In the spirit of the season?

I stumbled across a BBC Magazine article this morning while I was avoiding writing Christmas cards. It's ten pro/con items about sending Christmas cards. On the whole, the article encourages the sending of cards, but Item #9 drew me up short: the expert (some guy who wrote a book about the vanishing art of letter-writing) . . .implores: "Please no pictures of your beaming family."

Oh, damn.

The Resident Fan Boy and I have sent picture cards for the past 21 years, starting with elder daughter's first Christmas. People tell us they like them. But they would, wouldn't they? I've always figured we were gifting both our friends and "frenemies". Our friends would get a kick out of watching the girls grow up; anyone who didn't care for the RFB or (more likely) me, could derive grim satisfaction out of watching us age.

The BBC and I seem to be in agreement on the subject of what Britons call "round robin letters" and I call "newsletters". I have loathed them from the get-go. At best, they are impersonal documents pretending to be letters; at worst, they are painfully tedious itemizations of events that really aren't that interesting, usually accompanied by a painfully long travelogue for good measure. The nadir was the sweet young mother of two who informed us and everyone else on her list, in photo-copied splendour, that she had recently suffered a miscarriage and that her heart went out "to all those of you unable to have children".

So, for the record, I've never sent a family newsletter, journal, gazette, or year-in-review. Given the fact that elder daughter is now of the traditional age of majority, our friends and frenemies soon may be spared the gurning family photo as well.

So long as they keep off Facebook. I'll get back to scribbling illegible holiday greetings now; I've already bought the damn stamps.

Comedy cheat #3: feeling guilty about laughing at Sam Kinison

In the continuing series of comedy moments that have stuck with me:

So it was the mid-eighties and it seemed that everything was Band Aid, Live Aid, and CBC footage of skeletal children in Ethiopia. It was heart-rending.

Maybe that's why I laughed until I hurt when I saw this routine by Sam Kinison who never really was my kind of comedian.  However, the warped logic of this is diabolically irresistible:
I'm not proud of myself for finding this funny. But I did.  And a twisted part of me still does.

If you go down to the woods today

We like to support local theatre when we can. This was a musical at the Gladstone Theatre, featuring Zac Counsil, whom we had seen in a clever three-person adaptation of Macbeth last year, and the amazing Kris Joseph, who was one of the very best actors in Ottawa before he moved west to Edmonton. I knew next to nothing about this play -- it's a cult musical from the 1990s -- but we were warned: "Stage fog; prop guns; intercourse bears". Intercourse bears?

Well, the first half was quite entertaining. Even before the lights went down, the fog machine spewed interesting white billows across the black stage. Like real clouds, they floated into interesting shapes; one looked for all the world like the jaws of a smoky crocodile reaching out to snap the audience. When the show began, the acting was fine, and the singing strong. Kris Joseph, as expected, took over every scene he was in as the troubled doctor who saves the Bat Boy because he hopes this will save his marriage. (Things get nasty when it doesn't.) I was rather disappointed by the lack-lustre response of the audience; the cast was working so hard.

It all fell apart a bit after intermission. A young boy across the aisle who appeared to be about four, seemed to lose interest during the first musical number and started snapping pictures with his iPhone (or whatever it was -- he had been playing games on it during the intermission when the Resident Fan Boy heard him tell the couple behind him that his mum was in the cast). He snapped away steadily for about ten minutes until the man behind him firmly grasped his shoulders.

They lost me for good when the cute furry animals start copulating while singing about inter-species harmony. I saw the bears but didn't see them having intercourse. I was too busy trying not to watch a tiny bunny do unspeakable things to Grover the Monster. It's supposed to be funny and satirical; I thought it was gratuitous and over-the-top. This play is being marketed as "heart-warming".

After the big denouement, which involved a women being sexually assaulted by bats and a bit of inadvertent incest, I turned to the Resident Fan Boy and joked weakly: "My review for this would be: 'If you liked Avenue Q, you'll probably like this."

Back home, on Skype, we tried to explain to elder daughter in Halifax about the puppets having sex. Younger daughter gasped from the dinner table: "The puppets were having sex????"

Somehow, I don't think she's picking up much from the life discussions at her school.

Bedside manners

Demeter was determined that I should attend last Sunday's service at the First Unitarian Church of Victoria. The focus was to be The Bedside Singers, a group of Victoria Hospice volunteers who (when invited) gather in dying patients' rooms to sing them whatever they require and desire. A bonus for me, aside from the fact that I was a volunteer at the Hospice for some years before we left Victoria in 2000, was that I know two of the Bedside Singers quite well, although I hadn't heard of the group which was formed after my departure.

I enjoyed the service enormously, and when I approached them afterwards, the singers told me they'd seen me nodding in recognition of the things they were saying. I, in turn, told them the story of one of the two deaths for which I was present at Hospice.

See, when a patient is near death, you generally go fetch the nurses who usually know the patient and the family better than a volunteer who is only on the unit for three hours once a week. However, after children, I had to take weekend shifts which were quieter, as the administrative and counseling staff and the doctors had gone home. There seemed to be fewer nurses, too, although that can't have been right. One Saturday morning, I was asked to shave a non-responsive gentleman whose partner was on her way in. It was an electric razor, so although I had never shaved anyone before, I set to, softly telling the fellow what I was doing, because we were trained to never assume a patient can't hear.

He stopped breathing shortly before his partner arrived, and about half an hour after I shaved him, I hastily add. The nurse asked me to wait with him while they waylaid the lady to tell her the news. She soon came in, and I introduced myself briefly, asking if she'd like some time alone.

At that very minute, the gentleman breathed in with a noisy gasp. His partner and I nearly leapt into each other's arms. She hurried to his side, and I waited for the next breath. Which didn't come.

The lady looked up at me in tearful triumph.
"He waited for me!"

So, as deaths go, that one was remarkably untraumatic. Still, it's a solemn and unsettling thing to be present at a fellow human being's exit, so I phoned the Resident Fan Boy to warn him, and he was waiting for me at the door when I came home.

"It's a strange feeling," I told him. "It's only the second death I've been at...and the first fellow I ever shaved...."

The Resident Fan Boy could not resist. Striking a melodramatic pose, he warbled: ♪He went to his Maker impeccably shaved!♪

If you don't consider this in bad taste (the Resident Fan Boy has a rather dark sense of humour), here's the reference. (If you do, perhaps you'd better avert your eyes):


Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd
His skin was pale, his eye was odd
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
Who never thereafter were heard of again...
He trod a path that few had trod
Did Sweeney Todd
The demon barber of Fleet Street

He kept a shop in London town
of fancy clients, and good renown.
And what if none of their souls were saved?
They went to their maker impeccably shaved
By Sweeney,
By Sweeney Todd
The demon barber of Fleet Street

Swing your razor wide, Sweeney!
Hold it to the skies!
Freely flows the blood of those who moralize...

His needs were few, his room was bare.
A lavabo and a fancy chair.
A mug of suds and a leather strop
an apron, a towel, a pail and a mop.
For neatness he deserves a nod,
does Sweeney Todd,
the demon barber of Fleet Street

Inconspicuous, Sweeney was
Quick, and quiet, and clean he was.
Back of his smile
Under his word
Sweeney heard music that nobody heard.

Sweeney pondered and Sweeney planned
Like a perfect machine he planned
Sweeney was smooth
Sweeney was subtle
Sweeney would blink and rats would scuttle...

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
He served a dark and a vengeful god.
What happened then? Well that's the play,
And he wouldn't want us to give it away...

Not Sweeney...
Not Sweeney Todd....

The Demon Barber of Fleet...Street...