hyper parablabla

Today I saw the endocrinologist at St. Mike's. As usual, I send my prayerful thanks to Tommy Douglas - Dr. Josse and his intern Ray were efficient, thorough, personable. My family doctor had done her job, and the results of all the tests were assimilated and presented. At first, the word 'cancer' was mentioned as a possibility, but soon I was told this was not a threat in my case, not to worry. Fine with me.

I have what is apparently quite a common condition called primary hyper-parathyroidism. One of my four tiny parathyroid glands is malfunctioning, leading to a problem with my body's processing of calcium; an operation will remove the offending gland. Overnight in St. Mikes, only one night if all goes well, and a small scar on the neck. My mother just died in a hospital after spending months there; the very thought of lying in a hospital bed makes me want to throw up. But this operation will fix what's wrong, perhaps improve my osteoporosis. A Runfit-loving cheese-monkey like myself should not have full-blown osteoporosis, but I do. So this operation will help bring my calcium back into functioning order. Good news. Lucky me.

Moving right along.

Oh, and don't do yoga, I was told. Could do damage to the spine. Who knew?

Normally, the first person I'd call with all this news would be my mother. She loved medical things, as someone who'd dealt with every particle of her own body at some point or other. She would have been thrilled to discuss all this. My daughter, whom I told instead, is mildly worried. She has other concerns - Eli now not only crawls, he scrambles, and is pulling himself up on tables, sofas, chairs, bookshelves. Her work has just begun.

Last night, my Tuesday home class blessed me and each other with their courage and craft. And tomorrow, just for a treat, I take the train to Ottawa with my dear friend Lani, to begin the distribution, between my brother and me, of my mother's jumble of possessions. Please God, allow me to keep my sense of humour for the entire weekend, until Sunday late afternoon, when we get home. And then Anna has invited Lani and me to her place to eat nachos and drink beer. They'll watch the Superbowl, and I, the fancy footwork of my grandson, whose fresh young parathyroid glands, I hope, work perfectly.

Amour

First - the big news - his mother called this morning to say that Booboo is crawling - forwards, not backwards. Immediately I went on-line to look at baby gates. Glamma must be ready. Because in this kitchen are not only concrete stairs, but a collection of Fiestaware at a toddler's eye level.

Next, he'll be ready for a car.

Sweet Lady Sybil! Say it isn't so! How can life - or Julian Fellowes - be so cruel? Everyone at the Y was talking about it. "The minute he said 'swollen ankles', I knew!" said one indignant woman in the lounge. "That useless snobbish doctor! Shocking!"

Heavens, there's so much going on at Downton. Why has not a single person pointed out that that poor girl had to turn to prostitution because she was left with a baby and no help from anyone? People are so mean. I love how Carson has the best heart in the world except for fallen women, and the nasty valet sobs when he hears about Lady Sybil. As did I. The Bates stuff is getting tiresome, with all that plotting in prison - enough already, let the guy out. Is Matthew taking over the management going to be the way out of Downton for him? Apparently the actor is leaving the series, and I can't see how this will be done, right now; they can't kill him too. So maybe he and Mary fight so badly that they separate.

Or something.

Such a great way to spend Sunday night.

And a great way to spend a hideously mucky Monday afternoon was seeing a film with my dear friend Ken. Mind you, this film - "Amour" - is not for everyone. It's the story of an elderly Parisian couple who face disintegration and death in extreme close-up, and it was pretty rough going for me, especially right now, bringing back so clearly this last year with my mother - the indignities, the diapers and incoherence, the spoonfeeding, the impatience, pity, confusion and fear. Heart-rending.

But it is a brilliant film, a must see, for its writing, direction, filmography, and for the stunning performances of its French leads. Several scenes - one, a tiny scene between the ill old lady and a careless nurse, and her comeuppance - so raw and real, breathtaking. It's a glimpse into the life of the French intelligentsia, with their gorgeous apartment and cultivated lives. The couple were so formal with each other, so dignified and reserved, that I thought they had only recently begun a relationship, not that they'd been married for decades. As with their daughter - in her first scene, I thought she was having a conversation with a man her mother had recently started living with, not her father. They're not like us, those French.

And yet in the end - in this portrait of dignity, fortitude, duty, and great love - they are. We are all alike.

movies and memories

A bright, cold, peaceful Sunday morning. Last year from December to March, we had some sort of indeterminate season with cold bits; this year, it's called winter and it has hit hard. Good news for Bill my homeless friend, who makes his winter money shovelling for the neighborhood. Bill has appeared regularly at my door with his almost toothless grin and his trusty shovel. He fills the bird-feeder while he's out there. The faithful family retainer.

Yesterday's treat - my first long session alone with my 8-month old grandson, now known officially as Booboo. His mother was very busy, so her roommate Holly brought him over and there we were, Glamma and Booboo, for the day. I was ready: the blanket was on the floor covered with toys and books, and in the kitchen, avocado, banana, yogurt, MumMums, Cheerios, and Arrowroots. With him came bottles, diapers, changes of clothes, wet wipes ... The arsenal. All was needed. He cried once, for two seconds, when he hooked himself in the mouth with a toy fishing boat, and I was not paying attention. Otherwise, he played, he ate, we chatted, and then he fell asleep in my arms. I didn't want to put him down.

I did not think I could love any human being more than my two children, but this boy may just prove me wrong. He owns my soul. He is the personification of joy. Okay, a stinky diaper does take the angel choir down a notch. But just a notch.

There was a moment of sheer terror - he managed to scoot himself off the blanket while I was making up a bottle; when I turned around, he had grabbed my bicycle, leaning against the wall. Nightmare images of it falling on him ... How to be vigilant enough?

For once there are no photos; my hands were full.

The night before, I'd had a powerful dream, a brief moment of sleep during a restless night. My father, mother and I were travelling together. At one point, Dad and I sat looking at my mother, who was sewing in the sunshine, stunningly young and beautiful. My heart was pierced. "She's gone!" I cried to my father. "She's gone." And in the dream, I howled in grief, more than I have yet in real life, though in my sleep, tears ran down my cheeks. I was awake enough to be aware of all this, and yet asleep.

Friends have been writing about their own experience of grief. I'm on track.

Last night, after Booboo went home, TCM handed me a gift - two fabulous movies for an evening of vegging out. "Guys and Dolls," the best musical ever written, and, I'm always happy to note, of the same vintage as yours truly - written in 1950. I first saw it in Halifax in about 1962, in an amateur production in which my school music teacher played Adelaide. I loved it so much, I went twice, and have since seen the movie several times and a few stage versions. How can a silly story about smalltime hoods and the sexual negotiations between men and women in a repressed era become so moving and richly musical? And yet it does. The movie cast is sublime, as are the cars in the background. It's one of my life's tragedies that I never got to play Adelaide. "The female remaining single ..." I've been rehearsing it all my adult life.

Then TCM announced "Captains Courageous" with Spenser Tracey and I nearly turned off the set, imagining a Horatio Hornblower type of flick. But though Tracey is saddled with a ghastly curly wig and an inconsistent Portuguese accent, it's a beautiful film about a boy's need for the love and attention of a father, as well as the courage of fishermen. It resonated deeply on many levels. Has there ever been a face as handsome in a kind way as Spenser Tracey's, as masculine and yet sensitive, humorous - and wounded?

PS Just went to Wikipedia to read about "Guys and Dolls," and found another connection. When I went to the British theatre school LAMDA in 1971 - mentioned in my last post - the star of the school was an incandescent actor called Ian Charleson, who later went on to international fame as the Scottish minister in "Chariots of Fire." Despite his effortless superiority to us, his schoolmates, in every theatrical skill, he was sweet, generous and open, and we adored him; the loss was incalculable when he died of AIDS in 1990, at 40. He died just 8 weeks after performing what reputedly was one of the best Hamlets ever.

But I didn't know he was a singer too - and, it turns out, he played Sky in a ground-breaking production of "Guys and Dolls" in London. If I am ever granted 3 wishes, one of them will be to go back in time and see Ian in this production.

The revival opened March 9, 1982, and was an overnight sensation,^[20] running for nearly four years and breaking all box office records.^[21][22] The original cast featured Bob Hoskins as Nathan Detroit, Julia McKenzie as Adelaide, Ian Charleson as Sky and Julie Covingtonas Sarah.^[23] The production won five Olivier Awards, including for McKenzie and Eyre and for Best Musical. Eyre also won the Evening Standard Award, and Hoskins won the Critics' Circle Theatre Award.

Following Ian Charleson's untimely death from AIDS at the age of 40, in November 1990 two reunion performances of Guys and Dolls, with almost all of the original 1982 cast and musicians, were given at the National Theatre as a tribute to Charleson. The tickets sold out immediately, and the dress rehearsal was also packed. The proceeds from the performances were donated to the new Ian Charleson Day Centre HIV clinic at the Royal Free Hospital, and to scholarships in Charleson's name at LAMDA.^[29]

R.I.P. the indomitable Susan Rubes

Sad news: Susan Douglas Rubes, a pioneer of children’s theatre who founded the Young People’s Theatre of Toronto, has died. She was 87. Rubes died in Toronto on Jan. 23, according to a release from YPT.

An actor, producer and director, Rubes founded YPT in 1966 and developed and produced numerous Canadian works for children. She ushered the theatre into its permanent home in 1977 and was its artistic director until 1979 ...

Rubes led the fight to convince Toronto it needed a theatre for young people. She believed that children should be exposed to professional productions of the highest quality, including classic and contemporary works from Canada and around the world.

“It’s for children – it has to be the best,” she is quoted as saying in a history on the YPT website.

Susan Rubes changed my life, and that of several of my best friends. In 1969, as students in the drama club at Carleton University, we performed a one act play called "Interview" at the Canadian Drama League play competition, and won first prize. Susan invited our director, Bob Handforth, to direct it for a professional school tour out of Toronto, and he asked if he could bring much of his original cast with him. When Actor's Equity, after a great deal of arm-twisting, said yes, suddenly Peter, Suzette, Lynn, Karin, Paul and I, clutching our Equity cards, were on our way to Toronto to begin rehearsals. I was 19; the others, as I enjoy pointing out, were much older. Okay, a bit older. We rented a house in the middle of Kensington Market, and spent from January to May touring southern Ontario schools in a bus, with the addition to the cast of the great Heath Lamberts, who much later was a smash on Broadway as the clock in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." 

In September '70, I was back at Carleton picking up the pieces of my academic life when Peter and I were offered another of Susan's tours. Another Christmas day on the way to Toronto, another winter and spring on tour. At that point, I thought, this is REALLY EASY, you get offered jobs and they pay you really well, I guess I should be an actress. To clinch the deal, I auditioned for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and was one of two Canadians accepted that year. The other was R. H. Thomson. 

It was during that difficult year at LAMDA that I began to wonder if this life was, in fact, the right one for me. But not till 1981, with the birth of my daughter, did I leave the stage to go back to university to get an MFA - in creative writing. 

I wish I'd had a chance to thank Susan - not so much for my own trajectory, which perhaps didn't work out all that well, but for all she did in the arts for children. She was indomitable, with ferocious energy. Thank you, Susan Rubes, for all your hard work, your courage, your vision - and your faith in a bunch of green thespians from Ottawa. 

More bad news today: I was at the Y when we learned that Mayor Rob Ford would not be thrown out of office. There was gloom in the TV room of the Health Club. "How the hell did he get elected in the first place?" was the general tenor of the conversation, a question that has been asked countless times, I'm sure. The massive bulk and pea-sized brain of our own human stegosaurus will continue to loom over us all. Have mercy. 

Big news!

Potential AIDS Cure, Discovered By Australian Medical Researchers, Modifies HIV Protein 

Scientists working in a medical research facility in Australia say they may have discovered a therapy to potentially cure AIDS.

Researchers at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, led by Associate Professor Dr. David Harrich, say they have developed a form of gene therapy that turns the HIV protein against itself and ultimately stops it from replicating, according to the Australian Times.

Chris just sent this. How thrilling. Let us pray that it works. And let us never forget the multitudes lost to this deadly virus. In the case of the people I knew in the eighties, many of the most talented of Canada's theatre community, young, full of energy and vision, gone.