t have the money to fund the program the way he wanted it so we just bought what he needed. He had a vision of what he thought the program could become with time so he was always planning three or four steps ahead. There were times when I would say are you sure you need a $600 rosewood tenor xylophone and he would just give me that look until I got out the debit card. He called me up about a year and a half ago and told me “I found a piano for the kids”. He had been using an electric and he really wanted a small acoustic. Great I said. He told me the price. It wasn’t unreasonable. Great I said. He neglected to tell me that it was at some elderly woman’s house out at Smith Lake and that he would need to pay to have it picked up, loaded up in a truck, driven sixty miles, and tuned on its arrival. He viewed all those sorts of things as inconveniences which would just be disposed of in turn.

When he got sick last March, it was a week before the kids were scheduled to perform for service. Guess who had to get them ready for that service and conduct. I was pretty terrible but the kids rose to the occasion. I taped it on my phone and brought it to him in the hospital to listen to. His assessment was that the kids were fine but that I had no business trying to conduct anything as I had trouble keeping a steady beat. He was quite right.

His classroom is still as he left it as he fully intended to return to it. He wasn’t done with it and he was full of plans of what he wanted to do next. I really hadn’t been in it since he died. I wasn’t specifically avoiding it, but there hadn’t really been a reason for me to be down there. On Saturday, I met with Becca Rogers whom the church has hired to continue his work with the kids and I took her through the classroom and explained what and where everything was. His handwriting was still on the blackboard. His name tags from various music conventions and UU General Assembly were there. There were the piles of music of the pieces he was next planning on teaching the kids. It was a great big slap in the face about how unfinished his life had been left. I went up to our new minister’s office and Julie Conradyhelped put me back together after losing it.

Most days I’m doing OK but there are moments when I know that I’m really not and I’m far from being normal and the world is just going to have to bear with me a bit longer. I feel, at times, like I am sleepwalking through someone else’s life. I get up, I go to work, I meet my commitments, but there’s a level of detachment. I think there has to be or, especially given what I do professionally, I’m going to feel too much and it’s going to become overwhelming. The one thing that I know can always break through and get the emotions going is music.

This week is dress rehearsal week for a Brahms piece the ASO chorus is singing for the masterworks concert this weekend. My 19th century poetic German isn’t all that good (Tommy would have translated it and written the translation and the phonetics all down the margins but I’m too lazy) but there are some lovely moments that make me feel connected to the hundred or so other singers and the orchestra and make me thank God for having met Tommy who got me to do things like audition for the symphony. That is Tommy’s legacy. He made an indelible impression on the church choir kids, he got them ready for bigger and better things that I know Becca is going to be able to bring to the table, and he got a lonely man out of his own head, taught him to live again, and taught him to sing, something he’ll be able to do for many more years.

I’ll be travelling starting this weekend for a week or so, so the travelogues and stories will continue. And I’ve got to get that next column finished or Sue Millinocket is going to have my hide…

Long post night. Of course I already wrote this once and Facebook, as it occasionally does, ate the whole thing forcing me to try and remember my deathless prose. I suppose I should write these long ones in Word and cut and paste but I’m too darned lazy to do that so I’ll just have the occasional disaster when the Facebook has a burp and then I can feel good about having a private little hissy fit before retyping the whole thing.

It’s long post night as it’s an anniversary. Twenty years ago tonight, on Halloween, 1998, Steve and I drove into Birmingham as newly minted Alabamians, ready to dive into our new lives. We were filled with a certain amount of trepidation. Two gay boys from California weren’t quite sure what to make of the deep south but we were willing to give it a try. We were pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a long term commitment, maybe four or five years before we would be heading back west to California or Washington.

When we made the decision to leave California, we decided to sell up everything and to go ahead and make a fresh start of it. (In hindsight, this was a terrible mistake. We owned both a condo and a house in Sacramento and by my researches, both have roughly quadrupled in value since we sold them but at the time we decided we didn’t want to deal with property management or landlord issues from more than two thousand miles away).

We had decided to take the job and make the move in mid September and had made a fairly lengthy trip to Birmingham at that time to sign all of the University paperwork and to do the house hunting. (Peggy Rogers Baleswas our relocation specialist who hooked us up with a real estate agent and a bank and various other services that we would need). In Sacramento, we had lived in a condo in the top floor of an old Victorian house in the historic area and then we had moved into a 1912 arts and crafts bungalow a few blocks away – one which had all the original redwood built ins (which had escaped being painted) and had been lovingly redone by Allan Owen.

I knew I wanted us to live no further away from UAB than fifteen minutes and that any commute would not involve a freeway, vetoing all of the properties down 280 and in Hoover that were shown to us. We limitied ourselves to Highland Park, Redmont, Forest Park, Crestwood, and Homewood. As we were moving for my career, I let Steve pick the house. He wanted to find something historic, but there was nothing in our price range that was in good repair for sale at the time and we really didn’t want to get into the sweat equity business. Eventually, he found two houses he liked. One at the top of the hill in Crestwood, and one in Homewood, behind Homewood Library.

He liked the Crestwood house better and we were assured that the owners were motivated to sell to us so we assumed that everything would be a go, so we flew back to California to pack up our lives and the house and get ready for the move. However, after we returned, things got complicated. Our initial offer was returned with more conditions, counter, recounter and on and on. Despite good faith negotiations on our part, the deal fell through and, with two weeks to go before we had to be out of our house in California and with my start date in Birmingham looming, we were out of luck. Frantic calls to the real estate agent. No, the Homewood house we were interested had sold to someone else and was no longer available. Steve then recalled another house in Crestwood on the same block as the one we wanted which we had also looked at it. We both tried to remember the details. It had a great view from the living room. It had a nice master suite. It had some stairs. That was about it. What the hell? We’d only be in it for a couple of years. Let’s put in a low ball offer.

Of course, it was immediately accepted and we found ourselves moving into a house that neither one of us could recall terribly clearly. No time to think about that now. There are boxes to pack, things to clean, a life to shut down… Eventually, at the end of October, the California house was sold, the moving van arrived and picked up the majority of our stuff and we loaded up our 1994 Acura Integra with ourselves, those items we did not want to entrust to the movers and Patrick Flanagan, the cat (who made it clear within five minutes that he did not approve of road trips – I don’t think he ever quite forgave us for those four days.) And so, Eastward Ho! with stops in Kingman, Tucumcari, Fort Smith and eventually, on all hallows eve, we arrived in Birmingham just after dusk. I was driving. I didn’t know the geography but knew how to find Clairmont Avenue so we slowly drove up it among the trick or treaters until we reached our new home which we dubbed the Aerie. We didn’t have possession yet. We looked at it long enough to make sure it was still standing and headed off to the Eastwood Holiday Inn until closing and receiving the keys.

That process happened relatively rapidly and so Steve and I headed up our first day as official homeowners to figure out just what we’d bought. There were stairs. A lot of them – 42 from top to bottom and another 16 from the front door to the street. It was OK. We were in good shape. The house was in good shape and we figured we’d never need to invest in a stairmaster. We dealt with the electric company, the water company, the phone company, the gas company and the cable company to get everything transferred over and eventually the moving van arrived.

The moving crew took one look at the stairs and flatly refused to unload. Many phone calls to management. We agreed to pay a stair surcharge. The crew still didn’t want to do it. More phone calls. Tempers flared. The head of the crew had a few choice words for Steve. Steve had some very colorful ones for him. I wasn’t able to defuse that particular contretemps (Steve was not one to back down from a fight – ever) and it ended with the crew hopping in the van and taking off down the street with all our worldly goods still in the back. We could not raise them on the phone. Management could not raise them. No one knew where our stuff was. More phone calls. Threats of a major law suit. Eventually the van is found in a storage lot in Trussville. Management shows up with it the next day and does the unloading for us as they are rather embarrassed by the whole fracas.

Steve lived in the Aerie (so called because it sat like a nest in the trees) for the rest of his life. It always reminded him of the houses in the Hollywood Hills in which he had gone to a number of rather infamous parties in the 60s with its wood and glass and magnificent spreading view over the city below. The pulmonary fibrosis which would upend our lives started to manifest itself about a year after we moved in. He loved the house and eventually died in it when his heart gave out from complications of his underlying lung disease. I continued to live there alone for the next few years, eventually met Tommy, and he moved in with me about two years after Steve’s death. A few years after that, we used the money Steve had left me to transform the house from Steve’s house into Tommy’s house with a major overhaul/remodel. Ten years after that, the stairs had grown too much for Tommy’s lungs and my knees and it was time to move. Down Clairmont Avenue, the same street we drove up that first Halloween to a house right on that street in the heart of Forest Park.

I spent more than 17 years in the Aerie and lived several different lives there. It’s the longest I’ve lived in a single place ever, and may be the longest I will ever live in a single house or apartment. When I left, it was the right time and for the right reasons so I don’t miss it. It was also never really my house. It was Steve’s house. Then it was Tommy’s. This new house, where I’ve been for about two and a half years, is definitely Tommy’s house. He chose it as it suited his taste and his style of living. Will I keep it? For how long? I don’t know. I just know those are questions I’m not capable of answering yet. But after years of living domestically in the shadow of a partner of strong personality, maybe it’s time to have a place that is uniquely mine. But what is that?

The Aerie was the site of many a fabulous party (Tommy knew how to do that), and where we invented and perfected our holiday open house. It was full of half finished projects tucked into odd corners and a place where we could sit on the porch with a glass of wine watching the lights of the Jones Valley or be tucked in bed with a storm raging round through the trees and watch the lightning play in the skies and know that we were safe, other than the constant threat of power outages. But it’s part of the past now, receding into that nostalgic and romanticized memory that conveniently forgets things like the endless hauling of things up and down multiple staircases.

Tonight, I arranged to be a bit late to my rehearsal so I could man the door for the trick or treaters of Clairmont Avenue. (I swear, they bring them in by the busload). As I watched the kids and listened to their shouts as they ran up and down the sidewalk and through Triangle Park, I was immediately transported back to that other all hallows eve of two decades ago. Would that Andy have believed what all was going to befall him over the next 20 years? Would he make the same choices if he could know that future? Then I decided such existential questions do one no good and ate another Reese’s peanut butter cup out of the bowl while waiting for the door bell to ring.

Dateline New York, New York –

Vickie Rozell departed early this morning back to California and her beloved Dodgers heading to the World Series (see, I do know something about the Sportsball) while I slept in for a bit. Then, after a leisurely breakfast, I cleaned the apartment, did the laundry, and made sure things were in better shape than we arrived. I am a well trained house guest. While in the midst of these chores, the phone pinged… Delta airlines letting me know my flight home would be delayed. I thought perhaps it was the universe trying to keep me in NYC, but there are certain impracticalities with that. It did mean, however, that I had plenty of time to get up to midtown and catch one last matinee before heading to the airport.

My choice was Head Over Heals, the new musical using the Go Gos song catalog, marrying it to the Elizabethan verse of Sir Philip Sidney’s epic poetic romance, Arcadia. This is not the combination that would first leap to mind and the end result is, as one might expect, uneven. I don’t think it helped that there was a wholesale replacement of the creative team during the development process with Jeff Whitty, the creator/author more or less being dumped from his brainchild.

The plot is a farrago of nonsense about a shepherd in Arcady who falls in love with a princess, whose father, the king, is determined to outwit the Oracle at Delphi’s prediction of doom for his kingdom and family. There’s a lot of iambic pentameter, some of which is likely original to Sidney and much of which is modern parody, familiar songs which at least tangentially fit the plot, and a bunch of mugging from a fairly talented cast that includes Broadway veteran Rachel York as the aging queen.

I ended up enjoying the show, but not thinking it was terribly good and that it would likely collapse and be gone quickly were it not riding a current wave of 80s nostalgia. There’s a lot of genderbending/transexualism in it that wants to come across as hip, modern and relevant but which reads more as an older generation trying to reach a younger one but with outmoded language and false notes. I did like some of the choreography and was impressed with the scenic painting.

The one thing that sticks with me was a line from the second act. Rejecting pain is the thief of joy. (I may not have gotten it quite right but that’s what’s in my head.) I have certainly had pain in my life and it’s only when I’ve allowed myself to face it and embrace it, that I have been able to feel and find happiness again. It’s an essential truth, at least for me, and this was not the show I expected to find it in.

The flight back from Laguardia was uneventful, other than navigating an airport that seems to be under perpetual construction. The flight ended up being about an hour late, but I can handle that. I slept most of the way and now I have to gird my loins for a double clinic day tomorrow and the usual grind.

This will be my last daily update for a while. The next travel week is Thanksgiving week when I head for Seattle. I will check in from time to time before then. I’ve got to look over what I’ve written so far and see which stories I’ve told and which I have yet to tell. I wouldn’t want to bore anyone with too much repetition.

And so, in my best Samuel Pepys, to bed…

Dateline: New York, New York –

Another sleep in sort of day followed by breakfast at Big Daddy’s Diner around the corner on Park Avenue. After filling up on omelettes and berry pancakes, Vickie Rozell and I trekked uptown for our first show, Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman which is in its final previews (official opening scheduled for tomorrow…) The play is part of the subgenre of modern Irish plays looking at ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s when the IRA was at its height in a guerrilla war with the English. This one looks at a large Irish family which has been impacted by ‘the vanishing’ of one of its members some ten years prior. As the play opens, his body has been found, buried in a peat bog, and this news disrupts the carefully constructed dynamics of the Carney family. Patriarch Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine) has seven children ranging from infant to late teens. Also living in the ancestral farmhouse are his wife Mary (Genevieve O’Reilly), his sister in law Kate (Laura Donnelly), wife of the missing man, her teenage son, three elderly aunts and uncles (Fionnula Flanagan, Mark Lambert, Dearbhla Molloy), and a dimwitted English hired man (Justin Edwards). Throw in three teenage nephews who show up in the second act to help with the harvest, you have quite the house full and what must have been some really grueling blocking rehearsals when everyone is on stage and interacting together. The revelation of the death uncovers secret longings, family dysfunction, a weak catholic priest, a sinister IRA boss, a symbolic live goose and quite a lot happens prior to a violent denouement of the long night’s journey into day.

The three acts run nearly three and a half hours but it never drags as the characters are interesting, expertly performed and the audience knows that the tensions unleashed are going to lead to very bad things, but what ultimately ends up happening is not necessarily what you might expect. It’s a good play, approaching a very good play, with a top notch cast, many of whom are veterans of the original London production which was a huge success commercially and artistically. I don’t see it having a huge life outside first class productions. The technical requirements are easy but the cast is huge and there are eleven characters under the age of 18. Even if the older teens are played by young looking adults, that’s still a heck of a lot of child wrangling and they are not easy child parts and are integral to the action as one of the major themes is how violence descends from generation to generation.

Discussing the play in some detail, we headed uptown, discovering a large street fair on 6th Avenue and took a walk through Central Park, coming back past Lincoln Center and down to restaurant row for dinner. Then it was off to our evening show, The Play That Goes Wrong. I had seen this on a previous trip to NYC a year or so ago but Vickie had not and, as a theater person, I felt she needed to have seen it, at least before she has to sit through 20 community theater productions of it over the next couple of decades. The show is a distaff cousin of Noises Off. A not very good theater company is producing a not very good Agatha Christie type murder mystery and, during the course of the evening, everything that can possibly go wrong, does go wrong. The resulting fiasco on stage is riotous, even if you’ve never been involved in the production of live theater and had most of those things happen to you at some point. It’s great fun, review proof, and likely to be coming to a theater company near you as soon as the original production closes and stock rights are released.

Tonight’s story is about Bennie Middaugh. His wife, Laurie, let me know this morning that he passed on in the night. It was expected. Laurie and I have been communicating about its inevitability for months but no matter how much you think you’ve prepared yourself, when the moment comes, everything becomes overwhelming and difficult and you have a hundred conflicting emotions tearing you apart. I would never have gotten to know them well if it weren’t for Tommy. I knew their names, of course, as does everyone involved in any aspect of music or theater in the greater Birmingham area, but we didn’t cross paths until Tommy made the decision to go back to school for his degree in Choral Music at the University of Montevallo. He met Laurie right away and they hit it off and her name would come up in conversation from time to time. I went down for his first concert his freshman year and was waiting in the lobby for the house to open when a pleasant woman of roughly my age came up to me and asked whose father I was. They weren’t used to 40 something year old students and spouses in the music department. And that was my introduction to Laurie. We got each other pretty quickly and a friendship started to bloom.

A few years later, I realized that if I was going to do as much singing as living with Tommy required, I needed a voice teacher of my voice type and I arranged to take lessons from Bennie in his private studio. For a number of years, I traipsed down to Montevallo every Friday evening I could where Bennie became instrumental in my understanding of my voice. I’m the first to admit I’m not a great singer and never will be, but I’ve learned how to be a good ensemble/choral person and how to sell as song I can’t really sing all that well by giving it a good performance from his tutelage.

Bennie wasn’t young when I met him and, over the last dozen years or so, his health declined. He did me the great honor of asking me to be his doctor and it has been my privilege to work closely with him and Laurie through some difficult times. I will miss him, but will carry the lessons I learned with him in my heart and in my head forever. Goodnight sweet prince….patient….teacher….friend.

Dateline: New York, New York –

Today was a day of connections, memories and 20,000 steps according to my smartphone pedometer. No wonder my legs hurt. It doesn’t help that I missed my morning Tylenol as I got up and out early.

The first stop was breakfast on the upper west side with Grant A. Anderson and his lovely wife, Ines. They are in town from Arizona for a family wedding and got hold of me and asked if they could catch up. I hadn’t seen Grant for some decades as we went about our separate lives post Stanford but Facebook, in one of it’s good moments, brought us back into touch and we have been following each others adventures over the last few years. It turns out that I am indirectly responsible for his meeting his wife. My going to Stanford led my cousin Jenny to Stanford. Jenny and Grant were friends and after some late night dorm commiseration, she suggested they go to a dorm party and that was where they first met. The smallest incidents can have great repercussions through the years.

After breakfast, I ran into Cris Frisco and joined him on his morning walk commute from his apartment to his studio, He’s busy with vocal coaching and looking forward to coming back to Birmingham to be the maestro for Glory Denied with Opera Birmingham this next January. Then I caught up with Vickie Rozell and we headed off to Queens to the Museum of the Moving Image. They’re having a special exhibition on Jim Henson and we’re both Muppets fans. Quite an interesting exhibit and the permanent collection tracing the history of film from kinescopes through modern CGI is very well done. I especially enjoyed looping my voice for Judy Garland’s in The Wizard of Oz. Birmingham folk, the Henson exhibit is apparently coming to Meridian at some point so you can see it there.

Then, back across the East River for a little Fifth Avenue walking through Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s cathedral, ending up at Tiffany’s where I bought my niece her 16th birthday gift. Every girl needs a Tiffany’s box from time to time. It was too late for breakfast, but just about time for dinner so a jaunt over to the west side to a food hall for dinner with Tommy McDowell to talk over both the New York and Birmingham theater scenes.

Tonight’s theater was the new play, The Lifespan of a Fact, which officially opened at Studio 54 last night to very good reviews. We had chosen it before the reviews came out based on the cast. We figured the combination of Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones and Bobby Canavale couldn’t be all bad. We were right, it’s actually very good. The play is a 90 minute one act which takes on the nature of truth in terms of the conflict between an essayist (Canavale) who plays fast and loose with facts in order to get at deeper meanings and truths and the young fact checker (Radcliffe) who believes that truth is only verifiable fact. Caught in the middle is the editor (Jones) of the New York glossy that want’s to print a new essay and is unsure where the line are in terms of truth, art, and journalistic ethics.

The play, which is loosely based on real people and a real conflict, is sound (and likely to be a staple at regional theaters for the next few years with its small cast and unit set). It explores big questions related to the need to tell story and make story meaningful, along with the existential issues on the nature of truth. It’s also a play that resonates with where we are in society with our ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’. Despite the deep questions, which are not fully resolved – the audience is expected to draw their own conclusions, the play has uproariously funny moments and all three actors are well cast and deliver smart and introspective performances. Young Mr. Radcliffe, who has amazing eyes on stage, has definitely left Harry Potter behind (even if he does make an exit into a closet under the stairs) and has a brilliant comic monologue involving a traffic map of Las Vegas (don’t ask). Canavale uses his physicality as well as his wits as the brooding but brilliant writer and Jones, not playing a tragic heroine for once, is the fulcrum on which the plays arguments balance and she achieves that well.

After show drinks with old friends of Vickie’s (more discussion of the state of theater in New York, Canada, London, the SF Bay Area and Birmingham) before heading back to the apartment to unwind (and prepare for another two show day tomorrow…)

Do I have a story for tonight? Not really… Today hasn’t dredged much of anything up. Seeing Daniel Radcliffe on stage did put me in mind of my history with Harry Potter. I discovered the books shortly after the third one came out. Steve was sick at the time and I had had a habit of reading to him for years. It soothed him. Whenever we drove distance, he would do most of the driving and I would read to him. If he didn’t feel like driving, I would drive and he would snuggle down in the passenger seat and fall asleep. I used to term that one of his bassinet rides. When he was sick and his brain wasn’t fully operational because of the hypoxia from his underlying lung problems, I had to pick things that were relatively easy to understand so I had turned to a number of the childrens’ classics. Someone suggested Harry Potter so I picked up the first one at the local bookstore and read it to him. We both enjoyed it so I picked up two and three and read those to him as well. Four came out and was one of the last things I read to him before he died. The other books came out after Tommy and I were together and so did most of the films, so he and I made a big deal of going to those together and the DVDs became staples in the wig shop for company when he was working late. Harry watched over my husbands, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Dateline: New York, New York –

As neither Vickie nor I had had a lot of sleep the last day or so due to travel schedules, we both slept in this morning and got a bit of a late start on the day. That was fine. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before and we had to make sure we hit some particular tourist sight before breakfast. When we finally did get going, we had a nice walk up Manhattan Island from 21st to 51st street where we met Jeff Williams for lunch at a southern comfort food establishment called Spoonfed. Excellent fried chicken by the way so I recommend it for lunch or dinner if you’re in the Hell’s Kitchen area. Then, as we hadn’t yet gotten enough of a walk in, we descended 9th Avenue and picked up the Highline, taking it all the way down to 14th. At that point, we were some 14,000 steps into the day so it was subway back to midtown where we met my cousin’s wife Betsy and their daughter Claire for dinner.

Tonight’s show was Hamilton and Vickie, through her long time friend James Monroe Iglehart (currently playing Lafayette/Jefferson), had managed to procure four house seats. We started off with dinner at Pasta Lovers on 49th. It’s been there forever and I chose it for sentimental reasons. Steve and I had wandered into it for dinner before a Broadway show sometime in the early 90s and it just became our traditional pre-show dinner place throughout that decade. Tommy and I never really had one as he was too adventurous a foodie. Cafe Fiorello at Lincoln Center was probably as close as we ever came as it was convenient to the Met. Anyway, pasta eaten, we navigated Times Square (amusing with a seven year old) and made our way to the Richard Rodgers Theater.

Everything you have heard about Hamilton is true. It is as amazing a piece of theatrical lightning as I am ever likely to see. Five years ago, if someone had suggested a musical about Alexander Hamilton using modern musical idioms, predominantly rap and hip hop, with a multicultural cast, I would have thought they were crazy. Sometimes genius results from breaking all the rules. Performances, staging, music, technical elements all come together to create a complete theatrical world, telling an enthralling story from new perspectives and it is impossible to ignore the underlying messages about the strength of inclusivity that has made us a great nation in this age of Trump. When something is so good, it’s difficult to review, other than to tell people go; it’s worth it.

There were a couple of high points to the evening tangentially related to the show. The first was running into Eleanor Moseley Pollnow and her son in the lobby at intermission. The last time I had seen them together, he was a babe in arms. No longer. We chatted for a bit. After the show, James invited us all backstage and we actually got to be in the room where it happens. I must confess that I stood center stage and sang a couple of bars which will be as close as I’ll ever get to singing on a Broadway stage. Note to all: backstage at the Richard Rodgers doesn’t look all that different than backstage at the VST or the Day…

I didn’t tell a story last night as I had two shows to review so I’ll try to come up with one this evening. On our way through Times Square before lunch, we stopped at the Disney Store. I am a Disney fan, but not a fanatic so I looked with amusement at the $50 Lilo and Stitch light up Christmas sweater but I did not buy. The tour through Disneyana brought up memories of various trips to Disneyland and Disneyworld over the years. My first trip to Disneyland, which was the nirvana of vacation destinations during my childhood (Disneyworld was not yet in existence) happened when I was about ten when I was taken by my father courtesy of my grandparents who gave me the trip for Christmas. We stayed at the Disneyland hotel and took the monorail into the park and I still remember staring out the window as the various sights of the park unfolded around me with a sense of wonder. It was still the time of ticket books where the A tickets were for silly things like the fire engine on Main Street and E tickets were for the really good rides like Pirates of the Caribbean. Many more trips happened over the years in high school, college, med school and then I met Steve. Steve was a southern California kid. He went to Disneyland for the first time opening week in 1955 at the age of 7 and had been at least once a year since. Our first trip together was towards the end of my internship when I was not in a good place physically or mentally, as I was living in a world of illness, death and 80 hour plus work weeks. When we got there, he told me that I had to follow his lead. I was suspicious, but agreed, and he immediately headed us off to the kiddie things that I had always skipped as I thought they were too juvenile like the Casey Jr. train. I protested but he wisely told me that what I needed more than anything else at that juncture of my life was to recapture some of the joy and wonder I had felt at ten and that the best way to do it was to stop trying to be an adult. Just be a kid for a day. And he was right…

I think that was the day I realized I was in love with him.