Mom is reading Dad all the lovely birthday messages people have posted for him on Facebook

... while Bitch Kitty sits in her favorite perch on his shoulder to help him listen.

Don’t look now—or don’t even look at me when I try to take your damn picture—but someone we know is 15 years old today

That’s 76 in bitch years.

Happy half birthday to me!

I just sang Happy Birthday to this cat

Happy 48th birthday to my little sister!

I don't know how this happened, but she is somehow old enough to be the mother of a high-school senior and a college junior who are two of the most delightful, caring, fiercely loved young adults I know; a pillar of our community through her new job with the St. Luke’s Foundation and Unity Point and her volunteering through her church and many other civic organizations; a maker of world-class scotcharoos; an anchor to her extended family; and sister to a brother who is constantly in awe of her and everything she does. Her only real fault is she loves her terrible cat. But we’ll forgive her for that just this one day of the year to focus instead on how old she’s getting.

Happy 116th birthday to Grandma Ester!

She could sew a set of matching pajamas for her grandchildren (with cellophane-wrapped quarters in the neatly turned besom pockets), roll out crisp sugar cookies so thin you could read through them, make homemade raspberry-apple jelly sealed under paraffin in individually labeled jars, braid a gorgeous—and perfectly symmetrical—rug out of scrap fabric, grow a garden of snapdragons in a spectrum of fascinating colors, and patiently, politely lose endless games of Clue with her matching-pajama-clad grandchildren—usually all in the same day. We had four wonderful, loving grandparents, but our grandfathers died when my sister and I were very young, Grandma Marie lived in Colorado, and Grandma Ester lived only two hours away—and ended up living with us as she started declining late in her long, remarkable life—so I knew her the best. We’ve finally outgrown our besom-pocket pajamas and spent our last cellophane-wrapped quarters, but we now have a fourth generation of her descendants reverently making paper-thin sugar cookies on her well-loved baking sheets.

#CurrentlyReading

My co-workers might be starting to suspect I’m gay

Also: My birthday doughnuts had rainbow sprinkles. But the doughnuts from my plate are all gone. I might need to go to the kitchen to get more.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY ...

I’m not sure what’s most disturbing about this picture: the bar mitzvah clown smile, the Disney villain eyes, the dinner-plate glasses, the scarecrow neck, the weird-ass way I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist or the pink-on-white shirt that hung on me with all the sex appeal of a Mayan burial gown on an immolated corpse. The girls on my floor (Loser alert! I was living in the Foreign Language House, a co-ed dorm filled with language dorks who stayed in on Friday nights studying verb declensions!) had decorated my door with pink 21s. Probably to match the shirt. Or the homosexuality. I’m not sure where I got the wine, but I am sure I had only a sip of it to celebrate reaching such a milestone age. Because actually drinking a whole glass of alcohol on my 21st birthday would have been something the cool kids would do.

Welp. I’ve emptied the cat box and taken out the garbage for the last time as a 50-year-old.

So the bloom’s off THAT lily.

Facebook has reminded me that I’ve apparently begun commemorating the night before each birthday with a selfie next to the girls. So here we are again. Looking gay as a purse full of kittens.

What I want for my birthday, in no particular order:
• Less stuff
• Someone objective to help me have less stuff
• A hellfire-damning Mueller report
• A fresh start with a normal kitten
• One single little sentence in which autocorrect hasn’t Needlessly capitalized something
• Less stuff
• A bedroom that I’ve finally painted rich-people blue to cover its current state of urine-sample gold
• Someone to help me find the right shade of rich-people blue
• My old abs
• Lots of cake
• But without compromising my old abs
• A Broadway dance career
• Less stuff
• Abs

Next to Normal—a searingly brilliant rock opera examining the lives of a family whose mother is struggling with bipolar depression—opened on Broadway 10 years ago today

The show beautifully captures the swings between the ridiculous highs and the soul-crushing lows the disease brings to us living in it and to the selfless teams of people who care for us.

I’m fortunate enough to have seen the original production, very soon after I’d been diagnosed as bipolar and had found myself caught in a rather terrifying struggle to wrap my confused, exhausted brain around the fact that mental illness was no longer a mysterious entity in other people’s lives; it was MY LIFE, and I had no idea how to manage it or what potential and very real horrors to expect from it.

The musical is rough to experience from any perspective, but seeing it for the first time tore me apart ... and then put me back together with its closing anthem, “Light,” which features an almost casually placed lyric that is at once devastating and hopeful and never fails to sneak up on me and emotionally gut me even though I know it’s coming: “The price of love is loss / but still we pay / we love anyway.”

Back when I saw the show on Broadway, selfies were new and weird and shameful—and for you young folks, it was the Middle Ages when our smart phones had single cameras that didn’t let us see on our screens what our selfies would look like so we just had to hold our phones in the air and hope for the best—so I took this selfie as one-shot quickly and discreetly as I could to ensure an entire city of complete strangers wouldn’t judge me. It turned out rather well, although I cut off the last letter of the sign. Which means as far as any of you know, I actually just saw a knockoff production called Next to Norma:

Coe College in Cedar Rapids opened a production of Next to Normal last weekend that runs through this weekend. I was asked to have a QA with the cast a few weeks ago to help them create hopefully more informed characters, and I’m honored to be giving talkbacks with the audiences after every performance this coming weekend—starting this Thursday, April 18, which is my birthday, and I can’t think of a better way to keep my mind off the number fifty (ahem) one. I’d add a link here, but I can’t get one to load on my phone that I can copy. So google it and come see the show if you can. The show will change you.

Day after day,
We'll find the will to find our way.
Knowing that the darkest skies
Will someday see the sun.
When our long night is done,
There will be light.

Happy birthday, Stephen Sondheim!

Thank you for redefining musical theater. For redefining music. For redefining theater.

Thank you for composing music that's at once asymmetrical and balanced, halting and fluid, atonal and lush, messy and perfect.

Thank you for finding lyrics that explore the outer limits of rhythm and structure and rhyme, that tell a story or define a character or celebrate a moment or break a heart in sometimes just a handful of words, that always seem fresh, that always seem timeless, that always seem effortless.

Thank you for creating an apotheosis of creative and intellectual order, design, tension, composition, balance, light and harmony.

Thank you for inspiring as only you can an enraptured young writer to think outside his own thoughts, to feel outside his own feelings, to never stop searching for the perfect word or the lyrical phrase or the essential defining idea in a universe of creative entropy, to always make sure he's proud of how he creates and proud of what he writes.

And thank you for the phrase that I rely on almost daily to turn an undefined someday into a compelling now ... to pull me out of inertia and propel me sometimes through a bipolar fog and sometimes just through my own complacency to run a marathon, broaden my perspective, take on a challenging writing project, upgrade to a difficult tap class, find a solution, emerge unscathed or at least unbroken, or some days to just show up.

Careful the things you say; children will listen. And sometimes they'll turn your words into kick-ass tattoos.

Feel the flow,
Hear what's happening:
We're what's happening!
Long ago
All we had was that funny feeling,
Saying someday we'd send 'em reeling.
Now it looks like we can!
Someday just began.

Happy 334th birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach!

Fun Bach fact 2: The formal title of every work composed by Bach is followed by a BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis or Bach-Works-Catalogue) number. First published in 1950 by Wolfgang Schmieder--who was probably very boring at parties--the BWW system assigned a unique number to each of the 1,126 known written works of Bach. Unlike the far-more-useful-in-my-humble-opinion Köchel catalogue that assigns numbers to every known work of Mozart chronologically, the BWW assigns its numbers by genre. Which isn't even a German word.

Happy 334th birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach!

Fun Bach fact 1: Johann Sebastian Bach is considered to be one of the definitive composers of the Baroque Period in music, which lasted from 1600 until Bach's death in 1750. Following the Renaissance Period, which explored independent, interweaving melodic lines in a style known as polyphony, Baroque music introduced the concept of tonality, where music was written in an established key. The highly ornamental and often improvised music of the Baroque followed the key-based chord progressions played by the lower instruments of the basso continuo.

And though all symphonic music from the Baroque Period forward is collectively known as "classical music," the official Classical Period as we define it today directly followed the Baroque, lasting from 1750 to 1825. Its definitive composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I’LL BE BACH WITH ANOTHER FUN FACT SOON!

Twen. Ty.

Twenty—HOW IS IT ALREADY TWENTY?—years ago today I sat alone in my dining room with my phone pressed tight to my ear for my first listen to the cooing, contented breaths of my newborn nephew as he lay warm and pink and loved on my sister's chest two massive states away. I was an uncle. And I was instantly hooked. My little nephew and I (and later his precious little sister) have spent the majority of the last 20 years living in separate cities, but the time we've spent together through those years has been a steady progression of googly sounds, tosses in the air, impressively hearty belly laughs, long walks playing 1-2-3 Whee!, enough firemen toys and clothes to outfit a three-county volunteer brigade, underpants jokes, heroic efforts to make Apples to Apples card pairings inappropriate enough to elicit more of the aforementioned belly laughs, faithful monthly 529 payments, Mickey Mouse waffles, random uncle ‘n’ nephew meals at Village Inn, morally corrupting meals at Ed Debevic's and Dick's Last Resort, baseball games, show-choir concerts, hand-me-downs, and now a mature adult friendship that has come full-circle to the extent that we pretty much spend all our texting time exchanging the grownup equivalent of underpants jokes. He and I are currently in that brodude phase where we rarely exchange hugs and I'd somehow feel weird telling him to his face that I love him. But I love him. And this close, personal social-media post counts as one giant lean-in-don't-touch-and-pat-pat-pat bro hug. My once eternally jovial, read-to-me lap-sitting boy has grown up, successfully navigated his awkward years, and emerged as a well-informed scholar, a golden-armed pitcher, a freakishly tall monster and—as you can see in this last pic—a dangerous lady killer who somehow thinks fly fishing in the dark is fun. He's a great kid with a kind heart and a confident gait and a wicked curve ball and he's all grown up and gonna take on the world. By all accounts he’s thriving in his sophomore year in college—he just returned bursting with stories from a fascinating J-term in Indonesia—and we all delight in his texts that are a mix of proud academic accomplishments, insightful political commentary, excited details about the baseball games he’s pitched or pretty much anything else about his favorite sports teams, the occasional reports about his life in college ... and the occasional silences that tell us he’s off finding his way in—and making the most of—his life in college. And we all hope he comes back often for some more belly laughs and underpants jokes.

I got to spend the evening with the blurry Miss Bridget!

And with my nephew who came home from college to celebrate his birthday and we rarely get to see him blah blah blah BUT HOW ADORABLE IS MISS BRIDGET!

Happy birthday to my mom!

Happy 78th birthday to my tirelessly awesome mom who--not to make this about me after only nine words--has made it her personal mission to coordinate doctors, dole out ever-changing (seriously--they have a history of changing pretty much every week, though they seem to have leveled out for the time being) prescriptions, endure hours of medically related on-hold music, battle insurance companies, dig deep into online drug-interaction research, and sometimes just pour orange juice and fold laundry for her eternally grateful--though sometimes exhaustedly unable to show it--big ol' bipolar son, who undeniably couldn't survive this train ride without her.

When she's not enjoying that little hobby, she's a devoted grandmother to the--and I swear I'm being empirically objective here--smartest, awesomeist, above-averageist, talentedist children ever to exchange inappropriate texts with their compulsively corrupting uncle who once again managed to make this tribute about himself. She and my dad are also emotional and moral and eternally inspiring community pillars who waste no time securing donated coats or shoes or furniture or shelter or food or transportation or bipolar-caregiver emotional support for sometimes complete strangers who desperately need it. In that vein, she also sometimes brings unnecessary butter to my sister's house; buys my dad an ever-expanding library of V-neck sweaters in a gradient palette of dark dad colors; dotingly acquiesces to our relentlessly bellicose cat's increasingly finicky tastes in wet food, blankets and inconvenient places to vomit; and occasionally indulges herself in post-season vests from the Talbots clearance rack. She loves her family unconditionally and we love her unconditionally back, even though she dances with her wrists out and puts onion salt in everything she cooks.

Last year she celebrated being a 40-year breast-cancer survivor, and I'm posting this picture from her everyone-had-to-wear-pink 30-year survivor celebration not because we all look young and attractive in it--but now that you mention it, I guess we do--but because it radiates the profound joy she brings to her family, her community and everyone she comes in contact with. Except the cat, who demands that her tuna be prepared only with the white sauce from the pink can, which is laboriously difficult to find.

My blood starts pumpin'

I hate to brag, but eight years ago when I saw the 9 to 5 Broadway tour in Chicago, not only did Dolly Parton walk right by me in the lobby, but it was her birthday and I *personally* (well, along with 1,799 dear friends) sang “Happy Birthday” to her.

Today in NO!

We got Dad an Echo for his birthday in October, and he’s been delightedly asking it to play every song or musical group that’s ever occurred to him ever since.

Unfortunately, he’s run out of acceptable material to listen to, because he just asked Alexa to play an open-ended run of Ferrante & Teicher, and NO! We might as well install a Formica-paneled elevator in the living room and ride it in endless uncomfortable silence as the dulcet F&T song stylings play unsettlingly on low-fi speakers in the background.

In the time it took me to type this, we’ve endured “The Way You Look Tonight,” a samba-flavored reinterpretation of the theme from “A Summer Place” and, as we speak, something Alexa just informed me is called “African Echoes” on bongos and zithers and endless waves of profound cultural discomfort.

NO!

That. Little. Outfit.

Happy 17th birthday to my delightful niece, who has grown from being a squirmy toddler who refused to be snuggled to an adorable little girl who charmed everyone into giving her cookies and hosted clown- and cheerleader-themed birthday parties to an inquisitive student who’s rocked at basketball and tennis and cello and show choir and debate to a kind, talented, brilliant young woman whose passions for academics and social justice (and I suppose I should mention the Dodgers) inspire all of us to be better people.