Typhoid Merry

I almost got to be a super-spreader. 

 

Instead, I’m isolating in my room with Bear – the first in our family to test positive for covid despite all the social distancing, masks, vaccinations, and dodged bullets. 

I got covid without even noticing it. When Bear and I got home from our usual long walk Wednesday afternoon, I had an email from someone who attended the same festive gathering in Vancouver on Sunday. After feeling a little under weather for a couple of days, he failed a home covid test. He suggested we all check our coronavirus status. Most attendees promptly reported negative results – other than an unlucky few. 

 

I’d taken so many covid tests before. This time I squeezed four drops into the plastic well, then watched the bright red line instantly light up. 

After observing so much suffering during the pandemic, my own experience with covid has been blessedly anticlimactic. I’ve had no symptoms. The kids all stayed virus-free as we finished the last week of school. 

 

However, the December schedule is a mess. And I’m still trapped in “isolation”:  staying at home except for long walks in the woods with Bear; letting the kids feed themselves as the dishes pile up; and either wearing a mask as I try to get work done at my desk, or hiding in my bedroom while Christmas music plays on an infinite loop. 

Before the covid surprise, I was planning to drive back up to Vancouver on Wednesday night to attend a holiday sing-along event hosted by friends at a club downtown. According to the CDC chatbot’s calculations, Wednesday was my most infectious day. 

 

Ironically, I’d already decided to skip the Xmas sing-along and save myself for a New Year’s trip. Instead, I told the kids I was loopy on Theraflu. I hadn’t actually taken any. I just wanted to cover up my decision to take the day off, stay home, and do edibles while pretending to be sick. Still, I’m glad I checked my email before I changed my mind about heading to the piano bar. My boisterous caroling would have contaminated numerous unsuspecting revelers with aerosolized coronavirus.

 

Instead I’m in isolation for ten days. Blame Canada.

This is what covid looks like (Xmas 2022)

The Best Things That Ever Happened To Me

Barbara Cook singing "Anyone Can Whistle" on YouTube

Every musical theatre nerd mourns the loss of Stephen Sondheim, our adoptive artistic father, who died in November 2021 at age 91. I heard the incomparable composer speak a few years ago when I was still a lawyer in Seattle. Frank Rich interviewed Sondheim on the stage at Benaroya Hall in an event presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures. 

 

The year my mother turned sixty, I bought us tickets to see Barbara Cook perform at Benaroya. She was touring with a concert consisting of music by Sondheim, plus a few other showtunes he told Barbara he “wished he had written.” For her encore, Barbara sang an unadorned arrangement of “Anyone Can Whistle,” accompanied at the piano by her longtime musical director Wally Harper.

 

Anyone who gets to share Barbara Cook singing “Mostly Sondheim” with his mother is a pretty lucky fella.

This week’s “Must See” list in New York magazine highlights Thursday’s extraordinary musical event:

 

In a big Carnegie Hall celebration, MasterVoices honors one of Stephen Sondheim’s earlier, odder cult favorites, a 1964 satire written with Arthur Laurents about fake miracles, asylum patients who take over a town, and a corrupt (or playful?) solution for public health. Revivals of Whistle don’t come along often, but concert productions have kept its weird flame flickering. Vanessa Williams plays Cora, the crooked mayor. 

 

A young Angela Lansbury was destined for musical theatre immortality after originating the role of the mayoress, even though the original production closed after just nine performances. I’ve never seen Anyone Can Whistle. No one has. But in addition to tackling mental illness, the show introduced Sondheim standards like “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” “I’ve Got You to Lean On,” and “Everybody Says Don’t.”

 

Obviously I know the original cast album by heart, as well as the recording of the famous AIDS benefit at Carnegie Hall in 1995. Madeleine Kahn played the mayor, Angela Lansbury narrated, and Scott Bakula was mysterious stranger J. Bowden Hapgood. Bernadette Peters played Nurse Fay, who sings the title song.

Read “For Good,” my story about the dogs, 

in the recently published anthology True Stories Vol. IV

I’m almost to the end of my first book manuscript, entitled Anyone Can Whistle: A Memoir of Religion, Showtunes, and Mental Illness. I’ll finish writing the memoir as soon as I finish living through this part of my story – hopefully later this year.

 

A couple of years ago, I went through The Narrative Project’s flagship “Finish Your Book!” writing program. Under Cami Ostman’s expert guidance, I found a writer’s community where I learned to write through and about trauma. The nine-month program offered the perfect opportunity to practice my craft with the support and encouragement of other writers – even as I endured gaslighting lawyers and stonewalling bureaucrats, and single parented three teenagers through a pandemic.

 

I thought I would finish writing my memoir during the formal The Narrative Project program. Instead, I made immeasurable progress toward mental health and happiness. Meanwhile, after over half a million words of public blog essays and an even greater volume of legal filings and private journaling, Anyone Can Whistle needed to find its own voice and structure as a book. And to lose weight.

 

So I ruthlessly edited out all the tedious lawyer stuff, exiling it to a future sequel. The title will be Too Many Lawyers, an homage to my favourite mystery novelist Rex Stout, who published “Too Many Witnesses,” “Too Many Cooks,” “Too Many Clients,” and “Too Many Women.” Everything Is Connected became the working title for my research and writing about neuroscience and psychology. It would be my dissertation, if they awarded graduate degrees for reading a lot of interesting books while recovering your mental health. 

As I sit at my desk each morning, I ask myself whether today’s best story will be about a Father, a Writer, or a Lawyer. Readers vote overwhelmingly for “Father.” So as soon as I’m done with my tedious lawsuits and can finish telling my gay Mormon PTSD story in Anyone Can Whistle, I’ll focus on writing about Gay Sitcom Dad.

As I wrote in “Buster,” last month I was one of the writers reading from our recent work at the launch of a new anthology. My contribution to True Stories, “For Good,” comes from the chapter of my memoir where I explain that I’m not really a dog person.

Bear and Buster are purebred Aussiedoodles – one of the most popular of the trendy class of “doodles.” My ex and his husband were friends with a local breeder. I never wanted a dog myself – to the contrary, I was comfortable in my role as the dogs’ fabulous gay uncle. Besides, if I’d chosen a dog, I would have picked what in my day we called a “mutt.”

When my ex and his husband divorced a couple of years later and I ended up with three kids and two dogs fulltime, Bear turned out to be the comfort animal I never knew I needed. Although many of the dogs Bear and I encounter on our walks look like mutts, their owners always refer to them as “rescue dogs.” I feel like a “rescue human.” A rescued human.

 

Each of the chapter titles in my memoir is the name of a showtune, such as “If You Were Gay,” “Turn It Off,” and “I’d Rather be Sailing.” The title for my dog chapter is from Wicked. I’ve seen Wicked three times: (1) the original production on Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel; (2) with my mother for her 70th birthday at a lavish benefit for marriage equality at the Paramount Theater in Seattle; and (3) at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver with my daughter Eleanor for her ninth birthday. It’s hard to pick a favourite performance.

“For Good” comes near the end of Wicked. Elphaba and Glinda sing “I don’t know if I’ve been changed for better, but because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”

Stephen Sondheim won his Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, which is a musical about Children and Art. In addition to his artistic genius, Sondheim was a born teacher who often said his greatest regret was never having children. 

 

I came to fatherhood unexpectedly and late in life. The President of the Mormon Church when I was born was David O. McKay. President McKay’s famous motto was “No amount of success can compensate for failure in the home.” Growing up as a closeted gay Mormon during that era, I was taught that fatherhood was essential to human happiness – yet impossible for me. 

 

It Gets Better. I was forty-one years old when I watched my daughter Eleanor being born. We adopted Rosalind three and a half years later, and Oliver the following year. Having children transformed my life.

 

Every science fiction fan knows there are fixed points that connect the multiverse. The most important moment on my own timeline occurred in Spring 2011, when we salvaged Oliver’s adoption. Since 2011, I have made numerous mistakes I would reverse if I could. I have been beset by plagues I would have avoided with the benefit of Doctor Who’s or the Flash’s time traveling abilities. I would love a do-over of the last few years. 

I also made a lot of mistakes before 2011. I suffered trauma that still haunts me. But I would not change a single moment that led me to my daughter, child, and son.

The first Sondheim show I saw on Broadway was Into the Woods with Bernadette Peters. I also saw his next two Broadway openings, Assassins with Neil Patrick Harris and Passion with Donna Murphy. Sondheim and others describe Passion as his most personal work, because he wrote it after falling in love for the first time in his life.

 

If I had a favourite song it would be “If Love Were All,” from a forgotten 1928 musical by Noel Coward. Bitter Sweet is about an English maiden who must choose between her stuffy nobleman fiancé and her dashing Austrian music tutor. (Spoiler alert: she runs off with the musician.) The song is actually sung by the musician’s plucky ex-girlfriend – sorta like Eponine pining after Marius in Les Miserables. 

In her classic cabaret album It’s Better with a Band, Barbara Cook sings a lovely version of “If Love Were All.” But the definitive performance is from Judy Garland’s legendary Carnegie Hall concert on April 23, 1963. You can listen to Judy for yourself on YouTube.

If wealth were all, I would be a failure.

 

If professional success were all, I would be bitter.

 

If art were all, I would be grateful for my own talent to amuse, and the mental health to finally use it.

 

If social justice were all, I would be proud of what I’ve accomplished so far.

 

If romantic love were all, I would be as lonely as Judy Garland sounds on her Carnegie Hall concert album.

 

But if love is all, then I consider myself to be the luckiest man on the face of this earth.

The chapter of my memoir where I write about gay choruses in general and Vancouver Men’s Chorus in particular is called “The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me.” Windy City Gay Chorus, Seattle Men’s Chorus, and Vancouver Men’s Chorus represent my tribe at its best. 

 

“The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me” is the title of a song from Sondheim’s final Broadway musical. Road Show tells the story of colourful brothers Addison Mizner and Wilson Mizner from the Klondike gold rush through the Florida real estate scams of the 1920s. Addison Mizner and Stephen Sondheim both were gay. Sondheim came from a generation that survived homophobic psychoanalysis, yet continued to take comfort from the closet for decades. The composer worked on this particular show for years as it evolved from Gold! to Wise Guys to Bounce before finally opening as Road Show in 2008. “The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me” started out being sung by Wilson Mizner and his wife Nellie in Bounce, but ended up as a comic love duet in Road Show between Addison Mizner and his lover Hollis Bessemer. 

 

After the Omicron covid variant temporarily shut down choirs once again, Vancouver Men’s Chorus gathered online for Zoom rehearsals and weekly fellowship. In January we watched the video of our 2018 concert “Gays of Our Lives,” which showcased songs from our communal history of activism and anger, pride marches and prejudice, loss and love. Sondheim was represented by “The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me.”

 

You can find a recording of the song on YouTube by the actors who played Addison and Hollis in Road Show on Broadway. But my favourite version of “The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me” will always be the duet between tenor David Browning and baritone Alex Burns, backed up by the rest of Vancouver Men’s Chorus.

I spent last Wednesday evening with my two favourite Ukrainian-Canadians: my sister-in-law Kyla Moojalwsky Leishman and VMC founder/conductor Willi Zwozdesky. 

 

I saw Kyla while visiting my brother Doug on the spine floor at Vancouver General Hospital. Then I went to VMC rehearsal, where Willi conducted the entire chorus together in one room and off Zoom for the first time in two years.

 

Willi grew up singing Ukrainian folk songs among immigrants on the Prairies before founding Canada’s first LGBT choir in 1981. At rehearsal on Wednesday, Willi handed out the sheet music for “Mnohiji Ljita,” which means “Many Years” in Ukrainian. It’s the celebration song Ukrainians sing at birthdays. Willi picked “Mnohiji Ljita” because we only had to learn two words repeated over and over. You sing the song twice at normal speed, then a third time very slowly and dramatically.

 

Like every other Ukrainian folk song, “Mnohiji Ljita” usually sounds either like Rachmaninov’s Vespers sung by the Yale Slavic Chorus as a soundtrack to the classic Soviet-era silent movie Battleship Potemkin, or like a vodka-infused group of soldiers linking arms in a Kyiv pub. Sung in four-part harmony by 100 voices from a chorus that survived one plague as a band of brothers only to be silenced temporarily by a new pandemic, “Mnohiji Ljita” sounds like Hope.

In addition to our first real VMC rehearsal in two years, the recent liberalization of BC’s covid restrictions also meant that after rehearsal a group of us were able to gather for drinks at our longstanding watering hole PumpJack. (Sadly, showtune singalong night remains homeless and on indefinite hiatus.)

 

While at PumpJack I chatted with Xavi, a fellow Second Tenor who also happens to be a regular reader of my blog. When I asked him which kinds of anecdotes he prefers, Xavi voted for Gay Sitcom Dad. So over a couple of ginger-infused cidres I regaled him with unprintable stories from my less than fabulous life. Before heading for the border, I thanked Xavi and told him I couldn’t remember the last time I had the opportunity to talk to someone who wasn’t named “Leishman” or “Bear.” (Xavi realizes Bear is the name of my dog, not my porn fantasy.)

 

At rehearsal last week we got copies of the new songs for our June concert that VMC’s stable of arrangers completed during the pandemic. “Chosen Family” is by Rina Sawayama, a Japanese woman who lives in Britain. (Here’s a YouTube link to her singing it as a duet with Elton John.) The lyrics include “We don’t need to be related to relate, we don’t need to share genes or a surname – you are my chosen family.” The best things that ever happened to me are my biological, adoptive, and chosen families. 

SEEKING

We live next door to Washington’s third largest university. Unsurprisingly, on our walks Bear and I frequently encounter nerds.

 

The other day we ran into a young man on campus in obvious need of a dog fix. As he gave Bear a glorious tummy rub, the student exclaimed “He has heterochromia!” That’s an impressive nerd word – Bear was indeed born with two different colored eyes. My kids picked Bear out of the litter because of his soulful blue eye and his earnest brown eye.

 

After the Western student finally tore himself away from his canine cuddle, he asked whether Bear is an Aussiedoodle. Another remarkable nerd display. When I ask how he guessed the correct breed, he said it was because he observed Bear exploring the world. 

Heterochromia is less noticeable with Tina Turner bangs

In her book Animals Make Us Human, autistic animal husbandry expert Temple Grandin reminds us humans are animals too, with brains that evolved over millions of years. Grandin uses the model of brain function described by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp four decades ago in his research on the neural bases of emotion. Panksepp identified seven primal emotions. Grandin follows Panksepp’s custom of labeling each in allcaps:  CARE, FEAR, LUST, PANIC, PLAY, RAGE, and SEEKING.

 

CARE is the emotion underlying parental love. LUST fuels sex and sexual desire. PANIC (or GRIEF) signals distress to an animal’s “social attachment system,” and “probably evolved from physical pain.” The separate emotion of RAGE evolved from animals’ experience of being captured and held immobile by a predator. According to Grandin, “frustration is a mild form of RAGE that is sparked by mental restraint when you can’t do something you’re trying to do.” 

In contrast with PANIC and RAGE, the core emotion PLAY “produces feelings of joy.” As I wrote in “PLAY On!,” the same neural pathways that inspire Bear and Buster to boisterously frolic at the off-leash park became the foundation for quintessentially human urges like art and music. All seven of Panksepp’s categories represent very human emotions whose effects can also be observed in other animals. 

In Panksepp’s model of animal brain evolution, SEEKING is the core emotion associated with curiosity and novelty. It’s the aspect of Bear’s Australian shepherd heritage that drives him to explore the world.

 

An animal’s SEEKING impulse may be in tension with FEAR, another primal emotion that is necessary for survival in a dangerous and mysterious world. According to Grandin, “at least a portion of the healthy amygdala acts as if it has an anxiety disorder – searching for threat in response to uncertainty…. The single most important factor determining whether a new thing is more interesting than scary is whether the animal has control over whether to approach the subject.”

Grandin suggests FEAR and SEEKING “may operate like different-sized weights put on the opposite ends of a balance scale.” I agree that personality statistics for human or animal populations would probably show an inverse correlation between curiosity and dread. Nevertheless, FEAR and SEEKING represent separate emotional drives. For example, Buster is much too dim-witted for sophisticated FEAR or SEEKING behavior. (Instead, Buster is a bundle of the tics and awkwardness associated with PANIC disorders.) Buster invariably leaps out of the car into traffic, yet seldom strays far from his human monitor.

In contrast, Bear is smart enough to balance both caution and curiosity.

Last year I read several excellent books about how our brains process probabilities, choices, disappointment, and uncertainty. My upcoming blog essay “How Lucky Can You Get?” dives into these topics, including some of the insights from my favourite book of 2021, What are the Chances? Why We Believe in Luck, by neuroscientist and statistician Barbara Blatchley. According to Blatchley,

 

Luck is the way you face the randomness in the world. If we are open to it, accepting, not anxious or afraid, willing to learn from mistakes and to change a losing game, we can benefit from randomness. We can gain a modicum of control over this aspect of life, even if we can't control the universe on a large scale. Randomness will happen no matter what we do—chaos theory rules in our universe. Knowing how to roll with the punches; now that's lucky.

 

Blatchley analyzes four kinds of luck originally identified by Zen Buddhist neurologist James Austin in his 1978 book Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty. Dr. Austin’s first type of luck occurs by pure chance. Type I or blind luck is “random and accidental; it occurs through no effort of our own and against all odds.”  

 

In contrast with Type I luck, Dr. Austin’s second type of chance, “luck in motion,” is exemplified by Bear’s SEEKING attitude. According to Dr. Austin, Type II luck “favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.”

Last month Sehome High School put on its annual “24-Hour Play Festival.” On Friday night at 7 pm, four teams of writers arrived at the school to create new one-act plays overnight. The playwrights were assigned the same theme – “Keeping a secret” – and the same location – “The Wilds.” At midnight the producers added a random twist:  “All plays must include the word serendipity and a trophy.”

 

The tech crew, directors, and actors arrived Saturday morning and spent all day putting the four plays together before performing them Saturday evening. Eleanor was both a writer and an actor, which meant she stayed up for 46 hours straight. Their play “Crash Landing” presented a Lost-style jungle island mystery.

 

“Serendip” is the ancient Sanskrit name of the island of Sri Lanka. The English word “serendipity” first appeared in a 1754 letter by novelist Horace Walpole, and referred to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. According to Walpole, the three princes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” They deserved trophies for their discoveries. 

That’s the difference between serendipity and mere fortuity: it is precisely because the Princes of Serendip were on a quest for something that they found something else.

“Bear, you are just like my father. And me.”

 

My Apple Watch transcribes my dialogues with Bear as we walk. That recent quotation came as Bear sniffed his way along the trail from the off-leash park to the beach. Bear enjoys playing catch and frolicking at the park. But soon it’s time to move on.

 

My father turned 82 last month. He regularly golfs, bowls on multiple teams, and plays bridge several times a week. Dad is endlessly curious, and always busy with something. I’ve never understood the attraction of golf, the alleged sport that is often described as “a good walk spoiled.” I don’t need a pretext to be outdoors. I can just go for an unspoiled walk. But like my father and Bear, I have to keep going.

In the Mormon church, the children’s program is called “Primary.” When I was growing up, “Blazers” was the class for the oldest boys, just before turning twelve and graduating to Boy Scouts. You earned a glass medallion for your personal Blazer banner by memorizing and reciting each of the thirteen Articles of Faith, which are like a catechism of Mormons’ most basic beliefs. Obviously I had to earn every one. The most coveted medallion was for memorizing the Thirteenth Article of Faith, which was much longer than the other twelve. 

 

In 1976, I was the only boy in our class who could make it by memory all the way to the end of the Thirteen Article of Faith. I still can. It happens to be what I believe:

 

We believe in being honest, true,
chaste, benevolent, virtuous,
and in doing good to all men;
indeed, we may say that we follow
the admonition of Paul—
We believe all things,
we hope all things,
we have endured many things,
and hope to be able to endure all things.
If there is anything virtuous,
lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy,
we seek after these things.

 

Serendipity is the process of looking for something and finding something else. Nevertheless, what you’re seeking matters.

Calligraphy by 1980s Roger for the family room at his parents' house