It’s good, maybe, that I’ve been too busy living life to write about it? But I haven’t blogged in almost a month? Wow. OK, let’s bullet, and then expand, and this might go over several entries.
- Visiting Durham
- Attending shows
- Thanksgiving
- Christmas prep
- Mikado audition
- and a yucky thumb!
Trip to Durham to visit Dad and Sam was fun! (and unusual in that Sam had just been visiting me). It was my first airport experience with a pacemaker, but it’s not a big deal – when you go through security and are about to step through one of the scanning machines, you say “I have a pacemaker” to a TSA agent and they point you to the machine that won’t kill you affect your device.
Weather was nicer this time – when I went down in the spring, it rained every damn day. Dad and I had a nice dinner out on the first night I was there, but the restaurant was busy and the waitstaff was dumb as mud. When the waitress cleared Dad’s first course, they took his fork and it took asking 3 waiters, one at a time, to get a new one. Food was good, though.
Outlet mall shopping with my dad isn’t the fun event that C and I made it every year, but we went and bought socks and at least looked in some of the other stores. Then we went to Hillsborough to have lunch and look at art galleries. Lunch was at the sort of fancy coffee shop that has real food, but you have to order it at the counter. But we each had a pork sandwich special that was delicious. And it turned out that it was a great weekend to look at art galleries because there was some sort of self-guided art tour happening. One of my low-priority household tasks is replacing some of our decorator-art still lifes (still lives?) with art I actually like – so was keeping an eye out for things I might like to buy. I didn’t buy anything, but at one of the galleries, they were featuring the work of Ryan Raskousas, a local high school student (!) who makes these impressive sculptures of animals out of tools and other found objects. Dad liked the heron so much that a few days later, he went back and bought it.
Dad and Sam and I walked together on two of the mornings, about a three-mile walk each time. They were worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle the hills, what with my newfound heart problem and the recovery from surgery – but I was like, ‘well, I should be able to do this, let’s see what happens’. It was fine. I will say that I’d hoped that the exertion huffing and puffing that had sent me to urgent care in the first place would have gone away with the pacemaker, and it’s definitely better, but it’s not gone yet. It never stops me, not really, but stairs are still big huffpuffers for me. That may just be a matter of gaining strength.
Monday night, Dad and I met with his lady friend Amanda in her wonderful downtown Durham penthouse apartment, filled with interesting art, for drinks – and then out to dinner. She is very artsy and very interesting, I like her a lot. Turns out, to my surprise, that she’s the stepsister of one of my Blue Hill Troupe colleagues! Small world. (She’s also friends with David S, one of my Gilbert & Sullivan community friends who lives in Durham.)
Nice relaxed four-day weekend, easy travel home.
Back to work the next day, but first! My followup cardiology appointment. Again had the experience of a nurse – who’d been one of my nurses in October – checking my vitals and smiling. “Oh, yes, much better now, Mr. Patterson”, she informed me in her Caribbean accent. Then I met with the doctor who’d done the operation, told her that my GP had checked me out and removed my bandages two weeks before. She looked at the incision, nodded as it matched what she thought it should look like, looked at my data and basically all was well. I have a device on C’s nightstand that talks to the pacemaker and sends it to the cloud, so if she sees anything odd, she’ll call me and we’ll figure out what to do next – but right now, I don’t need to do anything except see her in six months.
The next weekend was my first in weeks where I hadn’t either had houseguests or been traveling, so there was much house-stuff to do – but I also went to two matinees!
My buddy Will was doing a fun semi-staged HMS Pinafore with his Utopia Opera. I had had every intention of playing in the orchestra for it*, but had pulled out of that along with all my other horn gigs after the heartquake. But I had a ton of friends in the cast. Will did the same thing he’d done with “Utopia, Ltd.” – both conducting and playing a role (Sir Joseph). My friend Richard Holmes, longtime NYGASP stalwart, delivered his two-hundred-plus times performance (excellent) of Captain Corcoran. Alexis C, another buddy, was an amazing Josephine. It was a lot of fun – not as goofy as I’d expected (the way Utopia Ltd. was) but very entertaining.
*Extremely odd, since Pinafore is one of the most-performed G&S shows, but I’ve never done it. I’ve played rehearsal piano for it, and I’ve sung all the bass/baritone roles in concerts and gatherings at some point or other, but I’ve never been in stage for it, played for it or conducted it. I hope to change this at the earliest opportunity. But it was definitely a bummer to drop out of this one.
Then on Sunday, I went to see the closing performance of VLOG’s “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder”, a show I’d loved on Broadway ten years ago and was anxious to see how it played in a community theater setting. Very well, it turns out, particularly with this very strong cast. For those not in the know, it’s the same story as “Kind Hearts and Coronets”, with an outcast with a rich family connection doing in every family member in his way to inheriting the title and fortune – and one actor plays all the family members. It’s quite funny, and my dear friend Chaz knocked the role(s) of all the family members out of the park. Dear friend Martin was in the very busy small ensemble of six, and had lots of featured moments. The audience was filled with friends of mine, so it was a delightful experience.
Yep, that’s enough for this entry… part 2 coming up Real Soon Now.
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