Seize the Moment

This year for Oliver’s birthday I promised we’d see the Mariners. We didn’t make it to a regular season game. Instead, last Saturday I drove to Seattle to watch the Mariners’ first division championship series game in 24 years.

Our tickets cost exactly as much as each of the Broadway shows I’m seeing on the way to my Yale Law School reunion later this month. On the drive south we stopped at Alderwood Mall so Oliver could buy an unconscionably expensive Cal Raleigh jersey. After finding street parking on Capitol Hill, we took the light rail to T-Mobile Park. I ate a hot dog at the ballpark, then Molly Moon ice cream on the way back to the car. Detroit won 3-2 in extra innings. We got home at midnight.

I would be telling a slightly different story if the Mariners had won. But despite the disappointing final score, I had an amazing day. 

The first time I saw a Major League Baseball game I sat in the owner’s box at the old Kingdome. I was spending my last summer of law school working at the Seattle law firm that represented the baseball team. Mariners’ Night was one of several recruiting boondoggles the firm used to lure summer associates into accepting jobs after graduation. It was like watching professional athletes play in your living room.

I never became a big baseball fan, but during my years in Seattle I took advantage of other opportunities to see the Mariners. I usually sat in some law firm’s less glamorous skybox, or in infield seats with a good view. Eventually I brought my children. One year Oliver and I went to a classmate’s birthday party in his family’s season-ticket-holder box. And when Seattle Men’s Chorus sang the national anthem at Safeco Field, I bought two extra tickets to the game so I could bring along my father and my son.

I moved to Bellingham a decade ago to take what I thought was my dream job as chief legal counsel to Washington’s third largest university. Unfortunately, then-Attorney General (now Governor) Bob Ferguson had created a homophobic and abusive workplace. My co-workers’ conduct triggered debilitating physical and mental symptoms.

My doctor promptly diagnosed me with complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Rather than resulting from a single traumatic event, C-PTSD is caused by an ongoing pattern of traumatic experiences, such as sexual abuse or childhood neglect. In my case, the original PTSD symptoms were the result of growing up in a Mormon culture that denied the existence of LGBT people. Later, my symptoms were amplified by the legal system’s refusal to acknowledge I have PTSD. Even today, Bob Ferguson’s lieutenants publicly insist that I am faking a disability.

At the end of 2023, I made a list of that year’s ten most triggering experiences. The worst event occurred while I was waiting in the veterinary Emergency Room with a seriously wounded Bear, while I happened to receive notification of a particularly dishonest ruling by a lazy judge. Most of the other triggering events that year involved misconduct by the State’s lawyers. But one outlier on the list stood out: I had a complete meltdown while playing a board game at my parents’ house. I thought I’d caught my son cheating.

With my healthcare providers’ help, I’ve learned how to tease out the relationship between past traumas and present triggers. For example, after my Family Game Night meltdown I remembered the only time in my life when I hit someone. I was a freshman in the Honors Program dorm at Brigham Young University. While playing a boardgame involving the War of the Roses, I became convinced one of my floormates had cheated.

For various reasons, I grew up without becoming properly socialized to deal with competition in a healthy way. I never learned proper boundaries. Instead, I became a sore loser and worse winner. I treated every competition as either meaningless or a matter of life and death.

I’ve learned to live with my disability, slowly finding healthy boundaries. Nowadays I can help clients in their contentious family law litigation matters without losing my own perspective on life. And I can play or watch intense games and enjoy the experience – win or lose.

I’ve seen a lot more plays than baseball games. So have my children. When I was a lawyer in Seattle I had season ticket subscriptions at multiple local theaters. I often found it easier to take one of the kids instead of getting a real date.

The Christmas before covid, my mother bought tickets to the Broadway tour of Dear Evan Hansen for my daughter, nephew, and me. When we got to the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Eleanor said “Papa, I’ve never sat in the balcony for a play before.”

Oliver chose our seats to last weekend’s Mariners game. When we got to T-Mobile Park, I realized that in all the professional baseball games I’ve seen, I’d never sat behind the outfield before. I loved our seats – it turns out a baseball game is more interesting when you’re looking toward the batter. Maybe someday I’ll learn to be a great parent without being such a terrible snob.

My ex and I amicably alternated kid weeks for years. As I wrote in Peak-End Parenting, “All I need to do to ensure my kids end up with memories of an idyllic childhood is to make sure each kid week includes some memorable peak experiences, and that we end the week on a high note.” It worked: while we were waiting for the playoff game to start, I asked Oliver what he remembered about our prior Mariners games. He said, “We always had box seats.”

Then seven years ago my ex moved across the country, and I became a full-time single parent. We spent most of this era living in poverty. During those years I learned to live with serious mental illness while being relentlessly attacked by the State’s lawyers. My new goal is for the children to grow up without being irreparably scarred by their childhood traumas. Fortunately, I have the support of the best family in the world. And even though I’ve failed at almost everything else in my life, I was born to be a father.

During the Mariners game I posted a much-liked picture on Facebook showing Oliver and me at T-Mobile Park. One friend commented “Great day except for the final result....” Actually, I had an amazing day. I think Oliver will remember it that way too. Regardless of the baseball score.

The Whiffenpoofs of 2025

 

As I waited for my mother in the lobby of the Bellingham High School auditorium last fall, Facebook reminded me we’ve been going to musical performances together for a long time. Mom and I started by seeing shows like Saturday’s Warrior and Anne of Green Gables at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in 1970s Vancouver.

According to Facebook, my mother and I saw the Broadway musical Wicked on tour in Seattle exactly twelve years earlier. To celebrate her 70th birthday, I’d bought tickets to a special performance benefiting the marriage equality campaign. When Mom turned 80, we saw Kristin Chenoweth at the Mount Baker Theater. For her 60th birthday, I got tickets to see the incomparable Barbara Cook sing Sondheim at Benaroya Hall.

At Bellingham High, I was waiting to share another unique musical event with my mother: the opening concert of the Whiffenpoofs of 2025’s World Tour.

The Whiffenpoofs are North America’s oldest collegiate a capella singing group. Fourteen tenors, baritones, and basses are tapped from each Yale graduating class. They sing a repertoire of elegantly arranged standards along with contemporary songs, all in tight harmonies. In addition to their concert tour, each year’s crop of Whiffenpoofs makes an album showcasing their talents. Together with my ancient vinyl and CDs, iTunes can fill an entire weekend with a guilty pleasure playlist. It’s my favourite kind of music. 

The reason the Whiffenpoofs of 2025 started their World Tour at Bellingham High School is Logan Foy. He’s the student chosen as this year’s music director (called the “pitchpipe”). Logan graduated from BHS, where he was the star of its music and theatre programs. He was also a proudly out member of the high school’s Gender/Sexuality Alliance. Each Whiffenpoof got a solo during the concert. Logan assigned himself the group’s classic arrangement of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” with he/him pronouns.

The Whiffenpoofs sounded great, and Logan basked in the hometown crowd’s love. As my mother and I walked out of the auditorium, I overheard a middle-aged man tell someone that Logan began studying with an opera coach while he was still in elementary school. It was Logan’s beaming father. I usually don’t talk to strangers. But I went over to Mr. Foy and introduced myself as a gay PFLAG dad. I said I’ve been going to Whiffenpoof concerts for 37 years, and told him he should be proud to hear and see what his son has accomplished.

The Whiffenpoofs of 2018 - L.W.W.B.

The last time I saw the Whiffenpoofs perform live was in 2018, when their tour included a stop in Seattle.

In 1975, President Ford signed legislation opening the service academies to women. Four years later, the Air Force Academy Class of 1979 adopted the motto “Loyalty, Courage, Wisdom, Bravery.” However, the Commandant cancelled their order for class rings engraved with the initials “L.C.W.B.” when he discovered the letters actually stood for “Last Class With Balls.” (At best – according to a Congressional report cataloging misconduct at the academy, the Class of 1979’s real motto was either “Last Class Without Bitches” or “Last Class Without Broads.”)

Yale College was founded in 1701, but women weren’t admitted until 1968. Similarly, after a 110-year wait, the gentlemen I saw perform in Seattle selected the group’s first female singer as a member of the Whiffenpoofs of 2019.

This year’s tenor section includes four women. It was my first time attending a co-ed Whiffenpoof concert. As someone who generally prefers his harmonies in the bass clef, I expected to be a curmudgeon. But the inclusion of a few women was not enough to tip the overall balance, and did not spoil the familiar arrangements. Instead, their voices added to the power, range, and variety of the performances.

Still, the concert sounded different. Our brains process male and female voices differently. Hearing a woman’s voice “triggers the auditory section of an audience’s brain,” which is “the area that’s used to analyze.” Because female voices are “more easily decoded,” they seem “clearer than their male counterparts.” Sure enough, this was my first time at a Whiffenpoof concert where I felt like Cole Porter’s lyrics were being beamed directly into my head.

“Singing Can Be a Drag” is Vancouver Men’s Chorus’s biggest annual fundraiser. Talented and extroverted members of the chorus don spectacular drag outfits and sing show-stopping numbers. No lip synching allowed.

I’m not the kind of guy who sings solos or wears drag. Instead, every year I volunteer at the event as an usher. This year a woman came up to me as I guided patrons to their seats. She said “You've shaved your beard since the holiday concert, but I recognized you. I wanted to let you know you have the best smile in the chorus. Whenever I watch you sing, the word I think of is ‘joyous.’”

In the classic fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling,” the hero of the story is the supportive duck mother – not the awkward swan who was lucky to find himself in the most affirming of nests. No parent expects a Whiffenpoof. But I will be eternally grateful for a PFLAG mom who raised me with the joy of music.

Happy Mother's Day

Overheard at the border last weekend....

Canada Customs:  Where do you live?

Roger: Bellingham.

Canada Customs:  What’s the purpose of your visit?

Roger:  I sing in Vancouver Men’s Chorus… 

(Usually my response continues “… and we rehearse on Wednesdays.” But this was a Saturday.)

Roger:  … and I’m going up for the Tenor Section potluck.

Canada Customs:  (Incredulously)  You’re a Tenor?

(I use my “butch voice” with authority figures, even nice Canadian ones.)

Roger:  We have First Tenors, Second Tenors, Baritones, and Basses. I’m a Second Tenor.

Canada Customs:  Did you bring anything?

Roger:  Treats from Trader Joe’s.

Canada Customs:  Are you carrying any firearms?

(Apparently my “butch voice” is extra butch.)

Tickets for our June concerts are on sale at vancouvermenschorus.ca

Un Canadien Errant

The Boys Who Lived

Vancouver Men’s Chorus is busy rehearsing for our June concerts. (Tickets are on sale at the chorus website.) This year’s theme is Totally Awesome ’80s. We will be singing songs by Cyndy Lauper, George Michael, Eurythmics, Madonna, Tina Turner, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Whitney Houston, and more. There will be synthesizers, dancing boys, and big hair. 

I spent the 1980s as a clueless high school student in small town Utah; as an earnest Mormon missionary in Korea; as an overachieving student at Brigham Young University; and as a liberated law student at Yale. I’m like an episode of Stranger Things – 80s music is the soundtrack of my youth. 

More than music and mullets, my relationship with the 80s is defined by one essential fact: I came out of the closet in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. 

I recently read a collection of essays with the title Between Certain Death and a Possible Future:  Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. These writers speak for my generation:

Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations - the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer.

I arrived too late for the fun. Instead, I threw myself into activism. I joined the ACLU of Illinois as Director of the LGBT Rights/AIDS Project at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The Project’s founder, John Hammell, had recently died. Many other pioneering Baby Boomer gay activists were dead, dying, and/or burnt out. Stalwart lesbians and unprepared young gay men filled their empty shoes. 

Some people see personality types through the prism of birth order. As the first of four brothers, I exhibit many “eldest child” behaviors. But when it comes to my gay tribe, I’m part of very specific cohort:  the traumatized gay boys of Generation X, stumbling through life as perpetual younger brothers to the men of the Stonewall Generation. 

This photo of San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was taken in 1993, twelve years into the AIDS epidemic. The seven men in white are the original members of the chorus. The 115 men in black represent those who had already died. 

Trauma warps memory. As I learn to live with complex PTSD, I’ve discovered a handful of revealin gaps and glitches in my recollection of past events.   

For example, the quietest moment in our 80s concert occurs during “Eulogy.” Seattle Men’s Chorus commissioned this song in 1985. I have sung and heard “Eulogy” countless times since I joined my first gay chorus three decades ago, including at various memorial services. I’ve repeatedly listened to SMC perform “Eulogy” on their classic Pink Album. 

Nevertheless, I have no memory of the song. All I can tell you is that it repeates the word “Onward.” Every time VMC rehearses “Eulogy,” I feel like I’m sight-reading a shocking new testament of grief. By the end of the song I’m silently weeping.

Many of the boys died.

The theme of VMC’s June 2018 concert was Gays of Our Lives. As we read through “I Shall Miss Loving You” at our first rehearsal, I realized the last time I’d sung the song was eighteen years before, at my friend Jim Palmer’s memorial. We sang together in Windy City Gay Chorus during the 90s. The miraculous new HIV/AIDS medications came along too late to stop the disease’s progress through Jim’s body. Still, he wanted to see the new millennium. He barely made it. 

I was thirty-five years old. Jim was thirty. I weep every time I try to sing these words:

I shall miss loving you.

I shall miss the comfort of your embrace….

I shall miss the joy of your comings,

And pain of your goings, and, 

After a time,

I shall miss loving you.

Boys like Jim died from AIDS, suicide, drugs, and other causes. Somehow, some of us survived to tell the stories. 

In September 1914, soon after Britain suffered the first casualties of the Great War, Lawrence Binyon published “For the Fallen.” The poem’s fourth stanza has become known as the “Ode to Remembrance”:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Some of the men lived.

In 1981, a pioneering national tour by San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus inspired gay choruses to form in cities including Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Vancouver. Forty-four years later, our founder Willi Zwozdesky still conducts Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Willi is the senior conductor in the LGBT choral movement.

VMC has never sounded better. We continue to attract talented new singers. At our recent rustic retreat, Millennials and Gen Y gay boys joined in the skits, rehearsals, and comradery. We listened to our elders around the campfire, and serenaded our conductor with his favourite song.  Along with Willi, a handful of other survivors have held the chorus and the community together through five extraordinary decades.

I am growing old. But the men of the Stonewall generation will always be older than me.

Children's Hospital

The first piggy bank I remember was shaped like the old Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. “Primary” is the Mormon program for children under age twelve. The LDS church founded Primary Children’s Hospital in 1922. 

When I was a child growing up in Vancouver, we participated in “Pennies By The Inch,” which has been described as “the nation’s oldest grassroots fundraiser.” Each year all the kids in Primary received our own cardboard hospital piggy bank. We were supposed to save enough money by our birthday to donate a penny for each inch of our height. It didn’t seem weird to send pennies a thousand miles away to another country. We knew Children’s Hospital is a special place for kids with special health challenges, wherever they are. 

I never met anyone who was treated at Primary Children’s Hospital. But it felt good to send my pennies to Salt Lake, just in case. As Marlo Thomas says about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, “Give thanks for the healthy kids in your life, and give to those who are not.”

As a parent, my faith in Children’s Hospital has grown even more fervent. My first paternal vigil was at Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2005. When Eleanor was a month old, her infant gastric reflux spiked. Whole bottles of formula ended up on her fathers, and she stopped being her happy self. Our pediatrician assured us this was perfectly normal reflux. But it kept getting worse. Eventually we took her to the walk-in clinic. They immediately sent us across town to the emergency room at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where Eleanor was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis.

 

The pylorus muscle connects your stomach to your intestines. Sometimes the valve gets stuck a few weeks after birth. Anything you try to put into the stomach just comes back up. In the old days, infants with pyloric stenosis soon died. Fortunately, surgeons figured out how snip the pylorus and get things flowing again.

 

It took three days before Eleanor was hydrated enough for surgery. My parents came down from Bellingham, and my sainted ex-mother-in-law Judy flew in from Nebraska. Before the surgery, the nice Korean-American surgeon explained to us what was about to happen. Then he and Eleanor disappeared behind the ominous doors, and the rest of us went around to wait on the other side.

An hour later, Eleanor and the surgeon came out through the happy doors, and she began her swift and complete recovery. We went back to another eleven months of ordinary infant reflux and pediatrician visits, never again begrudging the vomit-stained clothes.

My next trip to Seattle Children’s came six years later, and involved mysterious bacterial pneumonia. I drove to the hospital. Eleanor took a helicopter.

Eleanor, Kamryn, and my ex had taken the train home after visiting Judy in the Midwest. After Oliver and I picked them up in Seattle, Eleanor began writhing in pain in the backseat. By the time we got to the Whidbey Island ferry she was burning up. We drove straight to the hospital on the island instead of going home. The doctors pumped Eleanor full of antibiotics, then put her on a helicopter to Seattle Children’s. 

It took a few days in the hospital to bring down Eleanor’s fever. We missed seeing the Broadway tour of “Aladdin.” I gave our tickets to a friend from Seattle Men’s Chorus; he gave Eleanor an oversized Tinker Bell balloon from the hospital gift shop. 

Here’s the key passage from the story of Eleanor’s pyloric stenosis surgery:

“Eventually we took her to the walk-in clinic. They immediately sent us across town to the emergency room at Seattle Children’s Hospital.”

Our upstairs neighbor in Seattle was an ER doctor at Seattle Children’s. When I complained about Eleanor’s melodramatic helicopter ride from Whidbey Island, she said “If you showed up in my Emergency Room with chest pains or a gunshot wound, I’d sent you straight to the grown-up doctors at Harborview.” Likewise, whenever a pediatrician or parent in the Pacific Northwest faces a life-or-death situation, they want their patient at Seattle Children’s.

Last spring my son Oliver started having weird stomach problems. Every four or five weeks he would develop symptoms resembling food poisoning – 24 hours of nausea and vomiting, but without a fever. We talked with our pediatrician and stayed in monitoring mode. 

When Oliver experienced more intense symptoms in November after just a two week break, we skipped school and went to the Urgent Care clinic. The doctor ordered an X-ray and labs. She described some of the potential causes, from stress to cancer to Crohn’s disease. Instead, the nurse called that afternoon to say the X-ray images showed alarming signs of intestinal blockage. CT imaging confirmed Oliver had a bowel obstruction.

The good news is a blocked intestine can be fixed with a one-time surgery. As I learned during Eleanor’s first visit to Seattle Children’s, the bad news is your child will die without surgery. The scary news is emergency abdomen surgery has only a fifty percent survival rate.

If Oliver needed surgery, we wanted it to happen at Seattle Children’s. Our pediatrician and I spent the next few weeks folding bureaucratic red tape into holiday bows. Oliver’s insurance approved a referral to the Seattle Children’s Gastrointestinal Clinic – but the first available appointment was in April. Meanwhile, we watched for a return of Oliver’s symptoms. My friend Dr. Ken did his pediatric residency at Seattle Children’s. When I described the test results, Dr. Ken echoed our local healthcare providers:  “it’s probably not an emergency emergency right now, but if symptoms return or pain he should go to the ER right away!” Not just any Emergency Room – everyone told us we should go directly to the ER at Seattle Children’s if Oliver’s fever spiked. 

Eventually someone looked at Oliver’s X-rays. On Friday, December 6, as I was heading up to Canada for Vancouver Men’s Chorus’s (and Taylor Swift’s) last three concerts, I got a call from Seattle Children’s. The told me Oliver could skip the Gastro Clinic. Instead they scheduled us for a surgery consultation in Seattle on Monday. 

Oliver and I met with Dr. Steven Lee, the Korean-American Chief of Seattle Children’s Surgery Division. Dr. Lee told us Oliver needed surgery as soon as possible. A week later, Seattle Children’s called to tell me Dr. Lee would be performing Oliver’s surgery on December 30. 

After thirty years in gay choirs, a handful of songs inevitably reduce me to tears whenever I try to sing them, such as the coming out anthem “Michael’s Letter to Mama”; the AIDS-era funeral staple “I Shall Miss Loving Him”; and the homesick ballad “Un Canadien Errant.”

This year Vancouver Men’s Chorus closed the first act of our holiday show with a Cher song: “DJ play a Christmas song, I wanna be dancing all night long.” The chorus repeats the words “that’s the only thing I want this year” as if in a trance. When we began rehearsals in September, Cher felt like a total bubble gum number, just like our Dolly Parton encore “Baby I’m Burnin.’” Then I saw Oliver’s x-ray report, and realized my son needed abdominal surgery to save his life. 

Since November, I’ve been unable to sing or hear “DJ Play a Christmas Song” without weeping. I don’t know what Cher is wishing for on the dance floor. But all I wanted for Christmas last year was a surgery appointment at Seattle Children’s. 

Oliver and Papa’s story continues in “Abdomen Whisperer”

Kosher Dogs

I was ten or eleven years old when I saw my first musical. It was a touring show at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre called Saturday’s Warrior. After the Broadway successes of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, a group of musicians from Brigham Young University attempted to translate Mormon culture into musical theater. Saturday’s Warrior is about a family resisting worldly temptation and trying to get back to heaven together.

 

December 2023 found me back at the Queen E. This time I was onstage at the Vancouver Playhouse in front of sold-out crowds, singing carols together with a hundred of my gay brothers in Vancouver Men’s Chorus. And pretending to be Jewish.

Despite three decades in gay choruses, I’m still too much of an introvert to audition for an actual solo. But I have impeccable comic timing and a freakishly expressive face. Over the last few years I’ve confronted my anxieties by volunteering for micro-solos in VMC’s Christmas show. Each occasion involved a primarily dramatic rather than musical role. It turns out the contemporary choral repertoire includes a striking number of holiday songs where a lonely Jewish singer attempts to sing about dreidels before being shushed by Christian supremacists. Despite my Scottish / Mormon heritage, I keep getting faux typecast as the outnumbered Jewish guy.

 

For example, the Midwestern a capella group Straight No Chaser has created a raucous polyphonic “Christmas Can-Can.” It’s a cheery race between the chorus, a small ensemble, the orchestra, and the conductor. I signed up to be part of the small group when VMC introduced the song a few years ago. At our first rehearsal we had to assign a handful of short solo lines. “Not gonna do the kick line” went to the Asian bass. Next we needed someone to tell the audience “It’s not fair if you’re Jewish!” Without thinking, I pointed out I can easily play Jewish, and got the part. Afterwards I remembered PTSD was still a whole new adventure for me. There was a significant chance I would freeze when the time came to sing or say my four nebbishy lines. 

 

Fortunately, my fleeting solo came and went each night without any microphone glitches, wardrobe malfunctions, or PTSD episodes. Unfortunately, hundreds of blue-haired ladies and cute gay guys now labor/labour under the misapprehension that I’m Jewish. 

 

In subsequent years I’ve been assigned similar roles in other holiday songs. After one performance I got a message from a charming stranger who said the concert was “lovely” and I was “cute.” I hope his mother won’t be disappointed to find out I’m not really Jewish. 

Mark Burnham Photography 

 

The theme of this year’s VMC holiday show was “Cheers,” which meant lots of drinking songs. One of our recycled numbers was the “Christmas Can-Can.” I signed up to be part of the small ensemble because I’m too lazy to learn the chorus part. I was ready to let someone else take their turn being Jewish. But at the first rehearsal both the conductor and guy directing our ensemble pointed out “Roger already knows the solo.” I took the hint, and enjoyed being part of a revival. One longtime chorus member told me “It feels like Christmas when I hear you being Jewish.” 

 

However, current events made our repertoire fraught. The festive “Christmas Luau” was pulled after fires devastated Maui. Then war erupted between Israelis and Palestinians. Our perky “Boogie Woogie Hanukkah” number was replaced with a choral anthem in Hebrew. Nevertheless, our conductor chose to keep the “Christmas Can-Can.” He trusted the audience, and had faith in my experience and timing.

 

Each of my beleaguered Jewish lines gets smiles and laughs if it lands just right. Normally a missed landing wouldn’t be a big deal – there are a lot of other things happening on stage, and twenty other songs in the concert. But with the Holy Land in turmoil, I was terrified I would create an offensive distraction.

 

Although it stressed me out every night, I safely landed each comic Jewish line. And then I enjoyed the rest of the show.

Mark Burnham Photography

Rehearsals have started for VMC’s next show, which has the theme “Icons.” Our concerts are in June, so we’re still learning new music. In the meantime we’ve been asked to sing three songs at a fundraising gig next month. Two of the songs were part of our set at the Canadian LGBT choral festival in Halifax last May. I was pleased to discover I still have both songs memorized, including a surprising percentage of the choreography to “Don’t Rock the Boat.” 

The third number is an Irish drinking song from our concert in December. Unfortunately, when the conductor waved his baton I suddenly realized I don’t know “Nil Sen La.” 

One of my favorite psychology experiments tested the intelligence of farmers before and after harvest. The researchers found what they called a “scarcity mindset.” Before the harvest, while the farmers were still worrying their crop might fail, they tested an average of thirteen IQ points lower than their intelligence after a successful harvest. Chronic stress “makes you distracted, defensive, less rational, and effectively dumber.”

 

I have a lifetime of experience as a performer and public speaker. I can handle ordinary stage fright. At our June concert a couple of years ago, I kept my poise while introducing the song “Chosen Family” with a tear-jerking speech about being both a PFLAG son and father. But as a PTSD survivor I’ve learned to recognize the impact of extraordinary triggers and stressors. During our recent concerts, I thought I was phoning in “Nil Sen La” because it’s too high and I was saving my voice. In reality, I was so stressed about the four tiny solo lines coming up right afterwards that I couldn’t remember a word in Gaelic, or even the words “Dum Dee Dum.” Now I’m frantically memorizing “Nil Sen La” in preparation for our gig next month.

Bear and I walk for miles every day along the waterfront. My dog has both an uncanny direction sense and a perfect memory for establishments that offer treats. As I observed in “Fairhaven,” our local gay bar Rumors has the biggest treats, but the kitchen door at Chrysalis Inn has the best:  huge chunks of roast chicken breast diverted from the bourgeoisie’s Caesar salads. Bear will also drag us back to any place that has served him lamb or duck, long after the café itself has been boarded up.

 

When the Chrysalis Inn is out of chicken they usually substitute cheese. Which is fine – Bear loves dairy. The other day they had alderwood-smoked bacon instead, which looked delicious to me. But Bear is meh about bacon and pork.

 

I’m not Jewish. But Bear might be.

Let the World be Kind

The annual Sehome High School yearbook displays free “advertisements” where parents salute their graduating seniors with embarrassing baby pictures and a short message. My daughter Eleanor is on the yearbook staff. She chose our photos, nagged me about submitting my advertisements before the deadline, and lent me a couple of old yearbooks to see examples of previous contributions from parents.

 

“We are so proud of you” and “We love you” were the most common messages. Quotations came from Maya Angelou, Shel Silverstein, Led Zeppelin, John Quincy Adams, and the Old Testament. Several parents loved their children to the moon and back, while others chose to signal their affection with a dense forest of exclamation marks.

 

As a parent and a writer, I had two favorites. The first example was exquisitely succinct:  “Well done – the whole world awaits!” 

 

The second parental advertisement sent a different message: 

 

You came into our lives, and you’ve almost been a son to us. While you may not be our number one child, you at least rate in the top three. When you return home from receiving your diploma, your stuff will be packed up for you to take away to be someone else’s problem. Please don’t try to find us. 

Love, Mom and Dad

 

Here’s what I wrote to Eleanor in the Sehome High School yearbook:

 

You are messy, passionate, determined, curious, sensitive, creative, and kind – all mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie. You’ll be gone, but you’ll always be mine.

Love Papa

 

And my message to Rosalind:

 

You are completely yourself:  brave, loyal, artistic, and kind, with a unique sense of style. Raising you has been the greatest accomplishment of my life. I will always be proud to be your father.

Love Papa

I wrote Eleanor’s yearbook message first. It’s a shout out to Waitress, her favorite musical. Before covid, I took Eleanor to a performance of Waitress at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. In “She Used to Be Mine,” our inconveniently pregnant waitress lets go of the person she hoped she would become. Like many of the parental advertisements in the yearbook, the song involves a series of revealing adjectives baked together. In Waitress, the list opens with “She is messy” – which happens to fit my daughter.

 

Songwriter Sara Bareilles told the New York Times “the chasm between who we are, and who we thought we would be, is always something we’re negotiating.” New York Magazine offers its “definitive ranking” of YouTube versions of the song. (Bareilles herself only reached Number 6.) For her high school performance competitions, Eleanor chose the accompanying monologue the waitress speaks to her unborn baby. 

 

Other than my decision to describe Eleanor as “creative” and Rosalind as “artistic,” by the time I finished writing my message to Rosalind I’d forgotten which adjectives I used for Eleanor besides “messy” (which Rosalind emphatically is not). After forwarding my messages to the yearbook editors, I was struck to see the repeated adjective in both descriptions:  “kind.” 

 

When Bareilles composed “She Used to be Mine,” “kind” provided a convenient near-rhyme for “mine.” In my yearbook messages, the unconscious repetition is a reminder that my second greatest accomplishment may be raising children who aren’t lawyers.

First year law students are taught to “think like a lawyer.” Legal scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter provides an excellent summary of the concept in “On Thinking Like a Lawyer,” a short essay addressed to new law students. The phrase means, “in the first instance, thinking with care and precision.” But “thinking like a lawyer also means that you can make arguments on any side of any question”:  

 

Many of you resist that teaching, thinking that we are stripping you of your personal principles and convictions, transforming you into a hired gun. On the contrary, learning how to make arguments on different sides of a question is learning that there are arguments on both sides, and learning how to hear them. That is the core of the liberal value of tolerance, but also the precondition for order in a society that chooses to engage in conflict with words rather than guns. It is our best hope for rational deliberation, for solving problems together not based on eradicating conflict, but for channeling it productively and cooperating where possible. 

 

Professor Slaughter ends her essay with optimism about the contribution that lawyers and legal thinking can make to society: 

 

One of my colleagues at Chicago ends her first year civil procedure class by saying: “Sometimes in the first year of law school, people learn to think like lawyers, but to be a little less like people. You’ve learned the first of those things. You shouldn’t let us teach you the second.” I disagree. There is no dichotomy here. Thinking like a lawyer is thinking like a human being, a human being who is tolerant, sophisticated, pragmatic, critical, and engaged. It means combining passion and principle, reason and judgment. 

 

I absorbed a similar idealism about the legal profession when I was at Yale Law School. For me, thinking like a Lawyer or like a Writer means using words to explore and share ideas with other people, including your future self. It turns out that’s the only way I can think clearly. 

 

However, in the last few years I’ve discovered that “thinking like a lawyer” is corrosive when an attorney’s duty to vigorously advocate for the client becomes an excuse to selfishly twist the truth beyond recognition. Since my PTSD diagnosis, I’ve completed an extensive reading list in psychology and neuroscience. In the field of evolutionary biology, “thinking like a lawyer” has a much darker meaning than the ideal celebrated in Professor Slaughter’s essay. 

Humans are profoundly social animals. In particular, we’re deeply concerned about social status within our tribe. Evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright argues consciousness arose in human brains not to promote effective decision making but rather for “image management” – the “hoarding of credit and sharing of blame.” Like Trump University, evolution taught us “shady accounting,” resulting in “a deep sense of justice slightly slanted toward the self.” 

As Wright puts it, the “human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments.” Evolution could have designed us to prioritize finding the right answer. Instead, “like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth.”

Is selfishness a bug or a feature of humanity? Is kindness?

 

Many atypical traits persist in the gene pool despite their lack of any obvious benefit to survival and reproduction, such as homosexuality, left-handedness, introversion, blue eyes, schizophrenia, and country music. In his recent book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, neuroscientist and clinician Randolph Nesse examines how evolutionary processes can explain various quirks of the human brain, including the persistence and power of altruism: 

 

For most species, close social partners other than relatives are either nonexistent or nearly interchangeable. That was probably the case for our human ancestors until some tipping point in the past hundred thousand years, when selecting especially capable, generous partners began to give advantages. The benefits of having relationships with the best possible partners shaped tendencies to generosity and loyalty.... The resulting prosocial traits are as expensive and dramatic as a peacock’s tail.

 

Common decency makes civilization possible. But no community can be healthy when it reaches the opposite tipping point, with too many individuals defaulting to lawyerly selfishness. 

David Browning, one of the second tenors in Vancouver Men’s Chorus, is a talented singer-songwriter. (In real life he’s just a doctor.) This year David set himself the personal challenge of writing a Christmas song. As any musician besides Mariah Carey will attest, composing a catchy holiday pop song presents a daunting assignment. 

 

David did an excellent job, and VMC was proud to premiere “Merry Christmas” at our recent concerts. The song’s bridge ends with the lyric “Let the anger and the tension unwind – let the world be kind.”

As Bear and I were walking through Boulevard Park last month, we met a young woman who was making a documentary for a college class. She asked if she could film me with Bear as I answered a few questions. After pointing her iPhone at us, the student asked “Are you happy?” 

 

Life has been extra frustrating lately. My family and I are beset with mounting health, personal, financial, and legal challenges. The road ahead is uncertain and confusing. Nevertheless, I am enjoying the best mental health of my life, and The Kids Are Alright. I found myself answering “yes.”

 

After I responded to a few more questions, the student filmmaker asked if I had any concluding message. I said “Be kind. And you’ll be happy.” 

Merry Christmas