Well, the first routine weekend is over and done with. Was it productive? A little. I completed the majority of my CME for the year. One more course to go which I should finish this coming week, then I’m good until sometime in 2019. What I’ve noticed is that I can’t read those board style questions and make sense of them with my aging brain the way I was able to a few years ago. I have to get through one more of those exams in my life, my geriatrics boards recertification in 2024 (when I will be 62) and then that is it and I refuse to do more after that point.

What else did I manage to do? I wrote this week’s MNM column (which will be out midweek sometime). I went to a work related social event. And I went and saw two of my favorite actresses, Holly Dikeman and Carole Armistead in the play Well at Birmingham Festival Theater. I haven’t been on that stage for some years so maybe that should happen this season. They’re doing The Good Doctor this fall and that has parts for which I would be appropriate casting so I should get off my butt and audition. Going to have to brush off a monologue or two. And, I spent this morning at church teaching Sunday School – I’ve got upper elementary this year. I also got my laundry done so, all in all, not a bad weekend.

It still feels empty and slow paced without Tommy and his multiple jobs and projects. He had so much to do, far more than most human beings can handle, and it was my job to handle the overflow. I can’t say I’ll miss being pressed into service rolling wigs at one in the morning, but I do miss the hum of activity and the hours of busy companionship. I even miss being told that I’m doing it wrong.

The play, Well, is by Lisa Kron who wrote Fun Home and has a lot to say about health, illness, how that affects the body, family relations and communities at large. I nearly lost it when they got to the Chaka Khan scene (see my last story) but much of what was being discussed is what I deal with professionally on a routine basis.

Tonight’s story is one of healthcare. I don’t talk a lot about my job in this forum for HIPPAA and other reasons but this is from years ago with no identifying information so I’ll go ahead and do it. Most of you know that house calls have been a huge part of my career. I’ve been doing them since 1991, when I first figured out their usefulness in community based geriatrics. This particular house call, from some years ago, was a routine visit to a family of limited function and socio-economic means where daddy, who had severe dementia, was the patient, and mama had severe untreated schizophrenia. We arrived one morning to check up on daddy as he had repeatedly been in the emergency department with burned feet. What we discovered was mama would roll him right up to the space gas heater to keep his feet warm, then forget he was there. His dementia and his diabetic neuropathy kept him from recognizing that his toes were getting a little too toasty and burns would result. I and my nurse showed up, pulled his feet from the fire (literally) and went in search for mama. We found her in the kitchen of their filthy and decrepit house (we took bets as to whether someone on the care team would put their foot through the floor on any given visit) frying up a mess of something on the stove. She opened a cupboard to pull out some seasoning and the largest roach I have ever seen came flying out and landed in the midst of the pan. Without missing a beat, mama picked up the can of Raid and sprayed the roach, the food, and the open flame of the gas stove. I looked for a handy window out of which to dive in case the house went up but luck was with us and no explosion was forthcoming. Mama then looked at us and said with a grin, ‘Y’all want some?’. We politely refused. The visit ended with daddy peeing all over me as I did my physical exam.

No one ever said medicine was a glamorous profession. Now I’m going back to Season 2 of Queer Eye on Netflix.

And like that, the road trips were over, I was back in Birmingham, and it was time to get back to work. If I were a few years older, I might have toyed with early retirement, but 56 is just a bit too soon. I’d been through all this before, but with Steve’s death, I had had a couple of years to get used to the idea before he died and was able to do a lot of my grief work in advance. No such luxury this time around with Tommy who went from functional to deceased in just over a month.

And so I’m returning to my usual patterns with mixed success. The first UAB day back on Monday went well, thanks to the kindness of multiple colleagues who had handled most of the clinical issues while I was gone. I was more or less back in the saddle and up to speed by lunch time and there are no major issues on the horizon. The first day back at the VA today was not as smooth.

My biggest issue is trying to figure out how best to spend my downtime without Tommy and Tommy’s unending stream of projects that usually required a factotum to follow him around and lend the extra pair of hands to make sure it all happened on schedule. I do have a show coming up, but it doesn’t go into rehearsal for a few more weeks. I have a house to clean out, but I can only do so much of that so fast for emotional reasons. (I went through all his clothes and sorted everything out this weekend. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it might have been – except for the shoes. Those held a lot of memories. Tommy had tiny little feet (Mens 7 1/2) so fitting him in shoes was always difficult. When he found some he liked and that fit, he always bought them so his closet tended to resemble that of Imelda Marcos. But, it’s done, I just have to get things to where they need to go.) I’ve got some writing projects to work on, but I often don’t have the energy after a full day at work to get too intellectual. I’ll probably do that more on weekends. I can write these little epistles to the world and I need to get back to writing my MNM columns more routinely as well.

The current decision, so I feel like I am getting something constructive done, is to do my CME for the year. I have some computer courses that expire at the end of the month so I need to get them done and then I can forget about those hours for another year or so. I hate the years when I realize it’s December and I have another ten hours I have to get and I’m up late with the laptop trying to cram the difference between Eschericia coli and Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae into my brain. I figure if I can get an hour or two in on weeknights the next few weeks before turning on Netflix and becoming a vegetable, it will be a good thing.

The Chaka Khan story. This is another Steve story. Steve and I used to travel a lot with the gay travel group Atlantis Events and, in January of 1999, shortly after we had moved to Birmingham, we were booked on one of their first Caribbean cruises on the Norwegian Wind. This was before Steve became ill so he was in fine form, making sure he was noticed by the other guests and staff alike. The special guest entertainer on the cruise was Chaka Khan and one evening, she did her set. Later that night, there was a white party up on the deck and as it was a lovely warm night, most of the men weren’t wearing a whole lot. Steve decided to attend wearing a white sailor top and sailor hat and a white jock strap. The top was long enough to cover most of his rump, not that that crowd cared and he and I were dancing under the stars. Chaka came out on deck and sat at a table at the side of the dance floor to watch the dancing and Steve spotted her. He immediately took off his jock strap, tossed it to her (she nimbly caught it) and then proceeded to flash her. Her response was uproarious laughter and something along the lines of ‘Honey, a girl likes it when you leave something to the imagination’. He laughed back and she invited us to sit down with her. Steve and she were roughly the same age and knew some of the same people in LA and soon were having a high old time together, even if he wasn’t wearing any pants. He always adored African American women and they him. Once we moved to Birmingham, he would say the most outrageous things to African American women we would encounter and they would all laugh, and then fix him with an amused, but steely gaze and say “You’re so bad” to which his standard response was “I didn’t know any better” and they would all laugh again.

For those of you who were wondering, yes, I had my pants on, thank you very much. If I recall, I was wearing white jeans and some sort of sheer white top. Yes, there are photos. No, I’m not publishing them…

Dateline: Columbia, South Carolina – Birmingham, Alabama-

Well, the trip has come to an end. I have a three day weekend to gear myself up for returning to work on Monday. Sorry that there was no update yesterday, but as it was a holiday (and I may have had one cocktail too many), I decided writing last night was probably not the wisest of ideas.

Yesterday, the 4th, I left Asheville after poking around downtown for a bit and made the easy drive to Columbia. I was invited for the 4th to my dear friend Frank Thompson‘s house where I spent time catching up with him and his wife, Laurel Posey. They had a barbecue potluck for the Columbia theater folk so I finally got to meet such people as Kathy Hartzog, Ripley Thames, Bill DeWitt and Bill Arvay whom I have heard about for years but had never actually met in the flesh. Much food was consumed, many drinks were had, and all of the problems of both Birmingham and Columbia theater were solved.

Today, after a leisurely morning, I made the last leg of the trip driving back to Birmingham which requires about seven hours of I-20 with all of the Atlanta traffic in the middle of it. It rained a bunch, but was otherwise uneventful. I got back about 7 pm to find the house intact, (Thank you Melissa Bailey), the kitties somewhat fussy (but only Anastasia seeming to have missed me in the least), and a large pile of mail which I will deal with tomorrow.

So, what have I learned from all this gallivanting around ?(11,500 miles and 28 states over the last few months…)
-People seem to like my writing
-My storytelling seems to be improving
-All of this current writing is becoming something, I just don’t know what yet.
-You can get a single ticket to pretty much anything in New York without much notice
-Hampton Inns are the same everywhere
-Hampton Inn breakfasts are the same everywhere
-Ken Follett does not write good sex scenes
-A Prius does well on back roads
-I’m going to miss Tommy like hell

I don’t know what sort of FB writing I’m going to do now that I’m setting back into routine. I probably won’t write every night as I have been. I may continue to post personal stories as I think of them. I will write when I travel. (Nothing in stone yet, but the tentative plans for the next six months include NYC again in October, Seattle for Thanksgiving, someplace for Christmas, the Caribbean in February).

Today’s story is a me and Steve story and as you read it, you’ll get why I thought of it over the last couple of days. When I was brand new faculty at UC Davis, I won a major award for ideas in Wellness sponsored by the insurance company, HealthNet. It came with some money, a book chapter, an award lecture etc. My topic was that disease prevention and health promotion were two very different things and should not be confused with each other and that more emphasis should be placed on the latter. It’s the kind of award usually won by senior faculty, not by those just starting out and it made me one of the fair haired rising stars of UCD school of medicine.

As the medical center was in Sacramento, just down from the capitol, all of the lobbyists and other pieces of the UC system that interacted with state government were headquartered there so UCD faculty were often trotted out for various legislators in their attempts to butter them up for additional state funds. Steve and I were invited to the chief lobbyist’s home for dinner a number of times. He lived in a very nice house, right on the river, with a huge entertaining space. I was invited initially due to my award and as spouses were included, Steve tagged along and put on his best manners and charm and we became regulars in the rotation. The second or third time we were asked for dinner, the hostess knew enough about to Steve to know he was from Los Angeles so she put us at a table with a state legislator from LA who represented the district that Steve had lived in before he moved north. He, of course, knew who she was, they discovered some friends in common, and they had a high old time together. The other tables kept looking around to see what was so funny at our table. Steve always got along incredibly well with African American women, a talent that was to serve him well in later years. The legislator in question was, of course, Maxine Waters, long before her rise to national prominence.

Some day I’ll have to tell the story of Steve and I and Chaka Khan…

Dateline: Asheville, North Carolina-

I must have been tired yesterday as I slept until nearly 11 am this morning and got a late start. This kept me from being too crazy in my mountain meanderings and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I had a brilliant idea. I was close to the Blue Ridge Parkway so I headed south, picked it up around mile marker 150, and stayed on it for the 250 miles to Asheville. It’s a slow road with its twists and turns and stunning views so it took about seven hours to cover that distance but it was worth it. I had been on the Parkway in the past for brief distances but had never driven so much of it and I highly recommend that anyone in this part of the country do that at least once. It’s beautifully constructed to take full advantage of the scenery, the other roads go under or around it so it has no stops or traffic backups and it’s simply gorgeous with banks of wildflowers, towering rhododendrons and full growth deciduous forests everywhere. There were deer aplenty at roadside, mainly does with fawns. I was hoping for a black bear but they were all out of town for the holiday week.

Most of you have probably figured out by now that I like to distance drive. I especially like driving winding mountain roads, something I seem to have inherited from my father who would always take the longer, more scenic and curvier road when given a choice. This was not always wise, especially when my sister who was prone to car sickness was in the car. Over the years I have driven Highway 1 along the California Coast, the Hana Highway and Haleakala crater roads on Maui, the road from Grand Junction to Durango and many other such malarial germs of asphalt. I’m sure there are more for me and Hope to explore and if any of you have any nominations. One that I’ve always want to try and never have is driving from Seattle to Anchorage,and maybe even to Fairbanks on the AlCan highway. Some day.

Asheville has been my favorite mountain town for many years. I’m not doing the Biltmore thing this trip as I have been a number of times in the past. I first discovered Asheville long before moving to Alabama. Steve was a genealogical researcher and was obsessed with chasing down all the descendants of three brothers, Jonas, Isaac and Moses Spivey who came to the Asheville area in the 1760s. (He was descended from Jonas). In the early 1990s, we made a number of trips to the area visiting all the county courthouses for a hundred miles around looking for records and so Steve could go to Spivey family reunions. One of the mountains just outside of Asheville, is Spivey mountain, named after one of his cousins who resided there in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Steve and I went to Biltmore and really enjoyed the town on our trips. Years later, Tommy and I would make a number of trips to Asheville whenever we wanted a mountain getaway. Steve was most interested in the history of the house. Tommy was most interested in the backstage tours where they let you in to the pieces not normally open to the public and the winery.

Sometimes I dream of retiring to a mountain top chalet with a view over some lush valley, then I realize that I would get immensely bored after about two weeks if I did not have easy access to city life. I think I’ll leave this for vacations.

Dateline: Blacksburg, Virginia-

After thinking about various options for travel today, I opted to head down the Shenandoah valley and up into the mountains of West Virginia. It seemed like a good idea, until the thundershowers arrived and you could barely see five feet. Fortunately, there was a nearby rest area so I pulled off until things got a bit better. For whatever reason, I was feeling a bit on the tired side today so I opted not to go as far as I might have otherwise and stopped for the night at the home of Virginia Tech. Seems to be like all small college towns every where. As I am not due in South Carolina until the day after tomorrow and I’m not all that far away, I’m going to take an extra day in the mountains and maybe take some of the back roads which can be such fun to drive.

I’ve gotten into bed early and am watching some bad movies and starting my next MNM column which I should have completed in the next day or two. It hasn’t been a terribly exciting day but a slower pace after two weeks of Manhattan is probably good for me.

Many of you know that I have spent a lot of time in the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky over the last couple of decades. It ‘s another one of those serendipitous things that seems to happen to me. This one came about as part of my original hire at UAB. I was hired there originally, specifically to help strengthen the outpatient geriatrics clinic. Given the structure of Medicare, ambulatory practice does not generate enough money to both run a clinic and pay providers so it was necessary for me to have a couple of other sources for salary. One of these was a contract that UAB had with the United Mine Workers Funds geriatric care management program which had started with a demonstration project in Walker County Alabama and Mercer and McDowell Counties in southern West Virginia. The UMWF is an organization that administers union guaranteed benefits to individuals whose coal companies are no longer in business. One of those benefits was lifetime health benefits for miners, their spouses, and dependent adult children. As the miners (and more often their widows) aged, they were not necessarily being well served by their local health providers and the GCM provided nursing oversight in the home long term to these frail and usually impoverished rural elders.

I had had experience in case management programs in California and so GCM was entrusted to me when I got to UAB. I started with training and working with the Alabama nurses and it went so well, I was asked to do the same thing with the West Virginia nurses. This necessitated my heading off to the metropolis of Welch, West Virginia. The first time I went, I flew. By the time you took two flights, landed at the only airport in WV which is at the opposite end of the state, rented a car, and got to where I was going, it was a 10-11 hour process. This compared to a 9 hour drive from Birmingham so ever after, I drove up once a quarter or so to teach, review cases and lend my expertise to the program. Over the years, the program expanded to additional WV counties and then into eastern KY and I just kept adding more and more nurses and patients to my purview. I got to know the roads between Alabama and the heart of coal country very well.

I made fifty or sixty trips up there over the 17 years I was affiliated with the program, ending my tenure in 2015 when the UMWF had to retrench its finances and could no longer pay for the contract with UAB. I got smarter about the drives over the years, or I just got older. Originally, I would drive up the afternoon before a meeting, spend the night in a hotel, have eight hours of meetings, then immediately drive back to Birmingham getting in about 2 AM. (Steve was sick during this period and I didn’t want to leave home for too long a time). Later I got smart and refused to do the drive and meetings on the same day.

There’s not a lot to do in small town Appalachia so Ellen Peach, the program’s NP, and I explored pretty much every decent place to eat in Princeton WV, Beckley WV, and Pikeville KY. The list isn’t long. There was also the memorable Veteran’s Day parade in downtown Welch in 2001. It was just two months after 9/11 and we both nearly lost it when the zaftig high schooler dressed as lady liberty proudly rode by on the back of a flat bed Ford chained to a model of an ICBM. That one was incorporated into an MNM column.

Dateline: Allentown, Pennsylvania-

Looking at that title makes me realize I pulled a reverse Peggy Sawyer today. I guess it’s because there was no crowd singing The Lullaby of Broadway at Grand Central Station when I went to catch my train. (For those of you totally confused by this, go watch a musical…)

Last day in Manhattan so went around trying to leave the apartment in better shape than you found it. I always try to restock, replace small appliances, or do other things so that it will be ready for family or next guest and they won’t have to make a late night CVS run. I interrupted that process in order to have brunch with Ginny Crooks and her husband. Ginny and I go way back in both UU and Birmingham theater circles but I haven’t seen much of her since she remarried and hightailed it to New Jersey so it was lovely to catch up and reminisce. She’s also one of my few Birmingham friends who knew Steve and my life before Tommy.

NYC was hot and sticky again so I splurged on a cab to Grand Central rather than the subway as I had to schlep a couple of suitcases and a shoulder bag. Everything had gotten a lot heavier due to piles of playbills and other detritus of a two week stay. Trips always seem to do that. I always grab a bunch of extra playbills so I can give some to people who want them and then the extras go in a box in the basement which has a whole bunch dating back about thirty years.

The train deposited me back in New Canaan where I made my way to my cousin’s house and hung out with his family for a while and had dinner before heading out. I wanted to get away from the metropolitan area before Monday morning traffic so back towards the city, into New Jersey, turn right at Newark airport and into Pennsylvania where I figured it was a good enough place to stop. I haven’t decided on tomorrow’s route yet. It’s going to be a mass of holiday makers anyplace interesting so I’ll play it by ear.

No stories are occurring to me tonight. I’ll think through stuff on the drive and maybe I’ll have one tomorrow. I’ll post an old MNM column instead.

If your confused by the MNM reference, you have yet to meet my alter ego, Mrs. Norman Maine, star of stage, screen, and dream ballet. I invented her for a gay chat board several decades ago and she started writing film reviews for a now defunct site called epinions.com around 2000. She was a psychological response to the stresses of providing care for Steve during his prolonged illness. I wrote something over 350 columns for epinions from 2000-2005. I stopped as my life changed with Tommy and I developed my own performing career and no longer needed a vicarious one. In 2014, the site movierewind.com asked me to bring her back so I started up again. There’s about 150 columns in that series so far. One of these days I’ll edit them into some sort of publishable form for the three dozen MNM fans out there.

Dateline: New York, New York-

This will be the last entry from NYC. I don’t know where I will be tomorrow night, it just won’t be here. I have some ideas, but we’ll see what happens. It’s going to depend on train schedules, cousin schedules, and holiday week traffic. It’s been a bittersweet two weeks. I’ve caught up with people, attended some terrific theater, but at the end of it I find myself full of tidbits that I want to share with Tommy which I just can’t do anymore. Heck, there are even some things I want to share with Steve. I’ve made so many trips to Manhattan over the years that details elide and sometimes I find myself confused as to whether a certain event involved Tommy or involved Steve and I can see them becoming more and more intertwined in my brain as time goes on. By the time I’m eighty and my dementia is well in place, I’m likely only to remember one husband with aspects of both men.

It was a hot and sticky day all day in the city. The kind of day where he feel you need a shower after walking three blocks. Fortunately, it was also a day I could spend primarily indoors. I headed to midtown around noon for a matinee of The Bands Visit. (The Barrymore has a great air conditioning system). This is the musical that swept the Tonys this year. It’s a long one act about an Egyptian band that gets on the wrong bus and is stranded in the wrong town overnight when they go to Israel for a cultural festival. David Yazbek has written an Arabic music flavored score for the band (many playing their own instruments) as the Arabs and Israelis awaken to their human commonalities. It’s a very sweet show. Not much actually happens but you recognize that both the band members and the townspeople will be pushed out of their respective ruts by their interaction and they will be forever changed.

My evening show, another long one act, Come From Away, has a similar theme. It’s the story of what happened in Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11 when US airspace was closed and 38 transatlantic flights were diverted and a town of 9,000 found themselves playing host to 7,000 unexpected guests. Again, an event over which they have no control throws people together and all of them are forever changed for the better because of it. I found the show incredibly uplifting. The cast of twelve, of all ages, shapes and ethnicities, fluidly portray dozens of characters with the quick change of a hat or coat. While the tragedy of that day is always there in the background, the show is about the good that we as humans are capable of doing for each other. Sitting through the unfolding story, most of which I already knew, I thought that both of these shows were the perfect antidotes for the toxic politics of today. Most people are decent people and when confronted with the stranger on an individual level, they will open their hearts and homes. It’s when they can hide behind the anonymity of the internet or distance themselves from the human face of the news that the toxicity bubbles to the surface. The row in front of me was occupied by a tour group from Newfoundland who adored the show and waved Newfoundland flags at key moments. It was obvious the cast could see that and were touched by the gesture.

Both of these shows, while neither even about the US, made me feel more positive about what we as a society can accomplish when we can break our problems down to the individual people to people level. I once wrote a play entitled ‘Terrorist in the Family Room’ about a dysfunctional suburban family that takes in an international terrorist by mistake, but the whole point of the play was that the real terrorist was the television set and the constant diet of unrealistic images we all get fed which distract us from what’s in front of our noses.

Something interesting about all three of the new musicals I have seen (these two and Dear Evan Hansen) is that they are all very small scale. Come From Away has a cast of 12, Dear Evan Hansen, a cast of 8, and The Band’s Visit a cast of 14 plus some additional musician band members. All three of them are in relatively small Broadway houses making the experience of seeing them fairly intimate and it is easy to relate to the performers. They are all going to be swallowed up on tour in 3,000 seat civic barns.

Between shows, I had one of those weird things happen that tend to become stories. Tommy and I had both been fans of the long running TV series, Bones and had binge watched it several times. Our favorite character was the quirky Zach, played by Eric Milegan and we thought the show was never quite as successful after his departure. Anyway, I have followed Eric on Twitter for years. This morning, scrolling through, I saw a tweet from him asking if anybody was in NYC? Being in a silly frame of mind, I replied that I was. Lo and behold, I get a message from him several hours later asking me to please come to a set he was doing at the Broadway comedy club and to please introduce myself (he had looked up my social media and I guess he decided I was worth knowing…) As the show was scheduled between matinee and evening, I thought what the hell, turned up, had a very nice chat with him (and we seemed to hit it off quite well) and I stayed for the show. I may have made a new friend. We shall see…

Dateline: New York, New York-

It’s a hot night and I just walked back from Times Square to Gramercy Park. I walk when I need to think and process and Manhattan is the perfect place to do it. Relatively flat. Always something interesting going on streetside. My pedometer has been very happy over the last few weeks. My feet have gotten used to the miles and aren’t hurting the way they were so all is right.

Today, after breakfast and a little window shopping in the Flatiron district, I headed for Lincoln Center where I met the one and only Dona D. Vaughn for lunch. Dona heads the opera program at the Manhattan School of Music and has been down to Birmingham a number of times to direct productions so we have gotten to know each other rather well. Both of us have experienced recent loss so we had plenty to talk about. Dona will always be in my personal pantheon of heroes as she was one of the original Vocal Minority in Company back in the day.

As I had nothing much to do this afternoon prior to show time, I took myself to see the new Jurassic Park film. It wasn’t good… MNM will weigh in on it soon, I’m sure. Then it was time for happy hour cocktails and part II of Angels in America: Perestroika. I’m glad I did the two parts on two different days. Putting them together on the same day might have been a little much.

I wrote a little bit about Angels after seeing part I and now that I’ve had a chance to see both parts and digest them, my general thoughts. Impeccably designed and staged – there’s a true cinematic flow from scene to scene with multiple turntables, whirling set pieces, rooms rising and falling into the floor and the greys and blacks of the set with the neon trim in various colors evokes the mid-80s. The performances vary. Nathan Lane, as Roy Cohn, brings a waspish sense of humor to a part that’s usually played very straight and it works and deserved his Tony. I did not like Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter, and don’t think he deserved his. To me, for the piece to work, Prior has to have a central core of dignity to explain why the angel would choose him and Garfield plays him as a silly queen. He starts to get a backbone later in part 2 but by then it’s too late. To me, his Tony should have gone to Joe McArdle as Louis which is a much more difficult part and which I thought was masterfully done. I hated Denise Gough as Harper and wanted her to fall into one of the traps so we wouldn’t have to listen to her deadpan delivery anymore.

Angels in America is a difficult play for my generation of gay men as we lived it in real time. Those not in the LGBT community really don’t understand what it was like to watch your peers dying all around you and have your government nonchalantly not care and more or less condemn you to disease and death. Those of us who were around and remember it all too well know that we organized, fought back, and forced society and the government to acknowledge our humanity. Having been through it once, I am less worried about Trumpism as I know what Americans are capable of when their backs are against the wall and they have nothing else to lose.

The parallels between the Reagan 80s and modern day in regards to the callous politics of ignorance are on full display in this production and, of course, the prescient inclusion by Tony Kushner of Roy Cohn as the major antagonist makes it all the more obvious. Cohn and Trump are cut from the same cloth (and New York sources suggest it was Cohn and his malevolence that took a spoiled rich kid from Queens and turned him into a malignant narcissist with a sadistic streak). Trump is perhaps Cohn’s ultimate middle finger to American society, wreaking havoc three decades after his death.

Because of my age, the HIV epidemic has molded everything about my adult life. I was a college student in the San Francisco Bay area when gay men first started getting sick. I spent my 20s fully expecting to be dead before age 30 and you can’t go through something like that without it changing who you are in the very core of your being. I’m sure it’s part of what drew me into a chronic care specialty and palliative care arenas. Tommy used to say that the year he was 23, he went to 26 funerals of young men his age. He hated going to funerals and memorials ever after. I took my anger and fear and poured them into my career. He took his and poured it into helping create the HIV service organizations that still exist in Birmingham and into nursing. What might have become of us had we not needed to do that? Would Tommy have been a musician earlier with a different career trajectory? Would I have ended up in Geriatrics? Who’s to say?

Dateline: New York, New York –

I didn’t write an update yesterday or this morning. Bad Andy. No biscuit for you. So tonight’s entry will have to cover the last two days which shouldn’t take too long as I don’t think most of you want to read about my doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen.

Ellise departed on Wednesday morning heading back to the southland. I’m sure we’ll get together in July when I am back in Birmingham and start to cook up some theatrical mischief. With everything that’s going on politically, we know we need to get the cabaret up and running but writing a show that can keep pace with the current political insanity is anything but easy. We had one ready to go in April about the development of fascism but Tommy’s illness put the kibosh on that one.

I took myself to Brunch and then off to the matinee of part one of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. It’s the production from the National Theater in London which is on Broadway for a limited run with the same cast (with one replacement – Lee Pace for Russell Tovey as Joe Pitt). I’ve read Angels and seen scenes, but never seen a full out professional production. I’ll post my full thoughts on it tomorrow after I have a chance to see Part II. I did not book them back to back as I thought that might be a little much, after all, I lived the 80s in real time.

After the show, I took an hour or so to unwind and then met Jonathan Miles Goldstein for a drink and we caught each other up on both Birmingham and New York theater gossip, then I headed off to the West Village and Marie’s Crisis where I met up with Jay Rogers whom I have known on line forever but whom I had never actually met. We talked for a while and then I headed home and put a movie on the DVD player and promptly fell asleep.

Today, I got up and spent some time with domestic chores and doing a little shopping. Then it was out to dinner and off to see Dear Evan Hansen at the Music Box Theater. I’d been hearing about this one for a while and had looked into getting tickets when I was here this past fall but they were hard to come by. One thing I’ve learned this trip is that you can pretty much always get a single ticket to anything if you keep looking and I did find one for this although it took me about a week.

For those of you who don’t follow theater, Dear Evan Hansen is about a quirky misfit of a highschooler, the title character, who has high levels of neuroses and his therapist suggests he write letters to himself about his positive traits. One of these letters is taken by the class psychopath who shortly thereafter commits suicide and the letter is presumed to be from him to Evan and misinterpreted by his family as a cri de coeur. Evan, who has a yen for psycho’s sister, gets drawn into the family circle and ends up making a fictitious friendship between him and the dead son to comfort them and to bolster his own ego. Complications ensue.

Ben Platt, who won a Tony for the title role, has left the show, but his replacement Taylor Trensch (whom I saw last year as Barnaby in Hello, Dolly!) is very good. The whole cast is very good. I’m not sure if I liked the show. The score is not very strong. I can’t remember a single number two hours later other than parts of ‘Waving Through a Window’ and ‘You Will Be Found’ mainly because I’ve heard them multiple times in other contexts. I also found the teen angst which motivates much of the show a bit facile. That being said, it still made me a bit of a weepy mess at the end of both acts, not because of the teen psychodrama, but because of the messages of love and community, and others being there to pick you up when you fall and to help you climb higher. Those are themes that are resonating in my life right now.

Story time: OK, I will finish the Sondheim lunch story from a couple of days ago. I’m warning you all that it’s anticlimactic. Anyway, invitation was received and I was given his home phone number to talk to his assistance regarding scheduling etc. (That phone number is still in my phone and I have teased generations of theater kids with it. Bad Andy…) Steve and I had a trip to NYC coming up so I called to make sure Sondheim would be in town. His assistant assured me he was. Great! I had visions of a lunch in Sondheim’s elegant Turtle Bay townhouse with witty repartee and several cocktails. We arrived Friday night. I called as instructed to let them know we were in town. Lovely conversation with answering machine. Called again Saturday, more answering machine. Steve and I went to a matinee of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ (This was before I had met Charles West as I wouldn’t move to Alabama for another year). Called again. This time, got human who said Mr. Sondheim was very busy this weekend but would be able to see me for fifteen minutes as he went between this meeting and that. Please be at such and such diner and he would stop by our table. So, on Sunday we did that, we waited for about ninety minutes, toying with our food but eventually Sondheim did walk in, sit down and talk to us for a few minutes. He was complementary of the piece, chided me for a few bad rhymes (Lord Byron/environ), told me to keep writing, and then breezed away. It wasn’t what I expected but how many of us get any sort of feedback from our idols at all?

It’s late. Off to bed…

Dateline: New York, New York-

Another relatively leisurely day. The second and last day I get to spend with Ellise Mayor before she has to go back to Birmingham. We spent the daytime hours visiting with some of her old friends. She lived in NYC in the 80s pursuing the dream and still knows lots of people in town. Breakfast coffee with a friend who works for Stella Adler acting studio, then up to the upper East Side for lunch with the elderly gentleman who employed her as a nanny. He’s been around NYC acting circles since the late 40s and had many delightful stories of old Broadway and its personalities. Then back to Gramercy to put our feet up before showtime.

Tonight’s show was the off-Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street Theater in the West Village. A cast of eight and three musicians leap all over a theater completely redone as the interior of a pie shop, complete with pre-show meat pie dinner (which was actually pretty good). I had just seen Sweeney at the Atlanta Opera a few weeks ago and the two productions couldn’t be more different but both were incredibly successful each in their own way which shows how strong the underlying material is.

The eight actors and three musicians filled the space with sound and with scenes being played inches away or even on top of the table at which you had just been eating, you were made part of the action. I know the show well and know what happens, but I still had a couple of major scares as I was afraid Sweeney was really going to lose control and come after audience members with his razor. The Mrs. Lovett found every ounce of humor in the part garnered laughs on lines that I had never thought of as particularly funny in the past. Both Ellise and I were blown away and had to repair across the street to Marie’s Crisis for cocktails and showtune sing alongs afterwards.

I’ve already told my Sweeney story, so here’s a Sondheim story. Years ago, in the infancy of the internet, there were various chat boards and mailing lists. One that I belonged to was devoted to Stephen Sondheim. At one point, a topic of discussion was what might happen if he were ever to collaborate with Tom Stoppard on a project, with the general consensus that the result would be so esoteric that no one would be able to understand it. I wasn’t so sure. Stoppard’s play, Arcadia (my favorite of his works), had recently had both London and Broadway productions and I was familiar with it and had a copy of the script so I decided to put my hand to a fictitious Sondheim/Stoppard collaboration. I collapsed the entire plot of Arcadia into a parody of ‘A Weekend in the Country’ from A Little Night Music beginning with Thomasina singing:

Look here a new equation,
One which defines nature’s forms
And see, the x-y relation
Doesn’t obey Euclidian norms…

I posted the end result to the chat board and folk were highly complementary. One of the people on the board was a friend of Sondheim’s and sent him a copy and he was quite taken with it and, in turn, sent it to Tom Stoppard who also thought it was great fun.

And that is how I received an invitation to lunch with Stephen Sondheim.