Family Time – A Precious Gift

 

Dawn at Sea

We recently returned from a Caribbean cruise, one of many we’ve taken over the years, this one on the Celebrity Apex.  For seven months we anticipated this and poof, in seven days it was over.  The ship went to ports we’ve been to before, and it is a newer ship, larger than most we’ve been on, with all the glitz we try to avoid.   As a one week Caribbean cruise at this time of the year, it was filled with people who were there simply to have fun and eat and drink a lot.  The cruise catered to that crowd in their choice of entertainment, massive buffets, booming music in the pool area, and the constant encroachment of announcements.

 

My description cannot even approach the definitive work on such a cruise which was deliciously captured by David Foster Wallace’s experiences on a 7 day Celebrity Caribbean cruise in 1996’s Harpers Magazine, “Shipping Out; On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise.”

 

Although written almost thirty years earlier, its satirical truths and hilarious observations have stood up to the test of time and ought to be required reading, all 24 pages. Here are just a few of the breakouts from the article as teasers:

I have seen naked a lot of people I’d prefer not to have seen nearly naked.

On a cruise your capacities for choice, error, regret, and despair will be removed.

You don’t ever hear the ship’s big engines, but you can feel an oddly soothing spinal throb.

The atmosphere onboard the ship is sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing.

Not until Lobster Night did I understand the Roman phenomenon of vomitorium.

The vacuum toilet seems to hurl your waste into some kind of septic exile.

 

So why go?  It was the one week our “kids” could accompany us for a family vacation, Jonathan and his wife Tracie, and Chris and his partner, Megan.  We booked a table in one of the ship’s restaurants where leisurely dinners were permitted if not encouraged.  We also sometimes met up in the morning or for lunch. 

 

My usual routine was to get on the track at sunrise, get in a few laps of power walking (I still call it that although I’ve slowed as I’ve aged), frequently meeting Chris there, and then quietly having some coffee, bringing some to Ann as she got dressed for breakfast.

 

They did some port sightseeing, while we usually stayed on the ship, appreciating the quiet time, especially in the spa solarium.  There we enjoyed soft spa music, a dip in the Jacuzzi for 15-20 minutes and then spent the rest of the morning lounging in comfy deck chairs reading our books.  I finished one novel, more on that in a later entry.  No direct sun in the solarium, so no need to lather up with sun screen.  We either had the no calorie spa lunch that is served in small bite sized portions or splurged one day on a hamburger and fries.  Those days were brief respites of blissful peacefulness.

 

None of us went to the so called entertainment in the evenings, opting instead to extend our dinners for as long as we wanted.  The point was to be together and not to sit in a theatre watching their brand of shows.  The piped in music onboard was excruciating, catering to a much younger crowd.  But it was a week where we could really relax, be lazy and enjoy being with both sons and their spouses. 

 

All those years raising our “boys,” Chris and Jonathan, now a distant memory but watching them interact with each other as if they were still kids.  I tried to get a candid shot of them as they fooled around, and here I post one as well as one of when they were really kids watching TV on our bed.  Can it be, all those years?  But we’re happy they have a relationship as there is an eleven year age difference and different mothers as well, although Ann is “Mom” to Chris.  We raised him during the angst of his teenage years.

 

A bit of serendipity led us to get off the ship in the Cayman Islands.  Over the years this blog with its (now) massive amount of information and family history, has attracted many people who have been touched by connections closer to us than six degrees of separation.  I get emails from them and follow up.

 

Two months ago I received one from Melanie, a woman who had been researching some family history online and found an entry in my blog and believed we shared some common ancestry.  We do indeed.  Her grandmother was the daughter of my grandfather’s sister.  And I was at her grandmother’s wedding when I was ten years old, hardly remembering any of it, but I had photographs of the wedding which my father left in his files; I eventually scanned those and I was able to email some to her.  You can imagine her shock and delight.

 

Tendering to the Caymans

But the story doesn’t end there.  I soon learned that she lived in, of all places, the Cayman Islands, with her husband and son.  The light bulb went off; that was one of the ports the ship was going to so I suggested we get together and she was delighted.  We had to tender to the port and it’s a busy place but we finally were able to connect and have lunch overlooking the Georgetown harbor.  Thanks to AI I was able to pin down our exact relationship: Melanie is my 2^nd Cousin, once removed. 

 

There is more serendipity.  Our ship arrived there on March 7 which was her 49^th birthday.  As Melanie said, “how cool is that?”  Now about our meeting, I’ll turn this over to Ann who had emailed a friend the following (Ann is a very spontaneous, emotive and sometimes funny writer): “You know when you’re going to meet someone brand new, you know nothing about, you never know what to expect.  They could be dull as dishwater and you’re rolling your eyes in 10 minutes praying for an early escape.  Or as in today, you are met by someone totally precious and in fact, so utterly delightful that I wish we had known her years ago.  It was her birthday and I brought her a gift Bob made for her especially, a photo of her grandmother’s wedding.  Framed, wrapped and with a card delivered to her in a beautiful bag, useful for a million things.”  I could not have said it better and more entertainingly than that.

 

I had an ulterior motive visiting the Caymans though.  I had heard it is a decent place to live and here was a full time resident (her husband’s job led them there and coincidentally she works now in publishing which was my working moniker as well) and the opportunity to hear her story and who knows if the unthinkable happens this coming November, perhaps a place for us to consider.  As I suspected, this is easier to ask than to do; it works for them as they are young (with an 11 year old son), employed, and don’t have the health challenges that we octogenarians have.  

 

The Cayman Islands is a self-governing British Overseas Territory and as such enjoys some of the benefits.  I was especially impressed by the low crime rate, the relative safety of living there, and the fact that firearms are forbidden. People there don’t have to worry about mass shootings in the shopping centers, the schools, in the houses of worship.  Imagine that?  Must the last bastions of civilization be on remote islands?

 

In any case, our fantasy of moving to escape the insanity of our self-destructive polarized politics had to be put to rest, but it is reassuring we know someone as lovely as Melanie is and who is part of our extended family.

 

After seeing her, we only had two nights left on the cruise and Ann and I had booked our only tour and that was of the ship itself the next day.  Since 9/11 the bridge and the engineering parts of ship tours were mostly off limits but with a small group, a security check and an armed guard, the tour included the heartbeat and the brains of the ship.  That is what I wanted to see.

 

First we toured other parts of the ship, the galley, provision lockers, laundry, waste management, and what they amusingly refer to as I95 which is a corridor, strictly for the crew, with their staterooms, restaurant,
rest areas which runs the complete length of the ship on deck 2.  Unfortunately, photographs were strictly prohibited (particularly in the engineering room and bridge), but I managed to sneak one of the liquor storage room, nearly depleted towards the end of the cruise, as were the food provisions.  The quartermaster logistics for these functions must be mind boggling. 

 

 

By the time we arrived at the engineering control room we had walked miles, including stairs, and then standing around, but that destination and the bridge were worth the fatigue.  The engineering officer gave a presentation including flow charts of how the five engines are coordinated (usually the ship cruises with only two), and how redundancies are built into the propulsion system, including two additional engines on deck 15 in case the engine room is flooded. 

 

Crew are in the engineering room watching television monitors of all the engines and gauges for the equipment, the seawater reverse osmosis water maker systems (which makes delicious water in my opinion), the bow and stern thrusters, and the highly effective stabilizers.  In fact, for my taste, they were too effective as most of the time one hardly knew of any movement underway. 

 

This is in stark contrast to the first ocean crossing we made in 1977 on the QE2.  Ships in those days were built for speed with 29 knots a typical cruising speed, with a top cruising speed of 32.5 knots.  The trade off was a less beamy ship without stabilizers and the ship rocked and rolled, sometimes quite violently in a storm.  These new ships can hardly do two thirds the speed but you wouldn’t know you are moving.

 

The high point for me was a visit to the bridge which runs the full beam of the Apex with two helm chairs one might imagine Capt. Kirk and Spock sitting in, facing controls at the centerline.  Operationally, there are three different navigation stations, everything completely redundant so the ship can be controlled from the main station or stations on the port and starboard sides. 

 

What impressed me was the clean minimalism with features such as its integrated radar/GPS so powerful it can detect anything in a wide swath and its computer system able to indicate bearing, speed of any other ship and if documented its name, port, tonnage, etc., by simply putting the trackball pointer on it.  Collision avoidance features are built in. 

 

Everything one needs to run the ship are at these three compact stations.  Parts of the floor deck at the port and starboard sides are windows so one can visually watch docking while cameras show stern and the full length of port and starboard sides for tender activities, boarding pilot boat captains, etc.  But given the full expanse of the beam of the ship, there is the sense of being able to easily control the essential ship functions.  Joysticks now prevail over a ship’s wheel.

 

Although one would hardly know it, the seven day cruise covered 2,000 nautical miles.  Rarely did the ship’s speed exceed 18 knots.  Its top speed is only about 22 knots with all engines engaged.  These ships are indeed floating hotels and are not built for fast ocean crossings.

 

So we shared one last night with our kids and we disembarked for our separate destinations.  Bittersweet.   It is rare we can all be together like that for an extended time and it is a reminder that living in the moment and sharing family stories and laughter are life’s most precious gifts.

 

 

The World Premiere of ‘The Cancellation of Lauren Fein’ Portrays the New American Tragedy

 

Must meritocracy be sacrificed at the altar of Diversity-Equity-Inclusion initiatives (DEI) and what is the cost to society when it becomes cancel culture?  That is at the heart of this gripping and disturbing World Premiere of Christopher Demos-Brown’s The Cancellation of Lauren Fein at Palm Beach Dramaworks.  His play pays homage to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible which, although about the Salem Witch trials, is an allegory steeped in McCarthyism and the hysteria over communism.  As Mark Twain remarked, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”  Higher education’s commitment to DEI is giving rise to a kind of vigilante justice with unintended consequences.  It is the next rhyming verse in history, and the playwright and PBD’s production powerfully capture the repercussions. 

 

A liberal university’s “Anonymous Reporting System” (and therefore no accountability, a kind of Orwellian big brother watching you) along with vociferous DEI proponents, aided and abetted by the ubiquity of social media, take aim at a lesbian couple, both college professors, Lauren Fein and her wife, Paola Moreno, impacting not only their lives, but that of Dylan, their 16-year-old African American foster son.  Like a stone thrown in a pond, the ripple effects wash far beyond this one story.  Much of Demos-Brown’s play is a moving suspense-filled court-room style drama in Academia, with Kafkaesque twists and turns, building to a startling conclusion and a highly effective double ending with a truly tragic twist of the knife, the imagined alternative reality in a world of truth and scientific reasoning.  It is unforgettable.

 

The play is an invective of modern academic woke life.  Nothing escapes the playwright’s scathing eye, as his drama examines a liberal university’s killing of the goose and, along with it, the golden egg of truth and academic freedom.  Universities’ core values of intellectual inquiry and research seem to be taking a back seat to values that work against their very mission.  The play is exciting, suspenseful, painful, making you want to shake your fist at good intentions gone unhinged.

 

Demos-Brown pushes the play to the borders of metadrama.  Paola’s academic specialty is the playwright’s spiritual mentor, Arthur Miller, and her colleague, Evan’s, is David Mamet.  The latter playwright wrote Oleanna to which this play finds some commonality, although Mamet’s play was for an earlier time focusing “merely” on sexual harassment.  DEI moves well beyond yesterday’s critical-race-theory outrage and its roots in Title IX.  One only has to consider the recent crisis at Harvard University which morphed into questions concerning the prevalence of anti-Semitism.

 

Yet, the playwright lands his punches with great pathos and humor, the cost to the Fein- Moreno household being just the microcosm to that of society and academic life.  His play is so contemporary, it actually anticipated developments as it was being written even the innuendo of there being positive values to being a slave, shades of Florida’s Governor’s pronouncement.   It is an example of life imitating art, and it is written meticulously to capture the way people really speak and react to one another in love and under unimaginable stress.

 

Niki Fridh plays Professor Lauren Fein the brilliant, indefatigable genetic biologist, on a fast track for the Nobel Prize.  Yet, she is the good academic soldier, agreeing to teach a basic biology course (laughingly nicknamed “Holes and Poles”).  Fridh nails her character’s breezy open manner and her brilliance, neither of which count for much as the cancel-culture hammer comes down on her.  She captures both the tragic side of her fallen character, a victim of her own hubris, and yet delivers lots of the humor in the play, but with a contemptuousness so fitting the nightmare that evolves.  As the play is a tragedy, the seeds are sown in her personality, with off ramps from the crisis readily available, but knowing that she is not guilty she refuses to avail herself of those reputation-saving alternatives.   

 

Diana Garle and Niki Fridh Photo by Alicia Donelan

Diana Garle is Paola Moreno, Lauren’s wife, a professor of theatre and film studies who freely admits that her status as Fein’s wife and being queer and Latina didn’t hurt her future for advancement in their liberal university.  It is a co-leading role, a key one as she breaks the fourth wall, keeping the audience apprised of the back-story. Garle slips in and out of being a truth teller to the audience and a character in the play with ease.  She has the most impactful role in the play, a bravura performance by an actor who is new to Palm Beach Dramaworks.  Paola lives with the consequences of Lauren’s tragedy and Garle’s collapsing resignation at the end is heartbreaking.

 

Malcolm Callender (PBD debut) is very effective as Dylan Fein-Moreno, the troubled 16 year old foster child confused by the world, his place in it, and such is easily manipulated by the nightmarish circumstances.

 

Odera Adimorah and Malcolm Callender Photo by Alicia Donelan

Odera Adimorah (PBD debut) is the kindly Professor Chikezie Nweze “Chi”, Lauren’s Nigerian research partner with a comforting basso profundo voice.  In a way he’s also a soul father to Dylan, trying to help him make sense of the world.  His unease about homosexuality is overshadowed by his dedication to Lauren as he is convinced that her research on sickle-cell anemia will save untold lives in Africa.

 

Lindsey Corey plays the prosecuting attorney, Melanie Jones, with a fervency befitting her nickname “’Melanin’ Jones” who Paola describes as “the DEI movement’s Che Guevara.”  Being a “loser” is not in her character’s DNA and Corey goes on a fresh attack with every push back.  She is also Lauren’s academic adversary as Jones’ field is Gender Studies for which Lauren has contempt as being a phony made-up major, one which siphons off needed funds for her research, a field which can actually publish papers “about how penises cause climate change.” 

 

Karen Stephens, a veteran of many PBD plays Dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Marilyn Whitney, heretofore a friend of Lauren’s.  Stephens projects her character’s pain at having to move from friendship to becoming almost a “tag team” with Jones.  She knows that her new and rarified position of being appointed Dean depends on her appearing to disapprove of Fein’s actions and explanations (“as a woman of color, I’m really under the microscope here”).  Lauren feels betrayed by her once-upon-a-time friend.

 

Lindsey Corey, Diana Garle, Niki Fridh, Barbara Sloan and Karen Stephens Photo by Alicia Donelan

Barbara Sloan makes a mighty effort to stay impartial as Judge Lorraine Miller, and keep order at one point saying “we are academics with PhD’s” (amusingly implying that should ensure decorum in the proceedings).  She marks her territory to Lauren’s defender’s question about her law experience with the acerbic reply “I’d prefer ‘Judge Miller’ in these proceedings.  And, yes – I have a law degree from Duke.”  She also delivers one of the more profound truths attached to the proceedings, the “rules of civil law do not apply here.”  Precisely the problem!

 

Stephen Trovillion plays the voice of reason in the role of Professor “Buddy” McGovern, which I suspect is a stand in for the views of the playwright, who also is a practicing attorney.  He is the only straight white male in the play, and amusingly is a progressive from the old south, complete with a southern drawl which adds to the abundant humor of the play.  Trovillion projects his character’s bewilderment of the proceeding’s disregard for the rules of law to the point that Judge Miller nearly removes him from the kangaroo court.   

 

PBD veteran actor Bruce Linser is perfect as Evan Reynolds, a white, gay film / theatre scholar who has probably been passed over for tenure because of those facts.  He is best friends with Paola and knows the dangers to Lauren saying to Paola “I stopped teaching a long time ago. I just lecture now directly from my pre-vetted notes. But I know Lauren has standards.”  His feelings of betrayal by Paola are palpable.  He is also the ominous voice of Judge Howard in a real court at the play’s sad, disturbing conclusion

 

Kaelyn Ambert-Gonzalez (PBD debut), plays Zoe, a PhD graduate student who once studied under Lauren, had an affair with her, and enacts an incident as a drunk at a party, the final nail in the case against Lauren Fein.

 

Margaret M. Ledford directs this world premiere production with pace and crispness.  She elevates the verbal sparring of the proceedings, even when they are overlapping.  The director and the Palm Beach Dramaworks team have transported the play to a level of hyperrealism with the video design seamlessly integrated into the performance.  Clearly, she commands the respect of the actors and flawlessly choreographs the action as intended by the playwright, with the help of Nicole Perry (PBD debut), the intimacy choreographer for a number of such scenes.

 

Scenic design is by Anne Mundell who has created an area supporting the other technical designers.  The worn pragmatic benches and tables serve a multiplicity of purposes and could be the setting for Salem in 1692 or appropriately a stage for a modern day Greek chorus.

 

Video design is by Adam J. Thompson.  The visual projection enhances the architecture of the set, identifying different locations and creates a canvas for the brilliant montage of social media at work.  There we can sense the voyeurism of people stepping into private space.  The play is cinematic and so are the visuals.

 

Costume design is by Brian O’Keefe, for real time, extended time, flash backs of each character with his/her own color pallets.  They range from pant suits worn by the professionals, with Dean Whitney’s costume design having military connotations and Buddy McGovern amusingly dressed in attire resembling something Tom Wolfe would wear as the style of a Southern gentlemen.

 

Lighting design is by Kirk Bookman who in Act I has multiple lighting challenges for many different locations whereas Act II is mostly the courtroom with full lights up.  At the denouement there is a ghostly white spot on Lauren and a life like spot on Paola.  It is highly effective and moving

 

Sound design is by Roger Arnold with an emphasis on transitions between spaces.

 

What Paulo says about “Uncivil Rights,” a student’s play she advocated can be said about this play: “In my writing classes, I teach my students: ‘Dazzle, delight, and derange. Find the sacred cow and kill it.’ This kid...located the most tender spot in American political culture and probed it with merciless beauty. The play was everything art should be: Poetic. Painful. Hilarious.”

 

But the future is encapsulated by Buddy McGovern’s impassioned concluding argument: “Is this truly the goal of your so-called revolution? A post-modern world with ad hoc rules at every turn? A world where innuendo kills reputations and rumor ends careers? A world devoid of any semblance of due process? Where subjective slight trumps objective truth? Is that what you really want?”

 

The Cancellation of Lauren Fein is sure to enter the canon of important contemporary drama and it can be seen here, first, at Palm Beach Dramaworks.