Another performing adventure has ended at my beloved Paramount Theatre, and once again I stopped before I packed up and left to take a picture of this awesome door

It’s literally where a hole was cut high into the side of the gilded, lavishly baroque auditorium (specifically an alcove above the audience-left mezzanine) to link it to the austere new addition with all of its modern dressing rooms and bathrooms and showers and elevators and laundry facilities and its comfortably appointed green room with refrigerators and a wide third-floor window offering a southern view of downtown Cedar Rapids. I love how you can stand where I took this picture right next to a sleek stainless steel elevator surrounded by the clean walls and neutral carpet tiles of the modern addition and peer through this door and see the brilliant reds and golds of the rococo carpeting that hint at the breathtaking, venerable grandeur waiting just around the corner.

I grew up in awe of—and in love with—the Paramount Theatre, and I’m so thrilled and honored and humbled not only to get to perform on its century-old stage and enjoy the distinct privilege of looking out into the vast sea of lustrous golds and merlot velvets of its auditorium on a happily regular basis, but also to see first-hand the backstage additions and upgrades and enrichments to the expanded facility that will take it—as I see through the metaphor of this door—beautifully into its next century.

This happy (relatively) warm-weather memory popped up in my Facebook memories today

(The Chicago Marathon is in October, so I have no idea why I initially posted this memory in January. Perhaps because it warmed my heart.) I still have this shirt, but I have no idea when or where I'd wear it again. I tried to give it to my nephew and niece to sleep in when they were kids, but they WEREN'T HAVING IT. Draw your boundaries where you can, I guess. Just don't expect me to ever call you Jake and cheer you on, you two ...

Throwback Tuesday: Close Shave Edition

I'm in The Full Monty now ... then 9 to 5 ... then my 15th year in Cedar Rapids' annual Follies song-and-dance extravaganza. I've spread myself a bit too thin this spring as far as rehearsal availability goes though, so I'll be a pit singer in this year's Follies--where I won't have to wear costumes, worry about my hair or even shave. But Facebook just reminded me there was a time when I not only had to worry about shaving for the show BUT I HAD TO DO IT ONSTAGE. I can't quite remember why, though.

So apparently I’ve consistently been pretty naked on stage every January since time immemorial

because Facebook just gave me THIS memory from seven years ago when I tapped to “Rubber Ducky” in a flesh-colored speedo covered in soap-suds-colored tulle with a bunch of equally almost-naked tappers wearing rubber-duckie butts:

Pro tip: Never tap in the presence of bubbles ... unless you want to put yourself at risk for slipping during your Maxie Fords, breaking every bone in your body and ending up in the ER wearing nothing but soap-suds-colored tulle.

The Hillary/Horse'sAss debate was two years ago today

Facebook memories shows that I live-blogged my color commentary as I watched it. I didn't realize Snifflin' Don's "very good people" blather has been an established through line in the fiction of his presidency.

The highlights:

8:24 pm
Hillary's talking in paragraphs. Donald's just yelling the same interruptions over and over. #SniffingDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

8:35 pm
"Trumped-Up Trickle Down" gets points for alliteration and conceptual clarity, but it's too rhythmically bumpy to catch on. My money's on "Deplorable Don." #SnifflingDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

8:44 pm
When did #SnifflingDonald suddenly get interested in infrastructure? That's a four-syllable word. And it's nothing he can electroplate with gold and slap his name on in seven-foot letters. #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

8:48 pm
"Law and Order"! He finally said it. Now I can mark it off on my bingo card. Next up? My money's on "The Generals." #SnifflingDonald #SniffleGate

9:00 pm
UGH. Here we go again. The NRA is "very very good people and they're protecting the Second Amendment." Since when do "very very good people" insist that "a well-regulated militia" means "citizens with assault rifles"? That's bastardizing the Second Amendment, not protecting it. Only an anus-lipped sociopath would confuse "bastardizing" with "protecting."

9:06 pm
Birther bullshit? Still? It was--and continues to be--a meaningless distraction for people too stupid and lazy to understand NATO. But it does have the bonus benefit of being a convenient code for helping sentient people suss out racists. #SnifflingDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

9:25 pm
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG. #SnifflingDonald just spent 90 seconds yelling like a feral boob monkey about his temperament! And also his temperament! Plus his temperament! #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

9:36 pm
"She doesn't have the stamina," says the guy hemorrhaging snot like a man with end-stage syphilis. #SnifflingDonald #DeplorableDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

9:46 pm
#SnifflingDonald postulates that the DNC could have been hacked by "someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds." What does it matter how much the bed weighs? #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

2018
Look! I made a calendar that says I didn't rape anybody for a whole month in college! (Oops. That was Kavanaugh. I get my rapists mixed up sometimes.)

....aaaand just to rub it in

This successful-Disney-half-marathon memory popped up today on Facebook. But check out those big yellow Mickey buttons I made for my Mickey-red shorts!

I’d forgotten about this post

I’d forgotten about this day, this episode, this helpless despondency ... probably as soon as it melted into the ocean of some-better-some-worse days, episodes and helpless despondencies that I’ve navigated my way through over the last decade. I’m coming up on the one-year anniversary of starting THE med cocktail: the one that—while still not perfect—has kept me overwhelmingly functional and present and foundationally able to live and participate and just BE. I’m thankful for the pharmacology, I’m thankful for the determination of my family, I’m thankful for the understanding and support of everyone around me ... but it’s KILLING me that I didn’t proofread this before I posted it, and though it’s a perfectly preserved time capsule of a day and an episode and a helpless despondency, it’s taking everything in me not to go back and edit it today.

This is the face of near-catastrophic bipolar depression. This is also a brain dump of a Facebook post that may or may not be a shameless plea for affirmation or an embarrassingly disjointed documentation of my current inability to generate linear thought. I haven't decided yet. Because I haven't written it yet. And I don't know where to start.

I fell over getting out of my car this morning at work. I opened the door, grabbed the frame to pull myself up and immediately lost all sensation of the direction of gravity, spinning to my left, rolling against the rear door and hitting my head on the door frame on my way to the ground. I've felt a little off-balance all week since my doctor doubled one of my meds on Monday but this was the first time I went full-pavement.

My right hand is slowly losing its ability to function. Last week I couldn't push the button on the key fob to unlock my car door. Last weekend I couldn't hold on to a tube of chap stick hard enough to pull the cap off. Last night I couldn't pick anything up with my chopsticks at the restaurant where we celebrated my brother-in-law's birthday. This morning -- after realizing I was plummeting faster than I could manage to control at work -- I couldn't pull the key out of the ignition when I got home.

I have no idea if any of this is related to being bipolar, changing meds or something entirely unrelated, but it's the easiest to explain.

My depressive episodes are mostly about fogginess (I get lost physically and mentally, I forget stuff like things I promised to do or why my parents are gone for the night) and abject despondency (everyone I know hates me, I don't care if I live or die). Fortunately, I've been doing this a long time and I can look at it all objectively -- no matter how acute or systemic or visceral or urgent the feelings are -- and know with slightly foggy certainty that none of it is real and it will all pass and if I can just find a blanket and a dark corner and a couple of uninterrupted hours I'll be emotionally drained but highly functional.

I'm a 48-year-old man who after a 15-year advertising career in Chicago moved home to Iowa ostensibly to care for his blind father but more as it turns out to be cared for as a mentally ill person by his parents. On paper, I hate everything in that sentence. In reality, I'm currently sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree with both my parents and Bitch Kitty and I'm so thrilled I get to share so much of my adult life with them and that alone helps me rebound when I spiral out of control.

It has taken me over two hours of intense concentration to write this. But I'd already napped for five hours and writing this gave me something relatively constructive to do instead of stewing in self pity. I know I probably spend way too much time on here talking about being bipolar but it helps me clear my head and organize my thoughts and in some ways make myself accountable for my own mental health. And it's even helped me bond with a number of you who have confided in me about your own struggles with mental illness. You call me "brace." I call myself "unfiltered." But if any of us finds value in my ramblings, it helps compensate for the fact that I've probably scared away every eligible gay man in Linn and Johnson counties.

600 paragraphs ago, I said I didn't know where this post was going. Almost three hours later, I don't have a clear recollection of where it wandered to wind up here. And I'm not going to proof or edit it so when I emerge from this episode I can maybe see how the depressed me kicks through the brambles and strings together thoughts. In the mean time, I have my blanket and dark corner and I'm finally sleepy again. For those of you still with me, thank you for your friendship and support and kind words. And good-night.

When you oversleep

... and you’re so late to the gym that you have to cancel your trainer at the last minute, your obvious first order of priority is to repost a proud Facebook memory from the middle of the Disney half marathon you ran a year ago.

Sigh.

 

I miss the guileless insouciance of our younger days at Crochet Camp where we’d while away our afternoons sitting back-to-back against a sturdy sapling in our geo-patterned macramé leotards with nothing to do but contemplate our place in the natural beauty around us, our heads as cocked as our emerging youth and the lives awaiting us as hard as the tree keeping us upright. I look back fondly on those warm-but-not-too-warm-for-macramé summer days and wonder what our younger, less-constrained-by-the-simple-gifts-of-natural-fibers-and-neutral-colors selves would think of us now. But we can’t go back. We can never go back.

Follies Fosse flashback

Follies is five days away, and nobody is safe from my relentlessly jazz-handed posts this week. Nobody. Not even you.

Did someone say Follies? Because oh my god I have a Follies memory right here that I can share! Here I am backstage with my indefatigable swing partner Jill in the last Follies I did before I moved to Chicago and she eventually moved away to parts west but I came back so you could enjoy my Follies posts you're welcome. Jill looks all wholesome and ready to six-count her way into the hearts of millions in this picture while I look all awkwardly trynabe sexy in my Fosse black and never-did-fit bowler hat. But that's the magic of theater: decades-apart dance styles and a little bit too much boyblush crossing hurriedly backstage like two ships in the night who pause for a huggy picture even though ships don't have arms.

We have Fosse stuff this year too! Get your tickets already at www.crfollies.com