I lived

Well, it went well yesterday with the lumpectomy (I cannot get used to that word!) and the surgeon didn't kill me. The good news is not only that I lived through it, but that the lymph nodes are all clear, which means that radiation should be all that I have to do now and that I shall not end up bald and puking. I am wearing a little flowery tube top sort of thing around my chest to hold everything together. It would be flattering if I were about 50 years younger. I get to take it off tomorrow.

The worst part of the whole experience was getting the shots of radioactive dye into my delicate breast without any anesthetic. The radiologist kept apologizing and I assured him that I knew he was only doing what he had to do. In a bad German accent, I told him that he was only following orders, which made him laugh and tell me about visiting Berlin once. So we got through it, and I didn't glow in the dark. A couple of hours later I went into surgery and then recovery where I was presented with the above little pillow, made by one of the volunteers for breast cancer patients. I came home around 2:00 and iced my chest and slept. Today I am a bit sore but it's not too bad and (prduct placement)Tylenol helps.

So now I guess I will become a Breast Cancer Survivor. This is a bit like being a Recovering Alcoholic. I don't know why they use that label. I mean, you don't say someone is a pneumonia survivor, or a measles survivor. Why always attach that label to someone who has had cancer? It seems to me that it adds to the fear we all have of that disease, since it reminds you that some people can die of it. Well, you can die from a lot of things. You then become identified by a disease you have had. It's almost as if that becomes your identity, the way that alcoholics become defined by their alcoholism, even though that is only a part of who they are. After she had breast cancer, Susan Sontag wrote a book called "Illness As Metaphor." I don't know if that was what she meant, but in a way perhaps she felt defined by it by becoming a "survivor." Maybe we need to think of it some other way.

So let's all remember go get our mammograms every year.

Alas, Poor Jane

Friday last I went up to the university theater to see a musical version of "Jane Eyre." I have always loved this Gothic romance. The Orson Welles version came out when I was in high school, and my friend Ethel and I went to see it after school one day. We loved it so much we stayed to see it again, causing great upset to our parents, who had expected us home much sooner. The first time I went to England, I was able to to go to Haworth, where the Brontes lived. In the gift shop at their former home, there was a little TV set, playing the Welles version. In the very home where Charlotte had written it! On that same trip, my friend Susan went to see the non-musical play "Jane Eyre" in London, starring the actor who played the very bad guy in "Jewel in the Crown." Not so good as Welles, but it was well done.

The Kent State University Theater department puts on two musical plays every year and they are invariably outstanding, so I really looked forward to seeing this one. The major problem was that it was just not a very good musical. The set, the lighting, and the costumes were up to the usual excellent standards of the theater department. The singers were, for the most part, adequate. However, now that actors no longer know how to project, everyone was miked, but apparently forgot and tried to project anyway. The result was so distorted that it was hard to understand most of the content. I kept hoping the sound technician would adjust things, but that didn't happen. We had good seats, I don't have a hearing problem, and it was maddening.

The music was pretty terrible anyway and the dialogue was pretty bad, too. The actors had to sing their stories instead of acting them, which made for some pretty dead spots as they were standing there going on and on, sort of singing pages from the book. It's hard to describe the awfulness of this thing. One egregiously dreadful scene involved a pretty young woman playing Blanche, the woman who Jane thinks is going to be Rochester's bride, singing this cheery song about - God, I can't remember what it was about, only that she and the orchestra (which was excellent) weren't able to come to terms with the pitch. It involved a lot of very high note, just a hair off-key, which I am sure disturbed a lot of dogs 'way out in the county. All in all, a disappointment.

I almost forgot: Another excruciating aspect of this show was the attempt at an English accent on the part of the student performers. I noticed in the programme that they did have a dialect coach. I think that must have been the man I saw sobbing in the corridor during the intermission.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow I will have the surgery I mentioned in my previous blog. Everything is fine - I cleaned out my desk. Washed a load of underwear. Talked to everyone in my family. Talked to a few women who have had this "procedure" - I love that word - and obviously survived it. I should be back at the blog in a few days. Think good thoughts for me.

Keeping Abreast of the News

So I'll just start out from the beginning. I flunked my latest mammogram. That was not a good thing to hear. I had another, very painful one, called a compression mammogram during which one is very much compressed. Something showed up after they tried about 6 or 7 times and then I had a biopsy. What that showed was a very small but not at all nice little thing. It is stage one and non-estrogenic which is not too bad, if you have to have something strange living in your body. The surgeon says the prognosis is very good and that I have a choice between a mastectomy or a lumpectomy and to think about it and let him know. I asked him what he would recommend if I were his mother. He said the lumpy thing. So next week that's what I'll have, with a side of radiation to follow.

I shall now be a member of a club I didn't really want to join. This is not one of the things I ever thought about during one of those wide awake at 3 a.m. nights. Falling asteroids, yes, but cancer, no. I tried to de-disaster this, but it didn't work this time. I will be fine, but it does put a glitch in my equanimity. The hardest part is telling the family, but nobody panicked.

Last week there were two great concerts to distract me. In the morning, the Cleveland Orchestra had the Brahms Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony with that great pizzicato 3rd movement. It was tremendous and thrilling. That night the Hausman Quartet, which is a resident group on campus, did a terrific free concert at the library with lots of fugues by Bach and Beethoven and ended with some tangos - it was Valentine's Day. I don't know if I'll make it to the Cleveland concert next Friday (my seat is in the very last row of the top balcony and I love it, but will I be in good enough shape to climb up to it?) and they're doing the Beethoven 7th. My friend Ethel's mother had all of the Beethoven Symphonies arranged for two pianos. She and her mother, who was from Germany, used to play together. The 2nd movement of that symphony was within my feeble capabilities, and we used to play it together.

In the meantime, there's the Academy Awards coming up. Predictions: "Slumdog Millionaire" for best picture, Sean Penn for "Milk" and Kate Winslet for "The Reade." I did like Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married", so that may happen. I didn't see "The Dark Knight", so I have no idea what all the buzz about the dead guy is. I did like Viola Davis in "Doubt" even though she was barely there. I'll have to watch the PBS "Oliver Twist", so I'll miss some of the broadcast, but since it goes on for hours, I'll be able to catch up in time for the big ones - best picture and actor/actress.

So, tonight I am going to see a musical version of "Jane Eyre." Can't imagine what tunes Mad Bertha will sing, but it should be interesting. Nothing like a Gothic tale to cheer a person up.

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Bloody Lucia

So I went to see "Lucia di Lammermoor" on Saturday in HD over in Akron. The theater was packed, since this is a favorite opera for many of us. One of the draws was Rolando Villazon, who is a terrific tenor, who is also very cute in a fuzzy big-eyed toy animal sort of way. However, Rolando was ill and was replaced by a very fine Polish tenor and the audience both at the Met and in the Akron theater all responded with a disappointed "awwww" when the substitution was announced.

Lucia was sung by the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko who has the perfect bel canto soprano voice but isn't much of an actress. In fact, the tenor who also sang beautifully wasn't much of an actor, so I think it is better to just listen to singers like that on the radio and not watch them, especially in High Def. The opera itself leads to some cognitive dissonance: a Scottish story by Sir Walter Scott, with Italians wearing kilts and emoting in Italian all over the place in a very non-Scots sort of way, not that there isn't the odd Scot who goes mad and stabs her husband on their honeymoon, especially if she has been forced to marry a man she doesn't love by her cruel brother in order to save the family estate. Happens all the time, I'm sure.

One thing that has always puzzled me about this story is that after Lucia offs the groom, she dies. It's necessary to the plot, but you never hear what she dies of. I mean, she has just spent about 20 minutes doing the mad scene, which would tire a person out, being incredibly difficult and requiring a lot of breath control, but I don't think it would kill a person outright. It hasn't killed any sopranos over the years, after all. (She is accompanied, by the way, by a glass harmonica which really adds to the eeriness of the situation.) This is such a really good old fashioned melodrama that the man she really loves, who goes by the old Scottish name of Edgardo, on learning of her death, stabs himself, while singing the most beautiful aria, managing to get through the whole thing before expiring.

I saw this opera years ago when the Metropolitan Uprear used to come to Cleveland in the spring for a week. Roberta Peters was Lucia and was wonderful and sang the mad scene without personally dying. In the production I saw Saturday, they had the dead Lucia come back as a ghost and hang out with Edgardo while he was singing and dying. It was ridiculous, if you want to know the truth.

Gabrielle Who?

The last time I was in Germany, Emily took me to the Lembachhaus, a museum which grew from a private residence in Munich. A prominent feature of this museum is the work of the Blue Rider group. I had never heard of the Blue Rider, although among its members were Franz Marc and Vasily Kandinsky. They were similar to the French impressionists of the late 19th century in that their work had been scorned by the art establishment, which resulted in their banding together in 1910 to promote their "new" art. They started a journal, or almanac, called "The Blue Rider" to express their ideas about art.

Since my education in art took place during and immediately after WWII, I knew nothing of this group, other than those names mentioned above. (Germany and its culture was pretty much country non grata at that time.) What I saw at the Lembachhaus introduced me to some work which I immediately fell in love with, especially the work of Gabrielle Munter. She had met Kandinsky in Munich in 1902 as a student in an art school he had founded, and ended up as his mistress. (He was married, but, hey, we're talking about artists here.) They traveled together on painting trips with other like-minded painters.

In 1909, Munter bought a house in Murnau, which became a kind of headquarters for the Blue Rider Group. Kandinsky spent the summers there and he and Munter did decorative painting on the furniture and the woodwork which is still there to see. Murnau is a beautiful town near the Bavarian Alps. The house sits on a rise from which you can see the Schlossmuseum on another rise across town. The museum features her work, as well as that of other members of the group. She did many paintings from her windows and when you tour the house, you can see what she saw and the paintings she made. Her paintings look simple but are not. She uses color wonderfully. I guess her work would be considered expressionist landscapes, similar to the American Marsden Hartley who was her contemporary. Kandinsky went on to abstract expressionism, but she continued her own style.

She and Kandinsky were together until 1914, when WWI broke out and he had to return to Russia. They corresponded for years, but she only saw him once again the next year. However, she had kept safe in the house in Murnau his paintings, as well as that of other Blue Rider members, through both wars, and donated them to the city of Munich on her 80th birthday.

It's wonderful to discover someone you never knew about when you are a geezer. I have decided to try to do some work in her style. One is the view out my kitchen window. The other is of a strange building in Freising, a cathedral town north of Erding. It's part of the cathedral complex on a dome-like hill overlooking the town. I think it's a barn or a stable that may have been there before the cathedral was bult.

Thoughts About a Historical Day

Like millions of others around the world, I spent Tuesday, Jan. 20, glued to the TV. I think the last inauguration I watched was Jimmy Carter's back in 1977. (He's still one of my favorite presidents, one who has contributed a lot to the world and humanity.) It was a grand day for people all over the world, who watched along with us here.Perhaps they think better now of our country, which has suffered from the hubris and arrogance of the most incompetent administration in history. The healing has started.

But yesterday was an amazing milestone for this country, something to be proud about and something my late husband John would have celebrated more than most, perhaps. He was a sociologist whose field was race and racism. He worked early on for equal opportunity and inclusion for all Americans. He didn't live to see the Freedom Riders in the South, Martin Luther King's sacrifices, and the Voting Rights Act at the time when the civil rights fight began to boil. When he was teaching at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio, some black students came to him about being denied access to the local skating rink, which claimed that it was for members only. He led a group of black and white students to the rink and when he and the white students were admitted without being "members" and the black students weren't, he confronted the owner and demanded an explanation. It made the front page of the local paper and infuriated the president of the college (who was a not so closet racist). When my husband was up for tenure, it was denied, based solely on this incident, since he had been named one of the best professors by the students. When an offer came from Kent State, we left BW with no regrets. Interestingly, tenure was granted retroactively after a faculty battle. It made no sense, but everyone felt that John had been vindicated.

At Kent State, he and some other young professors discovered that the university had approved off-campus housing where black students were turned away. They wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, which infuriated the president, who actually had a sterling record when it came to equal opportunity, having hired the first black professor at a state university, and had encouraged numerous instructors and grad assistants of color. There was one of those academic furors and finally the housing situation was cleared up - no open housing, no approval from the university. The bigger battles were to come, but sadly John was not around to fight them, and now we have an African American president who offers hope to all of us.

As I watched this massive crowd of happy people, I hoped that my daughter Emily was somewhere in there, and in spite of the impossibility of actually seeing her, I kept looking when there were close-ups. As of today, I haven't heard whether she and her friend Kick were lucky enough to get into the city or onto the Mall. She had said that just being in this country would be a good thing.

Some general impressions: Aside from an amazing hat, Aretha seemed to have gotten out of her natural vocal range, which spoiled her rendition of "America." Maybe nobody cared, but it was disappointing. I mean, she is the Queen after all. The minister who gave the benediction was wonderful, and I'm sorry I can't remember his name. I only know that, with MLK, he co-founded SNCC who were the very brave heroes of the civil rights movement in the 60s. His warmth radiated right through my TV. President Obama's (what a cool thing to write) speech was not particularly memorable, but it was the right kind of speech to make at the time, reality based: Enough with the swooning and hero worship; we have a hard job ahead of us, all of us.

Well, it was day to remember and treasure and like the rest of the world, I wish him well.

It's January, Dammit

Even though this is the coldest January we've had in about 25 years or so, it is not unusual for us in Northern Ohio to suffer the stings and bone marrow chilling effects of this frigid weather. The press doesn't help much, drilling it into our heads that the wind chill factor is even worse than the thermometer reading. They stand grimly in front of their fake weather maps and sweep their hands across the ice-blue front moving right toward the viewers. This is now, and tomorrow is going to be EVEN WORSE!! And it usually is.

What I really don't like about this weather is not just that it's cold. After all, I am fortunate: I have a warm house, and a car that works and I don't have to go out if I don't want to. I must say, though, that when I turn the thermostat down to 50 before I go to bed, and I still hear the furnace roaring to life throughout the night, the vision of dollar signs going up the chimney is not too comforting. But I am lucky. I can pay for it without having to go hungry, so I can't complain really.

What does bother me, and it is so petty I am almost ashamed to write about it, is the bundling up that must be done: the gloves, the scarves, the thermal undershirt, the zipped up jacket, the boots. (I refuse to wear a hat unless I have to walk some distance through a parking lot. My hair becomes electrified in the dry cold and a hat only makes it worse, downright shocking.) I feel like Ralphie's brother Randy in "A Christmas Story." If I put my keys in my pocket it takes forever to fish them out, unless I take my gloves off and stuff them into my mouth, which is the only accessible orifice available. I use a cane when the ground is slippery to avoid skidding onto my face, and then when I have to carry a bag of groceries, try to get my keys out, balance the goddam cane, my purse and the grocery bag, I end up shedding possessions like a molting turkey. I feel like a molting turkey.

I see students tripping merrily along in sneakers and little bitty jackets and envy their hardiness and their parents' health insurance. I couldn't do that even when I was in school. I have been cold since the winter of 1940, when my parents uprooted me from the warmth of Atlanta, Georgia. and thrust me into Ohio in January, right into the snow which had always looked so good in picture books, but wasn't , not really. I did forgive them before they shuffled off their mortal coils. But this winter, I must say there's a tad of bitterness.