Faw Down Go Boom . . . part 1

We are coming up on a week since the bottom fell out and we started life in the U.S. under a new socio-cultural and government regime—a new reality.

Last Wednesday morning, March 11, I took the streetcar downtown to act in two more shows of the first full stage production I’ve been in (for various reasons) since the spring of 2012. As with many of the 19 performances before that day, we played to two nearly full houses of school children: fifth graders, sixth graders, and middle schoolers, mostly. Later in the afternoon I did a commercial photo shoot, and in the evening I attended the book discussion group I’ve been active in since July 2002.

While my book group buddies and I were having dinner together and discussing Ken Kesey’s Last Go Round, the news broke about a Utah Jazz player testing positive for the coronavirus and the NBA promptly shutting down its season. The next morning, everything in the rest of our lives ground to a halt. When the cast of the play showed up at the theater about 8:45 a.m., did our vocal warmups and fight call, and got into costumes and makeup for the first show at 9:45 . . . the house was empty and remained so.

Our two shows for that day were cancelled, and by evening, so were the other 18 scheduled performances. Most of my family and friends will never get to see this memorable show, with its timely evocation of external threat, racism, and persecution of minority citizens due to irrational fears.

How different our various worlds look now! Here’s how the situation looks to me, starting with the most personal and ascending to state level. I’ll post a second commentary about what I think about national and world developments either later today or tomorrow morning.

HANDS

I had been washing my hands often and hard for several weeks prior to our Wednesday shows. After a diagnosis of stage 2 or 3 breast cancer in September 2016, my wife underwent a year of chemo, two rounds of surgery, and radiation. I do not know whether she still technically qualifies as immuno-compromised, but her age is well within the range where mortality due to the virus has been deemed the highest.

I felt I should take extra care for her sake, despite the fact I was acting nearly every day to a theater full of 200-250 schoolchildren, with performances for all ages on weekends. I had already scaled back my part-time work aboard Portland Streetcar trains and guiding Portland Walking Tours (though the latter had been mainly due to schedule conflict).

The regimen has been tough on my hands. The backs have turned spotty red and itchy, as if they have a rash or sunburn. The palms and “faces” of my fingers seem to be perfectly fine after repeated vigorous scrubbings, but from the knuckles at the base of my fingers to above the wrist, I’ve had to apply hand lotion to quell the irritation. They don’t look and feel bad today. (My hands have actually landed me several commercial video jobs over the years.)

HOME ROUTINE

Again, to keep Carole safe at home, I’ve made brief trips downtown to pick up groceries, and to the post office to drop time-sensitive mail and buy stamps. The farmers market on the campus of Portland State University decided to go ahead and open Saturday morning (fresh produce is not going to keep, and the market is outdoors so social distancing isn’t a major challenge). Carole and I braved the trip and brought home a lot of fresh food . . . from potatoes, radishes, a leek, and hedgehog mushrooms to fish, two loaves of bread, and a bourbon caramel croissant (which I craved).

Vendors and customers were understandably sparse, but oddly, it snowed for just about the first time this winter while we were at the market. The ground air temperature has remained just warm enough to prevent the snow from sticking, however. In fact, we’ve had quite a bit of sunshine this week. I looked up rain stats, and despite a record dousing in January, Portland’s had a total of roughly 21 inches this rain year (Oct-Sept), when the mean would be closer to 28.

On Monday at noon, I went downtown to retrieve my personal belongings from the dressing room of the theater where “The Journal of Ben Uchida” finished only half of its 41-show run.

I saw nearly all the rest of the other actors getting their things. We all regretfully refrained from the hugs to which this cast had become accustomed during rehearsals and performances of an emotionally intense play about the Japanese-American incarceration during World War II. I felt oddly furtive and criminal, and I suspect the others did as well. I squeezed off a quick, out-of-focus shot of our lead, Ken, in the backstage space for costume changing and the props table.

Otherwise, Carole and I have stayed home. We mostly read, write on our Facebook pages, study and share online news reports, read books (I’ve finished three and am partway through five others). We also walk the dog. Here’s Pixie bemused by a mid-March snowfall in our neighborhood park on Saturday morning.

Just to be safe, I swung by the library on Thursday after our plays were cancelled and picked up seven feature films or TV series season sets on DVD, and I have at least 40 or 50 others I’ve purchased cheap and used in recent years at library sales or Goodwill, but I haven’t watched a minute of any of them. On the one hand, it’s hard to stay away from social media and the news; on the other, I’m just accustomed to choosing books over movies when faced with both.

STATEWIDE (and FAMILY)

Though we were based in Eugene when I was a kid and in Coos Bay on the southern Oregon coast in my teens, my immediate family has since divided between Portland Metro near the Washington border and Ashland near the California border. (All of us remain along the Interstate 5 corridor, roughly a dozen miles from the edge of the state in either direction.)

My mother, a Hood River native who was 10 in 1942 when her family was sent to those camps that feature in “The Journal of Ben Uchida,” has lived in Ashland, where my middle brother has an optometry practice, for more than a dozen years. She has suffered on and off for nearly two decades from trigeminal neuralgia, a condition in which a blood vessel presses against a nerve just inside the skull, regularly causing massive face, neck, and especially jaw pain. At times she could not stay upright, let alone chew solid foods.

The pain-suppressing medications had startling and challenging side effects of their own, such as dizzy spells. Several times over the years, Mom fell down and injured herself. So yesterday she underwent neurosurgery: basically, a hole was drilled in the base of her skull and a pad inserted between the blood vessel and the nerve. I was certain the procedure (technically elective) would get postponed because of the Covid-19 outbreak, but they went ahead. Here she is at left, signing in at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford, Oregon, yesterday morning; my brother Ken sent me the photo from his phone by text message.

This afternoon, positive tests for infection in the state of Oregon total 75—most of them centered in the larger population centers in the north and west sides of the state. We have had 3 deaths, all in hospitals or nursing homes. Still, I have to hope the virus didn’t get to my mother, who’s less than 3 months from her 88th birthday. The numbers may be more a reflection of the relative few who have been tested, and where they’ve been tested, than the reality of infectious spread. Barely 1,000 people have been tested (not much better than 1 in 5,000 residents) and only 215 more are awaiting results.

We might be staying ahead of the curve . . . but since medical officials know so little about the disease, it’s also possible that 50 percent or more of the population is already infected and either will remain asymptomatic or will show symptoms later. I’ve seen estimates for the latency period that range from 3 days to two weeks. Nobody really knows, I guess.

Ken reported that our mother got out of surgery an hour early, the surgeon seemed pleased, and Mom was looking forward to a salmon dinner in the ICU. I’d have preferred to drive downstate this week to help my brother look after her during her recovery from surgery, but the risk of bringing infection to my mother means I’ll probably choose to stay home.

Next up, my assessment of the national and world picture. . . .


Photo Credits: First two above courtesy of Owen Carey/Oregon Childrens Theatre, and Rachel Lee Millena, respectively; the final one courtesy of Ken Loftus. All the rest are mine.