Dateline: Seattle, Washington

Just a quick entry tonight. Finishing up that three thousand words on the baby boom and aging earlier today (posted separately) took most of my writing energy. If I can write another dozen or so of those on various topics related to aging, I may have the makings of a book. Feel free to chime in if you have specific topics you would want me to get into. I think I’m going to tackle geropharmacy and the failures of Medicare next. They’re both topics I cover frequently in various lectures.

Spent a leisurely morning this morning with my father in his apartment at Aljoya, the senior community in which he lives. It’s a very nice unit. It’s an end cap so it has windows on three sides, overlooks Thornton Creek and has easy access to pretty much anything he would want as he’s a block and a half from the Northgate Mall. At 86, he’s independent and still drives but knows that’s going to go away soon so he’s learned to Uber and has bought himself a little electric scooter that he can use for short neighborhood hops. His geriatrician son has cautioned him about falls. We went out to see my mother, who lives in a group home a few blocks away. Her Picks disease variant continues to worsen and she’s pretty much non-communicative. She was alert this morning, which isn’t always the case. We ate cookies and she pulled at my hands a lot. She remains quite strong and the staff need to trim her finger nails as she was able to scratch quite hard.

Took myself on my usual city tour in the afternoon. The downtown/Lake Union core continues -to be full of new construction and I can’t say that I like what it’s doing to the city. But I moved away thirty plus years ago so I don’t think I get a vote anymore. I also took a nice walk through the Arboretum which is my favorite place in town.

This evening was family gathering at my brother’s house for dinner and an early birthday cake for me. Everyone appears well, we all caught up on each others lives and then my brother, sister, niece and sister’s SO all gathered around to watch this week’s Game of Thrones. Laughing at the first half and sitting on the edge of our seats for the second half.

Tomorrow is my last full day in town. The only formal plan on the books is giving a talk to the Aljoya residents on aging issues (something I do pretty much every time I come up) so if you’re in the greater Seattle area and you have nothing better to do and want to see me do my professional schtick, come on by at seven tomorrow evening.

Dateline: Seattle, Washington

Today was the last day of the conference. I dutifully got up, had breakfast, checked out of the Porter Hotel of downtown Portland and headed back to the convention center for the last gasp. Meetings were over with by lunch and not overly memorable other than the literature review where the faculty had incorporated a sing-a-long by the audience. I suppose that’s one way to get people to remember your information. I haven’t tried that yet but I have some ideas for the next time I do Geropharmacy for a large group somewhere.

As I didn’t need to be back in Seattle until dinner time, I had a free hour or so so I drove east of Portland to the start of the Columbia River Gorge where I had not been for some years. I took a walk through the type of forests I grew up with, delighted that I could still recognize Devil’s Club, huckleberry bushes, camas lilies and other assorted Pacific Northwest flora. Not a lot of fauna around other than a very fat and sassy ground squirrel who came up and danced at my feet in the parking lot when he saw that I was eating a cookie. I also made the obligatory stop at Multnomah Falls for the view and a selfie. I can guarantee you’ve seen the Falls before. They appear in almost every movie ever filmed in the greater Portland area.

The drive back to Seattle was uneventful, other than a major traffic slow down between Olympia and Tacoma where they were repairing a bridge across the Nisqually River. It put me in mind of another day in May, nearly forty years ago. It was the Sunday after Mother’s Day and the week after my 18th birthday. We were due to go visit my grandmother (my father’s mother) who lived in a large senior community called Panorama City outside of Olympia. The family got up, packed ourselves into the 1972 Ford Van that was the family transport at the time, and headed south on I-5. The news started to come in over the radio. Mount Saint Helens had erupted (and we were heading directly toward it). More reports of ash clouds, sudden river flooding, flattened forests. What were we getting into? Fortunately, St. Helens was a good 75 miles south of our destination so we arrived for lunch with my grandmother without incident. We then all hurried home to watch the news. Phone calls to friends (from the land line at home – no mobiles yet) revealed that those on the water had heard the explosion that morning as the sound waves echoed off of those flat surfaces but those further inland were oblivious until the news started to pour in. We looked for visual signs on the horizon but there wasn’t much to see. A couple of steam and ash eruptions later that summer were very visible from the city and I remember watching them. For one of them, I was on a boat on Lake Washington and that one was truly spectacular. I had no call to go towards St. Helens that year, but the next year, on a trip up down I-5, I stopped somewhere and gathered up some ash from the side of the road into a jar which I still have somewhere. I’m not likely to be close to many other volcanic explosions in my life.

Dinner tonight with my father, and then to bed with some bad TV. I am working on a couple of writing pieces. A new MNM column for this next week and an essay on the Baby Boom and aging which I will post for comment and may become a chapter in the book I’m contemplating.

More tomorrow – as long as it doesn’t interfere with Game of Thrones…

Dateline: Portland, Oregon –

This is the last update from Portland. I shall be heading back to Seattle tomorrow and will be there for a few days before returning to Alabama. Today wasn’t terribly exciting. A bit of a repeat of yesterday. Breakfast, Uber to the convention center, meetings until mid afternoon, a nap and then a dinner meeting celebrating that my colleague, Kellie Flood, was named the American Geriatrics Society’s clinician of the year.

Today was definitely old home week as I ran into all sorts of colleagues from my past at various points. Deborah Francis, Caroline Stephens, Calvin H Hirsch, Tomas Griebling, Holly Richter, Karen Miller and more. The sessions were fine with occasional nuggets of good information among the academic double speak. I spent some of my down time jotting some notes for what’s going to become an essay or a book chapter on how the US health system isn’t ready for what’s about to happen to it as the boom continues to age. I was going to work on it more tonight but two Tom Collinses have put paid to that idea.

Kellie’s party was held in a sports bar across the street from the convention center. I arrived to find it jam packed with Millennials in red and black getting ready to cheer on the Blazers. We were in a private space in a sort of loft but the combination of the UAB Geriatrics folks against the rowdy and somewhat tipsy young people made me feel like I had wandered onto the set of some film I didn’t especially want to see. The drinks were decent, the food was edible (other than the quinoa salad – that was a mistake on someone’s part), and it was nice to chat up some people I hadn’t seen for a while. Now I’m back at the hotel and rewatching The Battle of Winterfell on Game of Thrones. I’ve turned the brightness on the hotel TV ways up and, with that, it’s possible to see everything fairly clearly.

Can’t think of a good story at the moment and the cocktails are fogging my brain so I’m going to sign off now. More musings to

Dateline: Portland, Oregon

I got myself up this morning, poured coffee down my throat and hopped an Uber from my hotel to the Oregon Convention Center for the annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society. I used to attend it pretty much every year, but as my career has wandered off the fast track of academic prominence over the last twenty years, it’s become less of a priority in life and I don’t think I’d been for at least a decade.

There was a time when I was starting to make a mark on a national level in academic geriatrics with research and symposia and posters and the like but life threw me a few curve balls over the year. I took myself off the fast track when Steve got sick and died as my energies were needed elsewhere in life. When I returned to that level of engagement in the first few years that Tommy and I were together, I found that I no longer had the fire for that kind of activity that I once had had and, over the years, I quietly disconnected myself from the kind of work that gets you noticed outside of your own institution in favor of the life that Tommy and I ended up creating together. One that gave us the time to be creative and better our local community with our endeavors. I’m too old now to get back in that game and have been out of those circles for far too long so you’re unlikely to see my name on something in the New England Journal of Medicine soon. Someone has to do the basic clinical work that keeps UAB Geriatrics and the Birmingham VA’s rural home based primary care programs up and running. Still, I’ve run into colleagues I haven’t seen in some years with whom I’ve collaborated on national projects in the past and I never say never when it comes to life events as you can never predict what strange twists of fate life has in store.

I spent from 8 until about 3:30 in various plenary sessions picking up some new nuggets of wisdom and then i was meetinged out and couldn’t take much more so I tiptoed out of the convention center and had a nice walk through downtown, ending up at Powell’s City of Books. For those who’ve never been to Portland, Powell’s is an enormous independent bookstore that carries pretty much everything. The closest equivalent I can think of is Foyle’s in London. Thinking of suitcase weight and shelf space at home, I didn’t go crazy but I did buy a couple of volumes to add to the ever growing pile on my nightstand. Then more walking back to the hotel and a burrito bowl dinner. Now I’m ensconced with HBO and writing a bit before going to sleep and lather, rinse, repeat in the morning.

My first trip to AGS was in 1992, 27 years ago, in San Francsico. I was doing my fellowship at UC Davis in Sacramento at the time so it wasn’t much of a trip. Steve and I would go down to SF about once a month for a weekend and this gave us an excuse to go for a bit longer. At the time the American Geriatrics Society (the medical group) and the Gerontological Society of America (the study of aging group) decided to hold their annual meetings back to back so it was a nine day marathon. I was completely fried by day five as were pretty much the rest of the attendees and they wisely separated them for the good of all. AGS in early May and GSA in early November. I don’t remember a lot about that first meeting. I just remember being there. The first meeting I remember was a year or two later in New Orleans. I had a poster accepted and it was my first presentation to the geriatrics world at large. Steve and I had never been to NOLA and we had a blast. The meeting was in a big old turn of the century hotel. There was a second meeting in the other half of the conference center, the Southeastern Society of morticians. The geriatricians and morticians being together in the elevators for three days made for an interesting dynamic.

I wish I could think of something truly exciting that happened at an AGS meeting, but I can’t. They tend to follow a pattern. Lectures, plenary symposia, posters, exhibit hall, catch up with colleagues in a see and be seen way. My big takeaway from this one is that American society is in no way ready for the demographic changes that are going to hit in another decade as the boom enters its 80s. Thank god I’ll be retiring. I don’t want to be the one who has to cope.

Dateline: Portland, Oregon –

As promised, time to pick up the travelogue once again. I’m on the West Coast for a week, first at the American Geriatrics Society annual meeting in Portland, and then a few days in Seattle to catch up with family. Today was the travel day so not a lot to report. I left the house with minimal incident, other than discovering that I had forgotten to buy another bag of cat food and that the feeder was not going to last a week which necessitated an early AM run to the Piggly Wiggly prior to catching an Uber to the airport.

I must say, the Birmingham airport is one of the positives of living in Birmingham. True, you have to change planes at least once to get anywhere interesting, but it’s never overly crowded, the security lines aren’t too long and they have a Starbucks so it’s vaguely civilized. I inherited the ‘one must be ages early for a flight’ gene from my mother so I was there well before flight time, only to discover that my flight to Atlanta was delayed and that my connection time in Atlanta had been reduced to 35 minutes. Not wanting to have to rebook and do other crazy things, I chanced it, did the sprint through the Atlanta airport and made my Seattle flight with ten minutes to spare. I was worried about my checked bag but the gods of travel were with me and it made the flight as well.

I had splurged on the Delta Comfort ticket meaning I got about six more inches of leg room which made a lot of difference and I didn’t have to wedge my knees into my nostrils for five hours as I often have to do. Instead I watched a film so that MNM can get a column done this week., and read the first 150 pages of George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood, his epic telling of Tagaryen history – sort of like reading up on the Plantagenets in order to understand the Wars of the Roses. I’ve been on a Game of Thrones kick with the new season. I’ve been watching old episodes before bed and now this. It’s not terribly literary but he does tell a good story about medievalesque political backstabbing,. Now if he’d only put down the side quests and finish the main books. I’ve come to the conclusion that he never will actually finish them. I think he’s a victim of his own success and lack of editing and has written himself into such an intricate world, that he can’t figure a way out of it with any narrative cohesion.

My father picked me up at the Seattle airport and passed his geriatrician based driving test back into town. We caught up, had dinner with my sister and a friend of his and then I borrowed his car and drove to Portland where the meetings are based. I am now ensconced at a downtown hotel called the Porter and will get up and head on in to the convention center after breakfast. I’ve driven through Portland dozens of times in my life but it’s been about thirty years since I last stopped and spent any time here.

The Tony Nominations came out this week. No huge surprises to anyone who’s been paying attention this season. The three big contenders in the musical category all opened after my last trip to NYC so I haven’t seen any of them and will have to withhold judgment. The Tonys do, however, bring me to tonight’s story. This one dates back to me and Steve living in Sacramento in the mid 90s. It was the early days of the internet. The web had not yet become a big thing but there were a number of internet chat groups and listserves that were becoming popular. One that I joined early on was devoted to Stephen Sondheim and his work. (Big surprise there). One of the other members was a young Chinese man in Singapore, Stephen Chen who was bound and determined to make it out of Singapore. He finally embarked on a grand tour of the US and one of his stops was in California where Steve and I hosted him for lunch. We stayed in touch as he made his way across the country, eventually ending up in NYC where someone gave him a ticket to the Tony award ceremony that year. Much consternation. Black tie only. He didn’t have a tux rental in his budget. Never fear. He was roughly my size so I shipped my tux to my cousin in New York for him to wear to the show and then had it shipped back. So, while I have never made it to the Tonys, my tux has.

Stephen eventually emigrated to the US and Canada where he has had a very interesting career as a musician and avant garde film maker. Watch for his work. A lot of the other members of that listserve are still on my radar screen in one way or another. I need to find my parody of Arcadia set to A Weekend in the Country and post it. It was written for that group and is still one of the cleverer things I’ve ever done.

And so to bed…

A year ago tonight. It was warm. I had stayed with Tommy at the hospital until after ten. We watched a couple of episodes of the Great British Baking show and then I helped the nurse with his bed bath. He complained how I was doing it wrong. It was a familiar refrain. He loved to hold up how impractical my physician’s training was when compared to his nursing training. I never won those arguments and had learned long ago to tune him out when he was in that mode. It was hospital day thirty-one. He had been bounced around from floor to cardiac care unit to ICU and back again and he had finally improved enough to have all of his assist pumps removed. Physical therapy was to start with him in the morning and he was going to be allowed to stand for the first time in more than three weeks. What did I say to him when I left his room that night? I don’t remember. Probably something innocuous and double checking on what he wanted me to get him for breakfast.

I drove home, wrote a quick update on Facebook to all our friends about his improvement and his beginning cardiac rehab in the morning, and then I have no recollection. Most of the last month I was operating in a sort of fog; trying to keep some semblance of our normal life going while spending what hours I could with him and heading home late at night to feed the cats and get a few hours sleep. Did I read a chapter or two of something? Watch an episode of some series on Netflix? (I can’t even remember what I was working my way through at that point). I dropped off to sleep about midnight and was wakened a few hours later by the house phone ringing. Without picking it up, I knew who it was going to be and what they were going to tell me. I’d been dreading that call since I had figured out just how sick Tommy was some weeks earlier, hoping that it wasn’t going to come too soon, that we would get him home and he would go back to his irascible self. Slower, and with his activities somewhat curtailed, but still throwing himself into life. Having had to make those calls myself in residency, I was polite to the on call doc who had to tell me that Tommy was gone, hung the phone up like an automaton, and went into autopilot, calling his family, heading down to the hospital and embarking on the business of death.

Here we are a year later and I’m trying to figure out how I feel about it. I’ve never been comfortable with my own emotions. They always feel messy and uncomfortable to me. Perhaps that’s why I like acting. It allows me to experience them in a neater way, and I can hang them up at the end of the evening. The last few weeks have been full of them. I can feel them roiling deep in my gut. I just can’t tell if it’s grief, anger, love or some sort of combination of everything at once. Tonight’s meditation is my attempt to process it a little bit and maybe I can figure out what’s going on so I can start dealing with it. The only real outward sign is that I’ve been zoning out from time to time. When people ask me what I’m thinking about, I don’t know what to tell them because it’s not really an intellectual thought process that fits well into words.

The jaunt to Savannah was, in some ways, a means of recharging the batteries as I knew this week and weekend might be a bit rough. Part of me thinks I should have stayed a bit longer, but I really did want to get back to Birmingham for auditions and improv class. It also allowed me to go to church last Sunday and sing with the choir. James Sullivan was kind enough to provide an anthem with an actual bass part rather than some sort of second tenor written in bass clef. Most of the rest of this week I’ve just felt tired, falling asleep in front of the computer at work, having difficulty getting my notes done (still have a sheaf to do tomorrow), not really feeling like eating much.

I spent this morning with various estate planning things I’ve been putting off for far too long. My basic estate plan up through this year was ‘I’m dead – Tommy gets everything and will have to figure it out’. That won’t work anymore so my dining room table is littered with computations and change of beneficiary forms and a draft letter to my attorney regarding my will. It seemed somewhat poetic to be dealing with all that a year later and I have a feeling I will still be dealing with some of it in another year. I’m not planning on going anywhere but I’m under no illusions that I’m going to live forever (unlike the lead edge of the baby boom, but that’s another discussion) and as I’m starting to do some more exotic travel, one must always have a plan for the worst. That was followed by brunch with Tom Baker who’s pretty good at cutting through my layers of BS and then another audition.

Today’s audition was for You Can’t Take It With You, a play I have directed, stage managed, and acted in twice. I was reading for Paul, the father, a part I played in college nearly forty years ago. At least I’m age appropriate now. I really don’t like to audition but it’s a necessary evil I suppose. I keep reminding myself that those on the other side of the table want you to be so good that you fill one of their needs and that they’re rooting for you. I’m pretty good at cold reads but I hate preparing monologues and songs as they’re so danged artificial in that environment.

Tonight I went to Unbreakable, a Andrew Lippa piece presented by the local gay men’s chorus, Steel City Mens Chorus. Dinner first with a new neighbor who’s also a widower of a certain age (just friends…) and then the show. The piece is an exploration of LGBTQ life in America over the last century in fourteen songs. As it’s Lippa, it’s very modern show tune sounding and I enjoyed the music very much. In structure, it’s more of an oratorio than anything else with a combination of solos and men’s choral numbers about everything from Gertrude Stein to HIV. This is only the second time the piece has been done but I can see it having a life as a special program from gay mens choruses in other places. I was a bit surprised that a piece of one of my earlier musings from this venue had made it into the program (a paragraph on the need for philanthropy to support performing arts). I guess someone reads these things after all.

As I was listening to the piece unfold, I kept thinking that in some ways it was very much the story of my life. Steve came out in 1962 at the age of 14 and helped blaze a trail for LGBTQ rights in Southern California through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We were together through the 90s in Northern California for all the changes that period brought, then came to Alabama. The 00s and 10s belonged to me and Tommy, moving from a time where my employer refused to acknowledge my relationship (I still have the letter from UAB saying if they acknowledged a gay relationship, people would be signing their next door neighbors up for University benefits) to one where I can go to my friends weddings and no one bats an eye. One of the anthems toward the end of the piece talks about we are the survivors, walking hand in hand. That’s me, I survive walking hand in hand in hand with my ghosts.

I have yet to visit Tommy’s grave. We don’t really do burial and grave stuff in my family. When you’re gone, you’re gone. He’s in his family plot in the little mining town of Parrish about an hour outside of Birmingham. I’m feeling like I should make a pilgrimage tomorrow. Maybe I’ll do that instead of going to church (the choir isn’t singing anyway). If I do, I’ll take a picture. There are far worse places to be resting than a little country cemetery in rural Alabama. If I take flowers, I just have to be sure there aren’t any roses. For some reason, he hated them. Occasionally I’d have a brain fart and get him some. His responses were usually none too kind.

I don’t know if writing this has made anything clearer to me or to anyone else. Sometimes when I write these posts, they take shape as a story or anecdote, sometimes they’re a travelogue, sometimes I vomit up random word salad from somewhere deep in my subconscious. Know that I’m OK, just processing a lot. As I go through all this I realize that not only am I processing my time with Tommy and his death, I’m also processing my time with Steve and his illness and death. Apparently there was unfinished business that was sublimated for nearly twenty years and it all has to bubble up before I can fully enter whatever phase of life is to come next.

Enough of this drivel, going to put on some old Game of Thrones episodes and snuggle up with the cat…

Dateline – Savannah, Georgia

OK, time to write the travelogue that I should have written last night, but the cocktail from earlier in the evening kept rearing itself in my brain and I kept falling asleep and I figured my regular readers (all five of you), didn’t need to decipher dharhjgfjaga as my keys slipped across the keyboard of my laptop.

So I am in Savannah. This whole trip came about as a legal case I was retained for several years ago suddenly woke up and was to go to trial in Pembroke, Georgia – about thirty miles west of Savannah. Panicked phone calls from the attorneys. My testimony urgently needed. You get the picture. So, I rearrange my schedule, take vacation days, book hotel which must be paid for in advance, and discommode myself in various other ways. Of course, the case settles on the courthouse steps. I am no longer needed. I decided what the heck, Savannah’s a nice town and went anyway, without having to pack my suit and play verbal jousting games on cross examination.

As I was on no set timetable, I took a leisurely drive over on Wednesday afternoon. Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels kept me company on the audio system and the weather was cooperative. Traffic through the greater Atlanta area reminded me of why I have no desire to ever live there, but other than that, things were uneventful. My hotel, my usual Hampton Inn (575,000 Hilton points and counting…), was booked to be convenient to Pembroke and is way out of downtown Savannah, making it quiet and I went to bed early.

I got up on Thursday morning and took myself on a walk through historic Savannah. It’s not my first time there by a long shot. Steve and I, like everyone else in mid 90s America, had bought and read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and one of our first exploration trips after relocating to Birmingham had been a weekend here to see all the sights from the book. I also took my parents here for a weekend when they came down to check on me a few months after Steve’s death and Tommy and I made a trip here a few years after that. I had therefore been to most of tourist Savannah at least once so I had no agenda other than enjoying a fine spring day and people watching. Other than rolling my ankle on some 18th century cobblestones on my way down to the river, everything was lovely.

I met Jeanmarie Collins, actress and teacher par excellence and now a Savannah resident, for lunch at a cafe called Clary’s where we both ordered late brunch dishes and yakked for an hour or so about Birmingham theater, New York, the state of our lives, and all those other things friends of a certain age talk about when they see each other. I’ll see her again tomorrow in Birmingham as she’s teaching one of her Spolin technique improv classes which I highly recommend. After lunch, more walking, then stopping in at a restaurant known as The Grey and built in the old bus depot for a cocktail. It didn’t strike me as the kind of place I wanted to dine alone so I headed back to the hotel and some comfort food and another cocktail may have been involved.

Today’s story is Savannah tangential and involves Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. As a nonfiction novel, it includes an incredible cast of characters drawn from real life, none more memorable than the Lady Chablis, an African American transgender entertainer from the downtown clubs. She was such an original that, when it came time to make the film, she was cast as her self and manged to walk off with the movie (and was one of the few good things in it).

About ten years ago, Tommy and I were spending a long weekend in a gay resort. We were sitting on the front stoop of our room when the next door opens and out steps a dimunitive African American transgender woman. Lithe and elegant, who smiles radiantly, says hello, and proceeds to spritz herself with something from a small bottle. Tommy says hi back and then starts to chat with her about something and it appears they’ve met before (I wasn’t paying a lot of attention). When he calls her Lady, I do a double take and realize, yes indeed, it is the Lady Chablis. She waves goodbye, floats off in the other direction. Tommy looks at me and says ‘I’ve had dealings with her before, make sure the door’s locked’ and we went off to dinner. He refused to elaborate further. I assume they ran across each other when he was doing his HIV prevention work in the late 80s and early 90s before we met. Just what went down remains a mystery Tommy took with him to the grave.

Back to Birmingham this afternoon, things theatrical tomorrow, and off to Seattle and Portland a week from Wednesday. More travelogue and stories to come.

Man of La Mancha is put to bed. I’ll miss this one. We became such a tight knit company who so enjoyed working with each other that we could have done the show for a few more months without getting bored. After the closing matinee yesterday, I had the gang over to my house for a cast party. Tommy was the one who knew how to throw a party. His ability to conjure up food for a hundred on an impeccable tablescape was legendary and I was somewhat afraid that people would be disappointed with what I’m capable of doing on my own as they compared it to some of our more infamous cast parties of yore. But everyone seemed to have a good time with a hard core group staying late for a raucous game of Cards Against Humanity. It cut my beauty sleep but I was glad to sacrifice a few hours for fellowship and deep laughter with people with whom I love to spend time. There were comments about the need for a regular game night going forward, I’m up for it if the rest of the gang is. It didn’t take anywhere near as long to get things ready as I had thought and my restoration of the house tonight was not as painful as I had feared.

The score for my next project, HMS Pinafore, arrived today so the proverbial window has opened where the door has closed. I’ve loved Gilbert and Sullivan my whole life but this will be my first chance to actually perform in one. I’m going to take a few days to unwind and try to get all my loose ends caught up from the past few weeks before I dive into it. Rehearsals don’t begin until the end of the month. I’ve also been sent a script for something that’s going up late summer to look over so there may be something to look forward to after I return from Europe. More about that one later if it comes to fruition.

Next week, I was due to go to Savannah for a long weekend. I do some expert witness work in geriatric issues and I was called to testify in a trial taking place there. I got word today that the case has settled on the courthouse steps. So, I have to decide what to do. I have a booked and paid for hotel room in Savannah should I still decide to go. Or, should I take the time and go someplace else? Or, should I stay here and do home projects on staycation? Complicating things are auditions for Cabaret that Saturday. I played Herr Schultz at the Virginia Samford Theater in 2007 – I was a good twenty years too young for the role, but had a blast and got good reviews. I’d like to revisit him now that I’m only about five years too young. Do I stick around and do an in person audition? Do I submit a video audition? Do I let someone else have a crack at the role? Decisions decisions. I’m going to sleep on it and maybe I’ll know what to do tomorrow.

Tommy’s birthday is Wednesday. He would have been 54. I’m not sure what I’m feeling about that. Last year on his birthday, he was tethered to his bed in the CCU. The only thing he asked for was carrot cake from Continental Bakery in Mountain Brook which I dutifully went and got him even if it wasn’t on his diet. Maybe I’ll go get carrot cake for myself on Wednesday in his honor. Maybe that should be a new tradition. April 10th. National Carrot Cake Day. I should go out and visit his grave but Parrish, where he’s in the Thompson family plot, is a distance from town so that may have to wait until the weekend.

I should probably tell a Tommy story in honor of his birthday. Tommy hated all Hallmark occasions and didn’t like cards or gifts or any of that. (He made a small exception for Christmas – not the gifts etc, but the gathering together of friends and family and the decorations and the food). The first few years we were together, I always got him a birthday card and a small token of some sort and he would lecture me about how we’ve all been brainwashed by corporate America into gift giving. I learned how to get around it. I’d leave his birthday card somewhere in the morning where he would find it early in the day so by the time we got together after work, he would have gotten rid of his self righteous impulses. Then I would take him to dinner and a movie and all was right with the world. Even though he hated his own birthday, he loved planning birthday parties. He was all about people coming together and enjoying each other’s company. My birthday rolled around when we were first dating and he organized a party for me at our church. He put me up on a platform and played the piano and sang two songs to me. These Foolish Things and Someone to Watch Over Me. The second one is the song that I feel is our song. He sang it to me once again on his senior recital when he got his music degree. The church is naming the music classroom for him and dedicating it this next Sunday. The plaque refers to him watching over us.

I think I have to have a quiet cry now.

I’ve got a lot bouncing around my head tonight.  It’s late, we had another terrific show and I’m revved up as I usually am post performance.  I don’t know about anyone else, but it generally takes me about two to three hours after the curtain comes down for me to be calm enough inside to be ready for bed.  These days this is the real lonely time.  I used to come home to Tommy working away in his studio, or busy on some project (which I would usually get sucked into) so we would talk while my system quieted down and we could think about bed.  Now I come home to an empty house and bounce off the walls for a bit, not really able to focus on much of anything until the adrenaline starts to wear off.  This show isn’t too bad as my track is very easy compared to most but I still have to push up my energy for the end of the show to get bureaucratic villainy across to the audience. As people whom I don’t even know have told me I’m scary at the stage door, I must be doing something right.

How does a group of people get together and create something as ephemeral and beautiful as this production?  I’ve been pondering that a lot over the last week or so and have been trying to figure out how to describe it in terms that those of you who are not theatrically inclined can understand.  I know my theater peeps get it but how do you unlock the door to that world to someone who may be an enthusiastic audience member but who does not have the time or the inclination to help in the creation of this type of art.  And how do I begin to convey the sort of nurture that I get from working with these people, some of them in show after show over many years and some of them new to my experience, but all organelles in a cellular matrix bringing forth life where there was not life before.  This particular production clicked early.  At the first full run through where we finally had all 19 of the cast present, something happened and we all recognized how good the show was and we all moved our work up another notch to be worthy of the material and each other.

I hate to say it, but theater starts with money.  The royalties, the physical production costs, the time and talents of professionals who have the skill sets to perform, play instruments, construct sets, build costumes.  It all costs.  In the community and semi-pro world in which I operate, only about a third of the operating budget can be raised from ticket sales.  (You can’t price tickets above what the market will bear, you have limited runs and seating capacity).  This requires a dedicated production staff who can raise money from the community via philanthropy, grants, and in kind donations.  Cathy Gilmore has been working her wizardry at the Virginia Samford Theater for nearly twenty years and has given me incredible opportunities to perform in her productions over that time.  She’s been quite complementary of some things I’ve done so I hope she’ll continue to ask me back in the future.  I really enjoy appearing on that stage.  It just feels right to me.  It’s not a huge stage (and there’s no wing space stage left where you’re always dodging the fly rail) but it’s comfortable for a performer, technically sophisticated, and has a nice intimate house of just over 300 seats so it’s easy to connect with the audience.   The first time I appeared on the stage was in 2004, playing the butler in Jekyll and Hyde.  I was scared to death.  I hadn’t done much stage work for the last fifteen years and even then, my background was in technical theater and backstage stuff.  What the hell was I doing singing in front of all those people?  But something clicked, I kept coming back and now, when I walk up those concrete steps and through the black metal stage door to perform, I relax and feel at home.  I don’t think I’ve had stage fright in that house for more than a decade.  I have done 17 shows there in 16 years and I hope there are many more.

Once you have some money in hand, you have to find your key creatives who will take the words on the page and the notes in the score and turn them into a vision which can be realized.  There are four people who are, more than anyone else, responsible for what appears on the stage.  The first is Henry Scott, the director.  I’ve known Henry for several years.  He directed a number of shows at Red Mountain Theater for which Tommy did the wigs and makeup and I know he introduced us.  My first memories of Henry are of him sitting calmly in the lobby at Red Mountain playing either a lute or a mandolin and just emitting a sense of calm, despite all the chaos swirling around him in the process of a technical rehearsal.  And that’s just who Henry is.  Always calm, always centered when working, and always getting his desired results through positive coaching rather than yelling and drama and negative feedback.  Henry has a background as a chorus boy and has taught theater and dance for years so he both directed and choreographed the show making all of the stage movement seamless in terms of transitions from book to musical staging.  This is my second time working with him and he’s such a joy that if he casts me again, I’ll have no problem pushing myself wherever I need to go to give him the character he wants and needs.  The second is Ben Boyer who designed both the set and the lighting.  I’ve known Ben as long as I have been around Birmingham theater and no one understands the capabilities of the VST space as well as he does.  He more or less built the set singlehandedly and he has always known how to light his sets for maximum effect.  Lighting is so important, especially in musical theater and so under rated by the audience. The third is Michael King, the music director.  Michael and I go way back as colleagues, working with him as both actor and director.  The man is a keyboard genius and a great coach.  He’s also another piece of the odd events that led me back to stage although I doubt he knows it.  Back in 2003, he and Diane McNaron did a show they called Masters Cabaret at some venue downtown.  Tommy and I had gotten to know Diane slightly when we all worked together with Ellise Mayor on the Birmingham Peace Project’s contribution to The Lysistrata Project.  (That story is told elsewhere).  After the Cabaret show, Diane, Ellise, Tommy and I were standing around outside the venue when Diane brought up the idea of us all working together on this improv cabaret she was thinking about and Politically Incorrect Cabaret was born.  The fourth is James Lebo who built all of the costumes.  James and I only met about two years ago.  Somehow, our tours through Birmingham theater had never intersected until that point but we definitely found ourselves with similar tastes, senses of humor and kindred souls.  He’s turned me into a churlish grandpa, a 19^th century martinet and a 17^th century conquistador so far.  We’ll see what else he has up his commodious sleeves.

This show, has it takes place on a unit set without intermission, a nod to the Aristotalian unities please, doesn’t have a huge running crew but who we have is choice.  Jenna Bellamy, our stage manager, cracks the whip and keeps us all on our toes.  My original theatrical background was in stage management so I have great respect for those who do it well.  What does a stage manager do you ask?  He or she is the person who makes sure that the interactions between performers and the technical elements of a production come off without a hitch.  He or she makes sure that all the cues for lights, sound, set changes, special effects happen and that each performance if of consistent quality.  He or she is the god of the theater during the run of the show.  We’ve also got Joe Zellner mixing the sound so that the balance between singers and orchestra remains correct. He also makes me scarier than I am by giving me a bit more bass and reverb and then my old pal Laura Kilgore Barnett who has done wigs and hair and came up with my Spanish grandee facial hair.

This brings us to the cast, my fellow travelers on this nightly journey.  Man of La Mancha is an unusual musical in that there is really no chorus or ensemble.  There are nineteen of us on stage and each one of us is a specific person in the moment.  The structure of the show with the prison frame and the prisoners telling the story of Don Quixote means most are playing their prisoner character and then also whomever they become within the story as Cervantes sweeps them up into his imagination and casts them in the other roles as the tale progresses.  I’m the one exception.  I’m the only character that belongs to the outside world so I am always the face of authority and the villain of the piece.  Villains are much more fun to play than heroes.  I usually get comic villains but this one is just evil and he gets his own entrance music.  I’ve decided that I’ll have had a good run if I manage to make it through every performance without taking a header down the dungeon stairs.  They lower into the dungeon like a drawbridge and they have no rail and I’m not wearing my glasses.

While the show is an ensemble show and every part is necessary for the success of the whole, some parts are bigger than others and there are three principal roles.  Quixote, Aldonza and Sancho.  They have most of the songs and the heavy lifting.  Charles Wood is Quixote.  He is one of the professors of vocal performance and the director of the opera program at University of Montevallo, Tommy’s alma mater and he’s the real deal as a singer.  I met him once or twice when Tommy was there getting his music degree but didn’t get to know him well as Tommy was not in his studio.  Tommy always tiptoed gingerly around him. I don’t know the whole story but it had something to do with Tommy talking him into offering a history of opera class and then Tommy dropping it four weeks in for some reason.  I started to get to know him better a couple of years ago when we were both in a production of Die Fledermaus.  He is quiet, studious, and a perfect gentleman off stage and a giving performer on stage.  Aldonza is Kristi Tingle Higginbotham, one of the reigning divas of the Birmingham stage and has been for many years.  I know I first met her fifteen or so years ago when I first started to get back into theater but we didn’t really start to get to know each other well until much later when we were both in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, she as Miss Mona and me as the mayor.  We’ve done a number of projects since then, my favorite being Gypsy a couple years back where she played Rose and I was her father.  Of course we’re not that many years apart in real life and I wasn’t quite sure what to think when they told me I wasn’t going to need any age makeup.  She never seems to age.  The same is not true of yours truly.  Kristi is one of those people who could easily have had a New York career had life gone differently and we are so lucky to have her locally.  Nick Crawford, who plays Sancho, is one of those guys whom I have known through theater circles for a long time but this is our first show together.  He’s a brilliant comic actor and is always the most interesting thing on stage in any show he is in.  I’m glad to finally get to work with him and hope we have another project together sometime which gives us a nice juicy scene  together.

Who’s in the supporting cast?  Chris O’Rear as the Innkeeper.  Tommy knew Chris slightly as Chris was getting his graduate degree in vocal performance at Alabama while Tommy was getting his undergraduate degree and I remember seeing him as Sorastro in a production of Zauberflote at UA circa 2006.  I didn’t actually meet him or work with him until that same production of Die Fledermaus where I first worked with Charles.  He lives a ways out of town so he doesn’t do a lot of local theater which is too bad as he’s a great dressing room companion.  Shawn Reese is Carrasco.  I’ve known Shawn forever and we’ve done a bunch of shows together over the last dozen years or so.  Shawn is another one of my friends that never seems to age.  He looks just as he did when I first met him.  He’s also incredibly handy with hammer and saw and has been known to knock a set together over a weekend when you’re getting desperate. The housekeeper is Julia Hixson.  Julia is a local elementary music teacher with a powerhouse voice and stage presence.  I remember seeing her on stage before I started to perform and how she could effortlessly steal a scene, even in a small role.  Julia and I are often cast opposite each other as comic foils and she is such fun to work with.  She’s also a calming maternal presence backstage. Niece Antonia is Lauren Marino.  I’ve done a couple of seasons of opera chorus with Lauren who, while young, has an amazing voice.  I never realized how good until I heard her singing Pat Benatar with a bar band one night.  I first met Barry Austin, who plays the padre, more than twenty years ago when I first moved to Birmingham.  Steve and I joined the downtown Y and we would do our exercise routine between work and dinner that first year we were here before he became ill.  Barry was on the same schedule/cycle we were.  We had nodding acquaintance and I had no idea we would become friends and colleagues a number of years in the future.  David Pohler, one of my favorite young people, is the Barber.  I met David a couple of years ago when he was in the chorus of La Traviata at the opera.  He was getting his theater degree at Montevallo and ended up being one of the caretakers of my old friend and voice teacher, Bennie Middaugh, as he required more and more assistance as he descended into dementia.  David’s ability to empathize and provide care and companionship to Bennie, who was also my patient, made me realize that this is a special guy.  He’s off to New York next month to try his luck with the performing scene up there and I’ll miss having him around.

Rounding out the cast is a collection of folk who run the gamut and whom I have overlapped with in many different ways over the years.  Emily Hoppe, as the Innkeeper’s wife, is someone I had not worked with before.  I’ve known who she is for years, ever since she played Tracy in a production of Hairspray a few years back and I’ve always enjoyed her on stage and I’m glad I’m finally getting to know her.  Tahauny Cleghorn, who bellydances in the Moorish sequence, came into my life last fall with Hello, Dolly! in which she played Ermengarde.  She’s another Montevallo kid (as are so many of the folk in Birmingham theater) and obviously learned her stuff.  She brought along her brother Duke Cleghorn for this production, whom I had not met before this show.  Duke is a slight young man, but when he opens up, that boy can sing.  It’s rather scary to hear that powerful voice coming out of him.  He’s not the baby of the show, though.  That crown goes to Max Tatum who is still in high school.  He has been performing with the VST school program and was ready to graduate to the adult stage.  When I see Max wide eyed and soaking it all in during rehearsal and backstage, I cannot help but think back to teenage Andy when he was first starting out.  Only slightly older is Joe Ardovino.  I remember Joe as a child of six or seven.  His parents are both Montevallo music faculty and old friends of Tommy’s and I remember him as a child tagging along behind them at some Montevallo events that Tommy and I went to together.  Well, Joe is now fully grown and I’d love to be able to tell Tommy we’re working together.  He’d be tickled.  J.D. Blackmon and I go way back.  We first met about fifteen years ago when we were pirates together in Peter Pan.  We’ve done a couple of other projects over the years but hadn’t seen each other for some time when we both ended up cast in this.   He and Mackey Atkinson have a great duet on the song Little Bird and their voices blend so well together.  Mackey is another guy I’ve known for ever and a day, since he was a teenager.   We would end up at the same parties and other theater events for years but didn’t actually do a show together until about five years ago.  He also does my hair from time to time so you know whom to blame.  I’ve been hanging out some with Mackey and with Mark Nelson who is also new to me.  I had seen Mark in a couple of shows around town and admired his talent and I’m glad I’m getting a chance to work with him.

So this is the community, the circle, the family.  Tomorrow, we have our last performance and the set will come down, the costumes will go to storage and the cast and crew will all move on to new projects.  Some of them mayl be in the next show I’m doing (HMS Pinafore), some of them I may not work with again for years.  That’s immaterial; what matters is that we have built something special that will live on in our collective memories for years.

I was trying to decide what to entitle this post.  Man of La Mancha Part 2? Man of La Mancha, the sequel?, Son of La Mancha?  La Mancha 2: Electric Boogaloo?  None of them seemed quite right somehow.  One of the theater games often played backstage is to come up with the most ridiculous sequel to a classic musical or play and I can recall fleshing out the plot of Oklahoma! Two:  Jud’s Revenge in which zombie Jud returned with a machete and hay fork and killed most of the rest of the cast. It must have been a particularly dreary stretch of technical rehearsals for something or other. It’s one of the thousand or so little ways that companies bond with each other during the painstaking process of putting together a production.  The two hours of stagecraft that an audience sees represents hundreds of hours of rehearsal, design, construction, and various people wondering why they just don’t go out in the alley and hit each other over the head with a stick a few times as it would be less painful.   So why do I do it?

My parents, relatively cultured individuals, started taking me to both children’s and the occasional adult theater performance around the age of six and I can still remember some of those early experiences and how transfixed I was at the real live magic happening on stage.  When I was about 11, my mother, who had stopped out of the work force to be there for her young children, went back to work as an instructor at the local junior college, teaching various sciences.  Her boss, a man named Herb Bryce, was involved in local theater on the technical end and so my parents started going to the plays with which he was involved.  When he started working on a string of classic American musicals, my parents got tickets for the whole family and we started going regularly to see them.  This was the 1970s and the shows of the golden age were only 20 or 30 years old and were amongst the soundtrack of my parents’ youth.  I was already in love with musical movies courtesy of Disney and the family friendly fare of the 60s and after starting to see decent productions of good shows, I became more and more enamored of the musical as an art form and started exploring cast albums, reading scripts in the library and seeking out film versions at the revival house. (VCRs weren’t yet a thing…) 

I never really thought about being a performer.  There was no tradition of it in my family.  My father had a nice singing voice and taught himself to play several instruments by ear but my mother was not very musical at all and I was much more my mother’s child.  I did learn to play clarinet starting in 4^th grade and had become pretty good by high school but that was about it.  I always thought that performing was for people who were born with some sort of hugely innate talent and I was pretty sure that wasn’t me.   I did do some plays in school.  I got the title role in Rumplestiltskin in third grade because I was the shortest boy in the school capable of memorizing the lines.  I also remember being Abraham Lincoln in 5^th grade with a beard rubber cemented to my face that made my skin break out for two weeks.  And I was pretty darn certain I couldn’t sing.

When I was a junior in high school, the school embarked on a building program and one of the new facilities they constructed was a theater.  In retrospect, it wasn’t much of a theater.  The fly system was primitive at best, it didn’t have a ton of backstage facilities but, when I walked into the completed building for the first time, something happened to me.  I looked up at the booth, through the backstage area and stood on the stage looking out at the house and knew that, more than anything else, I wanted to learn how to use these tools to make theater magic.  I signed up for the tech theater classes and did a little bit of everything backstage and it soon became apparent, with my organized and methodical ways, that I was a good stage manager and had some promise as a director.

When I went off to college, I quickly learned how to find my people.  They were the ones who, like I, were interested in the magic of theater, especially musical theater.  There were so many bright and talented kids who knew so much more than I did that, even though I was double majoring in chemistry and biology,  I would have to spend as much time as possible working with and learning from them.  I worked tech crew, building sets and hanging lights.  There is a tradition at Stanford of dorm theater.  Dorms tend to be houses of 50-100 people and each dorm would put on a theatrical production sometime during the year.  I volunteered to direct our dorm show my freshman year (You Can’t Take It With You) which got me noticed and I moved on to stage management for campus wide companies.  I directed my first musical (The Pajama Game) sophomore year and by the middle of junior year, I had catapulted myself into the thick of the production/technical group of folks, many of whom remain close friends thirty-five years later.  My senior year, I directed the big student produced musical (Anything Goes) on the mainstage and, after graduation, headed off to medical school in Seattle where I continued stage managing and directing in community theater whenever my schedule would permit.

After graduating form medical school, moving to Sacramento, and hitting residency, I gave it all up.  Every third night on call and theatrical production do not mix.  I chose to focus on training and career and, nine months after moving to California I met Steve and built a life and relationship with him which provided more than enough drama for anyone.  I missed it and every once in a while, I would stick my toes into the Sacramento theater waters.  I made some friends who did theater and helped out backstage with props or sound or some such from time to time.  Steve and I also went to the theater every chance we could get.  Between Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles, there wasn’t much we missed in the 90s.  Then came the disasters of 1998 and the collapse of our California life and the need to move somewhere else if my career was going to continue.

I’ve told the story of the job search and the odd chain of circumstances that led us to Birmingham elsewhere.  The move was followed shortly by his illness and my need to keep myself devoted to two things, his needs and my job until his inevitable death.  My response to that and to my pain was to run away.  For the first year or so after he died, I spent every possible moment away from home that I could.  I booked business trips.  I took vacations.  I visited family.  I didn’t want to be in the house alone with my feelings and I just couldn’t think of another constructive coping mechanism.   I couldn’t completely abandon Birmingham.  My job did expect me to show up routinely but there was more flexibility in my schedule at that point than I have now so I could do a lot of long weekends.

I met Tommy in late 2002.  At this point, I’d been living in Birmingham for four years but I knew almost no one outside of the people I worked with.  We hit it off and by mid 2003 were more or less a couple.  Tommy had always been of Birmingham and was one of those people who knew everyone.  With a new companion, we started going to local theater routinely, egged on by church friends like Ellise Mayor and Ginny Crooks.  We started to get involved with production beginning with the Lysistrata project in 2003 which eventually morphed into Politically Incorrect Cabaret.  Tommy was musical.  Tommy had always performed.  He knew I had a background in theater and asked me why I didn’t perform as well.  I told him it was because I didn’t have any talent.  He pooh poohed me and told me how he had seen me work a room with my public speaking engagements and that there was no reason I couldn’t transfer those skills to stage.  I told him I liked musicals but couldn’t sing.  His response to that was to get voice lessons so I ended up working with Diane McNaron and soon came to realize that I actually could carry a tune.  I was never going to be Alfred Drake but I could handle a character role.  I started auditioning in 2004, kept getting cast to my complete surprise, and here I am some fifty Birmingham productions later.

It wasn’t Tommy who brought me back to life after Steve’s death.  It was his opening the door back into the world of theater.  Together we found our tribe.  The people we could love and be loved by.  The people we could count on.  The people who would have our backs and help us through our hardest moments.  That’s what keeps me coming back show after show – the circle of humanity within a company that demands your best, elevates you, and holds you up when you feel like life has stomped you into the dirt.  I don’t choose projects based on the size of my role or what song I get to sing or how many lines I have.  I choose them based on the group of people with whom I am going to share my life and my vulnerabilities for six or eight weeks.  Somehow I have been lucky enough to be accepted by some of the best performers in town as one of them.

I tend to have a very bad case of impostor syndrome.  I think it’s common in high achievers.  It’s that feeling that you don’t really belong in whatever position in life you’ve managed to reach and that if others really knew you and your insecurities, you’d be busted back down to buck private in a manner of minutes.  Having two careers, I get a double dose of it.  I’ve almost shaken it in my physician career.  It’s been thirty-one years since I graduated from medical school and people started calling my doctor.  It took me at least a decade to stop looking over my shoulder when someone used the word and another decade after that to start to feel relatively comfortable with my abilities and my role as a physician and healer.  I get a lot of accolades these days for my work in geriatrics.  I’m one of the few that’s dedicated my life to an unpopular and underserved specialty and I’ve been in one place long enough for people to get to know me so, even though I don’t think I really deserve them, I have learned to accept them with a certain amount of grace and humility.  I haven’t begun to shake the impostor syndrome as a performer.  Every time I am cast, I begin to worry if I could possibly be good enough, that they should have gone with another choice, that the audience will know that I don’t belong up there in that group of consummate professionals and all those other things the committee in my head will start telling me. It doesn’t matter if I’m the lead or a member of the ensemble in the back row.  I’ve learned to cope by turning my super-ego off when I walk through the stage door and leaving Andy and all his insecurities at home so I can just be present in that moment with those people and do the job that has been so carefully rehearsed that it starts to become second nature.

I have one more long post I want to do about all the feelings stirred up by Man of La Mancha.  I’m trying to figure out to write about the couple of dozen individuals involved in the show that make up my tribe.  How they entered my life, what they have meant to me, anecdotes of our time together around various Birmingham stages.  I have a lot of ideas swirling around but I haven’t yet figured out how to make it engaging to a reader and not just a litany of names.  It’s a challenge and I’ve always been about setting myself challenges and seeing if I can surmount them with my writing.  I’ll start putting some stuff down and see if it amounts to anything I’m willing to show in public.

I had one lovely experience last night.  A woman, whom I had not previously known, found my first post about Man of La Mancha on line as I had tagged a mutual friend.  She read it and it compelled her to immediately come down to the theater, buy a ticket and ask to meet me.  How flattering and what a perfect illustration of the theme of both the show and that post – the power of story and narrative to move people.  Sometimes I wonder why I’m writing these long posts and then something like that happens and it gives me the energy and the courage to go on.