And so it begins… with the attack on Caracas, Venezuela last night and the arrest and capture of President Maduro and his wife who are being transported back to the US to face charges of narcoterrorism. I should have started with And so it continues… as it’s just the latest chapter of a saga that’s been going on for quite some time, both in Venezuela and in terms of American foreign policy in general. I can say that the whole narcoterrorist angle is a bunch of hooey. Even the most cursory look at where illegal drugs that cause destruction on American streets originate shows that the vast majority enter the country from Mexico where they are synthesized in illegal Mexican labs from precursors manufactured and shipped from China. Breaking Bad, especially the Gus Fring plot line, is a more accurate description of the drug trade than the propaganda issuing from the executive branch in defence of the current action.

I know a few Venezuelans. None have lived in the country for some decades but I’ll be interested to get their perspectives in what’s happening there these days as there are still family ties and they are likely to have some information on what is acutally happening on the street. I am becoming more and more distrustful of national media who seem to be doing a complex limbo dance under the bamboo of Trump’s will. I am no expert in Latin American history and politics, but if I recall the last few decades correctly, things have gone south between the US and Venezuela starting in the lat 1990s when former president Hugo Chavez came to power and, amongst other things, nationalized the Venezuelan oil industry, much to the consternation of US oil companies who lost lucrative contracts. There was a coup in 2002 which attempted to remove him, but it failed. I don’t know that the US was directly involved in the coup but the US government was quick to recognize the interim president as the legitimate ruler, only having to back down when Chavez was rapidly restored to power. Chavez went on to continue to be a thorn in the side to the US and Europe due to his consistent opposition to the dominant neo-liberal economic policies favored by the West.

Chavez died in office of cancer in 2013 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Nicolas Maduro who, in 2015, pushed through a number of political changes which made his essentially a dictator ruling by fiat. Maduro’s heavy-handed tactics seem to have turned most of the population against him and he has held onto power through intimidation, coercion, and fraudulent elections. He’s hardly a good guy but he is a sitting head of state and invading a sovereign nation and kidnapping the head of state is against international law. There are ways and means to accomplish this within international law but they would require competent diplomats and an executive branch run by intelligent individuals, neither of which seem to be in much supply these days.

But international law has never held the US back from fiddling with other countries sovereignity when there’s something it wants. The Kingdom of Hawaii, overthrown over the interests of the sugar magnates in 1893 and the various interferences in Central America at the behest of the plantation owners, especially the banana growers come to mind. Then there’s the times when the US has either gone to war or helped engineer coups over political and economic ideologies that are anti-capitalist such as Vietnam and the Chilean coup of 1973 that overthrew Salvador Allende. Our track record in recent years in regime change isn’t great. the human and economic disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria can all be placed at the doorstep of our foreign policy.

Is the current action a distraction against a failing domestic economy and the disturbing allegations of the Epstein files? Is this an attempt to unify the country on a war footing a la ‘Mission Accomplished’ in 2003 (for my younger readers – it wasn’t by a long shot)? Is it just a ploy for Trump and Hegseth to flex their alpha male muscles through beta male activities? I suppose we’ll all find out eventually.

On a completely different note, the flu is here and it’s bad. We have some years where flu activity is much higher than others depending on the circulating strains and this one is shaping up to be a bad one with near record hospitalizaitons happening in some locales and higher than usual death rates. Most of us aren’t in danger of dying should we happen to get it, just of being in for a rather miserable week. The antivax activity has driven down the number of adults receiving flu shots (currently about 45% of US adults have had one – it’s recommended for all adults unless there’s a contraindication). What this means is that it will be much easier for the virus to travel through the population. So, keep those hands washed, stay away from the obviously ill, remember your social distancing, and consider masking up in certain situations.

On the personal front, I’ve been rewatching Stranger Things over the last few weeks and am finally into the last season which recently dropped on Netflix. My takeaways so far. The Duffer brothers have an incrediblle eye for period detail. I’m roughly five years older than the teen characters (Nancy, Steve, Jonathan, Robin) so I have a young adult’s memory of the time and I have picked up very few flaws in their recreation of the world of forty years ago. The fact that the series was filmed over a roughly nine year period while only about four years elapse over the course of the story means that the kids are now much too old for the parts they are supposed to be playing – this is especially true of Will. The show suffers from some of the same issues as Game of Thrones. An enormous international fan base, invested in years of story telling and watching the young actors grow up before their eyes has led to feelings of ownership over the characters and storytelling and therefore disagreements with the artistic choices of the creators. I haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but I’m willing to go on the journey to its end. I’ll try to finish it up tonight and tomorrow, my last day off before I’m back to the grind.

Be the anti-administration: get up, get dressed, go out, do good, avoid breaking international law.

It’s New Years Day. New Years Eve is for looking back and the previous year and even further into the past. It’s a bit problematic for me (and if you want to know why, you can read the Prologue to Book 1 of the Accidental Plague Diaries – I’m not going to rehash it here) but I did pretty well and even put in an appearance at a friend’s New Years Eve party. I must admit that I did not stay all the way through the countdown as my neck and shoulder were bothering me and I needed to get off my feet and let gravity work on my body in a horizontal rather than a vertical position. This seems to be the best solution to my cervical stenosis and its pain complications but it’s somewhat incompatible with an active life so it’s acetaminophen and meloxicam and tizanidine and gabapentin for the next four weeks until they can shoot steroids into the problem areas again and hopefully make things improve.

So New Years Day must, in counterpoint, be for looking forward. What am I looking forward to? Various things. If all goes according to plan, it will be my last complete regular work year. I got my first job (data entry clerk) in 1977 so I guess I’ll have completed fifty years in the work force at the time of my retirement. I assume that’s enough. Something over 80% of that time was spent in healthcare in one form or other. I feel like I found my niche, helped a lot of people, and did some good in the world so I can’t be too disappointed with my career path over the decades. I have one more year to move it forward and then I’ll have to enter my Eriksonian stage 8 problem solving of figuring out what it has all meant. I’m in the process of cleaning out my academic office (as the whole department is moving and I am not moving with it as I don’t spend enough time in academic work anymore to warrant an office). I’m opening files that haven’t been touched in decades and launching most of the contents into the recycle bin. I am keeping a few things for sentiment’s sake – like the absolutely scathing review I received from the surgeons during my med school rotation. I haul it out occasionally to show discouraged med students that a bad comment or grade is not the end of the world and they’re going to be just fine.

I have performance opportunities to look forward to in 2026. South Pacific with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra is rapidly approaching in the next few weeks. After that, Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci with Opera Birmingham and Carmina Burana with the Alabama Symphony Chorus and Alabama Ballet are penciled in. And then there’s directing The Tempest this summer. I don’t have any plays on the calendar yet but there are a few holes and something is likely to turn up – it always does.

I have a trip to Eastern Europe on the books for the fall through Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. I’m looking forward to that one. I have a slot open for one other trip abroad but haven’t decided yet where it should be. I’m thinking maybe France. I haven’t been to Paris in more than forty years. But something else might beckon. I would really like to get back to Asia.

I don’t know how or what to look forward to in terms of writing for this next year. I’m having a difficult time buckling down as I don’t have structure or deadline. I do my best under pressure. If I’m left too much to my own devices, I put it away and get out a book or turn on the TV. I do have some projects with self imposed deadlines but that’s not quite the same. I really require someone texting me saying ‘I need those pages by Tuesday’ to get me moving forward with all due speed. I have been pulling pieces together from various sources that can be repurposed for my ‘Boom’ book so maybe that’s the first thing that needs to be pushed ahead.

Other things I want to fit in over the next few months: a theater week in NYC to catch up on various productions I have yet to see, a trip to Seattle to check up on the family, and some time at a beach somewhere so I can just walk along a beach and smell the ocean. Maybe I’m asking for too much. When I see the disasters befalling the country and how they ripple through my younger friends and my friends in performing arts careers, I realize I lead an incredibly privileged existence and maybe my energies should be put more towards healing the many hurts out there and less towards self care. I try to balance and do both but it’s not the easiest tightrope.

Get up, get dressed, go out, do good, then have some cornbread, black eyed peas and collard greens.

“What’s today my fine fellow?” said Scrooge. “Today?” replied the boy “Why Christmas Day”. The older I get, the more I understand Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ and why it has had such a hold on the English speaking world and its understanding of traditional holiday festivities for more than 180 years now. The book itself is not long, more of a long short story than even a novella and can easily be read in an evening. It gave to us all of those early Victorian trappings of Christmas that stay with us through the years – from the decorations, to the traditional feast menu, to innumerable strolling quartets of Dickens carolers popping up at a shopping center near you throughout the month of December. I doubt Charles, when he put pen to paper to write a ghost story about the holidays, had any idea what he was actually creating and the impact it would end up having on the world but most literary geniuses are writing to meet the needs of the moment and it’s only in retrospect that we completely understand their insights into the human condition which lift certain works above the mundane.

I played Scrooge on stage a decade ago. It’s one of those parts you don’t turn down if you’re an actor of a certain age. I’d love to tackle him again with another decade of living and life crises under my belt. I think I understand him better now. He’s not sinister, he’s not evil. LIfe just pushes him in certain ways which get his priorities out of joint and, at the end, he’s not a different person than he was; the visits of the spirits simply lead him to recalibrate. The results of loss and mistaken choices have embittered him over time and the making of money has become a maladaptive coping mechanism for dealing with the world. And one of the genius moves of Dickens is his not completely explaining Scrooge’s past. Did his business acumen destroy Fezziwig? What sort of business was Scrooge actually in? We know some of the superficial reasons why Belle breaks her engagement to him but what more was going on?

The ghosts, all four of them (yes four – Marley counts) each give him a different means of better understanding himself through the prisms of past, present, and future. What are ghosts? They exist in every human culture and folk tradition so they seem to be something that are created by human experience, no matter who we may happen to be. I know I am haunted by ghosts. They aren’t physical spectral manifestations but they certainly exist in my psyche, created by my thoughts, guilts, and regrets. I guess they’re a side effect of our prodigious brains and memories. There will always be roads not taken, bad decisions, old injuries to ourselves or to others and ghosts are a handy anthropomorphic shorthand way of dealing with all of that in narrative form.

Over the years, my ghosts have taught me a lot. They’ve helped me reevaluate my past, make different decisions in my present, and have hopefully allowed my future to unfold in ways that might not have been possible a few years before. They’re companions. Sometimes, late at night, they can make me uncomfortable as I ruminate over things that once happened and which are over and done with. But is that their doing, or is it me and how I am feeling and reacting to something in the present and processing it by seeing it through the lens of the past.

I’m old enough now that my life’s companions are starting to slip away and leave the party one by one. Some of them may join the chorus of ghosts in my head as they still have something to say or to teach me. I suppose one of the marks of true maturity is being able to homestly face them all and let them know that I have no regrets regarding where my life is currently headed. (Of course, I’m not absolutely sure where this is at the moment but does any of us really know)? I guess I just need to keep moving forward with enough momentum to keep their rumblings at a dull roar.

As I’m wise enough to be aware of my ghosts, I don’t feel a particular need to try and hold my life, or the lives of others in any sort of stasis. Those at the highest level of government don’t seem to have learned this lesson. The president continues to engage in puerile and awfully repetitive rantings, when not engaged in trying to engrave his name or image on whatever happens to be at hand. ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair’. wrote Percy Shelley and yet the lone and level sands stretch away from a shattered visage. I see in him and in the other politicians of his generation a primal need to try and stop time while they try to secure their legacies and reorder the world to their liking. But that’s not how any of this actually works. We live on by allowing the succeeding generations to build on our legacies not by imposing things upon them. I’m teaching the young physicians who are going to take over my clinical practice how to think and problem solve, but not the exact ways in which I have done things. Those are mine and worked for me – they’ll have to come up with what works for them and a new generation.

Will Trump and his ilk reorder their thoughts after spectral visitations? Unlikely. Their public actions suggest that they are unwilling to listen to the ghosts already speaking to them . I can hope that eventually their hearts and minds will let in concepts such as empathy and equity but I’m not holding my breath. We can weigh our options as voters and decide who listens to the voices of the past and uses them to improve the future and give them our votes rather than voting based on an R or a D after the name but that will require engaging in the political process rather than treating it as a spectator sport. In the meantime, I’ve had my Chinese food so it’s time for a movie. May you and yours have a merry Christmastime (remember it lasts for twelve days – until Janurary 6th) and, in the immortal words of Tiny Tim. God Bless Us, Every One.

I woke up early. Generally I sleep until the alarm sounds, I hit snooze a couple of times and then I drag myself out of bed trying to remember what I have to do that day and then wander through the bathroom and my closet doing all those little tasks that make us presentable enough to be seen by other people. If I don’t do these things, I look a bit like Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown from Back to the Future and no one is going to take anything I say seriously unless it has something to do with DeLoreans, Flux Capacitors, or 88 miles an hour. I am fortunate that it takes me a total of twelve minutes from the time I walk out the door of my condo until I walk in the door of any of the three offices in which I might start my day. This allows me to set my alarm relatively late. ‘Not a Morning Person’ doesn’t even begin to cover it although I usually reach a point of equipoise after either a large cup of coffee or 10 am, whichever comes first.

At least part of the reason for early rising was a large number of ideas racing through my brain regarding various writing projects. Now that things theatrical are complete for awhile (with the exception of South Pacific in mid-January, but that being an Alabama Symphony Orchestra production, it has a very compressed one week rehearsal/performance schedule and I am taking vacation that week as many of the rehearsals are during business hours), I have several months in which I can get a good deal of writing done if I can make myself focus. Nothing else on my performance calendar goes into heavy rehearsal until mid to late March. Therefore, these musings may start appearing a little more regularly, my movie reviewing alter-ego should get busy again, and I have two major projects in mind on which I want to complete full drafts. As I write quickly when I’m in the zone, I don’t think my goals are overly lofty. We’ll see what emerges. One of the two projects is my long-proposed book ‘Boom’ analyzing the fallout when the immovable object of the older Baby Boomers’ attitudes toward life are hit by the unstoppable force of biologic and physiological reality and what the effects may be on our already rickety healthcare system. The other one I’m not prepared to discuss yet.

Some of my sleep issues are likely bound up with my cervical stenosis and consequent left shoulder girdle pain and spasm. It was worse than ever the last few days (and if I snapped at anyone backstage at Miracle on 34th Street, I apologize – it wasn’t you, it was a pain response). I do have an appointment for them to try steroid injections at the nerve roots again, this time with me awake so I can tell them when they’ve hit the right spot, but it’s not for another five weeks. I shall be consulting with my primary care about temporizing options today. Tylenol is only taking me so far. The problem is that most of the things that are likely to help are also likely to put me to sleep so I can’t use them on workdays. Just one more thing in life designed to give me additional empathy with my patients.

As we head into the holidays in a society very different than the one we had last holiday season, I have to keep repeating the mantra I made up in response to the initial barrage of really bad ideas flowing from the White House. Get Up. Get Dressed. Go Out. Do Good. It’s all any of us can do unless we want to run for congress or some such. There are people who have suggested that I should run for elective office as I’m calm, have a good head on my shoulders, and always look for the win/win when problem solving. Sorry to disappoint you. As an openly gay man in Alabama, I have far too many skeletons in my closet and would rather not see them batted around town like some sort of festive Dia De Los Muertos parade. Instead, I’ll just write about them here- some of them at least. I do curate what I write. Someday I may write a warts and all memoir but now is not that time.

The latest target of the regime appears to be the Smithsonian. I guess they’ve finished hollowing out the Kennedy Center with the official and illegal renaming. Notices have gone out that federal funding will be withheld unless exhibits which do not agree with the administration’s interpretation of American history (which seems to have come from 1940s elementary school history texts). What has made this country great and unique is the fact that it has been created by so many different peoples, each with their own story, coming together to make something far grander than could have been done in isolation. Some of those peoples came willingly in waves of immigration. Some were tragically dragged here in chains. Some were not allowed to achieve full potential due to various waves of xenophobia. But each is important in the American story. This idea that ‘Heritage Americans’ descended from European settlers and immigrants should be the official narrative does a huge disservice to the country. In the last few decades, due to the elevation of other voices and narratives, I’ve developed a much clearer picture of who we are, both positive and negative. How was it that I, incredibly well read and well educated, was completely unaware of the Tulsa race massacre of 1923 until the last decade or so? Trying to bury these stories because they may make some of European descent feel uncomfortable does no good to anyone. I am expecting the administration to close the Smithsonian’s African American history museum and the Native American history museum as they are full of painful truths. They’ll probably sell off the buildings as well. But they can be rebuilt bigger and better when the time comes. The work has been done. The truth is out there. You can’t bury it. Perhaps people will draw the line when Melania is presented with the Hope Diamond. The Resolute Desk has already been spotted at Mar-a-Lago.

Other items of note – the DOJ has once again flouted the law with their refusal to release all of the Epstein files as required by congress. And they have been so busy redacting files (also illegal under that law other than to protect the identity of victims) that all sorts of crazy mistakes are being made. We’ll have to see what congress intends to do. The House will do nothing as long as Mike Johnson is in charge, but his days may be numbered as he is losing control of his caucus. If only the Republican party had not encouraged absurd stories about the government being controlled by a secret pedophile cabal through Qanon. Those adherents are hopping mad at the lack of transparency, and the Republicans will need every vote they can muster to maintain control after the midterms as the average swing away from Republicans to Democrats over the last year is sixteen points.

Another item – CBS news can now no longer be considered a news organization with Bari Weiss having spiked the Sixty Minutes piece on CECOT due to her pro-Trump positions. Walter Cronkite is rolling in his grave. I imagine Sixty Minutes will be producing incisive Trump propaganda in the new year but it’s unlikely to be very interesting once all of the real journalists and talent in the CBS News Department depart for greener pastures.

Another item – Turning Point USA had their annual convention the last few days. You could have a selfie in a replica of the Charlie Kirk death tent. The widow Kirk appeared in her mourning sequins as expected. Most of the other speakers seem to have spent the time attacking each other over Gaza, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, and various purity tests. There wasn’t much discussion of policy or how to fix the rather enormous problems we’re all facing. It was a circular firing squad worthy of the Democrats. The more I see of it, the more I believe that MAGA and the alt-right will splinter on the death of Trump. There’s no one in the inner circle with the personal charisma to step up into that sort of imperial leadership role. When will that be? I have no idea, but this physician can tell that he is not a healthy man.

I’ve rattled on long enough and I have patients waiting for me at my clinic so I better wrap this up. Get up. Get dressed. Go out. Do good.

I have a midweek day off today. I don’t get those very often. I scheduled this one because I was supposed to have a school matinee of ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ but that didn’t happen and I decided I’d take the time anyway. I wish I could say I slept in, but I had to get up early and complete a rush job on a legal case review that the attorneys are trying to settle prior to Christmas. I don’t have a drop everything and get this done rate. Maybe I should update my rate sheet. I haven’t decided if I’ll keep up the legal work after I retire. It’s interesting, it pays well, I can do it on my schedule (usually). A problem to be solved another day.

Speaking of ‘Miracle on 34th Street’, it opens tonight at The Carver Theater downtown and runs this weekend. Thurs/Fri/Sat evening at 7:30 and Sat matinee at 2:30. It’s an African-American take on the holiday classic. Tickets availabe online at the Encore Theatre and Gallery website or at the door. I basically have an extended cameo as the judge in the courtroom scene. In my head I’m basing him on Liam Dunn’s judge from the courtroom scene at the end of ‘What’s Up Doc?’ but I’m not sure that I’m entirely succeeding. But then I don’t have Madeline Kahn and Austin Pendleton to play off of.

My left shoulder continues to give me fits. I have more corticosteroid injections into my cervical nerve roots schedulesd for late January. I guess I just have to put up with it and try not to be too crabby with the world until then. If you run across me in person and see that I’m doing weird posturing with my neck and left shoulder, it’s me trying to lift up my cervical vertebrae to reduce symptoms and, if I’m not my usual sweet self, it’s a pain response – it’s not you.

Because of work and dress rehearsals and raiding my condo for things to use as set dressing for the show, and general holiday time mayhem, I haven’t been paying as much attention to the political world as I normally do. But I am trying to piece together the actions of supposedly intelligent adult men and women in DC in the light of events over the last few days. We have the Vanity Fair piece on Susie Wiles (which I have not yet read) which lifts the curtain on the full level of dysfunction and chaos in the executive branch. Why was that done? Is she trying to give herself a plausible deniability out in case everything comes crashing down? But that’s something I don’t get in general. The vast majority of the leaders of the Republican party on both national and state level have spent this past year gleefully supporting words which are demonstratably false, actions which are demonstratably illegal and motives which are demonstratably immoral under pretty much any human ethical or religious system. When the fever breaks, how do they plan to justify themselves to their progeny, to the electorate, to history? Trump is not immortal. Trumpism does not appear to be economically sustainable. I can see choosing to live in a world of alternative facts with others who think the same way but these are people who were educated using logic and reason and science. Objective reality must shine through the cracks occasionally. One can hold a society in thrall and stasis (witness North Korea or mid century East Germany) but the amount of social capital necessary to do so prevents that society from succeeding on the world stage in this global politcal and socio-economic system that’s been constructed over nearly a century.

We have the accelerating distraction of distant war drums in Venezuela. The administration is apparently trying to get American big oil interested in supporting him in exchange for developing the enormous Venezuelan oil reserves. Those companies, not being run by stupid or uneducated executives, are demurring knowing that going all in would likely help make them international pariahs. In the meantime, we all remain accomplices in unsanctioned muder of people in small boats thousands of miles away from our shores – unreachable by those small boats due to their short maritime travel ranges.

Then there is Trump himself. I did not watch his speech last night and will not. He has nothing to say that I need to hear. The reporting on it made it clear that is was bombastic, full of distortions and lies, and mainly regurgitated rally talking points. I can’t imagine it playing well to anyone outside of his more fanatical base of support. From what I can tell, Trump has devolved into an emotional toddler, running around with two basic thoughts ‘No’ and ‘Mine’. Anyone who has cared for a child in the terrible twos knows that just letting them run rampant isn’t the correct way to encourage growth and maturity, but we have an entire political party who seems to think that this is the correct course of action. His new plaques in the White House colonnade with insults to his predecessors that the average 7th grader would find juvenile, just further confirm his inability to lead a modern nation state and make me question the motivations of his well educated and intelligent supporters more and more.

Things seem to be relatively quiet on the public health front, other than the administration canceling grants to the American Academy of Pediatrics which funded a number of important long term child health studies. It appears to be a fit of pique over the Academy’s strong disagreement with HHS’s monkeying with the childhood vaccination schedule based on antivax propoganda. Vaccines save lives. The recent French study on Covid vaccines showed not only did they prevent that disease, but four years on, those who were vaccinated had 25% lower all cause mortality. They did not posit why. I assume that those smart enough to care for their health by seeking out vaccine are also more likely to engage in other healthy behaviors and are less likely to engage in risky activities.

There are a lot of viral cruds running through town and I have had a drippy nose the last few days. Covid, flu and RSV numbers, the dangerous ones, are all pretty low however. It’s just the usual wintertime things. Keep your hands washed. Stay home if you’re sick. Take some Tylenol. Keep your fluids up. The usual.

I’m going to have a bunch of time to write the next few weeks but I have no idea what I should be writing about. I may write more of these long posts. I may put my energy into a book project. I may start something completely new and see where it goes. If there are any requests, now’s a good time to get them in.

I miss Tommy. I especially feel his absence in December given the marathon of activity that accompanied our holiday season in our years together. Thanksgiving with my family in Seattle from which he would need to depart early in order to prepare dozens and dozens of wigs for the huge cast of Red Mountain Theatre Company’s Holiday Spectacular. Then on to getting the kids of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham ready for their pageant – he produced, directed, musical directed, costumed and I ran around with duct tape, safety pins, and hot glue keeping everything together. (It was a real challenge the year we were having the house painted in December and we were busy assembling everything in a rather cramped extended stay hotel room). Then he moved on to Opera Birmingham’s holiday concert – Sounds of the Season where he did the setting, coordinated the production logistics, ran the box office, and put together the patrons’ buffet. I was usually in a holiday show of some sort with its tech week and performance schedule (there was one memorable year where I drove across town between the matinee and evening shows of A Christmas Carol in order to help him with the tech/dress of the children’s pageant). One or the other or perhaps both of us would sing The Messiah with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. Then it was on to Christmas itself – Christmas Eve service at church (more children’s music and adult choir performance) forllowed by formal sit down dinner for his family which he cooked from scratch. Somewhere in there I had to get the house fully decorated and all the trees up. Christmas Day was usually low key and then it was balls to the wall to get everything ready for our holiday open house for our friends, traditionally the Sunday after Christmas and one of the must do events for Theatrical Birmingham. Again, Tommy made all the food from scratch while I had to rearrange the house for two hundred guests. And people wonder why we rarely went out for New Year’s Eve. We were pretty much passed out at that point.

The holidays are far less hectic these days. I’m appearing in Miracle on 34th Street for Encore Theatre this next week but other than that, the schedule is relatively empty and very quiet for me the weeks of Christmas and New Year. I’m not traveling as I have to take time off in January for various reasons. I have vague ideas of sitting around reading trashy novels and catching up on Netflix for a few days. I’m sure I’ll find something to fill my time. Maybe I’ll put up all my Christmas decorations. I did very little of that last year. I even had a little time to read some poetry for Birmingham’s Krampuslauf. I wore a holiday variant on my plague doctor outfit.

As I’m not overscheduled to the nth degree, I’ve had the chance to attend some of our holiday traditions that rolled around again this year in a non-participatory mode. The UU Church Children’s pageant was this morning. When I looked at the Christmas tree in the sanctuary, I realized that the prop presents under the tree were ones Tommy had made for some pageant years ago. This afternoon, I went to the opera’s Sounds of the Season. Same thing. There were various pieces of the setting that I recognized as having been devised by Tommy for a previous edition, including a couple of prop presents. Tommy continues to live on. Tommy loved certain aspects of Christmas – the food, the music, the decorations, the fellowhip. He absolutely hated gifts and gift giving. How ironic that it’s his prop presents that survive. Someday they will rip or fade and be replaced by something new but this year, at least, they were unexpected reminders of a life that used to be mine.

Per usual, there is a great deal I could say about modern politics and the current administration. I am choosing, at the moment, to avoid thinking too much about it for my personal mental health. I’m not depressed but I could probably nudge myself that direction if I spend too much time railing against things over which I have no power. I’m going to have to let a number of things based in domestic and foreign policy slide and care for themselves. I will, however, make note of a few things that have bearing on my life as people have asked about them.

The first is the announcement that the VA is going to cut 35,000 staff jobs (including doctors and nurses) on top of the 30,000 cut this past year. To put this in perspective, the VA employs about 470,000 people nationwide and there was a push in 2023 to hire 30,000 new staff to gear up for the needs of an aging population and to assist with the new directives allowing veterans to use VA benefits to seek care outside of the system in the community. So that first cut basically clawed back the increase under Biden and the second cut represents about 7.5% of the workforce, It’s mainly going to happen by not filling vacancies rather than firing staff but it’s not going to make my life any easier. The VA program I work for, Home Based Primary Care, brings fairly complete multidisciplinary primary care clinic services to the veteran’s home if he or she cannot easily access a VA medical clinic. Our goal has been to expand the program so that all veterans in the Birmingham VA catchment area of North-Central Alabama can enroll no matter where they live. We’re close to attaining it – we don’t have coverage in the far Northwest corner around Florence or on the Georgia border to the East. Two more teams would allow us to finish it out but with this latest announcement, that’s not going to happen. We also have a number of team members of retirement age (including yours truly) and it’s going to be very difficult to hire replacements over the next few years when the time comes. Services in general will be harder and harder to come by and weight times will be longer. But that’s been happening throughout the medical system over the last couple of years as there is a collision of an aging population, the changes wrought by the pandemic, and my whole generation of providers stampeding for the exit. Almost none of the specialists I’ve referred to for decades remains.

There also appears to be mass chaos within the health infrastructure of HHS given the caliber of individual elevated to positions of power. This is causing incredible stress to the research arms of academic health centers. As these institutions have been designed over the last eighty years or so to be knowledge factories, significant interference with the funds flow which allows this mission to be completed has led to everything being a bit off kilter. UAB seems to be weathering the storm at the moment but there are signs everywhere of fiscal retrenching and money not being available to hire support staff or upgrade facilities. What is all of this doing to the average American? There is no real health expertise or guidance working with congress on the issue of the spiking healthcare premiums caused by the Big Beautiful Bill and what this will do to both the health of citizens and the health care sector of the economy. We have major outbreaks of eradicated diseases such as measles. There is a coordinated attack on science and reason for political ends happening throughout the government. Can’t have facts that might contradict political narratives getting in the way.

Meanwhile, the Baby Boom enters its eighties in two weeks, there is no policy in place to deal with the very real problems this is going to represent to society and this particular Cassandra is packing up his megaphone and looking for other ways to expend energy. Thirty five years is enough time to have spent on that crusade.

I should have written a long post earlier this week. I had time. I had plenty of things about which to write but something kept preventing me. I think it’s an emotional response to the state of the world and the continuous firehose of news that ricochets between the tragic and the absurd. I know it’s making a lot of my fellow citizens who see the world through a more progressive lens angry. It seems to be provoking glee in some of my more reactionary acquaintances, although I cannot find anything to celebrate in government initiatives based in callousness and cruelty. In me, it’s just creating sadness. It’s not the sadness of clinical depression (which I have experienced in my life) but something more existential, a feeling of needing to say goodbye to all that (to borrow a phrase from Robert Graves who lived through a similar period of societal upheaval in the wake of the First World War).

The early decades of the 20th century, with two catastrophic World Wars and the Great Depression, led the United States to become one of the chief architects of Post-War Western Civilization, a rules based order guided by diplomacy, economic cooperation. The children of these planners and civil servants, the Baby Boom, were to be spared at all costs the horrors that had been visited on their parents. Now, eighty years later, those same children, now in their early geriatric years, are in the process of tearing down the systems their parents so lovingly built to protect them, prefering instead to rapidly institute a society more similar to that of the 18th and 19th centuries – one in which resources are not equitably distributed, opportunities are limited to the connected, and tribalism is not only encouraged but revered.

I don’t see much good coming from any of this. Tribal impulses are hardwired into our brains by evolution as our unit of survival is not the individual, but the tribe. We are social animals and we rise and fall on our ability to work together cooperatively. When we look around and define who we are by our social connections, one of the first things we do in order to make ourselves feel special is to define who or what we are not. We create out groups and underclasses and state that certain belief systems or philosophies should be spurned, if not outright suppressed. As we grew from nomadic bands into civilized urban society, it became clear that open societies more accepting of different kinds of thought or custom excelled quicker than those hwo took more repressive stances. Religion frequently became the means of overcoming the innate distrust of out groups through its messages of compassion and welcoming the stranger. Religious teachers were quick to recognize how strong the impulse to retreat across the moat and behind the walls is and how there must be countervailing messages. Of course, many of the keepers of American Christianity are abandoning this key role of religion and discounting the messages of the Bible which speak to this. I read somewhere that in a number of Evangelical denominations, The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), the key teachings of Jesus, are basically being phased out for being too ‘woke’. Reverend Dale Turner, my pastor at University Congregational Church in Seattle when I was growing up, would be absolutely appalled.

We’re in a period of change. Nothing can stop that. Socio/economic/political forces beyond the control of any individual have been unleashed. There’s lot of destruction in the change as it has happened over the last year. Physical destruction of public monuments, suppression of people and ideas outside of prescribed orthodoxy. Torture and murder condoned by the highest of officers. But the new cannot happen if the old stands in the way. I am trusting that the forest fire engulfing us clears out the brush and the deadwood and allows the cones of the giant redwoods to open and allow a new generation to come up with something better than we have had. Yesterday I was a judge at the Alabama State High School Theatre competition. 2500 theatre kids from all over the state descended on UAB along with their teachers, parents, friends, and other entourage. The Alys Stephens Center and surrounding buildings were bursting with youthful energy and idealism. There were teenagers rehearsing Shakespeare on lawns and perfecting their song phrasing in stairwells. The kids I met through the day were smart, kind, intuitive and a few were enormously talented. The kids are all right if we will just nurture them a bit longer and let them takee center stage. Unfortunately, that will require the Boom to exit stage left (pursued by bear?) and they will not relinquish the spotlight willingly. However, time and biology care not for their wishes and they will become culturally irrelevant around 2040 as their die off accelerates.

I suppose the essential question is which will come faster, the die off of the older generation or the repurposing of society to a model that the Georgians and Victorians would recognize. We are going that way. Despite the platitudes coming from the White House press office, our economy is in serious trouble for average Americans. (And it’s not because immigrants are stealing our jobs or eathing our pets and it’s not because Venezuelan narco-terrorists have somehow figured out how to run fentanyl (a product they do not make) over more than a thousand miles of open sea in small boats with at best a 150-200 mile range). Wealth has moved upward into fewer and fewer hands so fast that we now have greater economic inequities than existed in 1789 France and 1917 Russia. We are and remain the wealthiest society the planet has ever produced. If you run the numbers, mean household income in the US is about $100,000 a year. However, that is skewed upward significantly by the enormous gains of the very wealthy. If you remove the top 1% of earners, mean household income plummets down to about $75,000. If you remove the top 5% of earners, it goes down closer to $65,000. It’s this last figure that’s likely the one we should be considering when discussing economic policy, not the first. What is likely saving our social stability is our relatively recent ability to better control our reproductive habits. We are having far fewer children and revolutions happen when we reach a tipping point of too many mamas not able to feed their babies. Of course this is going to create a fresh set of issues in the late 21st century based in demography… and we’ve done such a good job with the glaringly obvious current one, the aging of the boom, which has been apparent for about sixty years now. I’ve spent thirty-five years of professional life playing Cassandra and telling several generations of health administrators about what was going to be necessary as we approach peak age in 2030. I’ve had zero luck getting any of them to listen or to make forward thinking changes. This, more than anything else, is what is driving me rapidly into retirement.

I finished work early on Friday so I did something I have not done in some time. I took myself to a matinee movie and went to see the new film version of the recent Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along. After paying nearly $40 for a ticket, popcorn, a dink and a bag of peanut M&Ms, I remembered why I don’t head out to the movies as often as I used to. From the mid 70s through the 90s, I went to a film at least once a week, and often more frequently than that. But not at those prices. Most of you who know me at all know that I worship at the altar of Stephen Sondheim and have since I was in my teens. Merrily We Roll Along has a special place in the canon for my generation. I was 19 years old when the original production opened, crashed and burned, shifting Sondheim’s career. The show was cast with performers of my generation and spoke to what it meant to be in that first stage of adulthood when everything was possible and nothing made sense. When the album came out a few months later, it became part of the soundtrack of my college life. I even had a Charlie and Mary in Craig Mollerstuen and Vickie Rozell. ‘Old Friends’ has remained our theme song since 1982 and we still sing it to each other on those occasions when we get together. Unlike the fictional trio, we developed adult lives without betrayals and we remain close. I saw the stage production twice in New York a couple years ago so the film held no surprises for me in terms of plot or musical choices or design or performance. What did surprise me was director Maria Friedman’s decision to film most of the show in close up and two shot. It allowed me, sitting out there in the dark, to understand and develop a more intimate emotional connection with the principal characters as I could see details of facial expression or eye movement that I couldn’t catch from the mezzanine of the Hudson Theater. As the reverse chronology carried them back from jaded middle age to idealistic youth, culminating in the exquisite Our Time trio on a Manhattan rooftop, I found my brain a jumble of memory. Memories of my life choices and the ramifications they proved to have. Memories of other productions of Merrily We Roll Along I had seen (and I’ve seen a lot – I first met Sondheim at one in Seattle at ACT Theater in 1988). Memories of Daniel Radcliffe growing up over eight Harry Potter movies (particular favorites of Tommy’s. He loved to have them playing when he was in his wig studio). I came out of the theater teary eyed and thinking about how everything used to be so clear and straightforward when I was that age and now nothing is and what were my contributions to all of those things that are currently making our world and our politics a mess and is it possible to atone.

I try to be a mensch. It isn’t always easy but I figure that’s what I’ve got to give. That and doing my bit to make sure that the young will get their time. Give them room and start the clock.

It’s the Saturday of the four day Thanksgiving weekend. According to my bedroom clock, the time is now five minutes past kickoff of the 2025 Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn. Most of the state will be glued to their TVs for the next few hours letting out occasional whoops of joy or howls of execration; I could care less. If I had a date, tonight would be the night I’d try that new restaurant that’s impossible to get a reservation for but I don’t so I’m enjoying a cocktail, a rewatch of Stranger Things in preparation for the new season, and the sounds of Liszt drifting in from the piano as my friend continues his diligent practice. He’s a trained pianist, does not own one, so I’m letting him come over and practice on Tommy’s grand. I think he’d like that.

I’m having a fairly quiet long weekend after the craziness of the Soulfood rehearsal schedule and before the craziness of the Miracle on 34th Street rehearsal schedule begins. We’re putting that one up in about ten days. Fortunately, I’m only in one scene with no blocking and a grand total of thirteen lines. I think I’ll make it. So far, without too much taxing of brain or body. I’ve managed to catch up on all my patient care work, write the letters of recommendation for fellow facultys’ promotional packets that I had been putting off, finished up a legal case, done my holiday shopping for the family, assembled my annual gift basket for shippping to Seattle, and started on some major and overdue house cleaning/reorganization. I’ve been in this space for over five years now. It’s time to get rid of stuff I moved in which I haven’t touched since and am unlikely to need in the near future. THis is being pushed by my losing of my academic office as I move towards retirement. Much of what is in there is hopelessly out of date and needs to hit the dumpster but there are some things which will be helpful if I continue writing and some consultancy so I have to find a home for them here.

It’s difficult to get a read on public health issues these days due to a complete lack of transparency on the part of the current administration and a general destruction of the means by which science has been diseminated both to the scientific community and the public at large. There are any number of respiratory viruses running around Birmingham at the moment. The majority are the cruds. Flu and Covid are out there but the numbers appear to be relatively low. Keep those hands washed.

On the other hand all of the other things in DC are also in their usual disastrous state. We have one cabinet member revealed to have given verbal orders to commit murder. We have another cabinet member revealed to have directly disobeyed the orders of a federal judge. We appear to be about to invade Venezuela for no discernable reason other than our president doesn’t like their president. The structure the East Wing of the White House was torn down for has no final design as the president’s expectations are unrealistic. A shooting in DC which leaves so many unanswered questions is rapidly being used for even more immigrant bashing, and in such a rapid and well ordered way that it’s clear they had the plans developed and just needed the pretext.

Those who live and die by the gridiron – have fun tonight and may somebody win. My college football career reached it’s zenith in 1982 when I was in the stands at the Stanford/Cal game that ended with the famous band play and trombone tackle. It will never be equalled so I figure why waste a lot of time going to less memorable games?

There is a moment, when performing a stage play, when you, as an actor, instinctively know that everything is working as designed. It usually happens sometime in the first act (and it’s generally best that it happens within the first fifteen minutes) – there’s a change in the energy in the theatre. You can feel that the audience has absorbed the rules for the evening and it engrossed in what’s unfolding on stage. You can relax as you know that no matter what happens moving forward from now until curtain call, it’s simply going to carry you, your cast and crewmates and the audience through to the end of the evening. It’s something like a river flowing. You just surrender to the current and trust. Doesn’t mean you don’t move the tiller or change the position of the sails occasionally to take advantage of what the river offers.

Soul Food: Another Serving, my current project, hit that mark last night. I wasn’t really expecting it. Due to various issues with production, getting the show on stage in final form was something of a drama in and of itself and opening, night, while the usual theatrical magic held it together, had its shaky spots. Last night, however, the blend of comedy, drama, great performances, and an audience eager to see characters to whom they could relate on stage made everyone realize something special was going on. And I can’t wait to do it one last time tonight. (Although, as the Soul Food series of plays appears to be ongoing, my character may be back in another one sometime).

Moments like last night remind me of how important it is to have theatre for particular audiences, not just pieces designed for mass consumption. There need to be pieces that represent and speak to different segments of society, that reflect who they are and their aspirations, and how they too belong in the wider world. And audiences need to be inquisitive enough to seek out works that don’t necessarily speak to them. Go to a show aimed at Black audiences when you’re not Black. Go to a LGBTQ themed show when you’re straight. Go to a political show which attacks the status quo when you’re well off and benefit from current systems. It’s the sort of thing which makes you think, see the world in new ways, and helps you become a better person. I love traditional American musical theatre and could easily spend my time, talents and energy solely working with and promoting that artform but, as I have aged, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s far more important for me to work with and encourage smaller companies with very different objectives. We’re only going to get through this current political moment by finding our commonalities and being willing to see other perspectives, otherwise tribalism will continue to be the order of the day and those with the biggest mouthpieces will dictate for us all.

The metaphor of the river has been popping up in various places all week. My current classic read (I’m usually reading four or five books at once in various categories, one of which is a classic I missed along the way) is George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. I’ve never read any Eliot before (Dickens being my Victorian novelist go to). In terms of style, Eliot is a lot less fun than Dickens and a great deal more ruminative, but she digs deeper into the psychology of her characters and their relationships with each other and, more importantly, with the strictures of their society regarding gender and economic status. I haven’t quite reached the end but all of the references to the River Floss and various floods suggest that heroine Maggie is likely to end up like Eustacia Vye in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native.

We’re all more or less caught up in a the river of socio-politics and current events as well. Each of us in our own little boat. I’m rowing mine solo these days, more often than not, so there’s not a lot I can do other than be carried along by the current but I am keeping alert, trying to keep myself from running aground on the shoals and trading information with the skippers of other boats so that we all navigate safely downstream. It isn’t easy. Current headlines tell me that the US is trying to force a Russian victory which will likely irrevocably damage NATO and Europe down Ukraine’s throat. The fallout from that is likely to be unpleasant, no matter what goes down. Everyone’s favorite congress critter MTG has announced her resignation. She used her special vituperative brand of rhetoric against Democrats and the Left for years without consequences. She turned it on the Right and has been deplatformed in a matter of weeks. That should tell you something.

Given my personal expertise, the grimmest development of the last week is the CDC website now trumpeting antivax propaganda at the behest of RFK Jr. The CDC has long been the gold standard of health science in this country. It has now been thoroughly politically compromised and there is no way to trust anything that appears under its imprimatur. It’s sad. It will take decades to repair that kind of damage. I won’t be part of the medical system that has to rebuild in that way. That will be up to a younger generation. I hope William Cassidy MD of Louisiana who cast the deciding vote in favor of this philosophy can look back on his legacy with pride. I’m spending the next couple years working on my medical legacy. I think it’ll be a bit more positive.

In the destruction of the Department of Education, the federal government announced this week that nurses, physical and occupational therapists, social workers are no longer ‘professionals’ in the way that physicians or even chiropractors are. In practical terms, this will limit the numbers entering those fields as they will be unable to finance their educations with federal loans. This announcement, coming six weeks before the first Boomers turn eighty is not only enraging but mystifying. The health issues of those in their 80s and 90s, being chronic in nature, require the kinds of interventions made by nurses and therapists and social workers far more than the kinds of interventions made by physicians. I can only do what I can do because I work in terms and in tandem with the professionals in those fields. We already have shortages in these fields, especially when it comes to caring for geriatric populations. Without this workforce, the aging Boomers, unless well healed and able to contract for private care, will die prematurely. I guess that’s the point. Lower the geriatric population and life expectancy so Medicare and Social Security costs go down. The decade I refer to as The Uncertain 80s are about to get a lot more uncertain for us all.

It’s been a week of almost. Various things have gotten near to succeeding in some way but nothing has quite gotten over the edge. I’m used to that in life. It’s the way most things actually turn out. You shoot for a goal and you don’t quite make it. I don’t usually get discouraged. If I did, I’d never get anything done. I just regroup, take a slightly different aim and keep on plugging away. That seems to be where things are at not just on the personal but also the political field at the moment. One feels that we’re almost at the point where there’s going to be some accountability for the various tramplings of norms and laws that have become an everyday occurence but we never quite seem to reach the tipping point. I suppose it has something to do with the monetized media culture in which we bathe. There’s more money to be made in perpetual anticipation than there is in resolution.

The first ‘almost’ involves personal health. I took my Tuesday federal holiday and headed off to the outpatient surgery center at UAB West for my second set of injections into my cervical nerve roots on the left hoping that it would quell my shoulder girdle pain that came rip roaring back at the end of September. When I had it done last year, it was relatively easy – no anaesthesia, just lie still and a little local lidocaine. This time, fully out with the propofol and midazolam. I, of course, felt wrong for the next day or so while alll of that wore off. Did the procedue succeed? I’ll have to say almost. I think things are better, but I haven’t had the significant relief I did last year. I’ll give it a couple of weeks to see if the steroids kick in more over time. If not, on to plan B which will involve almost anything short of cervical spine surgery. I’ve seen far too many disasters with that over my career. Of course, two days later, while still a bit off, I tripped on a piece of rough sidewalk descending the 20th Street hill on Southside and skinned up my hands and knees. I’ll have to answer yes to the ‘Have you fallen in the last three months?’ question at my next checkup. Peepaw gonna have to remember. Ground Hard! Fall Bad! and start taking his walking stick…

The next almost is my attempt to fully come off book for Soul Food: Another Serving before this weekend’s rehearsals. I have my lines down – mainly – but they aren’t exactly where I want them yet. I’ve got three tech dresses before opening to be sure they’re all in place. I have my various tricks for learning and remembering them and I’m employing them all for this project as the rehearsal period has been short. I hope my castmates all give me some grace and remember that I am multiple decades older than most of them. As it’s starting to come together, it looks like the end result is going to be fun. I have a couple of really good scenes which should get me some significant laughs if I play them right. Plays next Thursday through Saturday at The Carver Theatre in town – presented by Encore Theatre and Gallery and tickets available at http://encorebham.org

The next almost are my attempts to get fully caught up at work prior to the holidays so I can actually spend some of those extra days off doing plenty of nothing rather than playing catch up. The routine work load is pretty much taken care of. I’ve got two legal cases that I have to complete, each with many thousands of pages of records that I have to finish reviewing and I just haven’t been able to fully gird up my loins on those yet. I have promised myself they will be done by the end of the month. We’ll see if I can keep that particular promise.

Then there are the almosts on the national stage. The headlines remain as absolutely nutty as they have since late January when the new administration assumed power. I really should be writing some new Mrs. Norman Maine columns but I’m finding it impossible to write her at the moment. No matter how crazy an idea I dream up for her next adventure, something even wackier hits the news the next day. Same reason why I can’t really do anything with Politically Incorrect Cabaret – how can you satirize the political moment in which we find ourselves? If I’d started writing a version a few months ago in which the president took a wrecking ball to the White House, the Republican party campaigned proudly on withholding food aid and healthcare, and Margery Taylor Green became a voice of reason, people would have told me I was going too far.

Where are the current almosts taking us? We’re about to attack Venezuela over something called ‘narcoterrorism’ that doesn’t actually exist. The real reason is likely that Venezuela’s oil reserves are bigger than Saudi Arabia’s and the oil and gas industry is salivating over getting their hands on them without the bother of negotiating with a sovereign foreign power. We have a long history of such moves in this country. See Hawaii. In the meantime, ‘extrajudicial killings’ continue which is just a fancy term for murder. As we the people don’t seem to be doing much to try and stop things, we’re all complicit and that doesn’t sit well with me. We continue to abuse and degrade immigrants, independent of their legal status and who cares if American citizens get caught up in the fray. Christian clergy dare to protest in the name of the gospel message of welcoming the stranger? Tackle and tear gas them and cheers from the MAGA crowd. Various Trump associates are inserting vacuum hoses into the treasury and sucking out millions in payments for themselves and their friends in contracts and legal recompense to which they feel entitled, all while the DOJ eggs it on and chases after Trump’s perceived enemies at his behest.

Like the rest of the world, I’m still waiting for the rest of the Epstein files to drop. Given what has appeared so far, it seems like there are all sort of sordid details yet to emerge and we’ll all be satisfying our prurient interests for some months to come. I just have to keep reminding myself that the girls involved were real people and that they were girls, without fully developed brains and they were being used and manipulted by fully grown adults who felt above the rules of society. I can’t give it a pass under ‘boys will be boys’. And the elements of MAGA who are trying to do so should be fully ashamed. But then MAGA and shame don’t ever seem to travel together.