Keeping hope alive

 

   It’s getting harder and harder to be hopeful, not to mention sane, these days with the cascade of overwhelming news coming out of Washington, D.C.  Every day, we hear about men, including, according to 60 Minutes, a gay hairdresser, being shipped off to a notorious prison in El Salvador for barely any reason and no chance to defend themselves; thousands of federal workers, including those who do vital health research and provide warnings about the weather, being laid off with no explanatio; Social Security offices being closed and people finding that their benefits have been abruptly cut off.  The bad news goes on and on. 

  How do we keep our heads above water, so to speak? Or, as Jesse Jackson might have asked, how do we keep hope alive?  One way, I think, and as I explore in my latest Claremont Courier column published on Friday, is to focus on what we can do closer to home.  We may not be able to solve the nation’s problems, but we can help to make things better in our town, in our neighborhood. 

                TUNING IN – IN A SMALL TOWN

   “TURN THE T.V OFF”

   “TURN THE T.V OFF”

   “TURN THE T.V OFF”

   “TURN THE T.V OFF”

   The signs in the front yard not far from my house are, if nothing else, insistent.  They yell out at me every time I go by. 

    I could see them as a gentle encouragement, a friendly reminder.  I could see them as a neighborly nudge, a good-natured entreaty.  What I see each and every time I pass by is an urgent wake-up call.  I literally hear alarms going off. 

   Perhaps it would be better to see the gentle encouragement, the neighborly nudge.  But with the four signs lined up one after another, coming at me as I go by, I can’t help but get concerned, hear sirens blaring. 

   Every time I go by these signs, I see another warning.  I want to say that they protest too much.  Or, more to the point, that they protest in the wrong way. 

   For one thing, is the message really that we shouldn’t watch television at all?  Are the signs saying, screaming, that there is nothing good on T.V? 

   Sure, there is a lot to be said about the “boob tube,” about how television is a “vast wasteland.” But what about Sesame Street and The Crown, Murders in the Building and The White Lotus, I, Claudius and The Residence? 

   Should we really not watch these excellent shows and dozens of others I can list?  I’m all for reading and the joys of curling up with a book, but is watching a show or two on T.V so bad.  God knows we can use some distractions these days. 

   But not too many distractions – which is my point. 

   I suspect, or would like to think, that the signs are referring to the news on T.V.  While this is more understandable, the signs are still wrong.  Perhaps a friendly suggestion would have been okay, but definitely not this alarming demand.  Even the friendly suggestion would have been a mistake. 

   Look, I get it.  Running away from the news on our televisions, turning it off, sounds pretty attractive.  The 1news coming out of Washington, D.C, has been more than overwhelming, a daily onslaught of mind-blowing changes, a constant barrage of shattering7moves.  Even some of those who voted for this regime are at least taken aback, caught off-guard. 

   I have friends who have decided to retreat, who have stopped looking at the news, and who tell me I should do the same for my sanity.  And I hear them.  Hiding away, curling up with a good book, chilling on, yes, Netflix sounds awfully nice, really good. 

   But that is the last thing we should be doing.  That is exactly what the current administration wants, what it is hoping for and trying for.  It wants us to be overwhelmed and to give up and not care.   Now is not the time to not watch what’s going on, and it’s really not the time to give up and not care. It is not the time to be complacent and especially not the time to despair.

   If we give up and don’t watch what’s going on, this administration can, as it’s hoping to do, get away with doing all sorts of things, ultimately including things they weren’t elected to do.

   So how do we not feel overwhelmed and powerless when we are in a small town far from the tirade of norm-breaking decrees?  How do we do more than sit and watch – or not watch - what’s going on?

   We can make Claremont an even better small town in which to live.   

   I am thankful these days that I am in a small town where I feel encouraged to express myself and be creative.  I am grateful to live in a small town where being a community and a better and better community is so important. 

   Being able to so directly participate in and support the arts and cultural institutions the library and the community and community-making (including with this non-profit newspaper) here in Claremont is a reminder of what I can do, of what we all can do.  Being able to come together and work together to hear each other and to make this community even better and more enjoyable gives us power. Hashing things out in city hearings, joining in local protests, helping immigrants and the homeless instead of demonizing them or taking part in such civil-dialogue endeavors as the Circle of Chairs reminds us that we can get things done, that we don’t have to just watch what is happening. 

   In a town like Claremont, we can find ways to do what another sign in the yard rightly encourages us to do: “Stay strong.” 

Staying alive (close by)

 

   One evening last week, there was a concert featuring middle-eastern music nearby at Pomona College.  I was very interested and had planned on going. 

   But, in addition to being pretty chilly, it was also raining that evening.  It was a steady and pretty hard rain. 

   I thought about the considerable distance from where my attendant could park my van to the hall’s accessible door, a distance that included a long ramp leading up to the door.  I thought about going through the cold, hard rain to get to the door and probably back to my van when my attendant came to pick me up when the concert was over. I thought about how my arm might lock up in the cold, making it difficult to drive my chair and slowing my progress in the pouring rain.    

   I couldn’t.  I couldn’t do it.  Or I deci5d I couldn’t do it. Even with my rain poncho on and my attendant following along holding an umbrella over me, likely getting wet.  It just seemed so unattractive, seemed like too much work, like it was not worthwhile – at least on a cold, dark night. 

   This realization, or this decision, was difficult, as right as it felt.  It was painful.  It hurt.  Yes, I had FOMO fear of missing out.  But, more significantly, there was the fact that, for many years, I went out, on my own, in my wheelchair, in the rain with no hesitation and the awareness that this will no doubt happen more and more often in the coming years. 

   As I’ve mentioned before, I need to be or learn to be more content with staying close to Claremont and perhaps not doing so much.  Still, although I’m no longer venturing very far, like to Los Angeles, to attend plays and other events, I find there is plenty – too much? – to do right here in Claremont, as I explored recently in a Claremont Courier column. 

          LIVE PERFORMANCES LIFT CLAREMONTERS EVEN HIGHER

        Michael Jones looked like she was fighting back tears.  In fact, it looked like she was pretty much crying.  Meanwhile, Fred Theders-Arteaga was all but jumping up and down, clearly proud that he had made it and proud of what he had done, what he had accomplished.

   Both, along with the others taking a bow, had accomplished a lot, indeed.  The tears and the exalting were, as with the standing ovation, quite justified, quite understandable. All the more so because these were kids in high school. 

   It was the end of the last performance last month of Next to Normal at Claremont High School.  The play, by Brian Yorkey, Tom Kitt et all, is a rock opera, with hardly any spoken dialogue, in the tradition of the Who’s Tommy, Green Day’s American Idiot and Rent.  This meant that the actors were singing, often at full volume or at least with maximum emotion and backed with live music, for the entire two-hour-plus performance. 

   And, not unlike Tommy, Rent and American Idiot, and arguably more so, Next to Normal isn’t some sunny, happily-ever-after musical. It’s more like a tragic opera, dealing with particularly heavy issues. 

   The musical is about a suburban family that looks normal – but isn’t.  Ms. Jones played the mother, who is mentally ill and communicates with a son, powerfully played by Jude Ready, who died after becoming ill some years earlier. Theders-Arteaga played Henry, a high school student who befriends Natilie (Mairead Lucke), the family’s daughter who is barely hanging on, feeling responsible for and resentful of her mother.  Avon Bisano played the father, desperately trying to hold the family together, and Ryan Fass played both therapists who guides the mother through various treatments, including electro-shock therapy. 

   Yes, this was heavy stuff and certainly not the typical milieu for a high school production.  (What’s more, there were plenty of f-bombs.) This was difficult stuff for any theater ensemble – and all the more so for high school students.  No wonder Jones was in tears and Theders-Arteaga, the only cast member not in the school’s thespian troupe, was pumping his fist. 

   It is good to see that Mohammed Mangrio is settling into his job as CHS’s theater director and following the bold example of Krista Elhai, trusting the students with works that challenges them and us, the audience.  This was right in line with such Elhai-led productions of Tommy, The Laramie Project and Avenue Q, and it left me all but in tears and pumping my fist. Like Elhai, Mangrio gave his students and the audience a dramatic and emotional work-out.

   This production was a great example of the power of live performance.  For years, I went into Los Angeles and environs to see high-quality live theater, mostly at tiny, on-a-shoestring theaters.  But I got tired of sitting in traffic, especially coming home at 11 at night as well as when trying to get to the theater on time, and, in these past years, I have come to appreciate that there are plenty of opportunities to experience the power of live performance in and around Claremont. 

   Not only is there, surprisingly enough, the theater at Claremont High.  The colleges have put on some very impressive shows in recent years.  There is also the Inland Valley Repertory Theater. 

   Then there is Ophelia’s Jump.  This Claremont-bred theater company continues to put on professional-grade productions in its modest industrial park space right across the border in Upland, even if Beatrice Casagran et al haven’t quite hit their usual stride since the pandemic (who has?). As I keep saying, going to an Ophelia’s Jump show is like going to L.A without the traffic. 

  Live performances also includes music, which can also be quite moving and of which there are plenty around Claremont.  These include a bounty of free concerts and recitals at the colleges featuring students, faculty and guest artists, not to mention a bunch of musical offerings around town.

   I recently attended a Sunday afternoon concert by the Claremont Concert Choir, with Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer and Scripps College students, and the High Notes of the Pasadena Chorale, a girls ensemble.  It featured lovely singing by the choirs plus a stunning rendition, in two parts, of William Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices by the choirs’ directors, Charles W. Kamm and Jeffrey Bernstein, and guest soprano Lika Miyake. Right here, the performance transported me some place far.

Relaxed fit

 

   A friend has told me told me several times that he grew up on a farm and now has a pair of overalls – “bibs” he calls them – that he wears around the house.  He says this is because “they aren’t so fashionable.”

   What does this mean?  Is he saying I’m out of fashion wearing overalls?  Why does he only wear them at home and not want others to see him in bibs, like they are something bad, like he’s ashamed of them? 

   Before my spinal surgery, overalls were all I wore for many years, sometimes literally without a shirt. (As someone who always worked at home or in the theater, I had the luxury of being able to do so.) Since my surgery, with overalls being much harder to put on and take off, I try to wear them often (more on this later). I like to think I’m fashion-forward or above fashion.   

   I see bibs, as I also like to say, on plenty of women, but, from what I see, guys in overalls are pretty rare.  This isn’t to say I never see guys wearing bibs, but it’s usually in certain settings like construction sites, farms, rock and folk music concerts and perhaps parties.  I have had friends borrow some of my more unique striped and tye-dyed bibs to wear at parties and concerts – one guy reported that people raved over him in the bibs – but they didn’t feel comfortable or right wearing them in other settings or on an everyday (non-workday) basis.  The same guy was even uncomfortable wearing the plain blue overalls that a friend gave him (although he looked quite good in them). 

   I do sometimes see guys walking around, just going about their day,  in bibs, but they are almost like rare bird sightings.

   What is it about guys in bibs that isn’t “so fashionable?” Is it a class thing, a status thing – the idea that overalls are for laborers and farmers?  Is it about overalls being for toddlers (and women?), not for big boys and grown men?  Is it that, as I have heard, overalls are “gay?”

   I don’t know, and, frankly, I don’t care.  I enjoy being in bibs and being seen in them*.

-----

   After my spinal surgery, wearing overalls became considerably more difficult, because I can no longer assist in putting them on and taking them off. In the two or three years after my surgery, I donated or sold literally bags full of overalls – yes, I had that many! – which were too tight on me, too frail, etc. As silly as it sounds, this was quite difficult.   

   But I still wanted to wear them and did so, thanks to my and my attendants’ patience and persistence.  Even so, I have, for the first time in my life, put on weight in recent years (being paralyzed instead of in nearly constant motion since the surgery), and it has become too difficult to wear even some of the bibs I have remaining. 

   I still want to be in bibs, though.  So, I have been replacing some of my favorite pairs with used, relatively cheap pairs that are bigger, much bigger.  Call them relaxed, way relaxed, fit!  Some are ridiculously large, but, hey, it doesn’t matter, because I’m sitting down, and, anyway, I like the baggy bibs look on guys. Plus, they’re super comfy, and it doesn’t matter at my state in life. 

-----

   Over the years, I have been told that, when it comes to wearing bibs – especially ones that are more unique or colorful - or mismatched Converse high-tops with rainbow laces or sporting braids, dreads, a mohawk or a shaved head, I “pull it off.” I thought of this recently when I watched Booksmart, a hilarious and smart, albeit raunchy, movie about academically competitive high schoolers. 

   In a party scene late in the film, a guy is shirtless in white painter’s overalls which he wears backwards, Marky Mark style.  As stupid, dorky and crazy as it sounds, the guy pulls it off!  I am not saying that guys should do this, and I don’t know what, if any, fitting magic was done (I would love to know how this costume design came about and was enacted), but, for this guy at least, the backwards bibs, while funny, aren’t as silly as they sound and do nicely showcase his chest. (To those who say why not have him be bare-chested, I refer to a friend who once told me that a bit of clothing, carefully placed, can be considerably sexier than no clothes.  Also, why don’t painters wear white, or any, overalls anymore?)

 

*I like being seen in overalls in addition to or, ideally, instead of as a guy in a wheelchair, as I explored in a series of YouTube videos I created some years ago, before the spinal surgery, entitled, “The Guy in the Overalls (and the Wheelchair).”            

What was lost

 

   I recently realized that I’m feeling overwhelmed by the last six months or so, with my dad dying, the election, the holidays, the L.A-area fires and now Trump 2.0. (No, I’m not watching the inauguration – and what an obscenity to have it on the MLK holiday!)

   The fires have really taken a lot out of me, although they are “over there,” as I discuss in a column published on Friday in the Claremont Courier and below.  Not only do I have friends and cousins and one attendant who have been evaluated, the fires have stirred up a lot in me, like embers and ashes.  Many places that I love are gone, but, what’s more, they’ve been gone quite a while, since my spinal surgery seven years ago, when the drive and the traffic became just too hard.  In short, now that L.A, as many are saying, will never be the same, even with rebuilding, the fires are like the surgery, in how it radically changed my life. 

   I’ve been thinking about all the things I’ve been missing: going to dinner in Santa Monica after spending hours on the beach on PCH, passing the lines outside clubs after getting out of plays in Hollywood on Saturday night, taking the train and subway and bus on my own to see the latest exhibit at the county museum (when it cost $6, not $20, to get in), to meet a friend in Beverly Hills, even to go to the pier in Santa Monica and maybe cruise down to boardwalk to Venice.    

   There were the restaurants, the favorites and the discoveries that became favorites, especially the vegan ones.  I loved Doomies, when it was good, really good – the bomb – with incredible vegan chicken fried steak, pot roast scallops, shrimp served up to tattooed, pierced punks in black high-tops and jeans jackets.  (I felt right at home shirtless in my cut-off bibs and Docs.) The last time I was there, about five years ago, it was just a vegan burger joint.  Talk about missing something!     

           SAYING GOODBYE TO THE L.A, THE LIFE, I KNEW

   I was going to write a nice little column about how Claremont has changed over the years, about how things were there and suddenly not there, about how Claremont is suddenly the way it is and we barely remember the way it was, even a few months ago.  This occurred to me recently as I would go north on College Avenue from Arrow Highway and see the traffic lights at Green Street and think it has always been there, even as they were installed late in the Fall.  There was another traffic light and that weird permanent cone in the middle of the street a block south, replaced by the new lights, right?  Right? 

   I was going to write about other examples of this. Not far from the new traffic lights was a lovely field of wild flowers and grasses before it was used as a movie set across the street from where the Courier office was, just south of the railroad tracks, where I used to go in my wheelchair to hand deliver a hard copy (before it was called a “hard copy”) of my column.  There was the old Courier office on Harvard Avenue where I began working as a summer intern and the train-car restaurant instead of the large office building that now seems to have always loomed over the Village along First Street.  There was the vet office where the Village West plaza now is, and there wasn’t always a traffic light just north of Memorial Park on Indian Hill Boulevard, right?  Right? 

   There are hundreds, thousands of these small, not so small changes that have happened. I even had a nice, clever title: “In the blink of an eye, another Claremont.”

   Then there were the fires. And, suddenly, in the blink of an eye, my column wasn’t so nice, wasn’t so little.

   Sure, the catastrophic wildfires, at least as I write this, are “over there.” They aren’t a Claremont story, as my old editor Martin Weinburger would say. 

   But, for many of us, they are our story.  The fires, which so far have wiped out tens of thousands of acres and thousands of structures and caused at least 13 deaths and may well go on to do who knows how much more destruction, are my story. 

   I have friends and cousins who have been evaluated from Pacific Pallisades and Topanga Canyon.  One of my caregivers has been evaluated from Pasadena. 

   What’s more, much more, though, is that I’m familiar, so familiar, with many of the places now gone or now in danger.  That’s really what makes these fires, which some say will end up being the worst natural disaster in U.S history, so real and, as more than one person has been quoted in the L.A Times, so “surreal.”

     When I graduated from college, I told myself I would live in Claremont, because I could easily get to L.A and other area communities – and that’s exactly what I did.  A lot.  I loved living in Claremont, but I also loved spending days on the beaches on P.C.H and hanging out in Santa Monica and on Melrose Avenue.  I attended plays outdoors in Topanga Canyon as well as dozens of tiny theaters in Hollywood and everywhere else.  I enjoyed drives along Sunset Boulevard, past Will Roger’s house, UCLA where I attended briefly and through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and I enjoyed getting as far as I could in my wheelchair in Eaton Canyon and going to movies and free outdoor concerts with well-known artists in Pasadena. 

   Now, some of those places, like Will Roger’s house and the Eaton Canyon park, are gone, unrecognizable like the P.C.H beaches or endangered. Even with rebuilding, already talked about with hope and desperation, Los Angeles, my Los Angeles, will never be the same.

   Actually, the L.A that I know and love hasn’t been the same for some time. In a painfully real way, L.A, for me, has already been  gone. 

   Since my spinal surgery now seven years ago that left me more disabled, going into L.A, especially with all the traffic, has gotten too difficult.  If I go, it’s only once or twice a year, usually to see friends.  (I have enjoyed some time in Eaton Canyon, but, sadly, it looks like that’s gone.)

   While we are safe here in Claremont from the fires “over there,” I know already what it’s like to lose L.A, the L.A that I knew, the L.A we all knew.