Stella

Stella, our beloved cat,
Who always went tuxedo-clad,
After eleven lives, has passed,
Leaving us alone and sad.

We Had Them Laughing Last Night

The Matchmaker is your one and only chance,
To see me as the lead in a romance.
You’ll watch as I, an old and cranky miser,
Get ambushed by my social-life advisor.

Another Opening

Dress rehearsal’s done, it’s in the bag.
Now let’s hope we open without a snag.

The Matchmaker, by Thornton Wilder

Here’s a startling fact:
In this show I act.
I play a man named Horace,
A sort of tyrannosaurus,
Who endlessly rails about folly
But ends up outsmarted by Dolly.

Harvest Time

Most seasons have one name
And then there’s autumn/fall.
Can this be explained at all?
And who, pray tell, is to blame?

Tomorrow

I think the autumn equinox
Should be locked up in some dark box,
And summer needs to stick around
About six months, till spring is found.

The Root of the Problem

It’s my belief that “root canals” are dreary.
I much prefer the one that’s known as “Erie”.

Surge

Sometimes when acting a scene, I will feel a startling wave of emotion, emotion I didn’t plan on feeling, but that pertains to the character’s situation. The trigger is acting with another person, which has an amplifying effect. This is a hazardous moment for remembering my lines! Fortunately it’s mostly something that happens in rehearsal.

By the time we’re on stage
I know what to expect
And my concentration’s
Less likely to get wrecked.

Show Closing, Show Opening

Well, the 4-day Hale Park Theatre production of O'Brien & O'Brian is complete. I'm sad to wrap it up because it was so much fun while it lasted. We had nice big audiences every day, and on Saturday night we filled almost every seat. There was lots of laughter every night, and I heard from the cast that they had a lot of fun doing the show. It's the nature of live theater to be ephemeral, of course, but it's so intense while it's happening.

There is no rest for me, however, because I acting in a show - in the same festival at Hale - in about a week and a half. I'm playing Horace Vandergelder in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, which is the basis of the big hit musical, Hello Dolly. I'm playing the male lead, and of course at the end I am engaged to Dolly herself. It's a big part with lots of lines. I'm just about there on having all my lines by heart, which is good.

I've been pounding my lines
Into my brain
And it's holding up fine
Under the strain.

Hale Theatre’s O’Brien & O’Brien

Mike Murphy, who directed, has a sure sense of what’s funny, and he was working with a cast he knew, so I figured this’d would be s very funny production. I was right.

O’Brien & O’Brian opened to a great crowd at Hale.
I’m proud to say they laughed without fail.
We all had a blast.
Thank you, dear cast.

Worldwide

“There are members of the flat earth society
All around the globe.”
Boasts of that variety
Hurt my frontal lobe.

Disease Not Understood

A lot of money has poured into Alzheimer's research. So far, it looks like not much practical progress has been made. A few drugs have been tested, but not successfully.

So I thought this NPR story was interesting: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

There re some statistical reasons to think something infectious could be involved, but it's certainly just another hypothesis at this point. There's one line of thought that Alzheimer's is come kind of late-life reactivation of the roseola virus - a rash that most babies get. For some reason the roseola virus shows up a lot in the brain tissue of Alzheimer's victims.

Could the dreaded disease
Have a connection
With a childhood rash
Or some other infection?

But Do You Feel The Condition Is Real?

You might think that a fear of palindromes would be called palindrome-o-phobia. But someone came up with this: aibohphobia.

It seems distinctly unkind
That the phobia’s name is designed
To unsettle the sufferer’s mind!

Nike

It's interesting how a big publicly held company will decide to go all-in behind some controversial issue. On the one hand, they risk alienating people on the other side of the controversial issue. Hence the slogan, "Get woke, go broke." The additional danger is that your own partisans may turn on you, when it turns out that you're really just another profit-seeking company without a truly deep commitment to "sacrificing everything".

There's a theory that soon there will be liberal shoe brands and conservative shoe brands. Ditto with all consumer products.

Shoes do come in left and right,
But keep your politics out of sight!

Sat Pic

Plane flying over the local woods,
Cruising by my neighborhood.

This surprised me. I don't know why it should. My neighborhood is on the flight path to Midway Airport. Why shouldn't one of those Southwest 737's show up in a satellite view? And yet - I've never noticed a jetliner in the satellite views of my own neighborhood before.

This one popped up at the USA Track & Field website, where they have a "Map It" application that lets you draw your running routes on a map or satellite view. That's what I was in the middle of doing when I noticed that big plane. You can see the blue line I was drawing on Longwood Drive, parallel to the plane. There's something a little bit funny about the left wing of the plane - there's a dark splotch on it. I don't know if that's some kind of artifact of the photography process, or what it is.

I see them everyday, but from the ground.
Here my point of view is all turned round.

Memorizing a Part

Got in a visit to the beach.
Got in some swimming in the lake.
Lay in the sun and tried to teach
Myself my lines beyond mistake.

Richard Frisbie

I attended my godfather's funeral yesterday. Richard Frisbie, 91.

My sister Kathy and I went with my father, who was the best man at Richard Frisbie's wedding.

He made his living as a writer, which is no mean feat.

His son, Tom, gave a charming remembrance of him. One of the funnier lines was that his father was "Google search before there was Google." In other words, the man was a walking encyclopedia.

It was a sad but loving event
Celebrating a life well-spent.