A few years back we watched a small, amusing movie called “Adventureland.” Starred Jesse Eisenberg, Kristin Stewart and…I forget. It was about a recent college graduate who can’t find a job in his major (Renaissance studies) and ends up at a second-rate amusement park, in a “seasonal job” with a lot of co-workers who are more or less the same age. It was scratching in my brain for the first part of the summer until I remembered why every day reminded me of it, at least a little bit. Not that our waterpark was entirely Adventureland, but there were distinct elements, mainly because for the first time in my life since I was a teenager, I was working with teenagers. It was kind of a shock, but also lots of fun.

The endless energy, oh my god. One day I was sitting on a post next to a crowd-control barrier that was about, I’d estimate, 40 inches off the ground. One of my fellow guards walked up to it and effortlessly leaped over it, box jump-style. Like a deer. At the end of the day, when I’d be dragging my ass to whatever dinner Alan had prepared for us, they’d be on to the second shift. They could walk in hungover and refresh themselves with a short dip in the pool. It was something to see.

On the other hand, I had skills they didn’t, for instance: Telling time. I learned early on that if someone asks, “What time is it” and you answer “ten ’til,” they will stare blankly until you say “two-fifty.” On the other hand, they could communicate volumes thumb-typing their thoughts on their phones, using a million abbreviations that made their texts as hard to understand as hieroglyphics. But it was lovely, lovely, being in their midst after 40-some years of working with so-called adults. Their amusing slang, their incredible knowledge gaps (“man, Hawaii is really out there, isn’t it?”), the way they … well, let’s put it this way: No one knows shit about anyone else’s life. It made me think of the newspaper business, when we’d try to figure out what readers wanted, without talking about whether they were even readers in the first place. We all live in bubbles. It’s good to get out of your own, even if you have to go around for a few weeks as the old-ass white lady in the lifeguard crew.

In a few hours, I have to get up for an early workout. In the meantime, here’s some bloggage:

The bloodbath of the Michigan GOP, thanks to fealty to Donald Trump:

The Michigan Republican Party is starving for cash. A group of prominent activists — including a former statewide candidate — was hit this month with felony charges connected to a bizarre plot to hijack election machines. And in the face of these troubles, suspicion and infighting have been running high. A recent state committee meeting led to a fistfight, a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.

This turmoil is one measure of the way Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have rippled through his party. While Mr. Trump has just begun to wrestle with the consequences of his fictions — including two indictments related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 results — the vast machine of activists, donors and volunteers that power his party has been reckoning with the fallout for years.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of crazy people, if you ask me.

I hope you’re in Adventureland yourselves right now. See you soon.

I should warn you, this will go on for a while. Not today, but I’ll be processing the experience of my summer employment for a while.

I don’t know about you guys, but this last winter about broke me in two. I decided I wanted to spend the warm months a) outside as much as possible; and b) around young people. After reading a few stories about the shortage of lifeguards and the role of geezers in filling the gap, I thought, what the hell, go for it.

It so happened a waterpark in Detroit offered the best deal: A whole $15/hour, which stood in contrast to my own suburb, which was offering, I shit you not, $11.10. Most of the other clubs, parks and municipal pools were in that neighborhood. I think it was the dime added to that eleven bucks that bugged me the most. You could make more, a lot more, at any fast-food joint in town, but then, it’s lifeguarding, the cool summer job. Right?

Wrong. While there are some kids who still want to sit in the sun twirling a whistle and getting a tan, a lot are polishing their college application essays with fulfilling social work, volunteering, etc. It so happened I met another lifeguard at the top of the water slides a couple weeks ago, when a trio of well-built, supremely confident and otherwise cocky teen boys – which is to say, I pegged them for Grosse Pointers at a glance – came through for a few runs while I was posted as topside traffic cop. One was wearing board shorts with GUARD on one leg.

“You working?” I asked him, and he nodded yes, at the Detroit Yacht Club. “What are you making there?” Twelve bucks an hour to start. I told him he’d earn $15 here, but he’d earn every penny. “How many saves have you had this summer?” I asked. “For the whole club? Maybe four?” he answered.

“One of our guards had five in one day,” I told him, and pushed his tube into the flume. Down he went into the three-foot catch pool, where it was pretty common to have to fish frightened children and adults of shaky physical confidence out, or at least boost them to their feet so they could make their way to the steps.

I forgot to mention another reason I took the training and looked for this job: I’m interested in swimming as a social-equity issue. The data is plain: Children of color are far more likely to lack water skills, and drown disproportionately. The NYT had an excellent essay a couple weeks ago that explored the reasons, which are mostly understandable to anyone who’s lived a few summers: Lack of pool water, lack of a swimming tradition, lack of a swimming culture, lack of swimming role models, and a long history of discrimination at the gate to the inviting blue water beyond. Something I learned in my reading this summer: Faced with court orders to desegregate pools in the ’60s and ’70s, many cities just shut them down, permanently. White kids moved to private clubs and backyard pools. Black kids did without. And it shows in drowning statistics.

They told us in training that most guests can’t swim. We did everything to keep them safe; free life jackets for anyone who asked, little kids kept behind the three-foot line, but still, a day with no rescues was pretty uncommon. These weren’t dramatic Baywatch saves, but just jumping in and pulling someone into shallower water, where they could stand up. Even then, some people would, and did, panic and have to work to calm down. My first save, I jumped into the water after a girl who had slipped off her inner tube when the waves started up in the wave pool, and by the time I got to her, someone had already pulled her to safety. My last, a kid got that look — chin in the air, panic on his face — and I tossed him my rescue tube without going in myself. He grabbed it, pulled himself to the wall, said thanks and worked his way down into a safer depth. Very little high drama.

It made me think, a lot, about how I learned to swim, at the Devon Road pool in Upper Arlington, Ohio. The main pool, a rectangle, sloped from baby-pool depth to nine feet, and there were two ropes dividing it. To earn the right to pass the first rope, you had to pass Turtle B in the Red Cross swimming lessons everyone took (easy), but to make it past the second and into the deep end, you had to pass Turtle C, which required you swim back and forth across the width of the pool with only a touch at the wall in between, no resting. I had a hard time my first couple of tries, while my friends who passed were given the golden ticket to not only the deep end, but the real prize — the diving pool. It was a truly memorable moment when I finally made it, and collected the vinyl badge my mom would sew onto my swimsuit. I have been comfortable in water ever since, and the older I get, the more precious pool time is to me; it’s a profound pleasure of not only summer, but the whole year. Why swim for exercise? The older you get, the more it becomes the one thing you can do that doesn’t hurt.

But here’s something that occurred to me as the summer wore on: One reason swimming skills are still too rare? Waterparks themselves. The Devon Road pool had no slides, no splash pads, no wave machines. The deepest water at the park where I worked was six feet, and most people never went that far. But the rest of the park was shallow and inviting to people who couldn’t swim a stroke, and as I twirled my whistle and watched over it, I thought of the waterparks I’d been in, and had been built in the decades since I passed Turtle C. Kate and I would visit Soak City at Cedar Point when she tired of riding roller coasters, where she’d go down slide after slide and I’d float on the various lazy-river attractions. Affluent suburbs are less likely to build traditional swimming pools and more likely – at least around here, with months of cold weather to endure – to install indoor facilities with few lap-swimming lanes but lots of play opportunities for kids with February cabin fever. They’re fun, absolutely they are, but they don’t have much of a barrier to entry beyond buying a ticket.

Our park was on the east side, in Detroit. Suburban families would come sometimes, usually early in the day, and I learned to spot the Grosse Pointe kids pretty early. They all swam like Michael Phelps. You had to be four feet tall to ride the slides, but I waved through more than a few borderline kids who’d proved they could get from splashdown to the exit steps with three or four perfect strokes of freestyle. “You swim really well,” I’d tell them. “Yeah, I swim on my team,” they’d reply, the dead giveaway. One mother told me the Grosse Pointe pools started lessons for kids around 3, and there were plenty enrolled. (Well, it is a boating community, and it’s a life skill.)

One day, my shift ended with a break, and I thought I’d get a jump on closing duties by doing a few of the little chores we were expected to do — picking up trash, collecting abandoned life jackets, etc. I was in a remote area of the deck when came up on two women who were clearly getting high, although they were trying to hide it.

“Can you swim?” one asked.

“Well, I’m a lifeguard, so I’d better,” I replied.

“I should learn,” she said. “I never did. I should do that one of these days.”

“Yeah, you should,” I told her. “You never know when you’ll fall out of a boat.”

She looked a little startled. But it’s true. It’s a life skill. Life-saving, actually, every time you get in the water.

More later. It was a fun summer.

We went sailing yesterday, and it was perfect for it — clear and sunny and a steady-but-not-overpowering breeze out of the southwest. Motoring into the marina, we passed a smallish Boston Whaler flying a largeish — like, queen-size bedsheet size — American flag from one side of the Bimini top. Behind it, I could see another flag flying, and call me a cynic, but I had a strong feeling what it would be, and sure enough, the breeze lifted it so we could see: LET’S GO BRANDON.

Reader, I flipped him the bird. Don’t think he saw it, but I’m not letting that stuff go anymore.

This will be a bit of a mishmash. As usual, I start with an apology for my scarce presence around here. I’ve been working a second job this summer. Here’s a clue: I have the best tan I’ve had since high school.

Which is to say: I’m a lifeguard at a local waterpark. It has been a crazy summer, and I will tell you more about it when the season officially ends for me after this week. I got into it because I kept reading about the lifeguard shortage keeping pools from opening, or keeping them on shorter hours, but it’s turned out to be so much more than that. The biggest surprise is how physically exhausting it’s been. It’s not the physical activity (which isn’t all that much), but the sitting in the sun all day, even with shade umbrellas and sunscreen and frequent breaks and chugging water, just saps my strength. I can’t believe I actually thought I’d ride my bike to and from the park every day (four miles one way). I often end the day scowling at my car because it’s one space away from the closest possible spot in the parking lot. And there’s a mental exhaustion that comes from keeping focused attention on the water, especially when most of the people in it can’t swim.

Fortunately, Alan has stepped up and usually has a delicious meal waiting for me when I come through the door at 7 p.m. But I go from dinner to a couple hours of TV to a half hour of reading in bed to zzzzzzz.

My thoughts are with our California readers, especially L.A. Mary, as they deal with the hurricane/tropical storm. It looks like the worst of it is over, but SoCal simply isn’t set up to deal with rainfall of this magnitude. (Of course, many areas where it’s common aren’t anymore, either. :::raises hand:::) But I just read the the L.A. River peaked well below flood stage, and is falling now. So that’s good.

Here’s a funny story about Ron DeSantis’ awkwardness, which may have already been discussed in comments because it’s a few days old, but honestly I haven’t even glanced at ye olde comments in that time. Still, it’s a gift link and this made me laugh:

As he sought to connect with voters and donors, critics said DeSantis had resembled — to quote a couple of posts — “a robot put together from scrapped spare parts from Disney’s The Hall of Presidents” or “an extraterrestrial in a skin-suit trying to learn to be human.”

Been there, felt that.

Finally, Neil Steinberg expresses for the millionth time the jeez-would-you-GO-AWAY-already feeling so many of us have, but it still seems worth saying:

It’s the whining that most exasperates me. Don’t they ever tire of it? Yes, Donald Trump is famous for the lies that firehose out of his mouth, as easily as he draws breath and almost as often.

But it’s the constant complaining that drives me mad, if I didn’t tune it out — I can’t imagine watching Trump’s interview this Thursday with Tucker Carlson, his half-clever way of drawing whatever scant interest there might be away from the first Republican presidential debate, a gathering of gnats, all of whom, with the exception of born-again Chris Christie, can’t even muster the internal fortitude to string together a few critical words against the liar and bully, fraud and traitor whom they would defeat.

Yep.

OK, I have to do a few chores around this dump, drink some water, maybe clean my bathroom. I had some photos to share, but for some reason the server isn’t accepting them. I’ll try again later. Thanks for tolerating everything.

The other day I was debating whether to remove a comma from between two adjectives in this phrase…

its former, legendary zoo director, Jack Hanna

…when I remembered there’s a weird rule for adjectives, not only whether you need commas, but the order in which they should be used, if you need a few of them to describe something. I took out the comma between “former” and “legendary,” although I’ve since learned I should have left it in:

You should use a comma between two adjectives when they are coordinate adjectives. Coordinate adjectives are two or more adjectives that describe the same noun equally.

With coordinate adjectives you can put “and” between them and the meaning is the same. Similarly, you can swap their order.

The example given is the shiny silver pole. The source argues for a comma here, although I don’t think they’re strictly coordinate. To my ear, “shiny” describes the sort of silver, not necessarily the pole itself. Anyway, screw online grammar guides, because when it comes to adjectives, my favorite is the rule about order of adjectives:

Determiner
Observation (articles like this or that, plus numbers)
Size and Shape
Age
Color
Origin
Material
Qualifier

I found that list on a website for non-native English speakers, and you really have to appreciate how hard it is to learn English when you look at it. Natives would never say the “gray old mare,” because we know, even without learning the song in grade school, that it’s the old gray mare. Nor would we say “old little lady” – she’s a little old lady. We also don’t generally put commas between them, although I’ve probably edited a dozen writers who turn in copy about a little, old lady.

You can amuse yourself stringing adjectives together in the correct order, trying to make the phrase longer: nine fat yellow kittens or Bob’s old blue cotton shirt, etc., although you can get a little dizzy with the length, wondering if you really need to cram them all in there in one phrase.

But these are the things writers consider. Benjamin Dreyer, the copy editor who gave the world a Strunk & White for the modern age, noted today was the 75th anniversary of the publication of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and musing on how he might have edited its first sentence:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. pic.twitter.com/S3TIrhT3kp

— Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) June 27, 2023

(It’s a thread. Click replies for his considerations.) I remember reading “The Lottery” in, what, seventh grade, maybe? Eighth? Surely no later than that. I wonder whether it’s still taught today, or whether it’s been replaced by something more Relevant. I know it scared the shit out of me, the same way Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” did the same, just in the first paragraph:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Stephen King published a book on his favorite horror fiction, and devotes a fair amount of time to ol’ Shirley, who really knew how to set a mood from the jump. I think, in this one, the phrases “not sane,” “sensibly shut” and “walked alone” are little chills down the spine, and I wonder how many times she wrote and rewrote that passage to get it perfect. (Which it is.)

OK, then, on to the bloggage:

Hey, Buckeyes: A short but essential playlist of songs about Ohio.

You may have heard about the story about the penis-enlargement industry published yesterday, and upon clicking The New Yorker link, may have been shut out by the paywall. Never fear! ProPublica co-published the story, and it’s free and totally worth the time it’ll take to read it. It’s both funny and squirm-inducing and empathetic and all the other good things a story like this should be. I nearly shrieked at this passage:

When a defense­-and-­ intelligence contractor’s girlfriend, a registered nurse, aspirated his seroma with a sterile needle, a cup of amber fluid oozed out. The one time they tried to have sex, she told me, the corners of his implant felt like “someone sticking a butter knife inside you.”

Ee-yikes. And with that, sayonara until later in the week. Or maybe next week. Depends on what happens.

Today my pleasant little suburb had its “first annual” — the copy editor in me winced — “family fun bike ride.” It was clearly aimed at families with children, but they needed volunteers, so what the hell, I signed up. I’d hoped I’d get assigned to sweep, i.e., be the last in the peloton to make sure no one falls behind, but instead they assigned each volunteer to a corner, to make sure everyone stayed on course.

The course, I should add, was a rectangle. Down so many blocks, over one block, back the same number of blocks, over to the starting point. Total distance: 1.4 miles. Like I said, families with kids, and little ones. The lead and sweep positions were police, one on a bike and the sweep in a vehicle, lights blazing. We don’t take chances with child safety in the tender, fearful suburbs. I rode out to my post alone, and passed a yard where the owner gave me a cheery wave. I waved back, then noticed his side door had a Trump/Pence sign on the window. Given the events of last Friday, I wanted to circle back, stop and yell HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU PEOPLE ANYWAY? But I didn’t. Look at me, the adult.

Anyway, the bike ride was fun, even though it rained. (Finally, rain. The first in at least a month.) As the last of them passed my post, I got on my own bike and rode back to the park with them. It was a grandmother and her wee grandson, who still had training wheels, and was working mightily to keep pumping away. We encouraged him, and he found his second wind. The sweeping police vehicle celebrated our finish with a siren whoop. Forty-five minutes of waiting around after volunteer registration, 12 minutes of cycling, then home.

I spent the weekend running hither and yon, and so today, bike ride notwithstanding, was all about relaxation. (And doing pre-work for next week’s work.) So I had time to read the entire lengthy obituary for Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who died Saturday. (Gift link to the obit.) What…a life. On my way back from Columbus after the moving adventure, I listened to some podcasts, and heard one, a recent “Fresh Air” episode, on Clarence Thomas, tied to a POV episode about him and Ginni. I hadn’t realized how grim and painful Thomas’ early life had been; he is the ultimate example of the therapy phrase “hurt people hurt people.” His grandfather, who raised him, emotionally abused him. White people abused him. Black people abused him. So he grew up to be an asshole. So did Ted Kaczynski, although there’s a strong case to be made that he was simply born broken.

The obit has a hell of a kicker:

Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate

vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to a 2021 article in The Baffler.

Mr. Kaczynski was no longer the mysterious killer who had belatedly projected an outlandish justification for violence; now he was the originator of one of many styles of transgression and all-knowing condemnation to adopt online. His crimes lay in a past young people had never known, and he was imprisoned, no longer an active threat to society.

His online support did not indicate how many eco-terrorists had been newly minted, but it did measure a prevalence of cynicism, boredom, dissatisfaction with modern life and gloom about its prospects for change.

During his imprisonment, Mr. Kaczynski copied his correspondence by hand and forwarded it to the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an archive devoted to radical protest, which has amassed dozens of boxes of Kaczynskiana.

According to New York magazine, Mr. Kaczynski’s papers became one of the collection’s most popular offerings. In an interview with the magazine, Julie Herrada, the collection’s curator, declined to describe the people so intrigued by Mr. Kaczynski that they visit the library to look through his archive. She said just one thing: “Nobody seems crazy.”

No doubt. We’ll be passing this way again, I’m sure. Have a good week, all.

I have friends who have moved…let me count… three or four times in 10 or so years, and honestly, I don’t know how the hell they’ve survived. My brother lived in a small apartment, the heavy stuff was already done by his younger friends, and still, two days of moving his dusty shit from one place to another left me grumpy and wrung out like a worn dishrag. Driving home, I was forced — forced, I say — to put Donna Summer singles on very very loud in my car, just to keep my spirits up for the final push from Toledo to Detroit.

Of course, it would help if he hadn’t lived in one of those hellscape ’70s-era apartment complexes, about a dozen or so units that all look like this:

I mean, every single one. I was trying to find his unit in this ghastly array, talking to my sister on the phone, and said, “I bet even the people who build this shit were depressed afterward.” Of course they weren’t; this was the ’70s, and complexes like these were going up everywhere. The better ones had pools, at least, but this one didn’t. Just these ugly mushroom-capped buildings, garages and… shudder.

But he’s in a better place now, in a better part of town. And I have rested and rehydrated, got some pool time and some non-crap food, and I feel mostly human again.

And I do recommend Donna for slow periods on the road. Especially “Hot Stuff” and any playlist called Disco Forever.

After I got home, I retrieved “Heat 2” from my local library; I had to wait long enough that I’d forgotten I was on the hold list. This is Michael Mann’s novel-as-sequel to his film “Heat,” one of my favorites; one night in France when it was pouring buckets outside, we stayed inside to watch it on Netflix with French subtitles (I thought I might pick up some tips on obscenities). I read the whole 460-page thing in three days, which is to say it’s a page-turner, but oy, it reads like Mann dictated the whole thing into voice memos and left Meg Gardiner, his co-author, to turn it into prose. The action sequences — see, I’m even using film jargon here — are described in the most minute detail, as are the weapons, while the female characters are basically a combination of stock adjectives for hair, skin and body.

However! If you were a fan of the movie, you’ll probably find it worth your while. It’s both a prequel and sequel to the story told in the film, so you get lots of Neil McCauley, Michael Cerrito and Chris Shiherlis, as well as Vincent Hanna. And the female characters are all beautiful, athletic, and move like lionesses. And if you like that stuff, you’ll like this stuff.

Now it’s Monday, and it’s time to get to work. Poached eggs and spinach for breakfast, I’m thinking. I need to start the week like Popeye.

Well, that was a great weekend. Long, too much driving, but I got it done, the mother-to-be was showered — did I mention this trip was for a baby shower? — and I drank approximately 17,000 gallons of beer. My lord, they love their beer in Wisconsin, don’t they? And by 17,000 gallons, I don’t mean to say that I was drunk the whole time. It’s just that however many I had felt like 17,000 gallons. Beer used to be all I drank and now it’s more like once in a while. I felt… bilious. But happy. Perfect weather, old friends, a couple hours of WXRT on the radio.

And lakes:

And sunsets over the lakes:

The University of Wisconsin student union is the best I’ve ever been to, on yet another lake:

But I got home in time for “Succession,” which I see many of you have been discussing. A killer episode in a killer season. I will grieve its disappearance after next week. I’ve had my eye on Jeremy Strong since I saw him in “The Big Short” and it’s great to see him with such a meaty role.

And after <200 words, I can already tell I'm tapped out. Accept these photos and I'll be back later in the week.

Gonna be doing a little traveling, again, this weekend. On (to) Wisconsin for a friend catch-up plus baby shower. Both of the friends I’ll be visiting are Covid-sensitive, so I’ll be packing some tests for everyone’s peace of mind. Whenever I think of Covid, I’ll check current case numbers, which continue to fall and fall. Covid is not done with us, but for now — FOR NOW — the worst is over.

Sometimes, when I’m checking numbers, I’ll think about the early days of Covid, when nobody knew anything, some people were wiping down their groceries with bleach and it was sanitize-sanitize-sanitize. One thing I cannot tolerate in 2023 are people who believe everything we’ve learned since then was widely known in 2020. “The virus only killed old people!” “You couldn’t get it outside!” And so on. I saw a Guardian story about a woman, Naomi Klein, who is often confused with Naomi Wolf, and used that to spark a book about conspiracy lunatics. That reminded me that Wolf came to Michigan two years ago and testified before the Legislature, so I looked up what she said then, and: Whew.

I have no doubt another pandemic will wipe us out, because apparently we learned nothing at all from this last one. Can you tell I’m reading “Station Eleven” now, and loving it? Because I am. It’s wonderful and haunting, and a very different read today than it would have been when it was published in 2014.

Yesterday I went to the Schvitz with a friend. It was hot, hot, mega-hot. Like hell’s-waiting-room hot. I went in and out for a couple of hours, then came home feeling utterly wrung out, which is good, although I needed another couple tankards of water to even gather the strength to make dinner. On the way there, WDET played Shadow Show’s new single and the host speculated it could be this year’s “Detroit song of the summer,” which was very nice.

Speaking of Kate, she went to the Tigers game yesterday and was caught on the fan cam:

I used to date a guy whose father would write a one-page roundup of all the family news, kind of a weekly Christmas letter, using multiple carbons and sending them out to any close relative who lived out of town. He always, always ended it this way:

That is about all the news for this week.

Seems to work here. Happy Wednesday.

Last week Alan and I realized we are about to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary, and we should do something to observe it. So we made last-minute reservations in Stratford, where the Shakespeare festival isn’t quite up to full speed just yet, but the plays are starting to open, and still at preview-level pricing.

We drove over on Saturday and saw “Rent,” one of two musicals they’re doing this year. (The other is “Spamalot,” and as I’m only a casual Monty Python fan, the choice was clear.) It was very fine. I’m not much for sung-through musicals, but this was a good production. Just a few years ago, a 1996 play about the persecution of drag queens, homosexuals, AIDS victims, anarchist professors and others might have seemed dated. As it is, the only unrealistic thing about the show was the idea that artists could squat in a loft on the lower east side of Manhattan. The rest was pretty dead-on.

I was curious who was in the original Broadway production. I don’t follow B’way closely, but I recognized Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel (or as John Travolta called her at the Oscars, Adele Dazeem). Diggs played Roger, the AIDS-cursed guitarist Benny the bad guy, and Adele was Maureen, who gets a couple of big numbers.

Living so close to Canada, I always wonder why we don’t go more often, even to Windsor. We’re so close to Canada you can see cars driving the shoreline roads, and yet, once you get there, everything is different. The accents change, people say “soe-rry” for the slightest offense, miles change to kilometers, the roads are as smooth as glass, your chance of dying in a mass shooting drops off the table. You can pick up a little French just by reading labels and street signs. Even their vodka-and-tomato juice drink is different, the bloody Caesar instead of Mary. And yet, you’re still speaking English, the currency is still dollars and cents, just different, gaily colored dollars.

God knows what Canadians think of us.

As always when I’m in Stratford, I bought books. “Station Eleven” from the Canadian-authors rack. “Birnam Wood,” which got a rave review in the NYT today, and the text of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which I’ve never read. And a blank journal for Kate, who stepped up to watch Wendy on short notice.

Speaking of the NYT, some great work today, not only there. First, an infuriating, extremely well-documented project on how three assholes worked a number of fake charities via robocall, raising $89 million in the process, and spending only 1 percent on the issues they were allegedly raising money for. I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn these guys are…well, you know.

This is older, but from ProPublica, a report on the nation’s worst-funded schools, which are falling apart. It’s not where you might think. (But once you know, it makes perfect sense.)

Finally, is it past time for Dianne Feinstein to resign?

And with that, I’m going to doze and wait for my Mothers Day dinner with Kate. Hope yours went/is going well.

We had a good Easter. I hope you did, too. We invited Kate and her boyfriend, then thought hell, make it a party and invited four more people, which is just about the limit for my entertaining-indoors skills. But it turned out great; the secret is always in getting the right mix of guests, and it was a fantastic four-generation mix (Boomer, X, Millennial, Z). We had ham and biscuits and eggs and fruit and lox and pumpernickel and all the fixin’s, including my effort to make a frittata for the vegan guest, that which collapsed, so it was rechristened a tofu scramble and it tasted fine. Plus cake. Can’t go wrong with cake for Easter brunch.

The weather finally broke, and it was sunny all day, so we repaired to the back yard, and that was fine, too. Alan bartended, and made killer daiquiris, bloodies and all the rest of it.

I needed one day of joy, after the news of the weekend. First Clarence Fucking Thomas, then Matthew Fucking Kacsmaryk. Every time I see that smug mug on Thomas, I think unkind thoughts, things like you look like a frog and I hope you die on the toilet. Kacsmaryk is another breed of cat, far, far younger, but like Thomas, he has lifetime tenure, so we’ll have to hope for judicial isolation in whatever shithole in Texas he currently occupies. I saw some defenses of Thomas’ sugar daddy, Harlan Crow (god, what a name, right out of Faulker, or Dickens) over the weekend, mostly of the he’s-a-really-decent-man-and-only-collects-Nazi-memorabilia-out-of-love-for-freedom variety. But I’d ask you: If for some reason you felt that way, would YOU keep such items in your HOUSE? Of course not. These people are awful.

You knew the high from Janet Protasiewicz couldn’t last. I only hoped for a few more days.

So here we are at the beginning of the week. Temperatures ABOVE 70 predicted by Wednesday, so we should celebrate, at least a little.

Neil Steinberg has a good column today, which you can read, paywall-free, at the Sun-Times. It’s about a man living with HIV, among many, many other obstacles to a good life, including mental illness, autism, recent homelessness and at least some gender dysphoria (he uses male pronouns but is planning to live as female at some point in the future. But he’s also benefiting from a wide array of social programs, too. I always appreciate the twists Neil’s columns often take:

Since I know that readers can take a Victorian view of philanthropy — those benefiting from social service agencies ought to somehow earn their support by cleaving to a hazy puritanical ideal — it’s worth pausing to ask how the city would be better if Cox were being ravaged by AIDS in Grant Park rather than living his best life, healthy in an apartment in Forest Park?

He’s certainly better this way. And, it’s fairly clear, so is Chicago.

OK, so it’s on to the Monday grind. In the words of our sex-working former First Lady: Be best.