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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dateline: Columbia, South Carolina – Birmingham, Alabama-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dateline: Asheville, North Carolina-

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

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

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

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

Dateline: Blacksburg, Virginia-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dateline: Allentown, Pennsylvania-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dateline: New York, New York-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dateline: New York, New York-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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