Health Care Reform

 

Of all the advances

in medical science

the hospital gown remains

 

the biggest step backwards

ever to plague our days.

 

Have you ever got along

as if normally clothed

in such a shortchanged sarong?

 

Stand up straight,

and something hangs out.

Sit and you’re still in danger.

 

Lie flat on your back

it’s the sole safe way

to avoid indecent exposure.

 

And even then it’s still relative.

 

Speaking of which,

isn’t that your ex-wife there?

 

She asks, “How are you?”

her subliminal battle-ax ready.

 

And you wish you’d taken that job

as a roving rock star roadie.

Right on Red?

Maybe you’ve  had this experience. You are stopped by a traffic light. You are in the right-hand lane of a four-lane street. You intend to go straight ahead when the light turns green.

Before it does though, you hear a horn blow, and it is no mere toot. It is full-blown, its length announcing the presence of an Attitude.

You look about expecting to see someone blocking another car, or about to swerve into the attitudinal honker’s lane. Either scenario would justify a good warning honk.

But you see that the only other car around is a rather crappy looking old thing, sitting low to the ground, painted with a worn patina of gun-metal primer – the kind that might encoat a nuclear submarine.

USS Heap is right on your rear bumper, its driver grimacing in a millennial scrunch.

The traffic light has only been red for about 30 seconds, and now it turns green. You proceed cautiously ahead with an eye on your rear-view mirror.

Once clear, you see Joe Honker jerk his car into a sharp right-hand turn … and was that an ugly hand gesture directed at you?

He roars off – not because he’s got a hot engine. It’s just a wimpy four-banger with holes in the muffler, the kind you jab with an ice-pick to make it sound souped-up.

Once you are clear of the intersection and safely on the way you reflect on this rencontre.

Why would a reasonable driver demand with an obnoxious honk that you – showing no right-hand-turn signal – would break the law and run a red light so that he could exercise his right to turn right on red?

Of course it was irrational…but not an isolated incident these days. I’ve experienced others, and they seem to have proliferated in recent months. You may have had similar encounters.

Can we understand this phenomenon?

Is it drugs? Or is it some sort of twisted understanding of entitlement? Certainly it’s nothing new and seems to be more widespread nowadays.

I think it could be both – maybe one too many Red Bulls? – combined with a sense of egocentric entitlement. Entitlements, after all, seem to be much in the patois of politicians and their toadies these days. We are raising generations of attitudinally challenged newly “entitled” folks. Add them to the already entitled notions many of us may have just by virtue of being theoretically free people, and we have ourselves a social stew with a hint of advanced navel-gazing in the mix.

And can that be the product of politicians over-promising increasingly credulous generations no longer expected to leave high school – or college, for that matter – with a complete understanding of our Constitutional heritage and the rule of law?

And worse – are these historically deprived folks unable to understand that we do not have the right to challenge the rights of others just for the selfish need to turn right on red when someone else is ahead of them?

How petty.

And how dangerous.

An Unscripted Scene

An out-take from my memoir, War Baby – a scene set in the former Virginia Museum Theater during the 1950s…

The Museum Theater was looking for high school kids to work backstage, as well as try out for some roles for young people. My friend and I landed roles as the two paperboys in Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s classic take on life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.

We got to work backstage too, and Our Town was the beginning of several plays during the late 50s that I participated in. It was a terrific experience. One in particular stands out.

During a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, my role was backstage helper. Because of a total scene-change mid-act, an entire set backdrop was lifted out of the audience’s sight at the same time a new one dropped into place – all with the curtain open. A bit edgy, I understood, and only effective if the timing was perfect.

Because the large counterweights involved in moving full-stage backdrops up and down could collide with the steel catwalk seventy feet above stage, making loud clanging sounds, I and a colleague were assigned the job of waiting out the entire act on the catwalk.

When the weights came upwards towards the catwalk as the new set dropped to the stage, our jobs were to hold the counterweights’ cables out from the catwalk. That would prevent the weights from clanging against the steel catwalk. Simple... unless you’re a teenager.

Night after night through endless rehearsals, we trudged up the spiral staircase at the back of the stage to the catwalk. We took up our positions to wait for the weights to zoom up through the gloom below. The weights would appear suddenly out of the dimmed lighting just off Stage Right. But after so many rehearsals, to sit on a catwalk through an entire act of a play we had practically memorized became boring. And boring for teenagers is especially risky.

One night, we decided to take some snacks up with us. The night happened to be special. In fact, it was a major event. It marked the beginning of the show’s run: an exclusive showing, closed to the general public.

The house was filled with dignitaries. Since the VMT was part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, it was a state agency. “Opening Night” was reserved for the Governor, a variety of senior state officials, major donors and benefactors of the Museum, and families of the theater company. Backstage that night, all of us in the company– from stage hands to the lead performers– were wired, especially the stickler of a stage manager whose punctilious presence seemed everywhere at once, declaring: “Nothing Must Go Wrong,” and looking for anything that could be out of place.

He missed our Nabs and bottled Cokes as we hustled up the plain metal spiral stairway to the catwalk. The show went on, and finally, up came the counterweights. They caught us off guard. We jumped up, reached our posts and began to alter the courses of the massive iron weights – but not the trajectory of one of the Coke bottles which one of us had kicked in our panic to get in place in time. Off the bottle flew into the void. Its arc had it headed straight to Center Stage. But it took forever.

Time was reduced to extreme slow-motion. We were transfixed with fear, awe and apocalyptic anticipation.

Horrified, we watched as every light in the house glinted off the sculpted, translucent sea-island green Coke bottle as it descended, gracefully rolling and perfectly timed to crash onto the stage just as the leading lady emoted her first lines of the new scene.

True troopers they were on that stage that night, though. The pros know that the worst thing to do in a situation like that is nothing. The bottle shattered near mid-stage, and instantly the lead actor ad-libbed around the rather rude interruption of a Coca-Cola bottle from nowhere crashing on the floor of a Victorian parlor. I do not remember it exactly, but I’m sure it was something like this:

Ye gads! There it is again. Bloody stupid help botched the candelabra covers once more... and in such an ugly shade of puce, too. One would think they’d have learned something working here, wot?...

When the act was over, the curtain down, and the house lights up, the stage manager materialized at the foot of the circular stairs leading up to our steel aerie, his perfectionistic glower mimicking Iago leering at Othello, his face a florid match for his wavy red hair…