Vacation To Paradise

I revised this based on comments from my sister, Robin, and my husband, Joe, who witnessed all this and corrected my faulty memory.

I was looking for something to read at Morgantown's downtown library on June 1. I've been reading novels from The Washington Post' s "50 Notable Works of Fiction" in the November 20th edition of the paper, plus "The 10 Standouts of 2022 ." I've read three of the fiction standouts, one of the non-fiction standouts, and I had read three of the other "50 Notable Works of Fiction." I found Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise on the shelf.  I was put off by its 704 page length, but I had three weeks, with a renewal for another three, so why not? 

Joe and I were planning on a vacation in June. We planned for the 11th and 12th with my sister in Greenbelt, Maryland, the 13th in Baltimore County where we planned a lunch and dinner with long-time friends, and then a week in New York City visiting with friends and family. The original plan was to come back tomorrow, Thursday, June 22.

Yanagihara's book is in three parts: 1893, 1993 and 2093. They all take place in a house on Washington Square in Manhattan, with connections in the second and third parts to Hawaii, and all the people seem to be related, in fact, there is a character named David Bingham in each section of the book, sometimes more than one character with that name. Most of the men are gay, and even in 1893, in accepted same-gender marriages. This kept my interest, but as I went along, the plots got darker and more involved.

We met Seema and Chris for lunch Monday in Howard County, not far from my sister, in a vast development that didn't exist when I lived in Maryland. Seema and I dated in high school, and just when things were looking serious in college, I couldn't handle it. Chris lived with me and six other men in a house near Hopkins our sophomore year, and we shared an apartment junior year. He lives in Howard County with his wife. They have two grown children. Seema lives where my mother lived in suburban Baltimore after my father died; her boyfriend of many years lives in a restored old neighborhood near downtown Baltimore. It was great seeing both of them. Joe has met them both. Robin and Seema were friends and Robin knows Chris from way back.

Tuesday I thought we would take it easy. We were driving up to Baltimore and meeting my friends for lunch and other friends for dinner on Wednesday. I thought we would have time to stop at the cemetery to see where my parents are buried. I try to go every year. We were all a little restless, and since we were in Prince George's County, we thought to visit the county seat, Upper Marlboro, still a kind of sleepy southern town when most of the county is just an extension of Washington, D.C. 

We visited Darnall's Chance, a house museum dating from 1742. It was closed, but Robin knocked on the door and the people who worked for the Park Service offered us a brief tour for two dollars each. Robin gave them ten dollars and the three of us looked over the house. The guides also recommended a restaurant up the hill, a few blocks out of the center of town. I had a mushroom and Swiss cheese burger and a bag of Utz's potato chips, food I normally don't eat. We napped back home, had a light dinner and watched Jeopardy and ABC News, which Robin has on DVR. 

I continued reading my book, although as I got into the last part, it became more and more disturbing. Charles, one of the characters, writes letters to James in "New Britain" between 2043 and 2089. There are a series of pandemics, with ever harsher rules set out by the government. In Manhattan, the East and Hudson Rivers periodically flood the city; it's so hot by April that one must wear a "cooling suit" to go out in the air. 

I tried to sleep, but I felt edgy and nervous, then chilled, although it wasn't cold in the house. About 1:30, I started throwing up-a lot, and frequently, going on for hours. I looked up 24-hour walk-in clinics, but I couldn't find one nearby. Robin and Joe were fast asleep. Joe woke up about 6:30, and I was explaining to him what had happened, when I felt another wave coming on and ran to the bathroom. I didn't make it. Joe found me sprawled on the floor in the hallway. I had passed out. Robin woke up, made a few calls and told us which emergency room to go to. 

The hospital was what seems to be the typical nightmarish American hospital - long waits, dingy looking, unhelpful staff. The did a bunch of tests, pumped me with fluids and sent me back after 1 P.M., six hours after we arrived. By then, the waiting room was standing room only. Robin and Joe were sure the problem was that I ate an eight-ounce burger, something I just about never do. Robin cancelled the meals Wednesday with my friends online, and I canceled the hotel later. I was a wreck. We ended up canceling New York, involving a series of phone calls. We stayed at Robin's until Friday the 16th, when we were strong enough to eat regularly and drive home. By then, Robin was feeling dizzy and Joe wasn't feeling too well either. I drove all the way home Friday, while Joe mostly slept. He later took one of the anti-nausea pills I had gotten from the local pharmacy in Greenbelt.

In To Paradise, there are a series of illnesses that kill off large numbers of people. The first David is raised by his grandfather because his parents died in the 1870s of some widespread disease. In the second part, the gay men are coping with AIDS, although I don't think they call it that. And in the third part, there are a series of pandemics (like the one from 2020, although that is not mentioned) throughout the rest of the twenty-first century. People lose their freedom because they are quarantined and the regime cracks down harshly on any dissent. Life becomes gradually more and more miserable.

Being sick last week, (better now, but still tired and with some of the post-COVID symptoms I had in the fall and winter) I think about the warnings, not just from fiction, but from scientists about where the human race is heading, and how we will deal with it. It's scary.

Meanwhile, we are hoping to reschedule New York for early August, and I've picked up another dystopian novel from the Best Fiction list, where tourists in New York in 2079 see The Statue of Liberty, now underwater, from a boat.

To Paradise is much more complicated than I described and the writing is beautiful. I don't want to scare anyone away from it.

Jeanne Manford and P.F.L.A.G.

 The April 17 issue of The New Yorker had an article about Jeanne Manford, the founder of PFLAG, friends and Parents of Lesbians and  Gays. She started in 1972 at a Gay Pride March in New York, in support of her then-21 year old son Morty, who died from complications of AIDS in 1992, at age 41.  I wrote a letter to the New Yorker, which Joe signed also, after making some grammatical corrections. Here's the letter:

"We were moved by Kathryn Schulz' beautiful tribute to Jeanne Manford, the founder of PFLAG. We both marched in the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay RIghts, but we didn't meet until 2005. By that time, we had dealt with our parents'  discomfort, cycled through jobs where we were not respected, and survived the worst of the AIDS crisis. 

"Schulz reminded us of the sorrow we carry with us of the loss of friends to AIDS. We celebrate Jeanne Manford and others who stood up for us and our community, and we thank Kathryn Schulz for reminding us that we have survived and thrived. We kvell that Jeanne Manford was Jewish, and we bless her memory.

"Joe is now completing his eleventh year as the rabbi of Tree of Life Congregation in Morgantown, West Virginia. Barry was elected to Morgantown's City Council in 2017 and 2019, and was the Democratic nominee for U.S. Congress in West Virginia's Second Congressional District in 2022. We legally married in California in 2008.

"Thank you for reminding us how far we've come."

The New Yorker didn't print our letter, but I want to share it.

Tick Tick Boom

 It's Thanksgiving, and my husband and I are visiting with my sister Robin in Greenbelt, Maryland. She has access online to everything out there on Hulu, HBO+, Netflix and I don't know what else. At home, I have a television that's not hooked up to anything except a DVD player. Robin suggested we watch "Tick Tick Boom," a new movie directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda about the life of Jonathan Larson, who wrote "Rent." 

Robin stopped the movie about five minutes in. Andrew Garfield, who portrays Larson, shows us around his cramped apartment in New York City, filled to the brim with records and tapes and bookshelves sagging under the weight of too many books. "That's just like Barry's house," Robin laughed. I didn't laugh. It's true; I have thousands of records, cassette tapes and CDs, and  sagging shelves full of books. 

I've never written a musical, and although I took two years of piano in my forties, and I have a piano at home, I don't play and can't play well at all. I have tried acting, and sang professionally in the Jewish community. It was a lot of work in professions where I wasn't greatly successful. 

That part of my life started in Miami, where I worked as a Spanish-bilingual SSI claims representative for Social Security. I went to career counseling through ORT, a Jewish social service organization. They said I was a pure artistic personality, and why was I working for the government? I had my reasons: steady pay, annual and sick leave, the promise of a pension. I decided to develop hobbies in the arts. I took up black and white photography at Miami-Dade Community College. 

When AIDS hit in 1982, I heard about it before many people because people who were ill applied for disability. At first, they were turned down if they weren't exhibiting symptoms, but then, some of them died before their appeals were completed. The agency started approving cases where a person alleged that they had AIDS. Some wouldn't admit to that because of the stigma.

In "Tick Tick Boom," Larson has gay friends who are ill with AIDS, and he is bereft and angry, like many of us were. I'm almost ten years older than Larson, and at thirty-three decided to give up being gay, marry a woman and have children. Just as Larson thinks he should have accomplished more by thirty, at thirty-three I thought I was too old to be gay, and it was too dangerous to continue to have the kind of random sexual experiences I was used to. The straight life didn't work out for me. I was lacking the knack for it, or maybe deep down I just couldn't sustain a relationship with a woman. 

I came back out of the closet in 1987. When testing became available, I took the test and turned up negative, and we learned what was safe and not safe. I was much more cautious about who I went with (I wanted a first and last name) and what we did. 

I read about how Jesse Helms (who has a cameo in the movie) and others demanded that creators of obscene art have their NEA grants rescinded. The NEA Four included Tim Miller, a performance artist based at Highways, a performance space in Santa Monica. California made up his grant on condition that he teach free classes in performance. I signed up right away. At forty, I was possibly the oldest one in Tim's gay men's class. I got to write stories and perform them with other men. There were people in the group who died from AIDS. I remember two in particular, one a gorgeous man in his early twenties who wrote poetry. We held a memorial for him where we each read one of his poems. The one I read was about having sex with a man who didn't speak to him, and he laments that he might have become the man's lover had the man been open to that. I visited another man in hospice care on Rosh Hashana. There was an older man visiting, my friend's father, a rancher in Wyoming, who hadn't spoken to his gay son in a few years. "You walked in on the big reunion scene," my friend joked from his bed. 

I saw Jonathan Larson's "Rent" when it came to Los Angeles. I spent weeks looking forward to seeing it. The play is about a performance art group. One of the characters has AIDS and dies. They wheel his gurney off stage, and everyone goes on with their life. I was furious, because you can't just go on with your life. Thirty years later, I still think about the men from the performance group who died from AIDS, as well as my other friends and acquaintances. It wasn't something that happened, then it was over. It colored the rest of our time in that group, just as my hurt and anger have remained with me all these years. 

"Tick Tick Boom" is a brave work of art. Jonathan Larson is not necessarily a sympathetic character. His music is good, but I wouldn't say it's great. The performers, the singers he uses for his showcase knocked me out. I guess I related to Larson the slob and the obsessive personality, and his gay friend who says "I was a mediocre actor in a town full of mediocre actors." That may not be an exact quote, but I can certainly relate after taking acting, singing and dancing lessons for years, studying music theory, piano, guitar and Hebrew at community college in my forties, and never being quite as good as I would have liked to be. 

I applaud Lin-Manuel Miranda for making "Tick Tick Boom" and all the excellent performers in it. I appreciate the look back at the good and the horror of 1990, when Larson was concerned about turning thirty and I was already forty and still struggling with what I would do when (if) I grew up.  I don't think this will be a hugely popular film, but it's important and for some of us an inspiration to keep going. It got me to stay up late to write this.

This Is Us

 The S.A.G. Awards have been delayed this year because of the pandemic. I've been a member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) since 1986, and joined the Screen Actors Guild a year later when I had one line on General Hospital, which made me eligible. Now the unions are merged. Every year, the studios send out DVDS or allow one to stream their movies and television shows, with the hope that they will get votes in the awards program. It's a lot less glitzy and less exclusive than the Academy Awards, but it is actors voting for other actors. 

In Los Angeles, I often saw many of the nominated movies before the awards season. I haven't been in a movie theater since 2019. Joe and I don't watch television. I spend my time now with books, connecting with people online, and with my work on Morgantown's City Council. 

I've watched a few television shows online, and one movie, Minari, about a Korean family living on a farm in Arkansas. I saw an episode of the show about John Brown and about the girl who plays chess. They were good. But the one that's caught me up is This Is Us, one of the few shows from a traditional network (NBC). The shows they sent to stream are from the fourth and fifth season. I've watched some of it in past years, and I've always liked it. The first year it was nominated it took me some time to figure out the premise. It's a family, and the children in one episode are the adults in another episode. The glue is the father, played by the gorgeous (IMHO) Milo Ventimiglia, who is dead. We see him as a young lover, a husband and a Dad to the three children,  a son and daughter, and the Black child born the same day as the son, and raised along with him. 

What's hooked me on this show is the way the past lives on for the adult children, and for the mother. They remember everything, and we see everything, and how it plays out for them. The acting is terrific, and I find the foibles and hang-ups of the three grown children moving.

I'm writing this at 5 A.M. Monday. I've been awake since three. No reason particularly, it's just that after the third time one gets up to go to the bathroom, it can be hard to get back to sleep. When I'm up late, I think about my seventy-one years of life, and the things that have happened. I go over events from ages ago, and sometimes wonder how I got to where I am now. Often I think about friends and family who have died. March is hard for me anyway. My father died March 17, 1991, and my mother died March 18, 2003. So of course, I think about them, just as the grown children on This Is Us remember their father. 

In an episode in Season Four, the mother is diagnosed with a major health issue. She has remarried, and her husband is there for her. My Mom had a boyfriend when she became ill, who stayed with her through her illness, and helped me and my sister through our mourning period. He died a few years ago. 

It's been hard this last year for everyone. Friends have been quarantined because someone in their kid's school tested positive for the coronavirus. Others have juggled full-time jobs and children home from school; an older friend lost his wife, who was in a nursing home. He wasn't allowed to see her for months before she died. Jobs disappeared and people couldn't pay rent or utilities or buy food. I've been home with Joe for a year. We have not lost income, been sick, or had people close to us die. Still, we're dealing with the sadness of not being able to travel, to eat inside a restaurant (we do carry-out) or see people in person. Our closest friends, still, are in California. 

Like the characters in This Is Us, I still live in my childhood, my adolescence and my earlier adulthood, with the great things that happened, the mistakes and missteps, the grief over the loss of friends in the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 90s, the relationships I've screwed up and the people I've hurt and those who've hurt me. Facebook has brought back friends from years ago, and at my fiftieth high school reunion, now almost four years ago, everyone was so kind and loving. I'm still comforted by that. 

I don't want to get all maudlin, like some of the stories on This Is Us, but like those characters, I, and maybe all of us, need to acknowledge and deal with our demons, be better to one another and appreciate the love we have in our life.