How are you holding up? Are you holding up? I have a headache today. I really want to write about ideas: craft as healing, being a parent and being other things too, what we mean when we talk about information literacy. My brain though can’t gather all the floaty fragmentary bits of thoughts about these ideas that are whirring through my mind, so I guess I’ll write about them later.

I got my car inspected and its 60K maintenance done. It feels nice to have a car that should be in good shape for another 30K miles. The guy who helped me was the same guy who helped me the last time I took my car in, a year ago, and he recognized me, even with my mask on. He said he remembered my eyes.

So now I think I have memorable eyes.

Last night I had a desire to listen to Michael Crawford sing some distinctly un-Phantom of the Opera songs. I don’t know why. He always sounds ghostly to me, so it’s really funny to hear him do brassy songs in a ghost voice. It makes me happy. The most hilarious is probably The Power of Love, but that’s not on Spotify so last night I went with Any Dream Will Do. Hilarious! They should rename the show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor DreamGHOST when Michael Crawford sings it.

Have you ever noticed that Michael Crawford doesn’t do a lot of Sondheim? He plays Hero in the movie of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but on his solo albums there’s not much Sondheim. Maybe a little. (Only vaguely related, another role Crawford had in his early career was Cornelius in Hello, Dolly! and the story of how he got that job is hilarious.)

I’ve been thinking lately about how to be a theater person again, because I miss it and it was a huge part of my identity until the college theater scene kind of beat it out of me. (I made the mistake of aligning myself with the far too serious drama department kids instead of the more fun non-majors putting up their own shows.)

There’s a Theater & Drama Crash Course and it was nice looking through the titles of the videos to realize how much I remember from my BA in dramatic art. I might watch some of those videos and revisit that stuff.

Now is, of course, a terrible time to get back into theater; there’s not much live stuff going on and I’m not really in a position to do virtual shows because my kid could walk in at any minute.

But there are other angles I can approach it from; play reading, playwriting, watching recorded productions, theater history… We’ll see where I go with it.

Anyway, back to my first question.

How are you holding up?