And off on the second NYC jaunt of the year. It’s always more fun with a theater companion and I did well in that department this time around. If any of you who read these missives might want to do some traveling together in the next few years, let me know. I am always open to suggestions.

Dateline: New York, New York –

And so he’s back, trapped between the moon and New York City or however that song goes… I got up this morning to catch the one and only direct flight from Birmingham to Laguardia which leaves BHM at 6 am. That does mean you get to midtown Manhattan in time for a late breakfast but it also necessitates getting up in the middle of the night in order to make it to the airport on time. Delta airlines was running on time, the weather was cooperative and the flight was uneventful as was most of the rest of the journey, other than getting stuck in the midtown tunnel in a taxi for twenty minutes due to a construction delay.

I am back in my cousin’s Gramercy Park apartment for a couple of days of R and R which he has generously loaned me again. I shall pay him back by restocking paper goods and non perishable snack foods for the next occupants, whomever they may be. I am not alone this trip, I am up to no good with Vickie Rozell, one of my oldest and dearest college friends who has schlepped out here from the west coast for a long theater weekend. We’ve done lots of things together over the years, but this is the first time we’ve done NYC together.

Today was more or less given over to two shows. It is, after all, Wednesday, the traditional midweek matinee day. As I saw most of the musical offerings on my summer trip (with one important exception about which more is to come), this trip is more about plays. I tend to opt for music/theater when given the choice, but I do like a good stage drama or comedy as well.

For the matinee, we went to Roundabout Theater Company’s production of a new play by Theresa Rebeck – Bernhardt Hamlet starring Janet McTeer. Based on a true series of incidents in 1897, it tells the story of the legendary actress, Sarah Bernhardt as she prepares, as a woman, to play the title role in Hamlet. At the same time, she’s having an affair with Edmond Rostand, the married playwright 25 years her junior ,who is trying to complete his new play, which turns out to be Cyrano de Bergerac. She spars with critics, fellow actors, her adult son, and Alphonse Mucha, the artist, cannot figure out how to create an attractive poster in his distinctive art nouveau style.

McTeer gives a powerhouse of a performance (and the play is going to become a favorite for actresses of a certain age) and the role of Rostand (Jason Butler Harner) is nearly as good as the lead and the actor acquits himself well. The play feels very French in construction, consisting mainly of two person French scene conversations, most of which are a little long. The play would be improved with some judicious trims. Rebeck has a lot to say about the theater and the role of women in theater but she occasionally hammers the point home with a bludgeon rather than subtlety. I can see a lot of the scenes becoming standard in college acting classes over the next few years as they require a lot of interplay and choices on the part of the performers.

There’s only one really boneheaded move in the whole thing and that’s a design choice. When, in the second act, Bernhardt appears in an evening gown in a party scene in her boudoir, the color, and diamante dazzle are nearly identical to Roger DeBris’ Anastasia drag in the original production of The Producers. I kept expecting the cast to break into Keep It Gay…

We then treated ourselves to Thai food and cocktails before the day’s main event, an evening preview performance of the new musical version of King Kong. We had lucked into fifth row center seats so we got to see the whole thing very up close and personal.

So how was it? A mixed bag. The first question is why musicalize that particular property? What does the addition of music bring? Much of the show is heavily orchestrally underscored and that music has a grandeur that injects higher levels of emotion and involvement in the way a film score does (and it is very reminiscent of a classic movie soundtrack from the opening notes which sound like something Max Steiner would have written for a 1930s jungle epic). Then there are the songs. There’s nothing particularly wrong with their placement or the emotional moment that brings them into being, especially those for the heroine, Ann (Christiani Pitts). The problem is there is no consistent musical idiom holding the score together. There are vaudeville spoofs, numbers that sound like Pasek and Paul, a great 80s power ballad for Ann in the second act, and a bunch of hip hop. Almost none of it helps us understand the characters better.

The ensemble gets a work out (although I was unsure what the 1930s stevedores were doing breakdancing – they should have saved that for King Kong II: Electric Kongaloo) both as singer/dancers and as puppeteers for the true star of the show, the thirty foot King Kong. He takes stage puppeteering to a whole new level and they have worked out body language and facial expressions to give as impressive performance as you will ever see from cast aluminum and foam rubber. He walks, he climbs, he leaps, he roars, he threatens the audience, and he can be tender and gentle. I was very impressed with the puppeteering in the original production of War Horse but this outclasses it by a factor of ten.

The staging, set, and use of technology, especially moving projections to give a cinematic feel and flow are pretty top notch. It is previews so we did get a brief unscheduled intermission late in the first act when a fight between Kong and a giant albino cobra did not go exactly as planned but it didn’t really hurt the experience of the show.

The character of Ann has been modernized from the original to make her an agent of her own destiny and a power broker in her own right. She’s also been cast as African American which, tones down some of the more Mandingoesque racism of the original film. As the real love story is between Ann and Kong, the usual romantic lead part has been eliminated in favor of a piece of comic relief with bad skin known as Lumpy. The actor (Erik Lochtefeld) is fine but the part is underwritten. The antagonist, film maker Carl Denham, is badly miscast. Eric William Norris is simply too boyish and lightweight in the role throwing the piece off balance. He sings well and he’s a decent actor; he’s simply the wrong type.

There are a couple of cringe worthy moments in the second act that have to go. (It’s OK, the second act runs a bit too long anyway) including something that looks like a surprise appearance by the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders in what I think is supposed to be tinsel monkey fur and some bits from the show within a show that seem to have been created for ‘Daddy’s Boy’ from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

I’m glad I saw it and I think it will run as the word of mouth on what they do with Kong himself will be fantastic. Is it likely to end up on a list of ‘best musicals’, unlikely.

It’s now late so I’m going to try and grab some sleep before heading off to new adventures tomorrow.

White. A blank page, or canvas… That’s what the computer screen looks like tonight. So many possibilities. Or so much space to be filled up with random words. They may coalesce together in sentences, or there may be a rare Wankel rotary engine that falls in there. (And five points to whomever gets that obscure reference). I’m lying here in bed, old episodes of ‘The Office’ playing on Netflix and dreading the fact that I have to get up at a ridiculous hour to catch a flight. Of course, that flight is to Laguardia and I have a long weekend in Manhattan this week to look forward to. This means I’ll try to get back to my nightly travelogue and story telling as I have promised folk to keep that up when I am away from home.

I went to the theater this past weekend to see a production of ‘The Laramie Project’. It was a high school production, done by Indian Springs School under the direction of my old friend Dane Peterson. For those who don’t know, it’s a play telling the story of the murder of Matthew Shepard and the impact that had on the town of Laramie. The play was created by members of a New York theater group, the Tectonic Theater Company under the direction of Moises Kaufman, who went to Laramie in the aftermath of the murder and did in depth interviews with those involved, using their words to shape the story of three young men, Matthew, and his murderers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, probing the social milieu and tensions that allowed the crime to happen.

The play, later made into a film for HBO, has become a staple of college theaters over the last few decades. It’s subject matter and the emotions that it brings up in both cast and audience, however, are far beyond what high schools attempt and I was amazed at how well those kids could tap into the story and those individuals and lay themselves bare on stage at their ages. These are kids who were not yet born when the crime took place. It’s as ancient to them as the Eisenhower presidency was to me at that age. But they took up the challenge and led the audience through the story. A story of pain, suffering and questions in which the three central figures never appear on stage. All that is there are projected titles, a few chairs, and a section of split rail fence which, in its own way, has become an icon of martyrdom.

Being as aged as I am, I, of course, remember the Matthew Shepard case vividly as it was unfolding in real time via US and world media. It was October of 1998. Steve and I had finished up our summer of job hunting and coming to grips with the end of our life in California. I had taken the leap of faith and signed with UAB and we were in the process of making our plans for relocation to an unknown place and culture. We had decided we needed a little R and R before we finished selling the house, packing and moving so we had cashed in our frequent flier miles and hotel points for a week on Maui. We had planned on a few days of sunshine and nothing to do, but the Shepard case – the brutality of the crime, his eventual death, the arrest of the perpetrators, the grace of his parents – were inescapable that week anywhere a television was on.

We both felt incredible pain at the whole situation. I think because it was a slap up the side of the head reminder that, as gay men, we were not safe in our own country. The Clinton era had led to a certain amount of progress in gay rights and visibility and the two of us had reveled in it and assumed we were going to live in a more enlightened world. We spent a lot of time mentoring younger gay men, encouraging them to be out and comfortable with themselves and to not be afraid. The Matthew Shepard murder revealed to us that we had been lying to ourselves. It made us question whether the sacrifices and activism we had been involved with (in Steve’s case for more than thirty years at that point) had actually meant anything. I didn’t figure it out until much later, but we were mourning the loss of our home, friends, jobs, and time in California and this became entwined with mourning a death of hope for a better world, symbolized by a small town college student tied to a fence in rural Wyoming.

We came back from Hawaii, threw ourselves into packing up the house and doing all the thousand and one things one has to do when uprooting from one place to another. We didn’t speak much about it, but we both knew we were asking ourselves the same question. Did we make a mistake taking this job and moving to the deep south, a region even more unfriendly to LGBTQ people than the mountain west? That small town murder, to which I had no personal connection (other than having visited Laramie once as one of my best friends from high school had been a grad student at the University of Wyoming), completely colored my attitude towards my move to Alabama and how I viewed what I found when I got here.

While I was watching the play, the first time I have actually seen it produced on stage, odd memories and waves of emotion would roll over me. I thought of the last time I walked out of the house we shared in California (the only place I’ve ever lived that I truly miss), of sitting in a beach condo on Maui with Steve crying after hearing of Matthew’s death, of stories I’ve heard about Tommy’s pushing for better services and treatment of LGBTQ people in the wake of the HIV epidemic, of how I felt when I learned that my best friend from my time in Seattle in the 80s had been murdered, of how the best way to cope with grief is through shared feelings and times I’ve just needed to be with others, even if I’m not saying much.

Theater has the power to move us in unexpected ways. It’s the direct connection between audience and performer that’s always fascinated me and why I’ve always been drawn to it over film. May it continue to move me, both on and off stage.

Much theater coming up the next few days. I shall make a full report…

And sometimes, you just have to grieve and let it out.

Time for another long post as I try to sort out some of what’s going on in my head. Once again, you’ll have to bear with me as this is going to come out stream of consciousness. You’ll all be glad to know that I am doing some traveling next week so I’ll be picking up the travelogue again for a few days and that will give some spine/order to my musing. It’s not a long trip – just Wednesday through Sunday but it’s my first time away for some months. I deliberately kept myself close to home to get used to domestic rhythms without Tommy these last few months. I don’t know if that was a good idea or not, it just seemed like the thing I should do.

Last week was a low point, especially Thursday night. It wasn’t any one thing in particular, just a lot of things converging. First off, one of my friends unexpectedly lost his husband. He’s not someone I know well as he only recently came into my life and I knew his late husband barely at all but any time I hear of one of my peers being widowed, I take it to heart as I know exactly what that means. Losing Steve nearly 20 years ago first sharpened my senses and my empathy to loss of partner. The hard part isn’t the grieving, the hard part is the later emptiness when the person who completes you, who knows all the private jokes and moments, who just fills up your life, is no longer there. I’ve done all sorts of both formal and informal peer counseling regarding widowhood and grieving over the years and I do it well and it may be at least part of my calling in life, but every time I hear such news, it takes a piece of my soul with it. It’s especially true when it’s a gay couple. It’s so damned hard in gay society to find a compatible mate and build a relationship as most of that energy has to come from within the two of you due to a lack of external social supports and then to be cheated out of the rewards of a long and happy life together just feels so unfair.

That got added on top of some work shiz that made me feel inadequate to my job. I’ve always had a strong dose of impostor syndrome. That feeling that you have no idea what you’re actually doing and if anyone else really knew you, they’d know you were faking it and send you packing. Now I’ve been a doctor for over thirty years and I know intellectually I’m a darned good one, but it doesn’t take much for the self deprecation and the self doubt to start creeping over me. I’m also in the process of losing one of my favorite patients. I took care of her husband first, and he was one of my first patients on moving to Alabama; I then picked her up and have had her for nearly 20 years. She’s dying at the age of 93 after a life well lived and it’s a right and good thing but I’m still feeling a bit bummed out by it.

Then there was post show let down. Show weeks usually run Thursday – Sunday and there I was on a Thursday night and for the first time in eight weeks, I had neither a rehearsal or a performance so my rhythms were feeling off. My psyche and body wanted to be in performance mode and there was no where to place that energy. I suppose I could have lip synced the score of Dreamgirls for the cats but I don’t think they would have been interested. Unless I opened a can of Fancy Feast in the middle of ‘And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going’.

The last major factor was going to see Tick… Tick… Boom at Birmingham Southern College on Thursday night. I’ve seen the show before but didn’t remember a whole lot about it. The last part of the show, where Jon has to confront the mortality of his best friend, hit me in the solar plexus as it dredged up a lot of memories from my life in the late 80s during the HIV crisis when I had to deal with death, dying and loss on both a personal and a professional level. I think every gay man of my generation carries a lot of things locked away for self protection – painful memories, rage against society, survivor’s guilt – but every once in a while something slips through the cracks and unlocks that chamber just a bit.

Needless to say, Thursday night, I sat in the dark in my living room staring at the ceiling and trying not to feel. This of course, never actually works. As much as you try to avoid emotion, and I am the past master at it, it will come out one way or another and if you don’t let it out mentally, it comes out in physical form and that can be very destructive to the body. I eventually dragged myself upstairs and into bed, got some sleep, and felt much better the next morning. I made it through my Friday work stuff without major incident and actually feeling somewhat competent at my job and headed into the weekend in an OK, if somewhat subdued place. I trust I was decent company at the dinner party I went to Saturday night and I felt good enough to take myself to the movies on Sunday afternoon and write a column about it afterwards.

Two steps forward, one step back. Get up, face the world, meet your obligations… in the words of Voltaire, ‘after all, we must cultivate our garden.’

Well, ‘Hello, Dolly!’ has been put to bed and I’m trying to figure out how I feel about that. The show is one of the things I’ve organized my life and thoughts around over the last few months. I found out that I was going to be offered Rudolph during the period Tommy was in the hospital and the way things were going, I was expecting to have to eventually turn it down as he was going to be back home and have a lot of health needs and I would need to conserve my energies away from work to be able to be there for him and meet his needs, physical and emotional. Then he died unexpectedly and everything changed.

When the initial shock wore off and I made my decisions regarding life – take a few months off, travel some – one of the constants sitting at the back of the mind was that August and September would be taken up with Dolly rehearsals and performances. It became a bit of a rock in my grieving and turbulent emotional state… Just hang on, Dolly rehearsals begin in three weeks… two weeks… one week. It’s given me somewhere to be, people who are counting on me to do a job I love competently, a chance to hang out with friends, old and new, and a chance to be a part of something special. Maybe it’s the political moment in which we all find ourselves but pretty much everyone I’ve talked to who saw the show mentioned how it magically transported them away from their cares for a few hours and that they all left the theater singing and feeling light of heart and more assured of the general goodness of people. What a gift to be able to be part of a group that’s capable of doing that.

I had thought about trying to go into another theatrical project this fall. Something with an October rehearsal period and early November performance dates would have worked, but I think it’s better that I sit out for a few months now that my brain has been a bit reordered by the incredible supportive experience of Dolly and spend a few weeks closer to home. I still have a lot of Tommy’s life that I have to plow through and dismantle and there are some work projects that have been on the back burner for six months. There’s also the question of what these writings are to become…

There needs to be a story. Here’s a relatively recent one. It pertains to Dolly in a tangential way. Please forgive me for being a Carol Channing fan. I first learned of her from my mother who had always closely followed her career (they had gone to the same high school and Carol, who’s about ten years older was making her initial splash in NYC when my mother was in high school herself). We had copies of the OBCs of Dolly and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and childhood me didn’t quite know what to make of the tall lady with peroxide hair and the foghorn voice. I learned to identify her in the 60s and 70s when she made the rounds of talk shows and the occasional commercial and found her weirdly fascinating. In the early 80s, I helped direct Hello, Dolly! at Stanford and, shortly after that show, Carol came through San Francisco on one of her Dolly tours so a bunch of us went up to the city to see the show. She was gawky, quirky, not much of a singer, and you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. About the same time, Forbidden Broadway had opened and released its first album with the hysterical parody ‘Dolly is a Girls Best Friend’ which I immediately learned in my best Carol Channing voice and with which I annoyed my roommate and any number of other theater friends.

About three years ago, a group which raises money locally for senior services asked me to participate in their fundraiser – an all male beauty pageant in which men involved in the aging industry locally don drag and make themselves ridiculous on stage. I said sure and tried to decide what to do and then recalled the old Forbidden Broadway number and MissClairol Channing was born. I made an mp3 of the number, worked out a routine, had Tommy make me an updo wig with red feathers and pulled a red beaded gown out of our stock. Barry Perkins was my nurse at the time and he agreed to do my makeup. So on I go in my finery, waiting for my music to begin… and someone has decided to jettison my ‘Dolly is a Girls Best Friend’ track, which is why I’m dressed as Dolly at the Harmonia Gardens, and replaced it with Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend’ from the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Soundtrack. Oh lord, I thought, none of my routine is going to work. I’m going to have to wing it. Thank god I know the song so I can lipsynch and away I went… (there is video… I’m not posting it…)

I didn’t win (I make an ugly woman and red feathers and spangles didn’t help) but a good time was had by all and no one was aware that my routine was made up on the spot. I’ve threatened to bring MissClairol Channing back some day and I still have the wig. The time will eventually present itself.

Actually, MissClairol appeared again about a month later for Halloween. I had to do the makeup myself so it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Barry’s. I still had the wig in Tommy’s stock and his assistant, Holly, graciously restyled it for me.

Another long post tonight. What? Two in a row? What’s wrong with him? It’s just that he gets to sleep in tomorrow for the first time in nearly three weeks. Whether he’ll actually be able to do so or not remains to be seen. I have the unpleasant feeling the eyes will flutter open around about 6:45 am when the alarm usually goes off. I’ll try to will it not to happen but I haven’t been sleeping well the last few months so I’m not going to be surprised by anything.

I spent the last day or two scurrying around looking for W-2s and tax returns for my bank. I’m refinancing the house from a 30 to a 15 year loan and I need to go through the unpleasant task of having Tommy’s name removed from the title. It seems wrong. This was very much the house he picked out that suited him and his interests. In some ways I feel like an interloper here, a caretaker who should be careful about putting too much of my imprint on the place. I imagine I’ll sell it in a few years as it’s much more than I need and I’m really not a yard person at all, at least in this climate. I have a real estate person keeping an eye out for an urban condo that might suit and in which I will be able to maintain until I’m carted off to the dementia unit.

Tonight’s audience for Dolly was more docile than last night’s. At least in the first act. They must have all slammed tequila at intermission as they came alive in the second act and were absolutely roaring by the time we got to the end of the title song. Of course, that number is designed to elicit audience response. (Change keys, go into four parts and start marching around the passarelle and the audience goes wild. It’s almost pavlovian.) As I’m standing on the stairs center stage for a good part of the proceedings, I have a lot of time to look at the audience and watch them clap and sing along and wave their arms. We’re doing the original Gower Champion choreography so you know it’s going to get those of a certain generation right in the nostalgia button.

I was musing last night about what Tommy might have thought of the show. Tonight I was wondering about Steve. My time with Steve was more or less my theater interregnum. I had to give it up when I hit residency more or less. Every third night on call and theater do not mix. Later on in Sacramento, after I had finished residency and had settled into geriatrics with its easier hours, the first priority was still career building so I did very little. We became avid theater goers, befriended a number of local actors, and I was occasionally coaxed to lend a hand backstage. I did no performing. I auditioned for a couple of things on a lark but didn’t get cast but that was fine with Steve as he had had more than his share of nights sitting home alone when I was in residency and he always felt a bit slighted when I was out doing something that didn’t involve him. One of the few projects I did do was stage crewing/running sound for a production of Psycho Beach Party. Steve solved the problem of not wanting to be left alone by coming to every performance and sitting in the front row. He laughed uproariously at absolutely everything and had the whole audience keyed up every night. I had several discreet inquiries from various sources whether he was rentable as an audience plant.

Steve loved going to the theater and would go with me to see practically anything of any genre in any venue and always thought it was wonderful, whether it actually was or not. I honestly can’t think of anything we saw that he didn’t love. When life circumstance chased us to Birmingham, we went to a few things. The first thing we saw here was a production of Kiss of the Spiderwoman on the same stage where I’m currently performing and starring Jan Hunter who is now Dolly. If you had told me then I’d become a regular on that stage opposite the star of the show we saw that night, I would have thought you were not just mistaken, but plum crazy. Odd the surprises life has for us. Steve got sick within a year of our move so nights at the theater fell by the wayside and I didn’t see much for the next few years and then, before I knew it, I was in the middle of it all.

Theater is full of ghost stories so here’s the only one that personally involves me. I can’t explain it, but it may mean that someday I’ll be able to ask Steve his opinion of my second act. Steve died in August of 2001. This was about three years after we had left California and after about two years of serious illness from pulmonary fibrosis. I spent much of the next year travelling and trying to put my life and head back together. I was in the old house, the aerie up on top of Red Mountain, one evening about a year or so after he died when the phone rang. It was a woman I had known slightly through professional circles in California. She wasn’t a particular friend. I know she knew both me and Steve as he had met her at a couple of networking type events and, quite frankly, until she reminded me of her name and where she had worked in Sacramento, I had completely forgotten her. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and then she said ‘Steve’s dead, isn’t he?’. ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘Last year from pulmonary fibrosis’. ‘I know’, she answered, ‘I was in my bathroom on the toilet earlier this evening when he stepped out of my shower and told me he had a message for you. He wanted me to tell you that he’s OK’ I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I think I said something non-committal about is he still there. ‘No, he disappeared, but I’ll let you know if he comes back’. I never received any further messages.

Now, it would be just like Steve to step out of someone’s shower when they are on the toilet. He had a rather simple sense of humor. I have no idea if this woman was pulling a prank, after hearing about his death through the Sacramento grapevine or if she has some sort of sensitivity that allowed him to reach through and send me a message. He died in the old house and for years, I waited for a sign or visitation, but none was ever forthcoming. Tommy died at UAB hospital and I doubt he’s hanging around there. I can see him popping up backstage at Red Mountain Theater or the Wright Center. This rather weird story gives me the comfort that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, and that maybe both of them are hanging around somewhere, just out of sight. I wonder if they’ve found each other and what they think of me when they compare notes. I have a feeling I’m going to be ganged up on when it’s my turn to join them. In the meantime, I can see them both sitting in the patron’s balcony of the VST together each enjoying Dolly in his own way. Steve with huge hearty laughs and complete engagement, Tommy with his incredible eye for detail looking for minute flaws and creating solutions so that his next project will build on what he learned.

We’re nearly half way through the run of ‘Hello, Dolly!’ so I suppose it’s time to do a long post again. I’m writing this stream of consciousness so I have no idea where it’s going to go or how it’s going to turn out. Bear with me and hopefully I will eventually have some profound insight or make an exceptionally witty joke. Or I just might end up with a lot of word salad, you never know.

Tonight’s performance was one of those times when you know the show is clicking along on all eight cylinders and all the moving parts are falling into place. Everyone is comfortable with lines, lyrics, staging and all the little kinks with costumes, props, sets and lights have been worked out. The audience must have all had a few orange things at Bottega before the show as they were roaring by the end of the opening number and their response helped fuel our energy in a super charged exothermic cycle. We probably came as close to hitting it out of the park as we ever can.

I was thinking about Tommy a lot backstage. Dolly would not have been his kind of show. He was always much more about musical drama than musical comedy and he always loved the ones where there’s plenty of angst and some sympathetic character dies before the final curtain. He would have been happy to work on it in a production capacity, would have sat through it dutifully for my performance, and then spent the next two hours while getting ready for bed telling me how much he loathed the collected works of Jerry Herman, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe. I, on the other hand, love both musical comedy and musical drama. There are times when what we need is a show whose major purpose is simply to radiate joy into a world that at times appears to grow darker with each passing day. Tommy’s ultimate goal as an audience member was to go to local theater and see a show filled with actors he knew but to see no one he knew on stage. Are we achieving that? I’m the wrong person to ask but I know I’m losing myself in the cartoon valentine of 1890s New York we’re all creating.

Dolly is the right show for me at the moment. It’s the message. It’s about a woman of a certain age who makes a decision to break out of her rut, created by her personal tragedy, and in doing so changes her life and the lives of all of those around her for the better. The famous title song symbolizes her rebirth into the human race and all its follies. She has decided to live a fool among fools rather than a fool alone. My part in the show is a minor character role but that moment as she comes down the stairs to join me and the waiters is speaking to something deep inside of me and I hope it’s helping me figure out my own path in life. Will I have a staircase moment at some point? Well, Miss Clairol Channing has the red dress and the wig with the feathers so you never know…

Tommy and I went to a lot of theater in New York over the years together. The first show we saw together was the Studio 54 Cabaret, notable for us both getting somewhat squiffy on Southern Comfort Manhattans (we had one of the cabaret tables right up against the stage). The last was the current production of Waitress. I think the show that made the biggest impression on him was the original production of Rent, which we saw together late in the run. As he said afterwards. ‘That was my life on that stage’. He had had a horrific early 20s with trying to survive on odd jobs and little money, battling the HIV epidemic, losing friends, and an unhappy love life. I enjoyed it but I had spent that period in college and med school nose to the grindstone so I hadn’t been as thoroughly affected as he was. I lost friends and fully expected to be gone by age thirty myself but that educational structure had kept me focused and sane. He hadn’t had that.

I hope that Tommy takes some time out from whatever he’s up to in the next life to look in on Dolly and take in a performance and give a sign that he approves. I’ll be waiting like Dolly waits for Ephraim. I just hope it doesn’t involve blue wallpaper.

I got myself up this morning and dragged myself to church. I didn’t want to after the ridiculous call night on Friday topped off by the three am call last night from the lady who just wanted to talk because she has a high level of anxiety about her husband’s health. When those calls come in, I have to remember to put myself in his or her shoes, remind myself that it’s part of the job I signed myself up for, and reach down into my well of patience and compassion and give him or her what he or she needs to hear. Reassurance, a little wisdom, and most of all, someone in authority who will take the time to listen to his or her story for a while. I have found that by doing this, my patients almost always feel better after a few minutes even though I really haven’t done much.

Anyway, I did manage to get in some sleep last night and the choir was due to sing this morning, so up I got for choir rehearsal and service and it’s a good thing I did as it was a service I needed to hear. Our minister is out on maternity leave (safe delivery of a son last week) so we have some pulpit guests for the next six or eight weeks until she returns. Today, it was John Archibald. Anyone who considers themselves an informed Birminghamian will be familiar with him and his writings as a columnist for the Birmingham News and its various on line permutations. His topic was Finding Reason in an Unreasonable World. I was expecting some sort of dissection of the political status of Birmingham, Alabam, and the United States but, instead, he began by reflecting on the difficulties he had in creating a coherent message to go with his topic. (I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks of a bang up title for a lecture and is then stymied by the task of coming up with material worthy of that title).

His ultimate message was that the only way to find reason in the crazy political moment in which we find ourselves is to draw back. None of us can fix the US political system. What we can do is find meaning, order and reason in small moments and kindnesses in our everyday lives and that’s what we have to hang on to. It was a sermon that resonated as it made me think about my life and its changes over the last six months. I am now a different person and in a different place than I was in March. What has made that bearable have been hundreds of small acts of kindness from hundreds of people over the interim. The words of sympathy, the funny texts, the invitations to dinner, the offers of help, positive comments on my writings. Each and every one keeps me going from one day to the next. They make me recognize that I am a thread in a grand tapestry of life, touching other threads and making a complex pattern. We sometimes spend our time fighting and worrying over threads far removed from our own and while it’s good to see how they contribute to the overall picture, our courage, resilience and fortitude comes from our immediate surroundings, not capitol buildings in distant cities.

Storytime – This one involves me and my medical school experiences. I entered medical school immediately after completing my undergraduate degree. Stanford handed me a diploma in June and I was behind a desk for my first medical school class in late August. I was at the University of Washington for a combination of in state tuition and because it was the only med school I got into. My first year, spent in what was known as the WAMI program (Washington/Alaska/Montana/Idaho) went well. The three smaller states do not have state medical schools so students from those states can attend U of W as in state students. They spend their first year and many of their clinical rotations in their home state. Washington participates in the same way but it’s rare for them to get a lot of volunteers to head off to WSU in Pullman so they draft to fill up the complement and I was one of the draftees. We were a small group and that sort of seminar learning worked well for me and I had a good time and did quite well grade wise. It probably also set the stage for my interest in rural health.

Second year, everyone was back in Seattle in large lecture classes and I hated it. My grades remained OK, but not stellar and I became one of those indifferent middle of the pack med students that aren’t destined for a particularly illustrious career. I found that I could learn as much on my own as from lectures so by the spring quarter, I was barely going to class. When I hit clinical rotations in my third year, being in the WAMI program I rotated out to places such as Boise, Nome and Whitefish. As one of only a few students at a time, I did well. When in the huge complex of U of W, I did not do so well as I did not like playing the subservience games medical students are supposed to play.

I did graduate on time and, as I wasn’t certain what I wanted to do with a medical degree decided to match in Internal Medicine as I figured it was probably the most flexible thing I could do. I had no idea what I wanted to do. The match system put me at University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento so in June of 1988, I packed up the U-Haul and headed to California. Most of my first year of residency is a blur due to the combination of overwork and sleep deprivation and I was not happy with my life or my choices. However, in my second year, I started to really get to know Faith Fitzgerald, our residency program director. She was a tall, angular woman with a brillo pad of iron gray hair who I at first had found quite intimidating. She, through luck of the draw, became my outpatient clinic preceptor my second year. One day in clinic, she made a remark about the bed of Procrustes. This brought blank stares from the other residents; I on the other hand knew the reference and lobbed something back about Jason and the Argonauts. I think I was the first resident she had had in some years who had a deep interest in the humanities as well as the sciences and she took me under her wing and helped me find a balance in my life between medicine and my other interests and she, more than anyone else, showed me how to love medicine as an art, unusual in this time of science. She didn’t favor me over other residents, she just took the time to understand who I was, something that hadn’t happened ever in med school, and gave me a little nudge or two over the years that eventually led me to develop the career I have today. It’s the little kindnesses and the listening that can have enormous ripple effects years later.

It’s 4:15 AM, the beeper has gone off five times since midnight so I might as well accept the fact that there’s not going to be any sleep tonight. I would have a crazy call night on the only night I have off from the theater this week. Ah well, such is life. If I’m going to be up in the wee hours, I might as well do a little writing and updating on the last few weeks.

Where to start? Perhaps with Hello, Dolly! which is going rather well. We start tech at 10 tomorrow morning. This is the stage of the process that is both exciting and infuriating. Those who do not do theater have no idea of the enormous coordination of elements that have to come together to get a big musical put together. Sets, costumes, lights, props, actors, dancers, musicians… and if anything is out of place, things fall apart. I have my track more or less down in my head – lyrics learned, bass part in the harmonies down, dance steps down, lines mainly in the correct order. Now I have to add in the costume changes, making sure I’m not in the way of rolling set pieces, and figuring out how to fit into the nonexistent stage left wing with fifteen actors and the fly rail without being seen by the audience. The time with the show has been good to me. I’m hanging out with some old friends, have somewhere I need to be in the evenings, and the message of the show about reengaging with life is resonating.

Work is work. The current shape of my job is fairly structured with outpatient clinical work and that’s probably a good thing at the moment. I know where I need to be and what I need to do most of the time and structure is helpful to keep me moving forward. One thing leads to another in a weekly cycle and I’m able to operate effectively, even when I don’t really feel like it. There hasn’t been anything too unusual. The usual crazy patient/family stories but HIPPA prevents me from telling them here.

My slow clean out of the house is on hiatus until I get the show open. I leave around 7:30 in the morning and don’t get back until around 10:30 at night so I have neither time nor energy to do much around here. I did have a burst of steam that allowed me to get the laundry started. It was a necessity if I wanted to have clean underwear. The cats seem to be a bit put out by my absence. Anastasia, who usually sleeps on the bed with me has decamped to the media room. Archie and Oliver have been a bit more standoffish than usual.

I added them up the other day, and Dolly is my 15th musical on the Virginia Samford Theater stage since I started performing in Birmingham. A long run of servants, aristocrats, comic villains, and other supporting types. Someone asked me what my favorite role I’ve done there was. It’s a hard question to answer as it’s usually whatever I’m currently working on. However, looking back, the one I recall the most fondly is the one that’s most out of character for what I usually do – Herr Schultz in Cabaret. Dramatic/pathetic is not my usual wheelhouse and it was a part that made me stretch and go some uncomfortable places. I was 45 when I played it, and probably 20 years too young for the role and I hope I get to tackle it again when I am 60 something.

I’m trying to think of a story. The Virginia Samford brings up all sorts of memories of me and Tommy as we did so many projects there together, both onstage and off. It was responsible for his interest in wigs. That came from a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in early 2012. Tommy was recovering from serious respiratory illness and I was in the cast playing the mayor. Our dear friend Kim Rollins Dometrovich was doing the costumes and was also in the cast so she had a very full plate. Tommy was off work due to his recent illness and hanging around backstage during the tech process and Kim, who needed help asked him if he could do some finger waves to the wigs for the opening 1930s sequence. He graciously agreed to be taught, found he had a knack for working with artificial hair, and a career was born. He settled contentedly into the wig room while I pranced around the stage in a hideous powder blue polyester leisure suit. He approached the wigs like he did everything in life that caught his interest – pulling in disparate skill sets and learning as much as possible about the subject until he mastered it. Which usually took him about six months. Within about a year, he was wig master for any number of local productions. He always told me that he approached theatrical wigs not as hair, but as sculpture with hair as the medium and he had a unique way of envisioning the finished product and knowing exactly what sort of curling or cutting technique was going to get him there. Watching something like the wigs for The Little Mermaid take shape in his studio was watching an artist at work. Sometimes I go out to his studio and just sit there for a few minutes. It’s pretty much as he left it. I just close my eyes and smell the old hairspray and shampoo and for a minute I can pretend he’s there with me working away at some new creation and asking me to help with the washing or brushing out. I’ll have to clean it out and pack it up eventually. But not today…

It’s time for another long update. Why that should be, I don’t know. I just know that I was missing Tommy more than usual today; it wasn’t a prolonged longing or sadness, more a sense of going through the day and thinking ‘I need to tell him that when I get home’ and automatically wanting to call him around mid-afternoon to check in on his day and find out what he had going on and what I needed to put into my brain to keep all the balls in the air at home. It may be that we’re in the swing of Dolly rehearsals and as we did so many projects together over the years, rehearsal time often became family time for us. It may be that the weather has been miserably hot and humid and that always makes me irritable and start counting down the weeks and days towards fall. Fall has always been my favorite season with a crispness in the air and, having always lived by the academic calendar, it’s my season of new beginnings. Having grown up in Seattle, fall always comes with a special golden light in the late afternoons of September and early October that I have never really found anywhere else.

Everything is more or less back in the groove at work. I have all my clinical responsibilities that don’t vary much from week to week and a few extra projects going on, mainly some public speaking engagements. Why I agreed to do one this Saturday at 8 AM I’ll never know but at least it’s only a half hour on ‘Communicating with Your Aging Parents’. I can’t say that I’m an expert on that but I do have a few tips after nearly thirty years in geriatric medicine. There’s nothing wrong at work, but I am still feeling a bit detached from it, like I’m sleep walking through my days; I think it’s a deep psychological defense mechanism that’s allowing me to deal with the pain and grief of others without triggering my own too much.

Travel plans are set for the rest of the year. I’ll be in NYC from October 17-21, Seattle November 17-23, and out of the country December 15-30. (More details on that last one once everything is booked – I’ll just say that I think I’ve found a way to escape the holidays completely this year which is a psychological necessity. I’ll consider dealing with them in 2019).

Hello, Dolly! is going well. Rudolf is only in Act II so I’m filling out the ensemble in Act I. Let us just say that I am not a chorus boy, but, like most shows, there aren’t as many men as they might want so all hands on deck. I am learning my Gower Champion as filtered through Roger Van Fleteren of the Alabama ballet as well as I can despite being more than twice the age of most of the rest of the ensemble men. We had three hours of ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’ tonight. I came home and took a long hot shower. Having had rehearsal every night this week and all last weekend and this coming weekend, I am behind on MNM’s version of Dolly. I promise to get back to that soon and am likely to put some of my cast mates in her world.

The conversation at lunch today centered around concussions and traumatic brain injuries so that brought up a story that I haven’t told yet. This one is from my distant past, before Steve and Tommy. The year was 1988. I had just graduated from medical school and had matched for my internship and residency at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento so shortly after graduation, I drove down to go apartment hunting, staying with my old friend Vickie Rozell. I knew I wanted to live in the historic part of town, known as midtown so I called up a number of places in my price range and was driving from one to another to take a look. In the midst of the driving along unfamiliar streets, I was T-boned at the corner of 24th and K and bonked my head hard on the dashboard. I remember nothing about the accident, just being dazed and confused and loaded into the back of an ambulance and raced off to the emergency room where I was due to start work two weeks later. I started vomiting as one does after a concussion, as a nurse by the name of Diane got all my clothes off and I was checked for various fractures. Fortunately, other than the concussion and some superficial scrapes, I was fine, and Vickie was able to collect me from the ED and was kind enough to check on me in the middle of the night and make sure I wasn’t sinking into a coma.

There were three sequelae to the whole thing. One, a totaled car (my first car – a Ford Fiesta) which led me to purchase Vickie’s old one which had no air conditioning, highly unpleasant in Sacramento summers. That B210 later went to John Rambo so it had a lot of life in it. Two, a post concussive syndrome from which I had some mild narcolepsy for a couple of months. Not useful in an intern. Three, an ED nurse who must have seen something she liked as she pursued my relentlessly for the next year and a half despite my complete lack of interest. This continued until after Steve and I got together and it was rather bizarre when she showed up on the doorstep uninvited asking me out when Steve and I were both in our bathrobes and obviously quite domestic. What made it even weirder was she was seven months pregnant with an ambulance driver’s baby at the time. She stopped calling after that so I assume she finally understood the message.

No rehearsal tomorrow, instead dinner at a friend’s house. It will be a nice change.

Last night I wrote a very long post catching everyone up on the last few weeks and, of course, Facebook ate it before I could upload it. I was in no mood to redo it last night but I’ve mellowed a little bit this evening so, while I am binge watching season 5 of Parks and Recreation, here’s a quick update on life, the universe and everything.

I’ve been back at work for a month now. New patterns are starting to establish themselves. Work is work and going relatively smoothly, other than some computer issues on the VA side which are still being straightened out. Many of my patients read the obituaries obsessively and so figured out why I was out for most of the spring so I have returned to many hugs and condolences. When you’ve been caring for the same population for a couple of decades, you develop a bond. I have some people whom I have had since I picked up my original panel in the late 90s. They were 70 something then and 90 something now. I have the children of a number of my original patients who are now in their 70s and 80s. Yet another reminder of how I have become embedded in the fabric of this city.

Outside of work, arts stuff is starting to come back from summer hiatus. Church choir started last week and Hello, Dolly! rehearsals begin this Thursday. I did Dolly once before, thirty five years ago in college, when I assisted Lauren Marshall as director. Alex Kaufman and Elizabeth Bryantwere Cornelius and Irene and Marq T Laube was in the chorus. I wish I had a wonderfully entertaining story about that production, but, as I remember it, the whole thing went relatively smoothly. I do recall a rather endless production meeting that got bogged down on whether Dolly should wear black or tan character shoes. (I believe tan won). I also recall a couple of production numbers that refused to come together until final dress rehearsal when the usual magic of theater brought them home. There weren’t a lot of dancers in the men’s chorus so we staged the Waiters Galop and Polka Contest with a lot of tricks. Waiters on roller skates, waiters on rolling carts, juggling waiters, waiters tossing trays at each other… It worked. And of course the whole thing ended up with Rudolf getting a pie in the face. (One of my touches).

I still have empty hours at home which I am trying to fill. I’m starting to get some home projects done, such as decluttering. The master suite is essentially done and I am starting on the office/media room next. I packed up all of Tommy’s good clothes and sent them off to the University of Montevallo’s student clothing bank yesterday. It’s so starving college students can have dress clothes for interviews and the like. I thought he’d like that. I’ve kept the things that we both wore and I have his bow ties which I don’t wear, but they were his signature so I think I will bestow them as mementos.

I need to start organizing all my bits and pieces of essay and thought on aging and mortality and start organizing it together into something above and beyond Facebook posts. I’ve done a little bit but there is much more to do. I bought myself a new laptop as the old one was getting old and wonky and I’m hoping it will spur me into doing some writing in the evenings. Of course, I bought myself a new Xbox one on the same Best Buy shopping trip so I’ll have to put down the controller to do that.

Some days are harder than others but in general I’m OK. I feel like I’m sleepwalking through life and hope that as I get more things back on the plate as fall advances, that I’ll be waking up a bit more. I’m not going to journal daily like I did when I was travelling, but I do have some trips coming up, so I will write more as that happens. NYC again in October, Seattle for Thanksgiving and something exotic over Christmas that hasn’t been thoroughly planned out yet.

What do I need at this point? If you’re local, dinners out or an evening of cocktails and board games or some such. If you’re at a distance, just message or call or check in with me from time to time and say Hi. There’s just a huge hole and it takes time and other people to gradually fill it.