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.