Hopefully

Last year my one of my children told me they identified as nonbinary. I’m that kind of a father.

 

They also said “Rosalind” felt like “too girly” a name. So at school this year they went by the nickname “Lynn.” In the meantime, because they still haven’t picked a new permanent name, I have a free pass using “Rosalind” at home. (They said old people can only handle so much change.)

When I was looking at baby names long ago, “Rosalind” seemed like a name that said “strong woman” – with shout outs to Shakespeare and Auntie Mame. But I remember how uncomfortable my child felt sitting in the audience at As You Like It five years ago when everyone kept referring to the main character with their name. Of course, Rosalind cross dresses for most of the play....

I have seen anti-trans headlines many times before. 

 

As Co-Chair of the Federation of statewide LGBT advocacy organizations during the 1990s, I was among the voices loudly insisting on full inclusion for trans voices and trans issues in our advocacy. There will aways be whispered (and often shouted) temptations to leave some folks behind. Instead, I’m proud to have been part of welcoming communities and organizations for the last thirty years. 

Trans journalist Evan Urquhart recently published a chilling essay in Slate under the headline “Many Queers Can’t Bring Themselves to Face the Emotion They’re Really Feeling Right Now. We Must.” According to Urquhart, “the word for what we’re feeling right now is ‘despair’: 

 

I first had the idea to write a piece about despair more than a year ago. Let me leave you with the knowledge that none of this was unexpected. For many in the queer community, we’ve moved well past the point of fearing something might happen, and on to figuring out how we’re going live through this. Our despair is grounded in grim acceptance and practicality. We are learning that life goes on after you accept the fact that no help is coming, and you’ve been left alone to defy or defend or escape, or just bear witness.

 

It is 2023, and I weep to see children used as punching bags by evil politicians and the Republican Party. But I refuse to despair.

Something Rotten

At the end of July each year, my mother and her friend Carolyn spend a girls’ week at a condo in Vancouver’s West End. They watch the fireworks, shop on Granville Island, and walk along the seawall. They also attend the summer musicals at Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park, where the nonprofit Theatre Under the Stars has been producing shows since 1940. 

 

This year TUTS presented two shows in repertory. The first, We Will Rock You, is a British jukebox musical featuring the music of Queen, with a thin plot about a dystopia where music is forbidden. The second show, Something Rotten!, opened on Broadway in 2015. Brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom struggle to find success in an Elizabethan theatre scene dominated by William Shakespeare’s rock star status. Christian Borle won the Best Supporting Actor Tony for his portrayal of Shakespeare as a preening but insecure narcissist. 

Seattle Men’s Chorus singing “A Musical” (2016)

Desperate to get an edge over his rival Shakespeare, Nick Bottom offers his life savings to a soothsayer in return for learning what kind of theatrical production is guaranteed to succeed in the future. The only oracle Nick can afford is Thomas Nostradamus, an undistinguished nephew of the famous French seer. Thomas’s predictions turn out to be accurate but slightly garbled. In Something Rotten!’s show-stopping production number, Thomas convinces Nick he can succeed by introducing the world’s first musical. 

 

In 2016, Seattle Men’s Chorus conductor Dennis Coleman retired after thirty-five years with the baton. That was also my first year in Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Instead of singing with SMC, I drove to Seattle with my daughter Eleanor to see the “Everything Broadway” show. Both of us were riveted by SMC’s performance of “A Musical.”

This summer when my mother mentioned she had tickets to Something Rotten!, Eleanor and I immediately played her the original cast recording of “A Musical,” including this classic excerpt:

 

THOMAS:       Some musicals have no talking at all....
All of the dialogue is sung
In a very dramatic fashion.

NICK:              Um, really?

THOMAS:       Yes, really.
And they often stay on one note for a very long time
So when they change to a different note, [finally changing pitch] you notice.
And it’s supposed to create a dramatic effect
But mostly you just sit there asking yourself
“Why aren’t they talking?”

NICK:              That sounds miserable.

THOMAS:       I believe it’s pronounced Misérable.

Songwriters: Wayne Kirkpatrick / Karey Kirkpatrick        

A Musical lyrics © WB Music Corp., Mad Mother Music

Sure enough, my mother and Carolyn loved Something Rotten. (Mom’s review of We Will Rock You: “It was loud.”) I got a ticket to Something Rotten for the last Wednesday of the summer. As I reported on Facebook, the show was delightful.

The key to surviving Facebook is to remember you’re not the target audience in Facebook’s business model – you’re the company’s product. Facebook’s actual customers are paying advertisers. In a popular and apt metaphor, the rest of us are merely a herd of cattle on display. 

 

I’ve run the numbers, and I’m pretty happy with our bovine arrangement. As far as I can tell, the algorithm has never lured me into buying anything. Instead, Facebook serves as a convenient communication platform and auxiliary memory bank. After posting pictures of children, dogs, and travel for fourteen years, I can now rely on Facebook for daily reminders of happy times.

 

For example, according to Facebook I was at the Saint James Theatre seven years ago waiting to watch the original Broadway cast of Something Rotten!. As I wrote at the time, “Shakespeare has always been my idol.”

I’m lucky I have Facebook to remind me – because I don’t have any memory of being at the theatre in New York. In fact, other than the songs I heard on the original cast album, I didn’t remember anything about the show before I saw it again in Vancouver last month.

The last time I was in New York I was on my way to New Haven for my 25th year law school reunion. This was just a few weeks before my new Bellingham physician told me my weird recent symptoms added up to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and serious codependency. My disability diagnosis changed my life – but not as much as the abusive behaviour of my employers. 

 

PTSD is a disease of memory. As Bessel van der Kolk observes in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, “traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much.” Sometimes trauma results in disassociation or repression, leaving no accessible memories at all. More often, trauma prevents key brain modules like the thalamus and hippocampus from integrating our experiences into “normal” memories. According to Dr. van der Kolk, “the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces:  images, sounds, and physical sensations.”

When I realized I had no memory of seeing Something Rotten! on Broadway in October 2015 – even Christian Borle’s Tony-winning portrayal of my idol Will Shakespeare – I went back to my collection of Playbills to figure what else was missing. 

 

The only other show I saw on that trip was Fun Home, a musical based on lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s memoir about growing up in a repressed and dysfunctional environment (she was raised in her family’s funeral home). While Bechdel was away at college, her father killed himself rather than come out of the closet. 

In contrast with Something Rotten, I remember seeing Fun Home on Broadway. I’ve also read Bechdel’s graphic memoir. But my memories of both are fragmentary.

Theatre Under the Stars

Early in his career, Sigmund Freud successfully treated hysteria patients who had PTSD-like symptoms. Freud reported his patients could not access traumatic memories because of the “severely paralyzing” effect of strong emotions like fright and shame. Freud concluded “the ultimate cause of hysteria is always the seduction of the child by an adult.” 

 

However, as Bessel van der Kolk observes, when “faced with his own evidence of an epidemic of abuse in the best families of Vienna – one, he noted, that would implicate his own father – he quickly began to retreat.” Freud shifted his emphasis from real-world childhood trauma to “unconscious wishes and fantasies” like Oedipus complexes and penis envy. A century later, the leading psychiatry textbook in 1974 stated that “incest is extremely rare,” while opining it probably “allows for a better adjustment to the external world,” leaving “the vast majority” of underaged victims “none the worse for wear.” 

 

Since then, we’ve learned PTSD is very real, and that it’s not just a soldier’s disease. Here is Dr. van der Kolk’s call to action in The Body Keeps the Score after four decades treating trauma victims:  “Child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.”

 

My childhood best friend Paul killed himself a few months after he was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. In a pioneering study by Dr. van der Kolk and his Harvard colleague Dr. Judith Herman, 81 percent of patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder also had histories of severe child abuse. On my way to see Something Rotten!, sitting in line at the Peace Arch border crossing, I read more details about the study in The Body Keeps the Score. And I remembered various odd things Paul said or did over the years. Suddenly I made the horrifying connection – my friend Paul likely endured abuse while we were in elementary school together.

Christian Borle and "Will Power" on Broadway

When I visited New York in October 2015, my PTSD diagnosis was still a few weeks away. But I was well on the way to rock bottom. Even after Theatre Under the Stars refreshed my recollection, I still can’t remember seeing Something Rotten!.

 

I can think of several explanations for the memory gap. The first is the general effect of my disability. As a wrote in “Better-ish,” although many of my fuzzy memories from that period finally snapped into place, others never did. Instead my brain concluded the simplest way to adjust my internal clock was to delete two years from the timeline. It was like switching to Daylight Savings Time. Or like when England converted from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and eleven days were dropped from September 1752. Nevertheless, there’s a silver lining:  I remember half as much Donald Trump presidency as everyone else.

 

Another possible explanation for erasing Something Rotten! is my obsessive relationship with Shakespeare. For example, the best class I took at Yale Law School was Hal Bloom’s graduate Shakespeare seminar. My bardolatry goes beyond ordinary English Major fervor. I was born exactly four hundred years after William Shakespeare. (To the day, after adjusting for the switch to Gregorian calendar). All my life, or at least from 1964 to 2015, I could easily compare myself to where Will was at a particular age:  having his three kids in Stratford during the ’80s, writing classics like Hamlet in the ’90s, retiring to the country in the aughts, and dealing with poor health in the teens. Shakespeare died in 1616, on what would have been his 52nd birthday. On that date four hundred years later, senior managing lawyers at the Attorney General’s Office realized the State’s employment lawyers and their investigator had broken the law and discriminated against me. Rather than correct their errors, they hastily terminated my employment and embarked on the triggering coverup that continues today. My life stalled at age 51. As my health and career unraveled in 2015-16, I felt more doomed that Will Shakespeare. Now it feels like the clock has started again.

But there’s a third explanation for my memory blocking out Something Rotten!. As I sat in Malkin Bowl last month, I recognized some of the characters and plot developments from listening to the original cast album. For example, during Act I, Will Shakespeare’s rock-star narcissism was predictably charming. I was also prepared to see Nick Bottom weave his soothsayer’s misleading fragments of prophecy into the fiasco of Omelette: The Musical. (It’s no Springtime for Hitler, but it’s no Hamlet, either.) What surprised me was Shakespeare’s pathetic efforts during Act II to re-ignite own creative fire. Eventually Will is so desperate he steals Nigel Bottom’s brilliant draft script of Hamlet. After Omelette: The Musical bombs, Shakespeare conspires with the authorities to banish Nick, Nigel, their wives, and the soothsayer to America in order to cover up his own plagiarism.

 

Why did my memory block out the entire show, including the fact I saw it on Broadway? Because Something Rotten! centers on writer’s block. And finding your own voice. Which turns out to be how I finally worked my way through complex PTSD over the last few years. I still don’t remember anything from the first time I saw Something Rotten!. But I’m happy so many of the other rotten things from that time in my life are finally beginning to heal.

Daniel Curalli as Will at Theatre Under The Stars

A New Brain

My daughter Eleanor is my most reliable theatre date, at least since Fred died and Dr. Ken moved to California. Occasionally I invite one of my other children to attend with me instead, but it’s hard to find a play that will capture their screen-addled attention.

Last summer I took Rosalind to Vancouver for an evening of Bard on the Beach. The performance was a charmingly updated version of the timeless comedy As You Like It, with a 1960s setting and the characters all singing Beatles songs. The heroine at the center of As You Like It remains one of the Bard’s greatest creations. According to Harold Bloom, if she “cannot please us, then no one in Shakespeare or elsewhere in literature ever will.”

Nevertheless, Rosalind found the play disturbing. The heroine’s name is Rosalind, and my daughter isn’t used to hearing her name repeated out loud that often. Unless she’s in trouble.

I understand where Rosalind is coming from. Because my ex Jason was born the first year of his name’s decades-long reign at the top of the baby name charts, he went through his school years surrounded by guys with same name. To compensate, we gave each of our children names that were uncommon, classic, but not weird. My own name comes from a similar chapter of the Baby Name book. Like Rosalind, Eleanor, and Oliver, I seldom overhear my name referring to someone else.

Except when I’m introduced to rabid showtune fans. They invariably mimic the recording on the guys’ answering machine in Rent:  “RoGER, this is your moTHER.”

I’ve always relied on lists to manage my confusing thoughts, regardless of whether they involve shopping, legal arguments, or cute guys. 

For example, at the piano bar singalong night in Vancouver each Wednesday, I usually spend the evening noodling over three separate mental lists. The first list involves the evening’s songs. The two piano players, Kerry and Sean, always call for requests. I never comply. Instead, I maintain a secret list of the top three songs I’d like to hear that night. They average getting it right a couple of times a month.

The process of listening to the evening’s songs generates my second list:  which performance of that same song from my four decades of theatre-going would someone else be most impressed by? For example, Sean envies me for seeing the original production of Rent in 1997, but that’s because he thinks one of the actors is hot. 

One night I happened to be sitting next to Kerry’s mum. She swooned over “Losing My Mind.” I told her for my own mother’s 60th birthday I took her to see Barbara Cook in concert. Later I challenged Kerry to top my demonstration of filial piety.

The third mental list rotates each week, although eventually it degenerates from something like “Who would I like to come up and talk to me?” to “Who’s hot?”

With the bars closed, Showtunes Night has moved online. Each Wednesday Kerry and Sean take turns playing from their home pianos, with the regular crowd observing and chatting on Facebook Live.

A couple of weeks ago, Kerry saw one of my chat comments, and invited me to request a song. Here’s my response:

Roger Leishman: Same rule as at PumpJack. You're supposed to read my mind and guess my request.

Roger Leishman: However, my daughter says she can get credit in her Zoom high school drama class if you play something from Wicked, Waitress, or Hairspray.

Roger Leishman: Or Mama Mia.

Roger Leishman: I told her she could have the rest of my drink if you guessed my request instead.

I’ve been going to piano bar singalong after Vancouver Men’s Chorus rehearsal almost every Wednesday for several years. Personally, the most devastating consequence of the coronavirus pandemic has been the closure of the Canadian border.

The last time I enjoyed my fix in person, I closed the bar. (Hush, that only happens half the time.) After 1 am, the regulars are mostly vodka-infused rockers. Usually they prefer Sean’s renditions of AM radio classics from the 80s. 

However, Kerry and I are more the showtune type. In his last set, Kerry observed “This is one of Roger’s favourite songs. And in the show the song comes from, it’s sung by a character named Roger.”

William Finn is my favourite off-Broadway composer. Last weekend I spent my birthday blissfully listening to a playlist of Finn’s songs as I walked, wrote, and parented.  

I realized I’d only seen a couple of Finn’s shows in person. I saw the original Broadway production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in 2004. And years ago I saw a production of Falsettos, which combines Finn’s first three autobiographical plays into a single madcap story about a gay man organizing his son’s Bar Mitzvah with his ex-wife, his former therapist/ex-wife’s new husband, his HIV-positive on-and-off boyfriend, and the lesbians next door. 

I love the original 1990 cast album from Falsettoland. But I also recommend the film of the 2016 Falsettos revival, which featured the original Elder Price, Andrew Rannells, along with Christian Borle and Stephanie J. Block. Eleanor would recognize Borle as the gay composer in the TV show Smash; I saw him on Broadway as a dissolute Tony-winning William Shakespeare in Something Rotten.

As I sat at the computer listening to my playlist of William Finn songs last week, my non-showtune daughter dreamily wandered through the kitchen. Rosalind paused, then said “Papa, why do I suddenly want to watch Into the Woods?”

The “Roger song” Kerry played during my last Showtunes Night in Canada was “I’d Rather Be Sailing,” from the 1998 musical Finn wrote with James Lapine, A New Brain. The show is loosely based on Finn’s own experience at age forty when he was rushed to the hospital for emergency brain surgery, almost died, and slowly recovered.

The character who is a surrogate for Finn in A New Brain, “Gordon Schwinn,” is a frustrated writer. Gordon composes songs for children’s television host “Mr. Bungee,” but he’s blocked in his efforts to finish both Mr. Bungee’s frog songs and his own creative works. Gordon’s long-suffering boyfriend Roger is the one who loves sailing. 

Last week while surfing Apple Music I realized New York’s Encores! staged concert series produced a revival of A New Brain in 2015. The cast album features Jonathan Groff as Gordon, as well as Ana Gasteyer as his mother and Christian Borle as Mr. Bungee. Unlike the abbreviated original album I already knew by heart, this marvelous new recording contains the full show, including new and extended songs. 

In A New Brain, the experience of going through profound mental failure helps Gordon both to work through his creative block and to revive his relationships with Roger and others in his life. He changes his mindset.

Before his brain surgery, Gordon tries to finish “The Spring Song” and “The Yes Song” for Mr. Bungee. In the familiar original cast album, they’re mostly sung by Mr. Bungee. In the new Encores! recording, Gordon sings both songs first. They’re lovely and affirming – when Jonathan Groff sings them in earnest, not when Christian Borle or Chip Zien sings the same song as a hammy Mr. Bungee. Each of these encouraging songs eventually resonates with the musical’s happy ending, including Gordon’s reprise of “I’d Rather Be Sailing.”

My epiphany from listening to the expanded score of A New Born (other than the fact that Jonathan Groff is much more appealing than Malcolm Gets): even before he got his new brain, Gordon was on the right track. 

More Showtune Night Stories:

"Missing Marie's Crisis" (5/6/17)

"Get Out and Stay Out" (10/18/17)

"Six Degrees of Kristin Chenoweth" (10/31/18)

"Comfort Animals" (4/24/19)

"I am Third" (5/29/19)

"Spongeworthy" (6/13/19)

"Maybe I Love Showtunes Too Much"  (9/17/19)

"Artificial Emotional Intelligence" (2/25/20)

"Do Gay Androids Dream of Electric Brunch?" (2/26/20)

To Be or Not to Be

According to our current Gregorian calendar, May 3, 2020 is the four hundred and fourth anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. He died on May 3, 1616, just as he was turning fifty-two years old.

I was born exactly four hundred years after Mr. Shakespeare. To the day. So we have a lot in common. For my entire bardolatrous English Major life, as each major milestone approached or passed, I would compare myself to the Bard at a similar age. Until four years ago, when I turned fifty-two years old. The next day was my very last chance to ask myself “What Was Shakespeare Doing At My Age On This Day Four Hundred Years Ago?"

What was I doing on May 3, 2016, exactly four hundred years after the death of William Shakespeare? I was reading my client copy of an email from my employment lawyer to the State’s employment lawyer.

After I finally recognized I was incapable of communicating with my employer about my recent mental illness diagnosis, in March 2016 I hired one of the partners in Freed Frank Subit & Thomas, a respected Seattle law firm that represents plaintiffs in employment disputes. I chose Sean Phelan because of her experience working with disabled employees dealing with mental health and reasonable accommodation issues. I engaged her for the specific purpose of communicating on my behalf with the employment lawyers representing the State about the relationship between my disability and the status of my employment. 

On March 29, 2016, my employers designated Senior Counsel Kari Hanson to negotiate with Ms. Phelan on behalf of the State.

What were the state’s top employment lawyers and Human Resources professionals doing on May 3, 2016? Figuring out how to do the right thing after receiving that same email from my employment lawyer is was busy reading at home in Bellingham.

A few weeks before I hired Ms. Phelan, I filed a separate sexual orientation discrimination complaint with my employer. After following the State’s government contract procurement process, the Attorney General’s office hired their preferred investigator to look into my sexual orientation discrimination allegations. 

Soon after hiring this investigator, however, one of the lawyers in the Attorney General’s Office decided it made sense to combine the investigation into my narrow sexual orientation discrimination complaint with a second assignment. He therefore asked the same lawyer-investigator to evaluate a secret litany of complaints from the supervisors who had already decided to get rid of me – even though the State's contractual Work Order only authorized an investigation into my allegations regarding discrimination based on sexual orientation, and even though no one bothered to tell me they’d changed the scope of the investigation to focus on the separate State’s complaints about my interactions with other in the workplace.

The State employee who made the original decision to secretly expand the scope of the investigation into my sexual orientation discrimination complaint was the State’s top employment lawyer, Ms. Hanson’s supervisor Labor & Personnel Division Chief Shane Esquibel. By tragicomic coincidence, that same month the Attorney General promoted Mr. Esquibel to be Chief Deputy Attorney General – Bob Ferguson’s No. 2.

Almost two months later, on May 3, 2016, Ms. Hanson received an email request from my lawyer that made it obvious Ms. Hanson had a festering malpractice problem:

From: Sean Phelan [mailto:sphelan@frankfreed.com] 

Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2016 4:08 PM 

To: Hanson, Kari (ATG) Cc: Sean Phelan
Subject: Roger Leischman 

Hi Kari,
I am following up on the voice message I left for you yesterday regarding this matter. 

Mr. Leischman has recently been evaluated by a psychiatrist with regard to his medical condition and its impact on his ability to perform his job – and specifically its impact on his interactions with others in the workplace.
Could you please send me another accommodation assessment form to send to the psychiatrist to complete?
Thanks in advance. 

Please call with any questions. Sincerely, 

Ms. Sean M. Phelan
Frank Freed Subit & Thomas LLP

Surely by this point the State’s top employment lawyers realized that all those secret co-worker complaints about “interactions with others in the workplace” – including raising my voice after my supervisor accused me of faking my disability – could not be a legitimate basis for employer retaliation, particularly during the interactive “reasonable accommodation” negotiation process required by the Washington Law Against Discrimination and the Americans with Disabilities Act. And surely by now the State’s senior Human Resources professionals realized that the Rules of Professional Conduct forbid any attorney-investigator hired by government lawyers from secretly interrogating someone who is represented by counsel. 

You’d think. Call me a cynic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to eventually read a sworn statement addressed to some tribunal or another from every single lawyer in Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s Office. No doubt each lawyer will swear he or she personally had no idea that the disabled gay single dad isolated on “home assignment” had hired an employment attorney to represent him in connection with complaints about allegedly improper interactions with others in the workplace. No idea at all, not until after they’d heard that someone else had already fired me. 

Unfortunately for the State, however, this is one of those situations when more lies can’t help. After filing whistleblower requests under the Public Records Act, last year I finally obtained copies of the damning emails the State concealed from my attorney and me. Even the truth-impaired folks at the Washington Attorney General’s Office must admit that by they time they saw Ms. Phelan’s May 3 email to Ms. Hanson, the State’s lawyers were on notice that they should have been paying attention to my disability – and to my disability attorney.

What did the State’s employment lawyer Ms. Hanson do on May 3 after she received my attorney’s email? She forwarded a copy to two people. 

The first recipient was Rochelle LaRose, the Human Resources representative who was responsible for coordinating with me about the investigation into my sexual orientation discrimination complaint. The second recipient was one of the supervisors above Ms. Hanson in her chain of command – Deputy Attorney General Paige Dietrich. 

Even if Ms. Hanson completely misunderstood the purpose of my lawyer’s attempts to contact her for the last six weeks, don’t you think at least one of these other experienced public servants should have recognized there was a connection between my employment, my disability, inquiries from my disability lawyer, and the secret assignment the State had given to its investigator? 

After bringing Ms. LaRose and Ms. Dietrich into the loop, the next morning Ms. Hanson decided to tell a fib. Rather than finally respond to my lawyer’s inquiries about accommodating my disability, Ms. Hanson instead told her she’d been swamped with work, and that of one of the managers had been traveling. At Ms. Hanson’s request, she and Ms. Phelan agreed to meet the following week to discuss my case.

Later that day on May 4, Ms. Hanson forwarded a copy of her fibbing email exchange to Chief Deputy Attorney General Esquibel and several other senior managing attorneys at the Attorney General’s Office. Thus even more of the State’s lawyers had the opportunity to recognize Ms. Hanson’s and Mr. Esquibel’s mistakes, and to mitigate the harms they caused. But none of the lawyers from the Attorney General’s Office ever answered Ms. Phelan’s numerous letters, phone calls, and email messages. 

Instead, on May 5, 2020, Ms. LaRose – the same Human Resources representative who received a copy of my lawyer’s email on May 3 – telephoned me at home. Ms. LaRose reported that the investigation into my sexual orientation discrimination complaint was complete, and told me to show up at the Attorney General's Seattle office the following Monday.

Despite receiving my attorney’s May 3 email directly spelling out the connection between my disability and my workplace behavior, under the Chief Deputy Attorney General’s compromised direction, the State went ahead and finalized the written report about its investigation. The investigation that was supposed to be limited to examining my complaint about discrimination based on sexual orientation. The investigation that instead focused on previously-undisclosed criticisms about my allegedly improper interactions with others in the workplace.

Then on Monday, May 9, 2016, relying on their illegal investigation report despite receiving my disability attorney’s May 3 email, the State handed me a copy of the investigation report before knowingly and wrongfully terminating my employment. Since then, the State’s lawyers have engaged an illegal and unethical cover-up for the purpose of protecting each other and their boss.

Four years later, where are all the players?

·       William Shakespeare is still dead.

·        I’m still a disabled unemployed gay single dad. But I’m beginning to feel Better-ish, all things considered.

·        Senior Counsel Kari Hanson’s distinguished sixteen-year career with the Washington Attorney General’s Office ended expectedly in August 2016 – three years after the legal and ethical mistakes that destroyed my health and career. According to the internet, Ms. Hanson has started her own solo law firm. That’s a typical if unusually delayed outcome for lawyers who get caught making career-ending mistakes. 

·        Shane Esquibel is still employed by the State, where he continues to be shielded from accountability at illegal taxpayer expense. 

·        Bob Ferguson is running for a third term as the Attorney General of Washington.

Regardless of the size of the mistake, some men are simply too big to fit under a bus.

Beyond Bardolatry

The Bible of Bardolatry

Yale humanities professor and literary critic Harold Bloom died last October. That makes me the biggest bardolator alive. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

We English Majors have been worshipping the Bard of Avon for a long time. In his succinct biography Shakespeare, Bill Bryson describes a student play performed at Cambridge University around the time of Hamlet’s London premiere:

The Return from Parnassus contained the words ‘O sweet Mr Shakespeare! I’ll have his picture in my study at the court,’ suggesting that Shakespeare was by then a kind of literary pinup.

It’s not just a crush on a cute writer. [Ed. Note: The cute writer.] It’s a lifelong crush on the works of William Shakespeare – the entertaining plays, the gorgeous poems, the supreme use of language, the inescapable influence on culture, the endless insights about psychology, art, literature, history, killing lawyers, humor…. The list goes on and on.

What sets my devout bardolatry apart from your garden variety fanboy is a shared timeline. Shakespeare and I were born exactly 400 years apart. That makes it easy to figure out how old Shakespeare was at each point in the chronology of his life and career.

According to the parish records in Stratford, William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, with April 23, 1564, traditionally recognized as Shakespeare’s birthday. I was born four centuries and a week later, on May 2, 1964. 

In 1587/1987, we were twenty-three years old, and lost.

In 1596/1996, we were thirty-two years old, and making a name for ourselves in the world.

In 1603/2003, we were thirty-nine years old, busy with our big city careers and our country homes.

In 1620/2020, Shakespeare had been dead for four years, and I’m hiding indoors from the plague.

English Majors are notorious for seeing themselves reflected in their favorite characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Professor Bloom tended to identify with Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra. But the greatest bardolators also find parallels in the few factual fragments about the playwright’s own life that historians have uncovered.

In my case, it’s not just the Class of ’64 timeline thing. Or theatre, or literature, or hostility to lawyers and bad acting. What little we know about Shakespeare himself is eerily familiar.

For example, Will and I each had two daughters and a son, born a couple of years apart. Our fathers are both named John. They grew up on farms, but moved to town where they became successful businessmen. 

Bryson identifies a key developmental milestone I share with Shakespeare:  “something severely unfavourable seems to have happened in John’s business life, for in 1576, when William was twelve, he abruptly withdrew from public affairs and stopped attending meetings.” In 1976, when I was twelve, my father quit his job in Vancouver. My parents moved to Utah and ruined my life. Totally similar to whatever parental blunder traumatized moody tween Shakespeare. (As a Gay Sitcom Dad raising two teen-aged daughters, I happen to be an expert in adolescent drama.)

Fortunately, both William Shakespeare and I recovered from our youthful traumas. As we entered our fifties, we walked away from successful public careers in the big city, and moved eighty-seven miles north to be closer to our families.

Shakespeare family coat of arms

My Bellingham doctor diagnosed me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in November 2015. Earlier this month, I wrote in “Better-ish” about some of the recent improvements in my mental health:

Now I feel like myself, even when I feel unwell. The good news is that most of my fuzzy memories have finally snapped into place. The bad news is that my brain concluded the simplest way to adjust my internal clock was to delete two years from the timeline. It’s sorta like switching to Daylight Savings Time. Or like when England converted from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and eleven days were dropped from September 1752.

A few days later, after all the public libraries in Bellingham closed for coronavirus, I borrowed a stack of books from my mother. I’d recently finished her copy of Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants and passed it on to my pre-pre-med daughter, so I grabbed a few more volumes from Mom’s shelf of the complete works of Bill Bryson. (My mother and I tend to be completists.) 

Considering how many books about Shakespeare I’ve read over the decades, I can’t believe I hadn’t already noticed Bryson’s slim Shakespeare on the shelf. And I can’t believe I hadn’t already made this startling connection: 

Shakespeare was born under the old Julian calendar, not the Gregorian, which wasn’t created until 1582, when Shakespeare was already old enough to marry. In consequence, what was 23 April to Shakespeare would to us today be 3 May.

But wait, you point out, didn’t I just say my birthday is May 2, not May 3? However, I was born at 11 pm in Mountain Time Zone. Which in Stratford-on-Avon would be at 6 am on May 3.

So I really was born exactly four hundred years after William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616, at age fifty-two. Four centuries later, I didn’t die at fifty-two. Instead, I lost my mind when my employers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office placed me in an abusive and illegal “home assignment” in retaliation for seeking a workplace free from discrimination. 

It’s been four very hard and plague-filled years since April 2016. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, these days I’m doing better-ish when it comes to the things that matter most to me, like my family, my writing, and my mental health.

I’ll always be slow about certain things. I didn’t start any of the most important stuff in life until I was a couple of decades older than the prodigious William Shakespeare was four hundred years ago. If nothing else, that means it’s too late to compete with Shakespeare in the youthful fatherhood or romance departments. Like my other favorite author, Jane Duncan, hopefully I’m a late bloomer as a writer, too.

Still, William Shakespeare and I already have numerous traits in common. Two daughters and a son. A lifetime in theatre/gay men’s chorus. Ex-farmer fathers named John. English Major stuff. Disasters. (Nostradamus would say the Globe Theatre burning down in 1613 corresponds to a landslide destroying my dream house on Whidbey Island.)

If you survey the histories of our respective eras, you’ll also see how Shakespeare and I each survived multiple waves of the plague. In fact, just like Will and Kit experienced during the bubonic closures of London’s theatres four hundred years ago, as I write this paragraph it’s a typical Wednesday – but I can’t drive north for Vancouver Men’s Chorus rehearsal or for Show Tune Night. The border, the theatres, the chorus, the schools, the bars, the churches, and everything else in Canada and the States are closed because of a pandemic.

Regardless of our many similarities, there will always be two key differences between William Shakespeare and me:

He’s an immortal genius. I’m not.

He died at age 52. I didn’t.

Which means historians can argue over yet another intriguing fact about Shakespeare that no one will ever know for sure. Could he have made it to age 55 after surviving the Mormons, the gays, midlife Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, single parenthood, and a plague of dishonest lawyers? Because I did.

Here are links to more of my “Doppeler Effect” essays, describing other individuals whose lives have paralleled and/or crossed particular threads of my own story: 

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Gay Mormons" (9/11/17)

“I am Rob Lowe” (9/20/17)

“Chorus Minivan Dad” (3/6/18)

“My Best Friend Paul” (6/7/18)

“About my Yale Law School classmate Brett Kavanaugh” (9/24/18)

"Crossing Paths" (10/7/18)

"Crazy Mormon Mommy Bloggers"  (6/5/19)