The gods of the theatre are capricious gods. I suppose that goes along with the evanescent nature of the art form they sponsor – one that requires a small army of artists of varying skill sets to show up and work together in intricate patterns that put a football play book to shame . When things go well, it’s magic. When they don’t… well magic is probably not the right word. This is all a very long preamble to state that for various reasons, Encore Theatre is postponing the dates of ‘Love Scenes’ for which I have been diligently rehearsing and the new schedule precludes my continued participation as it conflicts with other projects for which I am already contracted. Oh well…

This does mean that this next week has suddenly opened up. I’m celebrating by taking a nap this afternoon. Something I don’t often get to do but which I am reaching an age where it’s reasserting it’s importance in life. The last few years, my afternoon post prandial dip has become somewhat more pronounced and About 3-4 pm I am very much out of steam. On my house call days, this coincides with the trip back to Birmingham from the hinterlands so I can snooze in the passenger seat of the car. On other days, I will often fall asleep for a few minutes at my desk while typing progress notes. When retirement comes in a few years, I will probably set up life to make mid-late afternoon home time so I can settle into that particular circadian rhythm.

The suddenly free evenings and weekend should eliminate my excuse of not having progressed further on the new book and I will hopefully knock out some significant paragraphs of structure and not so epic prose which my publisher has been patiently awaiting. I think I’ll also go to the movies at least once to see Dune II. I liked the first half and I have heard that this next piece is even better. I may or may not allow Mrs. Norman Maine to accompany me. She’s gotten better at seeing a few things and writing them up which has made the folks at Movie Rewind happy. But she doesn’t always have things to say about every film that crosses my path. It will also allow me to keep a couple of social engagements I was bowing out of due to rehearsal commitments.

I haven’t poked around in the Covid data for a while so I spent half an hour looking through my usual sources to see what all is going on. It’s no longer on the front pages but everyone knows someone who’s had a recent case so it’s still very much out there doing it’s viral replication thing. The numbers all look pretty good. There have been significant declines week to week through March in terms of test positivity, hospitalizations and deaths. It’s still hospitalizing about 10,000 people a week in the country and has settled in around 1.5% of total deaths. This puts it somewhere between 8th and 10th leading cause of death in the US (way down from the 3rd leading cause it held in the three pandemic years of 2020, 2021 and 2022). Will it stay there? Who knows. It could mutate again. Or we could get a brand new highly infectious viral agent that seeds in the population again (and the chances of this keep going up as we add more and more people and they keep spreading into new territory, previously uninhabited, coming into contact with new animal populations.) And if we get a new one, we’ll be in a far worse position thanks to the politicization of public health which will hamstring the response.

The weather has been lovely the last few days and I would like to be enjoying my terrace, but the project of redoing my tiling (which is pretty much a continuation of the pool deck) has slowed to a crawl so all of my patio furniture remains stacked in the parking garage and it’s sort of a mess out there. I was quoted 9-10 weeks for the repairs to be done. As it took the HOA nearly two years to actually get to the project after announcing it, I assume I shall have a terrace again sometime around 2026. I suppose I can just drag a dining room chair out there and have a class of pinot grigio and toast the sunset later today if I feel up to it.

And happy Easter to those who celebrate. And happy trans day of visibility to those who celebrate that. And for those who are upset that the two coincide this year. 3/31 has been the trans day of visibility for years. If you don’t like Easter falling on it, stop relying on a lunar calendar calculation for its date which makes it bop all over late March and early April. Easter next falls on March 31st in 2086 so we have about six decades of respite from this particular overblown fake crisis de jour. I spent my Easter morning at church singing in the choir. I then had to switch over to my religious education duties. The RE committee sponsored an egg hunt for the kids (and there were a lot of them – we’re in a major growth spurt with young families). My job was to oversee the candy table and make sure there were no fist fights or inappropriate greed. I dressed as Willy Wonka for the occasion. I don’t see why he can’t be an Easter figure.

It’s spring break week. I don’t get spring break. I haven’t gotten it in decades as medicine operates on a fifty two week a year calendar and not an academic calendar of quarters or semesters with breaks in between. People don’t stop getting sick or needing care just because the kids are out of school. I usually end up working a lot of the traditional holiday times as I don’t have children and therefore can take my vacations on a more flexible schedule and I cover on those traditional off times as a gift to my colleagues who do have families to whom they need to attend and school schedules around which they must organize their lives. As a lot of people are out this week, I’ve had a bunch of extra clinical work. I’m also on a tight rehearsal schedule for the next project and need most of my weekend free. The end result of this was my spending the last eight hours or so banging my way through back progress notes and messages so I won’t have any hanging over my head this weekend.

The new show, Love Scenes, is six two person scenes each taking place in a different apartment of the same building. I had my first rehearsal with my scene partner and director last night. I’ve known my costar for a few years but we’ve never gotten to work together before outside of improv class so it’s going to be fun exploring together. Our scene is a story of an incredibly dysfunctional relationship full of mental health challenges. I get my guy. He’s very like some of the men, abandoned by life and holed up in cheap apartments or decrepit houses – full of self neglect and self pity. My only worry is the quick production schedule. A grand total of one week of rehearsal before a weekend of performances. Going to be spending a lot of tomorrow working on lines. Most of them are short but I have to make sure my ‘No’ and my ‘Sorry’ and my ‘OK’ are in the right place and I don’t lead my scene partner astray.

I have a long NYC weekend a few days after Love Scenes closes. Most of the theater activities are chosen but I have one slot left. I have several ideas for it but haven’t made a final decision as of yet. I’m going to search out some more input from my usual sources this weekend and then grab that last ticket. I come home from that and go immediately into rehearsal for Opera Unveiled and immediately from that into rehearsal for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and immediately from that into rehearsal for The Merry Wives of Windsor so my next few months are spoken for and I should be able to keep myself out of too much trouble. Rehearsals and people depending on me keep me off the streets or out of my bedroom with a pillow over my head trying to shut out the world.

The big news of the week locally is the closing of Birmingham Southern College. BSC has been in existence for over 160 years and has been one of the anchors of local higher education for quite some time. A small liberal arts school, initially growing out of the Southern Methodist tradition, it has nurtured and educated many of the local civic leaders through its small class size, rigorous instruction, and commitment to developing critical thinking and intellect. Many of my friends have taught there, attended there, had family members attend there, had their pastors attend there, and it has been one of the major feeders of performers and technicians into the local theater scene. A previous president and board made major financial missteps fifteen years ago and the dominos of cascading money problems continued to fall and could not be corrected without state aid which was not forthcoming. It’s sad and the state continues to show it’s complete ignorance of what really makes an economy and a society tick.

To understand Alabama politics, one must understand that it is governed by the state constitution of 1901, a repellent document passed in a fraudulent election which was created specifically to ensure that all socioeconomic power remained with a very small class of white landowners. (When South Africa was looking for a model for its apartheid constitution, guess where they turned. The Nazis also used it parts of it to construct the Nuremburg Laws). The constitution consolidates pretty much all power in the state legislature, limiting the ability of counties and cities to home rule. It has been amended nearly seven hundred times and it still pretty much guarantees that rural landowning interests will dictate what goes. This means that there is always money to lure a new industrial plant to a rural county at the costs of hundreds of millions in tax incentives and give aways but no money for projects that might benefit urban populations. As the red vs blue divide as worsened over the quarter century that I’ve been here, the Republican super majority in the state house has made darn sure that any programs that might provide benefit to marginalized community or that might lead to additional political power for urban or minority populations go absolutely nowhere. It’s a shame. The state is beautiful. There are lots of lovely and industrious people here. And the metro areas lag way behind Nashville or Charlotte or Atlanta or Jacksonville or any other major Southern city due to these attitudes.

But life is change, and Darwinian theory tells us that the organism that cannot adapt to a changing environment is destined for extinction. The economic conditions surrounding BSC changed too fast due to both national and local politics for it to be able to survive. It won’t be the last prestigious small liberal arts college to shut up shop this century. The American attitude toward education is changing. The pandemic has completely redone the way we see and interact with education. Absence rates spiked with the shut down but have not particularly declined with full reopening. Nether students nor families seem to feel that schooling is necessary. Fewer students in the public schools mean fewer young adults prepared for higher education, not to mention the skyrocketing costs of tuition as public support of education has been slowly but steadily withdrawn over the last half century. Anti-immigrant sentiment and fewer visas will lead to the best and brightest from elsewhere no longer choosing an American education. The trends aren’t good. I was raised in a family where education was one of the highest ideals. The house was full of books. We all read and discussed ideas and learned and grew together. I’m hoping that that sort of upbringing isn’t becoming a rarity but I’m afraid that it is.

My next theatrical endeavor is a play entitled ‘Love Scenes’ which is being rehearsed in a week and then performed for a four day run. It’s a half dozen two person scenes about love and relationships with a surrounding frame based on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Because no one has more than about fifteen minutes of stage time and it’s two person dialogue, it should be easy to learn and come together relatively quickly. I’ve started on lines this weekend and, as most of mine are one or two words long, it’s just a matter with responding with the right word to keep things on track. I’ll have more to say about this project as it develops. The weekend after this, I’m off to NYC for a long theater weekend with a friend, and then come back to do a concert of opera’s greatest hits entitled ‘Opera Unveiled’ where the Opera Birmingham chorus is singing Libiamo from La Traviata, the Habanera from Carmen, and the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore. I’ve sung all of them before so it shouldn’t be too difficult. And then it’s into rehearsal for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang so my next few months are pretty much laid out.

I’ve been trying to decide what I’m going to do for my big trip this year. I’m waiting to hear what the damage is going to be at tax time before making any final decisions. I got socked last year as I went up a tax bracket and, if that happens again, it’s going to have to be a cheaper trip and not a private car on the Orient Express. I’ll get hold of my travel agent once I have an approximate budget and we’ll start working it out. It’s going to be sometime between mid September and Halloween if there’s anyone out there who has plans and needs a fairly innocuous travel companion.

As part of my life planning, I made a decision regarding retirement. I am going to retire from the routine practice of clinical medicine summer of 2027. That gives everyone three years to figure out what to do around here if I’m not part of the day to day operations of either the clinic or the house call services. I’m tired and what has happened in the US health system over the last decade has not been good for either my physical or my mental health so I need to have an end game in sight. I’ll be happy to stick around in an emeritus faculty role, helping out with projects, doing some committee work, and providing sage advice to the younger folk but I’ll be able to pick and choose my own schedule and if I want to disappear for a few months here and there, I’ll be able to do it.

So now that everyone’s caught up with my basic life patterns, what shall we talk about? There’s not a whole lot new in Covidland. It’s still out there. It’s still killing people. It’s not going away. The best things we have to fight it these days are common sense and an annual fall booster (with an additional one in the spring for those with serious health conditions or significant frailty). More and more is being published regarding the significant issues with long Covid. Somewhere around 17% of US adults have had long Covid symptoms at some point in the last four years. About 6-7% of US adults have current long Covid symptoms and about 0.5% of US workers have had to leave the workforce due to long Covid symptoms (3/4 of these due to cognitive changes). As the chances of long Covid go up with each subsequent infection,, doing whatever you feel is necessary to keep from acquiring additional infections is generally a wise choice. And I am still waiting for some hidden time bomb to go off in the brains or hearts or lungs or kidneys of previously healthy adults in the next decade or so.

There’s another health issue that’s busy tearing apart local politics here in Alabama and that’s the aftermath of the Alabama supreme court declaring that the clumps of cells used in IVF are people under the law. This decision came about following the Alabama legislature putting forth a state constitutional amendment back in 2018 explicitly defining embryos and fetuses as ‘people’ and the supremes simply took a very expansive reading of the text of that amendment. The state legislature rapidly drafted a law this past month exempting IVF procedures from this so that these programs (popular with both conservative and liberal families trying to work around fertility issues) could continue. Now the state Republicans are busy cannibalizing themselves with the more conservative railing that this work around is damaging to the pro-life movement and should not have been passed and the more moderate trying to keep their appeal with middle of the road voters while fending off attacks from the right. Allowing religious zealotry to write laws covering subjects as complicated as medical procedures was always a bad idea and the whole mess is likely to get a lot worse with time.

And then we have the other bill recently signed banning DEI programs from state funded college campuses and preventing ‘divisive concepts’ from being taught and, for good measure, a ban on people using bathrooms that do not align with the sex on their birth certificate. The majority of the bathrooms in my work areas are unisex and everyone uses them and no one has had an issue. The majority of us were raised in households with unisex bathrooms without ill effect. I just wonder about the people who go peeping and then seek to file a complaint. Actually, I would like to organize a cadre of butch FTM transexuals and have them caravan to Montgomery to go use the ladies lounge while Kay Ivey is in there and see how fast she realizes that law is a huge mistake.

I am on my department’s DEI committee and have been for years. I’ve been committed to the concepts because of things that have happened to me over the years because policies and rules were not fairly applied. I will continue to do that kind of work and, if I get in trouble for it, I’ll just retire a little early and tell my patients (especially the ones with political clout and there are quite a number of them) exactly why and let them take it from there.

Adaptation – Change – Resilience – that appears to be the order of the weekend. Not so much in me, although there’s been a lot of that in recent years, but rather in institutions which I remain part and parcel of. The ripples in society caused by the pandemic are continuing to knock against all sorts of far away shores and are continuing to cause serious issues. For everyone.

Today was the day of the annual Opera Birmingham vocal competition. It’s been going for pushing fifty years now. Young artists submit audition tapes for judging and the finalists are then invited to compete in person before a panel of judges in a concert setting. They all prepare five arias. They choose their first selection and then the judges select a second from the remainder. Pre pandemic, a large number of semifinalists were invited and heard on Saturday from which a much smaller selection of finalists were selected on the Sunday at the concert followed by dinner. With Covid having made travel more difficult and everyone’s budgets smaller, the semifinalist portion has been dispensed with and only the finalists now travel. The dinner has also shrunk with fewer patrons wishing to gather for dinners of hotel chicken in rented ballrooms. The competition has had to adapt for the times. In some ways, I rather like this more compact version better than the grander affairs of a few years ago. And, as a member of the board who has to oversee the finances of the organization, cheaper is always better these days.

The opera world is lived out of suitcases, with the exception of the Met, most opera companies in North America cannot afford to employ singers full time so it’s gig work and going from city to city or festival to festival or competition to competition. And that remains true in even the highest echelons of the art form, among the very few whose names become known outside of the niche industry by a wider public. They still have gigs, only they happen places like Covent Garden and La Scala and the Vienna Staatsoper. Tommy and I started opening our home to traveling singers in 2007 or 2008 and I’ve always kept it up. I have a decent guest room. It gives the artist someplace to stay besides a hotel with all the amenities. I’m relatively quiet and inoffensive. I get a small tax deduction from the opera for an in kind donation of housing that they don’t have to pay for. I’ve gotten to know some lovely people this way. In fifteen or so years of putting up young competition singers, I have a perfect record. Either they don’t place at all in the competition or they win first prize. I don’t let them know this in advance. I’m pleased to say the young man staying with me this weekend was the big winner. A huge bass-baritone in a slim young build of Korean heritage… he’ll have a career if he wants it.

It’s stewardship time at church. The annual pledge drive where the members are asked to pony up for the next fiscal year so we can make budget choices and keep the lights on. The UU Church of Birmingham is 70 years old. That seems rather old but when you look at churches that have been around for 150 years or so and have large 19th century endowments behind them, it’s a drop in the bucket. We more or less have to raise operating expenses for the year from current congregants. We do OK and, along the way, we’ve managed to purchase and pay for our building and land but it’s always a bit of a challenge. I’m on this board as well, and am additionally on the stewardship committee whose job it is to cajole, exhort and otherwise manhandle the congregation into making and fulfilling pledges.

The church is changing. When it was founded 70 years ago, the prime mover and shaker behind it was the then dean of the medical school who had come from Boston, where there are a lot of Unitarian churches. He had been recruiting additional faculty for health sciences from the North East and there was a nidus of New Englanders forming in 1950s Birmingham that did not have a taste for either Southern Baptist or Methodist creeds and so UUCB was born. The founding generations of the church were mainly people of intellect and high levels of education who were looking for a religious tradition that could coexist with scientific rationality and liberal social and political beliefs.

Most of the founding cadre has passed on to their reward. And times have changed and new generations with new needs have emerged. Six years ago, we called a new pastor, a dynamic young woman with energy, enthusiasm and empathy. The weekend of her initial visit was the weekend Tommy died. She was supposed to have a meeting with him about his children’s music program that week. She was also pregnant with her second child. Now, the children’s music program is coming back to life again post pandemic, that child is a rambunctious five year old, and her presence in the pulpit is leading to more and more young millennial and gen z families joining the church. Those generations don’t need staid customs and rationality. They need exuberance, and connection, and spiritual guidance in a dark and confusing time where an economy does little to help them improve and politics seems pitted against those with more open socio-political views, especially here in the Deep South. And so the church changes. And its a good thing. Most churches are losing members rapidly as younger generations revolt against dogmas of exclusion. We’re overflowing with young parents and kids and if even a fraction of them stay for the long haul, we’ll still succeed.

I teach Sunday school 3rd-5th grade a couple of times a month. I try to make it line up with the Sundays that the choir sings so that some Sundays I’m there for hours and some Sundays I can sleep in and tune in to Zoom church in my PJs if I feel like it. Most gay men of my generation have a certain trepidation regarding being involved with children’s activities. There’s too much conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia out there and Steve, Tommy and I have always had a hard and fast rule of no young people in our home without parental permission and others present. Even a whiff of impropriety will destroy a gay man’s reputation in a hot second. So I’ve always kept a bit of a distance from kids. But when I was asked to teach some years ago, I was happy to say yes. This was one institution where I knew the parents wouldn’t be speculating on ulterior motives. And we have a hard and fast rule in that church of always at least two unrelated adults present whenever there are kids. It protects everyone.

Work is changing too. Some for the better, some not so much. I should probably go into details on current changes in American health care but this post is already too long and that subject deserves a lot more than I have energy for tonight. I’ll come back to it. But I did make one decision this past week or so. I will retire from daily clinical work at the end of June 2027. That’s just over three years for UAB to figure out what they’re going to do with clinical geriatrics without me. I’ll still be around in emeritus status but I won’t be subject to the whims of administrators trying to buff up the next quarterly balance sheet anymore. Of course I still reserve the right to change my mind but that’s what it looks like now.

And the Alabama Symphony Orchestra Chorus season is over following two excellent performances of Brahms’ German Requiem this weekend. I wasn’t familiar with the piece prior to this rehearsal period and I have formed some opinions on it after having spent six of the last seven days with it. First, it’s an endurance test. Its seven movements are about an hour and twenty minutes in total and the chorus is never silent for more than about twenty bars so there’s no place to sit and regroup or to rehydrate once we stand and begin. Eighty minutes standing relatively still on concrete under stage lights in a warm room does a number on the back, legs and feet. Most of us ASO choristers are of a certain age and we’ve all been taking our Tylenol and getting into a hot bath at the end of the day. The ASO chorus was joined by the University of The University of Montevallo Concert Choir to bolster numbers. One of the young men went down in the sixth movement Friday night – young physiology/long and lean build/low blood pressure/heat/inability to hydrate. I wasn’t in the least surprised and I had been predicting that someone would go down at some point during performance week for those reasons. I told him afterwards not to be too embarrassed. I once went down in a room with forty medical students and eight surgeons and had some post vaso-vagal seizure activity to boot. That earned me a free trip to the ER and a visit to the neurologists. I was fine.

Second, Brahms has a very peculiar sense of humor when it comes to part writing. The bass part for the most part is a bass part, rarely going above the staff but with an occasional high note. Unfortunately, he put most of them in the last movement when you’ve been singing for over an hour and the voice is getting tired. He also put a lot of the musical climaxes in the sixth movement right before that and wrote it in such a way that there’s little time to even catch breath before coming back in on a blaring middle C or D. Third, the music is gorgeous when the voice parts and orchestra are all put together. As the chorus director said in one of our pep talks, it’s not just a great work of music, it’s a great work of humanity. The great choral requiems are prayers and supplications, and have the ability to transport the listener (and the performer) in a true spiritual experience, no matter what your religious bent may be. I’ve been able to sing most of them in the ten years I’ve been singing with the symphony. I think I’m missing the Berlioz and the Britten. Time to put that score away and break out the script of my next project. More on that later.

I keep nosing around Covidland. Even though I am no longer writing The Accidental Plague Diaries (three volumes were plenty thank you very much) I’m still quite interested in how the pandemic and its aftermath continue to change our politics, economy, and society. A couple of things came to my attention the last few days. The first is the very strong push by the financial sector to try and end the work from home trend. It seems that work from home has been relatively successful in terms of productivity, job satisfaction, and operation of office based business. However, it leads to less demand for office space. This means there’s a lot of vacant commercial real estate and this is putting pressure on the financial sector with its exposure in the commercial real estate market. Wealthy people don’t like to lose money and so the pressure is on, at least in large corporations, for things to go back to prepandemic models. Which of course means back into cube farms with inadequate ventilation as retrofitting for appropriate airflow to reduce the risk of transmission of airborne disease isn’t terribly high on the list of big business’ priorities. Smaller firms which are going with work from home models or hybrid models are growing rapidly. We may be getting into a Darwinian situation where the most adaptable will be the ones which survive.

Second, there is some evidence that Covid, in its tour of the body, has a predilection for the central nervous system and, the part of the brain, if most effects is the frontal lobe, especially the areas which create empathy and cooperation. There is speculation at the rapid rise in anti-social behavior over the last few years is due to Covid having damaged the ability of some humans to act in a more civil measure, an infectious sociopathy if you will. This is very preliminary work and may not end up proving true but it’s a fascinating concept. Of course it doesn’t explain the trends prior to 2020 under the previous president. It’s also unclear if the damage is cumulative with each additional infection adding to it or if people can use other parts of their brain to alter and correct sociopathic impulses.

My current car big via Audible is ‘The Deluge’ by Stephen Markley (thank you David Abrams for the suggestion). It’s a sprawling novel of near future dystopia taking our current political, economic, and ecological trends and projecting them out on their logical courses. It is perhaps the most horrifying work of literature I have ever read (and I’m only half way through). The characters – people with whom it is easy to identify – trying to prop up their usual comfortable lives while their civilization is disintegrating around their ears through climate change and the effects that has on politics, economics, and social movements. I concentrate on one piece of this slow collapse, the health care system, but Markley has the imagination to look at all of our collective choices and how that is likely to play out going forward. It’s painful. It’s also giving me a kick in the rear to get going on my next book.

And we’re on to March, having survived Leap Day. Hopefully this one will be a harbinger of better times than the last one was, arriving just as the pandemic was seeding itself worldwide, outside of China leading to several years of topsy-turvydom which certainly led my life in some unexpected directions. I posted a photograph of the roof of the Castel San Angelo in honor of Leap Day but I don’t think anyone got the joke. Well I thought it was funny. (For those of you scratching your head, the last scene of Puccini’s Tosca takes place on the roof of that building in Rome. After her lover Cavadradossi is executed by firing squad, Tosca leaps from the battlements to her death in despair). There is an old story about the last scene in Tosca, probably apocryphal, about a production done on a limited budget somewhere in the Midwest. The supernumeraries hired to play the firing squad were, for some reason, not rehearsed. On the night of the performance, they were told to go on stage, shoot the person that was singing and then follow someone off stage. Of course, at the dramatic end of the opera, the firing squad shot Tosca rather than Cavaradossi and then decided to follow her offstage, filing up one by one to leap off the battlements after her. Live theater… there’s nothing like it.

My very long ‘to do’ list is starting to come under control. The one thing I haven’t been able to fit in yet is some hours doing some review question CME needed to maintain my boards in geriatrics. Fortunately, I have until the end of the month so there’s plenty of time. I just need to open them up and do a few so I feel like it;s in process and then things will feel better. Today’s ‘to do’ involved spending four hours waiting at the Toyota dealership so Hope could have her complete 30,000 mile check up. It cost a small fortune but I have been told she’s good to go for another 30,000 miles or so. At that point, she’ll be about eight or nine years old so I’ll consider trading her in on a newer model.

Covid is back in the news again with the CDC’s dropping of a specific quarantine requirement during the recovery period, bringing the recommendations for Covid in line with those for flu and RSV. Basically, you’re good to go once you’re 24 hours past fever/symptoms. From what I can tell this was just a bending to the reality that society was pretty much ignoring quarantine recommendations and, if that was going to be the case, it doesn’t really offer any additional public health protections to keep people locked away for additional days. This change seems to have caused a social media ruckus on both sides. On one side, those who advocate for protecting everyone from a virus which remains a serious unknown quantity, especially with the spreading on Long Covid, are upset by a relaxing of restrictions, quite correctly pointing out that there will be additional cases because of this. On the other side, a lot of bloviation regarding this proves that the virus wasn’t dangerous and that we shouldn’t have shut down, and that the vaccines are killing millions and other such nonsense. Calm down everyone. Here’s where we stand.

Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere and will be part of our world as long as any of us is around. There is now substantial immunity, both due to natural immunity from prior infection and from vaccine. This plus the evolution of the organism has apparently made it less virulent with recent strains. (There’s no guarantee this will last). This winter, it was killing about 2,000 people a week which falls to about 1,000 people a week as the weather warms up. After three years where it was the third leading cause of death in the country behind only heart disease and all cause cancer, it looks like it’s going to settle in at about 50-60,000 deaths a year, putting it at roughly the same death toll as colon cancer or pancreatic cancer and well ahead of breast cancer. In comparison, Flu usually only kills 15-20,000 a year so those who say it’s no worse than flu don’t know what they’re talking about.

It looks like we’re going to fall into an annual fall Covid vaccination to go along with the annual fall flu shot and that this should suffice for most of us. There is some data to suggest that the very elderly over 85, nursing home bound or the physiologically frail receive second booster in the spring but the jury is still out. Are the vaccines and boosters dangerous, yes there are some rare cases of myocarditis and neural issues that have been linked to the vaccines but the rates are about 1/1000 – 1/10000 the rates that an infection causes these issues so I’m going to continue to be boosted going forward. I’m in the minority. Only about 15% of American adults took the most recent booster this past fall. If the virus mutates rapidly into something unpleasant, we may be screwed.

We’re still not sure about Long Covid and what it is and who has it and who doesn’t. But there’s a lot of scientific study going on world wide to try and figure this out. Got to remember that Covid is a whole body, not just a respiratory disease. There’s a lot of data being published currently regarding the neurologic implications of Covid infection and Long-Covid. Covid interferes with the blood brain barrier and can cause neural inflammation. A bad case of Covid seems to knock about six points off your IQ. It’s unclear if that comes back or if additional infections knock off more in cumulative fashion. Every Covid infection you get, increases the chances of Long Covid so the best way to stave it off is primary prevention – don’t catch the disease in the first place. Wash your hands. Avoid sick contacts. Don’t spend too much time in enclosed spaces with poor air circulation with thousands of your closest friends. Fortunately, a lot of public buildings are starting to be retrofitted with better air flow systems which is one of the best prevention measures we have. Should you mask? It’s unclear but I would if I was immune compromised or had other conditions which would make me more prone to complications should I develop the disease.

I have two more short writing projects to complete and then I can peruse the streaming channels for a movie. If I have energy, MNM will be unleashed again.

It’s that time of year again. Time to sort out that large box of receipts and records and get everything ready for tax time. Fortunately, there’s not a lot different about 2023 from 2022 other than my income seems to have gone down in all of my income streams. I’ll spend a couple of evenings over the next week or so chasing various pieces of paper that have gone astray, enter numbers gleaned from all sorts of forms in my little spread sheet and then pack it all up in an accordion file and drop it off at my accountant’s office and cross my fingers that I’ll actually get a refund this year. I seem to bop up and down between a couple of different tax brackets and when I go up, I owe, and when I go down, Uncle Sam owes me.

I don’t mind paying taxes. I recognize them as being necessary to a functioning society where a pooling of resources allows for much bigger projects than we could possibly do on our own. I’m a fan of functional schools, public libraries, paved roads, working healthcare infrastructure and all of the other myriad things that tax dollars allow to happen. I’m not a complete socialist. I think the profit motive is healthy but that I do believe that there are certain segments of the economy in which capitalism either does not belong or should be heavily regulated in the public interest. This includes such things as education, health care, utilities, military, and corrections. Putting profits ahead of people in such areas tends to create more problems than it solves.

The next few weeks are about catch up in various areas of life. I have the car tune up, my annual eye appointment, and a diagnosis and repair on my home entertainment system all scheduled for the next few days. This latter is necessary as, all of a sudden, the dialogue channel is dropping out on some streaming services. The music and sound effects are there but otherwise it’s silent movie time. Fortunately, it’s not all of them so I can find something to watch when I’m in the mood. I haven’t really been watching a lot of TV the last few months. An occasional film but none of the streaming series I’ve tried has really grabbed and held my attention. Maybe I should go back and revisit something I haven’t seen for a decade or more, like Six Feet Under (which still has the best finale of any series ever).

I checked my sales figures. The Accidental Plague Diaries continues to sell a few copies here and there. I’m thinking there might be a decent market in another couple of years when the children of the pandemic – those who were in elementary school at the time and too young to fully comprehend what was happening age into middle and high school and might want some sort of relatively readable chronicle of what the heck happened and why. I have a couple of readings and signings coming up the next couple of months and I need to get off my butt and really start working on the new book. I just haven’t had the energy. And I’ll have to do it around my performance commitments for the rest of the season (a symphony concert, a play, an opera concert, a musical, and directing a Shakespeare between now and Labor Day).

Covid seems to be waning again locally. There are still cases popping up here and there but far fewer than earlier this winter. I wonder if that’s because we’re far enough out from holiday gatherings for those increased contacts to still be making a difference. The local hospital numbers are fairly low and I haven’t heard of a lot of deaths. I have heard of continued issues with Long Covid wreaking havoc in some peoples lives and that fact alone is enough to keep me caught up with vaccinations. There was some data showing that vaccinations had some mild associations with myelopathy and myocarditis – something around one in a hundred thousand. Given that the disease itself caused this about one in a hundred, I’ll err on the side of the vaccine.

Speaking of vaccines, there’s an outbreak of measles in Florida. There’s nothing that unusual about an occasional outbreak in this country. It’s one of the most contagious viruses known to humans so, if it gets into an unvaccinated population (recent immigrants, Christian Scientists) it spreads rapidly,. It’s so contagious that you have to have over a 95% vaccination rate to keep it contained through herd immunity. Florida, thanks to various antivaccine beliefs on both left and right, only has about a 90% vaccination rate so it’s going to continue to spread. It could be contained with a vaccination campaign and keeping unvaccinated children at home from the affected school but DeSantis’ hand picked surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, is busy ignoring over a century of science carefully collected on how to deal with a measles outbreak and pushing the opposite. I suppose those who are trying to out Trump Trump won’t be happy until there’s a line of children in iron lungs again. Measles is not a benign illness. It kills roughly 1/1,000 children it infects and causes serious complications in another 5/1,000. That doesn’t seem like that high a number but what if it’s your child who suffers permanent brain damage or dies. If a child dies in Florida in the current outbreak, will the parents have a case for wrongful death against the public health system for wantonly disregarding the known science?

Usually my jaw drops at the political news out of Texas and Florida which seem to be trying to race each other to see which can be crueler more completely to their marginalized populations. Alabama, of course, leap frogged over both of them with its rather unbelievable ruling that a frozen embryo was indeed a person. I can’t completely blame the Alabama Supreme Court on this one (although Tom Parker, the chief justice is a seven mountains dominionist). The legislature created and the population passed an Alabama constitutional amendment that clearly stares that unborn potential lives such as embryos are humans for purposes of law and the court decision merely pointed out what was already clear in the not very well thought out amendment that was pushed through by prolife forces. Just one more example of why politicians should not be practicing medicine. The Alabama legislature, with egg on its face, as well as in the petri dish, is desperately trying to back pedal on this one as it has caused serious issues for their rich white campaign funders as it basically prevents IVF and other advanced fertility treatments from happening as any mistreatment of an embryo could be construed as child abuse, or if the embryo is rendered non-viable manslaughter or murder. Perhaps the legislature will be a bit more hesitant to pass poorly worded laws about very complicated subjects in the future. Naaaah…

I’m jonesing for some KFC. Better head off to the egg section of the supermarket.

I feel like I am trying to dig out of a hole created by several months of devotion to Into the Woods. I was sure I had stayed fairly caught up but now that I have resurfaced, I’m starting to notice all of the little things that I had put aside to deal with after the show and the piles are starting to teeter. There are legal cases requiring reviewing, music to learn, auditions to prepare, an enormous stack of laundry, church projects, book readings/signings to prepare and schedule, stuff to do to maintain board certification, a passport to renew, a car in need of a maintenance tune up, and some friends whom I have recently neglected and need to figure out a time for brunch or dinner or at least coffee. I’ll get it all done. I always do. But I’m going to have to make sure I don’t take on anything new for a month or so while I’m whittling away at the pile so everyone out there who was thinking about asking me to do this or that… don’t.

Most of my fellow cast mates have been decompressing after the show’s closure this past weekend and reflecting back on what this particular journey into the woods meant to them. It’s been interesting reading their reflections, some of which are similar to my own and some of which take completely different perspectives on the material and the experience. The Virginia Samford Theatre touted this show as an All-Star Birmingham cast since most of us have been around for a while and have played leading roles there and at other local theaters over the last few decades. I don’t consider myself a star, just a journeyman character actor who occasionally gets a lucky break with a really juicy role and who has lasted long enough to be a known quantity when it comes to casting. I have good theater work habits, usually do well if cast in the right part or opposite the right performers, and am perfectly willing to take a minor role in a production in which I believe in order to hang out with insanely talented folks and learn from them. Over the last twenty years, I’ve been in something like sixty stage productions in this town, some very good, some very not. This Into the Woods enters my top five. I can never have a single favorite. It’s always apples and oranges. How do you compare an edition of Politically Incorrect Cabaret that’s firing on cylinders with a classic musical with a modern drama with a 19th century opera?

I just have to say I’m deeply grateful to Chelsea Reynolds for casting me and allowing me to play with these dear friends, many of whom I have adored for decades (some of whom I have never had the chance to actually share a stage with in the past, despite knowing and admiring their talents from the audience for years) and letting me be a small piece of the ephemeral work of art which is theatrical performance. Theater has power because it is real and it is happening with the collaboration of the audience, mirroring their aspirations and fears and it will never exist again in that form after the final curtain is brought down.

My Christmas gift to Tommy’s family this year was tickets to the show for all eleven of them and they came en masse to our final matinee. He has five great nephews and nieces (ages five to fifteen) who loved it. The five year old, born while Tommy was in the hospital with his final illness, was riveted and on the edge of his seat the whole time. It’s a very long show for a five year old but he was so caught up with the twists and turns of the story and the magic of live performance that he barely fidgeted according to his mother. Perhaps we have a new member of the family who will want to follow his great uncle into the world of mutual cooperation and teamwork and creativity that I discovered for myself all those years ago.

I was taken to my first adult theatrical performance at age five. It was the very last American tour of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s original staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. I can still see it in my mind. The colors, the lights, the orchestra in the pit and remember the frisson I felt when the curtain rose and those real people enacted a story to music that I didn’t fully understand and still found mesmerizing. It has occurred to me, that if I live to 80 or so, that I will be one of the last people on the planet who saw an original staging of a Gilbert and Sullivan. Maybe that’s why I still enjoy them as much as I do. I’ve done Pinafore and an abbreviated Pirates. I’d like to do Yeoman of the Guard one of these days. I love the Mikado but the orientalism has become a bit problematic. It works fine, though, without the Japanese trappings if done by an imaginative director. If you don’t believe me, look up the English National Opera production of the late 80s with Eric Idle as Ko Ko.

I had a long talk with my editor/publisher this weekend about the new book. We have figured out a path forward in terms of how it should be put together. Now I just have to come up with the time to sit down and do some writing. Which is running into the issues mentioned in my first paragraph above. It will all work out in the end. I tend to do my best when under a bit of pressure. I don’t necessarily like how it makes me feel in general but I have figured out over the years just a little too much to do makes me more efficient in general and my work product tends to improve. Now if I could just figure out a way to get by on less sleep. Tommy and Steve both used to do just fine on five or six hours tops. I need about seven or eight. Perhaps I should induce a little hypomania. That’s probably not the best of ideas.

And so the Gregorian and liturgical calendars align this year to give us Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday, and Valentine’s day all at once. I didn’t really celebrate any of them. Birmingham doesn’t really do Mardi Gras and Valentine’s doesn’t have a lot to offer widowers so I spent the last couple of days with my usual work tasks and a legal case that I have to have opinions on by Friday. My relationship with Valentines Day is a bit complicated as it is the day that Steve and I used for our anniversary. As we closed in on one year together, neither of us could remember when we had first met and started dating but knew it was mid-February so we picked the 14th as it would be easy to remember and kill two birds with one stone. As marriage wasn’t possible during our years together, we never had another legal alternative. Tommy and I, on the other hand, had two dates. October 27th, the day we met (and we both agreed that was the correct date after consulting a calendar about a year later) and July 11th, the date we were legally married in Washington in 2014. We celebrated the October date. Well, celebrated isn’t really the right word. Tommy hated culturally approved Hallmark holidays of any stripe but he loved presents when given at random intervals or to celebrate things out of the mainstream.

If Steve had lived, today would be our 35th anniversary. Would we have made it the distance? Who can say? We went through some rough patches but the rhythms we eventually developed here in Birmingham with him devoting himself to his art and to cultural pursuits made him happier and more peaceful than he had been at any other time of his life so I like to believe that just maybe we would have. He would be 75 now. Something I don’t care to contemplate. I don’t think he would have taken to elderhood with any sort of grace and I would be footing bills for Botox and hair dye and liposuction were he still with me. Of course, if he were still here, I would never have had Tommy or either of my other careers as performer and author. And someone else would be playing my role in Into the Woods this weekend. I might have gotten involved with theater again while with him (I was making a few moves in that direction in California before we were unceremoniously shown the door by the University of California) but it probably would have been a very different arc.

And so I have a very difficult relationship with Valentine’s Day. It brings up too many memories. They’re a jumble of good and bad. The problem is that they bring emotions with them and then I have my usual issues with my interior emotional life – not being very good at categorizing what those feelings are and, because i can’t fully understand or control them, my intellectual side tends to label them as ‘bad’ in some way and try to shut me off from them. I am well aware that this can infuriate people who are close to me as it makes me more remote and shut down as the emotional stakes get higher but there it is. It’s just part of the package. I don’t have a bad relationship with Mardi Gras. I tend to ignore it. Our first spring here in the South, Steve and I went to NOLA for a Mardi Gras weekend. We usually loved New Orleans but we hated that experience with tens of thousands of drunk college students and I’ve never been back during the season since. Tommy lived in the New Orleans area for a couple of years in his 20s working as a cook for Ralph and Kacoo’s seafood restaurant. He was in the French Quarter one Mardi Gras weekend night when someone pulled a knife and the crowd panicked. He fell and was trampled. His hips were never quite the same afterwards and he never wanted to return. And that incident was a knife. These days it would probably be an AK-47.

I did a presentation to a local social club yesterday on aging with a couple of readings from the books. It was an audience of aging gentility in a very exclusive gated community. I wouldn’t be caught dead living there but chacun a sont gout. The first volume is not yet three years old but it already is starting to feel like a historical document from another time when I read from it. I guess that’s part of the point. What I hope happens with The Accidental Plague Diaries is that they become a decent primary source for someone who is researching the madness of the early 2020s decades from now. As we continue to emerge from pandemic thinking to endemic thinking, events of even a year ago are starting to feel like a bit of a fever dream and it’s so very hard to keep memories and relative time of the last four years or so straight in my head. And it’s spilling over from public health thinking into all other areas of our lives. I think it’s one of the reasons why we are finding it so easy to reframe and rewrite the recent history of our politics and governance and why there’s so little pushback on the bald faced lies that seem to emerge from both state and national capitols on a routine basis.

The CDC is considering dropping its quarantine/masking recommendations for those diagnosed with Covid. It’s not that they don’t think it’s a good idea. They’re just acceding to the current reality of endemic spread – it’s everywhere and quarantining the few that test and play by the rules is really making no difference in terms of either spread or strain on the health care system. They haven’t made the change yet but it’s likely to happen shortly. The practical results of this will be Covid infected needing to go to work as they won’t be granted PTO by their employers and, if they have jobs interfacing with the public, a greater chance of spread from workplace to population and certainly a high incidence of infecting coworkers. My last Covid, caught in August of 2022, was a workplace exposure. Half my VA unit was out. It was a few days after our Joint Commission inspection so we’re pretty sure they brought it in to us. I’ll be interested to see what health care institutions do regarding staff infections should the CDC make this change given how thin our service lines are stretched and how efficient health care settings can be in spreading infectious disease.

I’m personally not terribly worried about Covid these days. I’ve had every booster as its become available. I wasn’t that sick with my last case and I tend to bounce back quickly from whatever ails me. I still have some trepidation regarding long Covid as that seems to continue to dog a certain segment of the population. No one knows how many as there’s no agreement on what it is and what it isn’t and, without a decent definition, how can you survey and count? The most recent numbers I could find suggest there are about 17 million Americans with long Covid and somewhere between 3 and 4 million of them are disabled enough to be unable to work. That’s 1% of the population out of the workforce due to a single disease that’s only been around for four years. Those numbers are huge. Roughly 13% of Americans have a disability of some kind and roughly 7% are so disabled they cannot function independently (mainly elderly). Long Covid makes this jump from about 7 to 8% or so, a 13% increase in need for supportive services at a time when the population is aging and people are leaving the health care workforce in droves. And people wonder why they can’t get a next day doctor’s appointment.

It’s going to get really ugly out there over the next five years or so. This is why I’m contemplating retirement and why I’m working on a new book…

It’s pushing midnight and I should really be pulling the covers up over my head and trying to get some sleep. Especially as I have to be up in the morning for choir rehearsal, church service, and to teach Sunday school, all before reporting to the theater for tomorrow’s matinee. But, per usual, it’s taking me some time to wind down from tonight’s performance. Into the Woods has found its groove and settled into its run nicely. Tonight was performance 7 out of 12 (or 9 out of 14 if you count our dress previews) and the cast have all found their timing, their comic bits, and their moments of playing off each other which come at this stage and gives the production a certain level of buoyancy it was just beginning to achieve when we opened last week. The word of mouth around town has been terrific and so audiences are coming in expecting something special. Tonight’s audience had obviously been at the bar before the show started as they were raucous and responsive to everything. That’s exactly what you want when you’re performing musical comedy. They were even laughing heartily at the black humor moments in the second act.

I love being in an ensemble show that just works all the way around without any weak links. You know you’re a part of something far greater than you could ever achieve on your own and that if any piece were to misfire, the whole edifice could come collapsing down. But, instead, you make it all the way to curtain call having held the audience for the whole two and a half hours. I’ve been in other shows where there were major issues. A poor performance, design misfires, low energy, and you can tell that it just isn’t landing with the audience so those of us on stage try harder and harder, but it’s ultimately a lead balloon. I’ve been on a roll in recent years. Most of the projects I’ve been part of have gone well. I hope I can keep it up. I just got a call back notice for another musical for early summer and I have a play in April and direct in July and August. Fingers crossed that I finish out the season on a continued high note.

This cast is full of very accomplished singers. I do not count myself among that group. I dislike the sound of my own voice intensely and I remain incredibly intimidated when onstage with those who have performance degrees and Broadway/National Tour credits. But the current round of voice lessons are helping a good deal. My teacher is trying to break a lot of bad habits and rebuild it. One of my fellow castmates, a woman whose talent and voice I have admired greatly for many years was listening to my mic check tonight and said she thought my voice was beautiful. It made my night. My biggest regret with this show is that there’s so little ensemble singing – only in the prologue and the two act finales. When we’re all onstage and singing together we really do sound good.

The message of Into the Woods (or one of the many messages) is that it requires community to solve big problems and that those who try to live only for self interest are ultimately doomed. I can’t help but think that’s a good theme for today as the unpleasant political news continues to pour in from all sides. It’s getting to the point where I’m dreaming of locking myself in my condo and turning off all media for the next nine months until after the election, especially as self interest seems to be the name of the game on every side. The attitude of I and mine are fine and screw everyone else is no way to order a functional society long term and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, only worse as the tendrils of late stage vulture capitalism continue to infest every sector along with the attendant willful ignorance that’s needed to keep people from thinking critically about problems from multiple points of view and understanding that the answers to big societal questions require input from more types of people than are likely to live in gated communities with over zealous homeowners associations. The current attempts to ban, if not destroy books describing life from alternate viewpoints, defund programs that give voice to marginalized communities, and demonize religious principles antithetical to ones own are all about trying to preserve a very narrow reading of the gospel of America which doesn’t serve a globalized world of mutual interdependence.

If a certain class of people come to power and are given the means to execute their ideas of a fortress America, I wonder if they understand the consequences? The Stephen Millers want to rapidly deport millions. That would require a paramilitary of tens if not hundreds of thousands being asked to dehumanize their friends and neighbors. We would have no agricultural workers to speak of (and no ability to import produce with an impermeable wall at the Southern border). The hospitality industry would likely collapse. There will be no workers in child care or senior care requiring millions of adults (mainly women) to leave well paying jobs for domestic duties. We would have to have a system of internment camps that would dwarf what the Germans created in the 1940s with the attendant problems of sanitation, predation and other issues of overcrowding. And the legal issues that would be created between cities (mainly blue), states (divided) and federal (divided) would choke the court system for decades.

Ask yourself, if my friends and neighbors become immediately endangered by a rapidly hostile federal government, what are you going to do to protect them? I know what I’m planning.