Timber!

Nine years ago today—two years after leaving the hospital and just hours after taking the very first dose of yet another new bipolar med added to my ever-evolving cocktail—I stood up from a chair, walked a couple steps, blacked completely the hell out, fell Timber! onto the tile floor (which I cracked with my face because GO BIG OR GO HOME), shredded myself eyebrow-to-chin on my shattered glasses, bit most of the way through my lip, loosened some teeth, got a concussion, and woke up in my sister's car holding a huge bloody rag to my face too confused to remember that Christmas had happened (or, for just a few glorious moments, that I was even bipolar) as she rushed me to the ER, where I looked so brutally horrifying that the nurses assumed I was the victim of a violent assault and three police officers were dispatched my room to question me well before the doctor showed up to assess the damage, declare me not dead and give me double-digit stitches.

I came home covered in swelling and bruises and scabs and stitches and glue—after telling the ER doctor in my foggy haze that my modeling days were over and I didn't care if he left scars all over my face but I vaguely remember him informing me that he still had a professional obligation to do his best—and filled eyeballs-to-spine with a deep, not-for-amateurs headache that brought crippling new levels to my understanding of pain ... and yet I still found a way to take time out of my busy schedule for a quick selfie to document the occasion for future biographers. (You're welcome, posterity!)

This Timber! event was directly linked to my new drug (called Fetzima, who sounds like a possibly immodest resident of the Anatevka demimonde in Fiddler on the Roof) that, as with all psychotropics, came with an alarming list of ramp-up side effects ... including abrupt blackouts. But I knew from a decade-plus of trial-and-error experience that I needed to tough out the first three or four weeks until the side effects subsided and the drug's level (or not level) of efficacy manifested (or didn't manifest) itself.

And despite its hyperdramatic entrance into the madcap musical of my life, Fetzima more-or-less quickly proved itself to be perhaps the drug that effectively balances my serotonin and norepinephrine and keeps me (more or less) stable and engaged and functional and capable and able to go to work and do shows and take care of my parents and run races and do handyman projects (quite well, if I can toot my own horn, which I shamelessly will) and practice the piano and buy shoes and buy more shoes and here I am nine years later, scar-free (thanks, conscientiously ethical ER doctor!) (though it took a good six months for the scars to heal and the scar tissue where I bit through my lip to subside to the point that I could drink out of a straw again) and concussion-free (pro tip: you DO. NOT. EVER. want a concussion), and clearly in possession of new old-mad wrinkles and silver foxiness.

[Super-fun side note: Aetna, in its infinite wisdom, abruptly stopped covering my Fetzima for two years and summarily rejected all three of my doctor’s allotted appeals. Because apparently risking sending me to the psych ward for another week was far more cost-effective than covering a proven psychotropic. So my doctor hoarded samples for me in the hope that Aetna would finally get its head out of its fetz (which it eventually did) and/or Fetzima’s patent would expire, it went generic and it stopped costing $700/month out of pocket (which has yet to happen).]

Anyway, if you're inclined, raise a glass and yell Timber! in my scab-free, concussion-free, fog-free, not-functional-free honor today. I'm gonna go out and keep living. Timber!

Emma and the Aase

If you were making a move about sensible, salt-of-the-earth people and called Central Casting and said “Send me an old, stoic, self-sufficient Norwegian bachelor woman who can repair a roof and bake paper-thin sugar cookies all in one day … oh, and also who can terrify her sister’s young grandchildren at night because she looks like a floating Victorian ghost when she leaves her hair down,” you’d promptly have the white-haired, durably assembled Emma Christina Nystrom show up at your door in her homemade plaid cotton house dress.

Emma was my mother’s aunt, but she was always Aunt Emma to everyone from every generation in our family. She was part of a long line of my Norwegian forebears who practically built the entirety of Northeast Iowa, particularly Decorah and the sleepy bedroom-and-once-booming-train-hub community of Calmar just south of it.

My sister and I were kind of scared of Emma when we were kids. She wasn’t terribly demonstrable or huggy, she never told fart jokes, and she was completely deaf, which made it extremely difficult for us as kids to warm up to her.

A true child of the Depression, Emma never wasted a thing. She ate entire apples—even the cores, which kind of grossed us out. She turned her old dresses into quilts and eventually the quilt scraps became painting rags that she washed and reused until they crumbled into nothing.

 
She even darned her stockings and later her pantyhose, which made her look like she had alarmingly dark varicose veins running up and down her legs.

When her parents and grandparents (who only spoke Norwegian) got to the point that they needed constant care, Emma dropped out of business school to care for them and her younger siblings. And she never went back. She also never married, so she lived in Calmar her entire life caring for everyone and eventually for the house that her father had built and various generations of her family had lived in for almost a century.

Now, we Norwegians are of sturdy stock. Emma outlived her siblings and pretty much all her friends, and by the early ‘90s when she had to leave the family home and move into the nearby Aase Haugen Home For Sturdy Norwegians Who Are Finally Starting To Need Constant Care But Who Don’t Want To Burden Their Families, she was also in her 90s.

 
We drove up to Decorah to visit her in The Aase (as the locals and residents called it) as often as we could over the next few years. But her spirits were failing as fast as her body. She complained that all her friends and her entire family but us had died. She complained about the people assigned to her table at dinner time. She complained that she was just tired and was ready to go.

I was recently out of college and finally living in my first house about a mile from my parents. And in 1995 on Christmas Eve Day as we were busy cooking our traditional Norwegian Christmas meal at their house, we got a call from The Aase: Aunt Emma was failing fast and they didn’t expect her to last the night.

So Mom and I got in a car, left all the cooking and baking and table-setting and guest-entertaining to my dad and sister, and made the two-hour drive up to see her as snow gently covered all the Iowa farms and towns in sparkly white.

When we got there, Aunt Emma was in and out of consciousness and looking like she was indeed at death’s door. So we held her hands and adjusted her blankets to make her comfortable and sang Christmas carols with her.

 
At one point, we were finishing what we thought was the final verse of “Silent Night,” but Emma clearly knew the song better than we did because in her fog she barrelled into a final verse we only barely recognized. We did our best to sing along though. But only so she wouldn’t judge us in the afterlife.

As it got late, I realized we had no Christmas Eve dinner for the three of us to enjoy. The Aase’s kitchen had closed, so I jumped in the car and started driving around Decorah (in the prehistoric days before GPS phones and even Mapquest) to find something for us to eat.

You’d think a grocery store in a very Norwegian town would have Norwegian favorites in stock on Christmas Eve, but you’d be wrong. So I had to improvise: pre-packaged cups of Christmas-red Jell-O, Kaiser rolls (because Germany is in Europe so it’s practically the same as Norway) and cold cuts. It wasn’t much, but it would definitely become a memory.

But when I got back and we ate our bountiful feast, Emma started to rally. She was lucid and talking, and she and even the night nurse told us we might as well go home.

So Mom and I got back in the car and drove home through the snow-covered fields and little Iowa towns late on that Christmas Eve. We sang along with a “Messiah“ broadcast we found on the radio and talked about Emma and the end of an era she represented when she eventually dies, and we had a rather lovely time together.

But when we got home, everything was chaos … from a proper-Christmas-decorating perspective, and my sister begged us to never leave her alone with Dad on Christmas Eve again because he set the table like a toddler and made the Christmas trees on the Spode china crooked. CROOKED!

 
The next morning—Christmas Day—as we were finally enjoying our now-leftovers Christmas Eve dinner—ON CORRECTLY ORIENTED PLATES—we got another call from The Aase: Emma had died peacefully in her sleep that morning. And ever since then, her death has always added a poignant side note to our Christmas celebrations. But if you want to be remembered long after you’re gone—especially in a social-media post that gets re-posted every year in perpetuity—I recommend dying on a major family holiday.

Deaths are always sad, but Emma had certainly had a good, long run and we were all ready to let her go. And she was clearly ready to let go herself.

I don’t remember how we learned this next little tidbit because we certainly didn’t have the news on during Christmas, but we eventually found out about someone else who had died that same Christmas Day: Dean Martin. Boozy, handsome, king-of-cool Dean Martin had died on the same Christmas Day as prim, proper, sturdy, Depression-sensible Emma Christina Nystrom.

And as we pondered this odd little coincidence and mourned each person in our separate but very different ways, we all found ourselves asking the same obvious question:

What do you suppose Aunt Emma and Dean Martin are talking about as they wait in line together at the Pearly Gates?

Inpatient

After a year of unemployment in Chicago where I half-assedly looked for jobs and shuffled back and forth from Cedar Rapids, I more or less officially moved home eleven years ago this month.

My bipolar disorder was escalating and I was seeing what I now understand was a hack psychiatrist (because how can you know what to look for and who’s competent when you’re new at finding mental health professionals and you’re crippled by a mental illness?) who kept prescribing medication after medication (including the anticonvulsant Depakote that I had NO business being on due to its highly problematic interactions with my Lamictal mood stabilizer) without following up or even letting me know what catastrophic side effects to look for. And my unmanaged Depakote cocktail was a living nightmare of day-long blackouts, terrifying hallucinations, and sleepwalking through what was thankfully benign but could have been fatal odd behavior.

Every psychotropic drug gives you temporary—sometimes awful—side effects as you ramp up on a new prescription and wean off of it when you find out it doesn’t work. And thanks to this doctor’s random changes of drugs and cocktails, I was in a constant state of up-and-down side effects that left me miserable and confused and unable to function in a multitude of ways.

On top of all that, I was newly single and living alone for the first time in seven years, which meant I didn’t have an extra brain in the house to remind me to take that litany of changing meds on their prescribed schedules.

So by the time I decided I was moving home, I was a mess. A catastrophic, dissociative, emotional-train-crash mess.

And as Christmas drew nearer and nearer, I found myself more and more overcome with panic and dread about holding myself together through our family activities, worrying that I’d ruin them for everyone and inevitably escalating even more.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t comprehend.

I didn’t want to live.

So eleven years ago today, my parents—my terrified, confused, helpless parents—and I together made the heart-wrenching decision that I needed to be hospitalized. Two days before Christmas.

The ensuing details are still hazy to me, but from what I can remember: I sobbed on our couch in Greek-tragedy emotional pain as I slowly wrapped my muddled brain around what I was about to do. Mom and Dad came with me to the emergency room. I was evaluated by a doctor. We were put in an empty holding room for four hours while they looked for an open bed, which they eventually—thankfully—found right there instead of in a hospital 200 miles away. We were taken to the mental ward where we first had to go through a room where Mom and Dad had to leave their coats and Mom had to leave her purse.

When we got in, I had to forfeit my coat and clothes and phone and basically everything but my glasses. I was given scrubs and hospital socks. I met privately with a doctor, who took me off every drug I was on and prescribed yet another new cocktail of drugs. Which meant more simultaneous ramping-up-and-down side effects.

And when I was finally done being triaged, I was given an opportunity to say goodbye to my parents and then I was escorted to my room.

I made one last look back as I was halfway down the hallway, and the looks on my parents’ faces—their anguish, fear and inconsolable sadness—will be forever seared in my memory.

And so will my feeling of complete, comforting relief from accepting the fact that all of this was bigger than I was, I could finally release the demons fighting inside me, and I was in the protective, hopefully healing care of people who could manage whatever it was that was tearing me apart.

Eleven years ago today I launched into an unknown of what ended up being a full week in a locked mental ward in a hospital.

Eleven years ago today I started yet another roller coaster of the disorienting, miserable side effects of changing medicines.

Eleven years ago today I finally knew I was safe from myself, I was being cared for by experts, and for some reason what I found to be the most important: I wouldn’t ruin my family’s Christmas. I knew that not being there would be disruptive. But I also knew that being there would have been even worse.

Eleven years ago today, I started what would still be a long, bumpy road to healing, but I knew I was at least on the road to healing. It was one of the worst things I’ve been through and one of the best things I’ve ever done.

If you’re struggling with the out-of-control pain and confusion of mental illness, please know there’s no shame in asking for help—even to the point of being hospitalized—and putting yourself in the focused care of others.

There most likely won’t be immediate healing. But there will be hope. For you, your family and your support network.

There will be calming, restorative, essential hope.

Thirty-seven years ago today ...

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last thirty-five years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I learn the details of catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and daily mass shootings and our catastrophic global pandemic ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Thirty-seven years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Thirty-seven years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Thirty-seven years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a personal and very limited possession, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Thirty-seven years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for nine presidential elections and five new Sondheim musicals. (Seven, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through five cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Have-it-all mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous cat memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Thirty-seven years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Chanticleer: Ave Maria

I'm sitting home alone tonight. All the lights are off except the tree, which gives off a surprising amount of light ... along with a calming amount of dark. It's the perfect night for a marathon of Chanticleer, a 16-voice men's a cappella ensemble that sings everything from medieval polyphony to modern jazz. I've seen them in concert more times than I can count and I never missed their glorious Christmas concert in the soaring cathedral of Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church the 15 years I lived there.

 
Tonight they've been singing 400 years of stirring, thrilling, haunting, lingering Christmas carols on repeat as I've sat under a thick blue blanket in the semi-lit cathedral of our living room.

But there's one piece that is so stirring ... so meaningful ... so transcendent to me that I eventually just put it on repeat all by itself.

Bavarian composer Franz Biebl wrote what is arguably his most famous piece—a setting of "Ave Maria" for two choruses of men's voices—in 1964. At first listen, it sounds ancient, timeless, as though its deceptively simple, impossibly gorgeous cascading polyphonies have echoed through the sanctuaries and tabernacles of Europe since the Dark Ages. But listen deeper—beyond the words, within the progressions—and you'll hear faint whispers of—could it be?—early jazz. Indulgent Romanticism. Accessible, repetitive structure. Then keep listening. The text is familiar ... beloved ... but this is an "Ave Maria" from OUR generation with OUR chordal sensibilities. And it is a work to be cherished ... nurtured ... passed down as our gift to the future.

I first sang Biebl's "Ave Maria" ten years ago as part of the 100+ voice Chicago Gay Men's Chorus. I was instantly transfixed as we first passed out the sheet music and slowly started learning the tenor notes ... the baritone notes ... the two antiphonal choruses. And I waited with the patience of a saint to finally stitch the entire piece together and hear it weave and climb and crescendo and shimmer and positively elevate us as musicians, as people, as a massive ensemble with a newfound sense of congregation. We sang it slowly, lusciously, savoring the restraint of every pianissimo, reveling in the massive 100-voice power behind every fortissimo. It effortlessly joined the very small canon of sacred choral music that can move me to tears.

I was skeptical the first time I saw the piece on a Chanticleer program. How could 16 voices compete with our 100? How could they divide into two antiphonal choruses and produce adequate volume as an ensemble? How could they ever trump my transformative experience with the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus?

But Biebl's genius lies in the piece's versatility. Chanticleer sang "Ave Maria" faster than we did. Lighter. Nimbler. But still rich and sonorous and every bit as breathtaking as our mammoth interpretation.

The piece builds slowly, deliberately, repetitively. The antiphonal chorus is filled with gorgeous moments and glorious, fleeting harmonies. But they're not ephemeral; they happily come back to give you a second listen. Then something changes. The dialogue between the choruses becomes more intimate. The harmonies become more layered. The first "Sancta Maria" gives you faint goosebumps. The second "Sancta Maria"—the apex of the tonal narrative—absolutely soars in glorious cascading counterpoint.

But then the amens—the simple, layered amens—dramatically change the conversation. They rise quietly at first but soon ascend with thrilling urgency and measured beauty and triumphant, harmonic vitality ... and then waft away in a collective moment of breathless wonder.

 
With that, I'm turning off the tree lights and the CD player and climbing into bed. But I leave you with a hopefully inspiring—in whatever way inspires you—gift on a cold winter night in the middle of a hectic holiday season: Franz Biebl's transcendent "Ave Maria" performed by the peerless voices of Chanticeer.

I'm dreaming of White Christmas

White Christmas is the dumbest, plot-hole-iest, staggeringly-implausible-storyline-iest movie ever made—and I adore every second of it. I used to host a party every year in Chicago and invite only the friends I knew were able to shut up for 120 minutes so we could all enjoy its ridiculous awesomeness together in peace. And then I usually watched it again on my own. And maybe one more time. I have yet to watch it this year, but when I do I might invite a few devotees to watch it with me who can do it QUIETLY AND RESPECTFULLY.

All that said, it still drives me NUTS that Rosemary Clooney runs (well, clomps in four-inch stilettos) away from Bing Crosby in a self-righteous fit over a laughably stupid misunderstanding that she could easily clear up with a simple question and then boards a train with a little satchel in which she's packed all her clothes, wigs, makeup, gowns, those ridiculously slouchy white sequined oven mitts she wears in "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me" plus four of the Vermont dancer boys. And then she happily—yes: happily, despite the white-hot fury she had about Bing's appearance on TV that was so toxic it prompted her to sneak away from Vermont in secret—watches Bing's appearance on TV, suddenly has a mis-misunderstanding revelation, sneaks back to Vermont in the dead of night with her sensible orthopedic Army-issue oxfords in tow, ties up her understudy and throws her in a pile of horse manure (probably) and somehow absorbs all the "Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army" choreography out of thin air from some secret backstage rehearsal room in that drafty barn that apparently a cast of 1,000 people had mysteriously never even known about.

But those gowns!

And don't get me started on that overplayed "Sisters" number—it sure gets a LOT of mileage for having only one verse and an enormous dance break where Rosemary and Vera-Ellen basically just stand on stage and smile dewily at Bing and Doofusface (also: Don't get me started on Danny Kaye, the poor man's Donald O'Connor) while presumably the rest of the audience watches and thinks they're being somehow entertained by all that standing around.

But those gowns!

And Bing Crosby somehow croons “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep” after chugging a throat-gagging quart of buttermilk and Danny Kaye sings a COMPLETELY random song called "Choreography" even though he dances like an ostrich going through a middle-school gangly-boy phase and that mercilessly repetitive "Mandy" song has about eleven words that are all stupid and WHAT THE HELL IS THAT “MR. BONES” SONG? (It's a horribly racist throwback to minstrel shows, that's what it is.)

But those gowns!

From the Department Of Lies About Cute Boyfriends I Would Totally Date: Rosemary Clooney's and Vera-Ellen's "ugly" brother Benny (the one Bing Crosby unimaginatively calls "freckle-faced Haynes, the dog-faced boy" when they show him Benny's photo) is actually super-cute Carl Switzer, who had played Alfalfa in the Our Gang/Little Rascals films. So calling him ugly is nothing but CHRISTMAS LIES AND HOLIDAY PROPAGANDA.

But those gowns!

Did I mention Rosemary Clooney's ridiculously slouchy white-sequined oven mitts that turn "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me" into a very fancy Easy-Bake Oven infomercial? I think I did, though they can never be overmocked. You should definitely call the police every time you see them.

But those gowns!

Special mention also goes to that fingernails-on-chalkboards “Snow” number where Vera-Ellen sings in clearly not her own voice about washing her hair with snow—which, I’m sorry, would be completely ineffective and unhygienic—and then they all make some grade-school-art-class mountains-and-pine-trees diorama that they shake some kind of readily-available-on-their-cramped-club-car-table fake snow on and every time they do it my mind goes right to the scene in The Breakfast Club where Ally Sheedy shakes her own dandruff on a drawing to make it look like it’s snowing.

But those gowns!

And then Vera-Ellen—who does the entire movie in funnel-collared outfits tailored to hide whatever the hell is wrong with her neck—descends from the sky in her tearaway Ostrich Barbie outfit and executes some wicked nerve taps WITHOUT EVEN WEARING TAPS, A FACT THAT SHE DISPLAYS REPEATEDLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY TO THE CAMERA.

But those gowns!

And the general is clearly on a laudanum binge in the attic of his hotel-theater as every U.S. war soldier past, present and future swarms all over the entire property and fills every hotel room not already taken by the swarm of singers, dancers, directors, and costume and tech crew members, and when they all finally—and purportedly GENUINELY—surprise him with their heretofore apparently invisible presence they seat him at the table of honor behind a three-foot-tall cake that completely blocks his view of the show that they put together ESPECIALLY FOR HIM TO SEE.

But those gowns!

Books: The Couple at Number 9

I have many thoughts about The Couple at Number 9, the first of which is that I need to vet recommendations I get from Audible Books before I buy anything there. It gave glowing reviews and breathless descriptions about the book’s suspenseful, exciting narrative, but it really hid the negative comments. I usually check multiple sources before I start a book, and I clearly didn’t do that here.

My short opinion is I was really engaged in the story, but some elements of its telling were tedious and/or distracting enough that I ended up feeling pretty neutral.

Like Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code), author Claire Douglas sure knows how to spin a riveting, Gothic tale filled with ancient (well, ancient to the year 1980 here) secrets, tantalizing clues, and deliciously jarring plot and character twists.

But also like Dan Brown, she’s never met a cliché she couldn’t slap into her copy over and over ad lazyam. Cheeks are always rosy, old books are always dusty, time is always in the nick of, nouns always have bland, meaningless adjectives (the red scarf, the ceramic mug, the unexpected surprise) … and every book, email and photo album is about to be closed until at the very last second the reader notices something out of the corner of his or her eye that he or she hadn’t seen in the just-finished process of examining it for enormous amounts of time.

And while I’m whining incessantly about Douglas’ fusilade of adjective-nouns, she spends pages and pages rehashing plot points or belaboring characters’ thoughts but she never really takes time to explain the points of her adjective choices.

For instance: She has a character walk through an “arched door” of an English cottage, but she never clarifies why that detail is important to the character, to the world she’s crafting or to her readers. She could say the arched door made the cottage feel inviting and safe against the horrors unfolding in the back garden. Or that the arched door reminded the character of his childhood home, which made him feel extra-comfortable moving into this cottage. Or that the arched door felt like a portal to the rich history the cottage no doubt held (which it very much does).

But no. It was just a door that happened to be arched. He could have just walked through the door and moved on to the more pressing narrative unfolding inside. Wearing his red scarf and carrying his ceramic mug, of course.

The hackneyed writing choices legitimately undermined my immersion into the narrative and the world of the novel. Despite being a lifelong writer and editor, I’m never that picky as a recreational reader—things like bad grammar and stilted language can effectively define characters and settings—so take what you will about the fact that I’ve spent so much time addressing it here.

One more complaint: The things that happened long ago in the past happened in 1980. The story takes place in 2018. That math doesn’t add up because I was in junior-high school in 1980, and that was just a few years ago. “Long ago in the past.” Harumph.

All that said, the story is pretty gripping. It starts with the discovery of two bodies buried in a garden behind an old English cottage, and lives and relationships and families and startling secrets start unraveling at increasing speed from there. As expected, things and people are never what they initially seem to be. Innocent conversations lead to massive revelations. Encountered strangers end up being markedly supportive and helpful or alarmingly devious and violent. Or they sometimes just add color and life to a shared moment. A separate narrative involving the hostile relationship between a son and his father in a distant city eventually becomes deeply intertwined with the cottage narrative.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say whether or not justice is eventually served, but I will say the thundering freight train of a plot ends on a predictable tying up of loose ends followed by a pfffft of another boring, belabored, meaningless cliché of an emotional gesture.

Cleverly though, the title has multiple meanings, most of which don’t become clear until late in the story. So I’ll give it that.

If you like a Gothic novel filled with well-realized characters and dark twists and turns and you don’t get distracted by pulp-fiction writing, I truly recommend this book.

But if silver linings, easy pies and flying time make you a little angry that someone got paid to write them, send me a note and I’ll summarize the plot for you. Mark my words.

Books: What Lies in the Woods

I love a book filled with dark secrets, haunting pasts, and jarring twists and turns ... and HOLY SHIT does What Lies in the Woods deliver.

 
On its surface, it's the story of three adult women who as childhood friends survived a brutal attack in the woods by a serial killer their testimony eventually sent to prison.

The killer's death from cancer while in prison brings the three women back together in the town where they grew up and where two of them still live. They'd stayed close through the years, but the killer's death opens old wounds, brings dormant memories back into the harsh light of day, reignites old friendships and casual acquaintenceships ... and unleashes unanswered questions and unraveled realities and out-of-nowhere jolts that just don't let up.

Reader, it's truly mesmerizing. It's all I could think about in the three days it took me to devour it. And writing this brief review is keeping all the delicious chaos, gory details and shocking betrayals swirling around in my head.

 
As always, I'm verty carefully avoiding key plot points and potential spoilers here, so I'll summarize the narrative as this: It takes place in and around a smallish Pacific Northwest town with an insular social and political history. Everyone has a surface persona and a carefully constructed personal narrative, but nobody is who you think they are. NOBODY. Even the protagonist has doubts about who she was, who she is and who she remembers being. But she's written in a way that I'd totally want to be her best friend if we ever met.

While author Kate Alice Marshall sure knows how to spin a gripping tale, she also knows how to create relatable characters and construct compelling prose that gracefully elevates what could end up sounding like pulpy melodrama in less-skilled hands.

 
She's also thoughtful enough to give you subtle reminders about who certain people and places are when they pop back into the narrative after long absences. One woman's father, for instance, doesn't make a lot of appearances early on and I'd initially forget who he was every time he came back. But Marshall always provides some helpful context with each reapparance—and without hitting you over the head with it.

 
This is a book I'll definitely read again—if only to find the Easter eggs hidden in early conversations and rehashed memories that suddenly have new, telling contexts as secrets start to unravel.

 
You should read it too. Because I'm just dying to talk about it at length with someone.

Nobody thought it would be one of the kids

Nobody probably thought the Boat Crew would last this long, actually.

When four young couples from the same Cedar Rapids Lutheran church rented a houseboat and sailed up and down the Mississippi River for a long weekend in the summer of 1971, nobody probably even thought it was more than a one-time vacation.

But the couples invited more couples and did it again the next summer, and the next. Over time, a few couples came and went, but the tradition lived on summer after summer. Eventually a core group of seven couples emerged, and the Boat Crew was established … and a vital extended family was born.
Unofficially (or officially, depending on your personal opinion) the group’s name was the Mississippi River Marching and Drinking Society. But “Boat Crew” was easier to say. And less complicated to explain to the couples’ children, who were all about the age of the Boat Crew tradition itself.

As lives and careers evolved, many of the couples moved away … but everyone came back summer after summer for what had become an annual gathering of Boat Crew family with bonds as strong as any biological family.

And that family bond extended beyond the relationship between the seven couples; their children often spent the Boat Crew weekends together in one couple’s house, under the probably exhausted watch of two or three weekend-long babysitters.

Naturally, the kids developed a family bond as strong as their parents’. They were unofficial siblings in an extended family network, and they felt confident in the parental love they received from every member of the Boat Crew.

As the summers passed, the Boat Crew bond continued to grow and strengthen, especially over a developing collection of in-jokes, funny stories and traditions that became almost sacred. The most prominent tradition was Joy. It started when one couple brought a large white flag emblazoned with the word Joy in bright colors and displayed it on the ship’s mast. The flag appeared every summer, and eventually it inspired the regular exchanging of Joy-festooned knickknacks, shirts, Christmas ornaments (all collectively over the years described as "Joy shit") and even one summer little bottles of Joy dishwashing soap.

Music—an integral part of the Lutheran church where they all met—was just as important to the Boat Crew. The group contained many talented singers, and as they gathered under the stars with a guitar and a couple bottles of wine each summer, they sang hymns and folk songs and show tunes and whatever else they could think of. Their unofficial anthem was “Beautiful Savior,” which they sang together—in full, glorious harmony—on every gathering.

As the kids grew over the next four decades, the Boat Crew also started convening off-season for confirmations and graduations and weddings and grandchildren and the occasional family tragedy … and the inevitable deaths of the Boat Crew couples’ elderly parents.

And through it all, the Boat Crew became a bit of a statistical anomaly: seven couples who lived into their 50s and 60s and 70s and now 80s … and stayed friends … and stayed married … and stayed alive until the first ones passed away in the last few years.

As they started to retire from their jobs and prioritize grandparent obligations over Boat Crew gatherings, the group wasn’t always able to find a summer weekend that all seven couples could attend. And the “boat” part of Boat Crew became a bit of an anachronism; the summer reunions were happening now in Bed and Breakfasts overlooking the Mississippi instead of boats on the Mississippi.
And as they started to navigate the medical infirmities and physical indignities that come with age, the Boat Crew members started to contemplate their own mortality. Never ones to face life with fear or even reverence, they were realistic about—and at peace with—the inevitability of their deaths … and they were not above having betting pools over who would go next.

But it never occurred to anyone that the first to die might not be one of the adults.

Robbie (who as an adult called himself Robert but I’d known him since we were toddlers and I could never think of him as anyone but Robbie) was 42, pretty much right in the middle of the range of ages of the Boat Crew kids. He started getting sick 14 years ago last summer, but he didn’t think it was much to worry about: just some lower back pain, fatigue and abdominal discomfort. But then the guy behind the Chicago neighborhood deli counter where he went every day told him he looked yellow. And he became painfully constipated. And on a trip home to see his parents in Iowa, he decided to see a doctor.

And that’s where he found out.

Colon cancer.

Stage 4.

Colon cancer patients at stage 4 have an 8-15% chance of being alive five years after diagnosis. And Robbie, forever the optimist, dove right into surgery and chemotherapy while his parents took care of him in their home.

But it quickly became obvious that he was losing the battle. And as he eventually slipped into a coma, his parents—buoyed by the love and calls and texts and emails of Boat Crew members across the country—kept a vigil by his bed.

And six weeks after his diagnosis—six weeks after driving himself and his two cats seven hours from Chicago to his parents’ house, five weeks after walking into the doctor’s office with what he thought were just stomach pains, three weeks after cheering on friends in the Chicago Marathon via Facebook—Robbie drew his last breath, sending waves of shock and devastation throughout his extended Boat Crew family.

Robbie’s father had died of cancer 40 years earlier, before the Boat Crew had been officially established. His widowed mother and the man who eventually became her next husband had been regular Boat Crew members from nearly the beginning.

While she was still single, though, she and Robbie had taken vacations with our family a number of times, often to Adventureland amusement park in Des Moines, Iowa, and once on a Bicentennial road trip to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell and to Washington, D.C., to see pretty much everything else associated with America’s birth.

Robbie and I went to different high schools and colleges, but we eventually both found our ways to Chicago. We kept seeing each other at Boat Crew gatherings, but we’d slowly drifted apart … as had many of the Boat Crew kids as we scattered about the country and built our own families.

Robbie’s parents and mine, of course, had stayed fast Boat Crew friends. And when Robbie was facing the first weeks of his cancer treatments, my parents made a trip to Des Moines to stay with them.
Robbie died 14 years ago today. Even though I knew it was inevitable, I was more choked up than I’d expected to be when I got the call. We hadn’t seen each other in probably five years. And I knew that he was no longer suffering through an excruciating illness. But his death—especially as a Boat Crew kid and not an adult—was a shock to all of us … and an indescribable devastation to his parents.

 
But for the first time in many years, the entire Boat Crew—along with a handful of Boat Crew kids—dropped everything in their lives and appeared at the funeral. Forever part of the family, we walked in with Robbie’s parents and biological family members and were seated right behind them. And when the congregation sang “Beautiful Savior,” the Boat Crew’s beautiful harmonies rose above the music as if to lift Robbie to whatever awaited him in the afterlife and remind him of the loving extended family he’d been a part of on earth.

His parents asked me to be one of his pall bearers, which I accepted as an honor. Escorting a lifelong friend to his grave is overwhelming—especially when we’re both so young—but I felt giving him a solemn, respectful final journey was the best gift I could give him.

He was family, after all.

Books: Let the Great World Spin

In the weeks and months after author Colum McCann’s father-in-law returned from his harrowing ordeal escaping one of the Twin Towers and finding his way north from the destruction and rubble of the 9/11 attacks, McCann was struck by the sheer volume of personal stories and larger narratives intertwined in the events immediately before, during and after that day.

As he looked for a way he could possibly isolate and do justice to any of those stories to help make sense of the attacks and destruction, it struck him that there were just as many stories unfolding years and decades beforehand that could build a larger, deeper, more profound context illustrating the interconnectedness of lives and how they together collectively become the past that keeps the world spinning ever forward.

Soon after the Twin Towers were completed in the early 1970s, an aerialist named Philippe Petit managed the impossible feat of stringing a tightrope between the tops of the buildings in the dead of night and walking across it one morning, capturing the attention and fascination of every New Yorker on the ground below him. McCann uses this true-life event as the cultural linchpin for anchoring the fictional characters he brings to life in and around 1974, the year of Petit’s iconic stunt.

Each chapter in Let the Great World Spin is a stand-alone short story introducing a character, a friendship, a family, or an event that may be big or small: the childhoods of two Irish brothers who eventually emigrate to America, a woman regretting that she let her daughter follow her into a life of prostitution, a wealthy housewife in a grief support group, two relapsed addicts involved in a catastrophic car accident.

Some stories interact directly. Some characters pass by each other tangentially. Almost every character makes an appearance on the day of Petit’s walk.

Two characters over time establish themselves as the metaphoric twin towers linking all these lives … and when they eventually fall, they bring the lives and stories into an even more intricate orbit.

New York City itself is both a setting and a character driving these narratives through its distinct neighborhoods, segregated socioeconomics and vibrant melting-pot identity. The New Yorkers McCann creates and the lives (and occasional deaths) he guides them through are as disparate as they are fundamentally relatable, and through them—and the moments in history they occupy—he keeps their (and by extension our) worlds living, breathing, halting, progressing, collapsing, and always spinning from the past through the present and toward our collective uncertain future.

World Mental Health Day

Today is World Mental Health Day, an annual global event started in 1992 at the World Federation of Mental Health to promote awareness, education, understanding and advocacy for those of us suffering from mental disorders, the caregivers we sometimes desperately rely on, and the larger populations in which we live and often struggle to navigate every day of our lives.

In this spirit of awareness, education, understanding and advocacy, I'm offering here a view from inside the bipolar volcano hurricane that I wrote years ago as I was emerging from a distinctively catastrophic episode:

Sometimes being bipolar means waking up with your head covered in a gray wool blanket in the middle of a hot drenching rain and the weight of it is practically crippling but you know you're not depressed and you know you're not confused and you know you can breathe and you know you're invested in fighting your way out so you treat every blink and every word and every thought as fuel that sparks the next blink and the next word and the next thought and even though you're foggy and slow and maybe even late you're MOVING and no matter how long it takes and how hard you have to work just to achieve your minimum for now you know that it's just for now and you'll sooner than later find your way out of that hot wet scratchy gray wool blanket and you'll know from hard-fought experience that you may not have the power to make the rain go away but you have the tenacity and the fortitude to outlast it and find your clarity and focus again in the warm, restorative sunlight it was trying to hide from you and even though you're never entirely sure you know exactly what that unclouded sunlight feels like you'll always get close enough to know what you're fighting for and how to be stronger and smarter and even more certain of your indestructibility the next time.

Books: Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874

I was hoping that Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 would be a breathless page-turner about the human dramas of conflagrant destruction, abject suffering and triumph over adversity peppered with tantalizing details about old Chicago buildings and neighborhoods that I recognize. Instead it’s a hyperwonkish examination of class inequality, political grandstanding, religious imperialism (particularly the emergence of “scientific” relief that favored distributing blankets, food and financial aid to the religious and the “worthy” newly homeless rich over assisting the chronically poor and the working class who were technically able to support themselves despite the fact that there was little to no work available in the months after the fire) and the simmering intolerance toward (particularly German) immigrants in the fire’s aftermath. 

It does draw some perennial parallels to Republicans' straw-man obsession with “big” government in its discussions of Chicago’s post-fire laws against rebuilding with wood (which made rebuilding almost financially impossible for low- and middle-class fire victims) and its curiously detailed recounting of virulently sabbatical opposition to German-immigrant beer gardens serving alcohol on Sundays, which temporarily drove the mostly single-issue People’s Party into power over the status-quo Law and Order party of native-born religious privilege. 

The book does frequently refer to one concept that will amuse modern Chicago residents, though: the idea that fire victims “fled the city” northward to the neighboring community of Lake View.

Today is the anniversary of the 1871 Chicago Fire, which historians are not opposed to believing actually could have been started by a cow kicking over a lantern in Mrs. O'Leary's barn—though, to be fair, there are many other credible, though less historically charming, theories as to how the fire started. 

During the 15 years I lived in Chicago, I saw it as my civic duty to read and learn as much as I could about my city and its history. I was excited to start reading this book when I found it, but—as the above review I'd initially posted about it says—it turned out to be more of a lengthy essay on the cultural and sociopolitical Zeitgeist that framed the fire than on the timeline and geography of the unfolding inferno and the human-level experience of surviving it, which I would have found far more meaningful.

In any case, upwards of 300 people died and thousands were left homeless and impoverished 154 years ago today and tomorrow. I mark this day on my calendar every year so I'm reminded to think about who they might have been and the horrors they most certainly endured. And I encourage you to a moment today in their memory to celebrate what you have while you still have it.

Art: Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, James Ensor

At first glance, James Ensor's 1891 Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is perhaps a silly take on Halloween imagery. Or an homage to the memento mori ("remember that you [have to] die") traditions of Medieval and Renaissance art that placed skeletons, skulls and other symbols of mortality among the world and activities of the living. Or a metaphor for the last gasps of Impressionism and its emphasis on color and light at the expense of representational accuracy.

While the latter probably has a grain of truth to it—Impressionism in Europe had largely been killed by the emotional distortions and manipulations of Expressionism by 1891 (think of Edvard Munch's 1893 The Scream)—the skeletons and the pickled herring in Ensor's painting were more along the lines of prescient precursors to the illogicalities of Surrealism and the unorthodox silliness of the Avant-Garde.

And they were totally about his pettiness.

Ensor actually painted Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring in response to negative reviews of his work. In his world of distortions, illogicalities and silliness, the art critics are the skeletons (one with a few wisps of hair on his otherwise balding head, the other with an ostentatious hat that's failing to make him look important) and Ensor is the pickled herring. And the whole idea is bizarre and probably lost to everyone to whom it hasn't been explained.

Today, though, Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is a relatively obscure work of dark humor with light-hearted imagery that starts 21st Century viewers down the path toward the increasingly spooky, scary traditions of modern Halloween. So enjoy its silliness now. And be sure to lock your doors and hide your pickled herring before the end of October.

Art: Horizontal Tree

Horizontal Tree
Piet Mondrian
1912

A series of increasingly Cubist tree paintings marked Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s transition from representational and Impressionistic art to the Neoplastic geometries of white, gray and primary colors framed in horizontal and vertical black lines for which he is best known.

 
These later paintings—created in pursuit of a harmonious universal beauty told through a simplified visual vocabulary—were the culmination of the geometric-abstraction De Stijl (The Style) movement he co-founded in 1917.

 
And while these colorful, geometric masterpieces are icons of abstract art and continue to be powerful influences over architecture, graphic design and fashion, I find his tree paintings to be far more thoughtful, evocative, disciplined and noble.

Tributes: Edward Albee

There is a moment near the end of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—Edward Albee's 2002 tour-de-force play exploring the outer limits of love, fidelity, morality and tolerance—where the emotional crisis at the center of the narrative boils over into such catastrophic levels of heartache and rage and such Greek-tragedy levels of destruction and retribution that the first time I saw it—and the second time and the third time and the fourth time—the audience collectively gasped to the point of almost screaming and then sat rigidly and almost palpably silent until well after the final stage light had extinguished and the last emotionally drained actor had silently moved into position for the company bow.

It's one of my two favorite—if there even exists a favorite-not favorite continuum of cataclysmic emotional destruction—moments in modern theater ... the other being the last three seconds of David Mamet's Oleanna before the stage becomes abruptly, dreadfully dark.

He's largely a genre unto himself, so it's difficult to pigeonhole Edward Albee as a playwright. He wrote or adapted about 30 works that embodied movements like Theatre of the Absurd and brought popular works of narrative fiction like The Ballad of the Sad Café and Breakfast at Tiffany's to the stage and screen.

My favorite Albee works—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (embodied in this movie still by the incrementally calculated Richard Burton and desperately braying Elizabeth Taylor playing the American-experiment patriarch and matriarch George and Martha [the latter of whom the script deliciously describes as "large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger"]), The Play About the Baby and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—all share the format of four characters on stage interacting to varying degrees with one character who may or may not exist offstage. It's an intriguing conceit, and one that keeps bringing me back to these three plays for my own contemplation. In an odd double standard, though, I can't stand reading them; the characters for me seem to be clumsy and dry with no meaningful depth on the page, but they grant a glorious latitude for actors to make fascinating choices as they flesh them out.

Today is the ninth anniversary of Edward Albee's death. I'm not one to be sad when famous people I've never met pass away—and having seen only seven of his works (that I can remember) I'm certainly no slavish Albee devotee—but I'm profoundly thankful for the emotional roller coasters he's put me on in various theaters over the years ... and for the body of work he's left that I can continue to explore in my own way in my own time.

I have a couple favorite quotes from these works that I'd love to mention here in closing, but they're all potential spoilers. So I'll just lift a glass of bergen to his memory.

Art: September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb. 

His September (2005) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Remembrances: 9/11

24 years ago this morning I ran a little late and got caught in the rush-hour crowds that prevented me from getting a seat on my EL train. But as I stood there—a relatively new Chicagoan—I was still in awe of the fact that I actually lived in Chicago and rode a train to work and I reveled in the fact that I was one of THEM: my fellow Chicagoans packed in the train car with me, commuting to (or from) our jobs as waiters, insurance brokers, construction workers, actuaries, janitors, bankers, personal trainers, writers, and every other career and purpose in our big, always-moving city.

When I finally arrived at work and got off the elevator, I saw everyone in my office crowded around the TVs in our glass-walled conference room. My first thought was that my colleagues would see I was late. But after joining them—both in front of the TVs and in shared abject horror—and watching the towers burn and fall, seeing the gaping wound in the Pentagon, learning of the disappearance of an entire airplane and its passengers in a fiery pit, I was struck by the fact that my underground commute that morning with my fellow train riders—a microcosm of the city, if not the country—was our last collective moment of innocence before we had access to any news and we suddenly had to face the sickening, horrifying, misanthropic enormity wrought by other human beings on a scale none of us could have ever imagined.

24 years ago today I never felt closer to colleagues, friends, family members and even strangers as we worked to understand the hatred and comprehend the savagery of perhaps the ugliest tragedy in our lifetimes.

24 years ago today we lost a certainty in our collective safety but we gained a powerful strength in our ability to care for and protect and even love each other when we needed to ... and even when we didn't.

24 years ago today, our world changed immeasurably. Our hearts broke irreparably. Our determination grew mightily. Our humanity spread defiantly. Time may erode the intensity of our initial united magnanimity, but we will never forget.

Happy 184th birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

Though a proud native son of Czechoslovakia, Dvořák is perhaps best known for his mighty, highly melodic Symphony No. 9, which is most commonly called "From the New World" due to its early American musical themes and the fact that he wrote almost the entirety of it in the United States—more specifically in Spillville, Iowa, just 100 miles north of Cedar Rapids.

It's the last symphony he composed, and in my opinion its enduring brilliance lies in its endless accessibility. Its dominant six-note theme, often sung to the words of the American folk song "Goin' Home," is never far from the surface no matter how many variations or complex contrapuntal themes he weaves it through.

As a composer, he was rooted firmly among the late Romantics with their heroic storylines, soaring emotions, and confident nods to the nascent but growing fascination with the shimmering textures of the Impressionists and the gorgeous discordances of what would soon be revered around the world as American jazz. And this symphony sits right at the confluence of all that history, all that emotion, all that foresight and all that promise.

 
It's a gorgeous, centuries- and continents-spanning legacy ... built on a mere six-note theme he encountered on an 1893 stay in the humble American Midwest.

Books: Slaughterhouse-Five

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death) is a profoundly disjointed narrative of author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of war told through the eyes and experiences of his fictional proxy Billy Pilgrim.

Vonnegut occasionally inserts himself into the narrative or acknowledges that the work you’re reading is autobiographical historical fiction, creating a meta universe that both draws you in and sets you outside the characters and plot.

Billy’s adventures unfold in short, jarring sentences and jump through time and literal space—which are key aspects of the novel’s postmodernist structure and spirit. Postmodernism in literature (which thrived in the second half of the 20th century, with this novel being written in 1969) broke away from linear, plausible storytelling to embrace logical impossibilities, ponder questions about existence, and often create imperfect character and story arcs that never get resolved.

It’s through this everything-at-once literary lens that poor, beleaguered Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly from surviving the cruelties of war and the (historically true) bombing of Dresden to wetting his pants in childhood fear at the top of the Grand Canyon to losing his wife in a string of bizarre circumstances after he survives a plane crash to being abducted by aliens, ensconced in an interstellar zoo, and mating with a fellow earthling and adult performer with the delightful name Montana Wildhack.

And it’s through this structure that Vonnegut processes the horrors he experienced in war and illustrates the disassociative struggles of living with PTSD.

The story is by its very nature absurd and peppered with droll humor and truly singular characters (many of whom appear in other Vonnegut works) with names like Kilgore Trout and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. This being a novel centered around war, the frivolity is heavily balanced with often nonchalant accounts of death … always followed by Vonnegut’s “And so it goes” expression of existential futility.

The novel’s other recurring expression—”unstuck in time”—provides succinct, efficient shorthand for not only Vonnegut’s narrative structure but for the scattered aftershocks he continues to experience from of war itself, the upheaval it creates, the lives it redirects and the metaphorical slaughter it wields on his psyche … and by extension the world’s.

Happy 107th birthday, Leonard Bernstein!

His Candide Overture is perhaps the singular most joyful piece of brilliantly scattered, wickedly intractable music ever written, with its collisions of overlapping themes; fearless jumps between walls of boisterous brass, swirls of tittering piccolos and swells of velvety strings; and headstrong, disobedient asymmetries that have no doubt awakened every conductor on the planet in cold sweats since 1956.

Here he is conducting his thrilling juggernaut with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1989. I know the musicians know the music. I know HE knows the music. But I fail to see any sense of dialogue between them as he conducts. Yet they fly together with effortless confidence and musical delight. It all makes ME break out in a cold sweat, so I can't watch it as I listen in rapture.

You can watch at your own peril. But do take four and a half minutes to just listen.