Episode 1: “Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself”

So, here’s the scenario: you’re a Creative Person-an actor, musician, dancer, etc. so forth. You’re over 40, and your body at some point tells you-sometimes subtly, sometimes less so-that things have irrevocably changed in your life. What do you do now? Well, if you’re like me, you create a podcast and talk about it. I’m Michael E. Russo, and I’ll be discussing all aspects of being an aging artist here in the Creative Care Unit.

            The front lawn had been ignored by the 56-year-old owner of a house in Bucks County, PA for a while, due to heavy rains and scheduling conflicts, and by August 6, 2018 the grass had gotten pretty long.  Around 6 PM or so, having just finished dinner and still tired from work, the owner decided to at least try and mow some of the lawn before the sun set, stopping only whether he or the push mower had run out of gas. At 7 PM, both did just that. After putting the mower away, he came in the house, stripped off his sweaty clothes and laid down under the ceiling fan in the living room to watch “Jeopardy!”.

He couldn’t stop sweating, however, and a shower did nothing to cool him off. At approximately 7:30 PM or so, his wife dropped him off at the entrance to the emergency room of Doylestown Hospital, where he described his complaint to the nurse at the front desk with one word: “Chest”. By 9 PM he had been admitted, evaluated, had two stents installed in his heart’s LAD artery, AKA “The Widowmaker”, and was placed in a room. By midnight he was resting comfortably in his hospital bed, his wife and pastor having left him a little while before, tired and very thirsty after all that had happened to him in just a few hours.

            That man, as you may have guessed, me. It was not exactly the first time that I’d been admitted to a hospital, nor was this was the first time that I’d been presented with a condition that could seriously impact my abilities as an actor/singer/musician, but it was the first time that someone had said to me that I could’ve died.

            I spent a little over three days in the hospital, and there’s only so much reading, sleeping and television watching you can do before you’re left alone with yourself. There was a lot of emotions to process, mostly anger mixed with self-pity and a sense of the bizarre that seems to follow me even in the direst circumstances. Now I dutifully followed the instructions of the staff, running out of patience when I finally had to check out and they wanted to keep me for an extra day. Once I’d gotten home, notified anyone else who hadn’t found out already and settled in to my new normal, all you can ask is: Now what?

            This podcast will attempt to answer that question, and all of the others that came up at the same time. We’ll go walking on my journey as a Creative, documenting the specific issues I’ve had over the years (the heart was just the latest one) and how I dealt with them. We may not get an answer to any of the questions I raised, but we might find a way to cope with all of this, which is an answer itself, I suppose.

            But first, a little background as to how I got here in the first place.

            I’ve always been fascinated with music. My first memories of printed music come from when I was a child attending church with my parents and little brother. We’d open the hymnal to the song selected for that part of the service and start singing. By that time, I could read the words on the page, but I had no idea what all of those little black dots on the lines meant. How do you know which notes to sing? How do you know which words come when? I had no clue. By the first grade, we’d had a lesson on music notation-what a G clef was, the names of the notes on the treble staff, etc.- and I think I aced that test. Music was becoming less foreign to me.

            In my elementary school, you could sign up for instrument lessons in the 3^rd grade. I wanted to play the drums, but I made the mistake of asking my parents about this first thing in the morning before the paper was to be turned in. I soon discovered that asking your parents for drum lessons before they’ve even gotten out of bed is not exactly a recipe for getting what you want. One of them suggested I learn to play the trumpet, so I signed up for that. Turns out I had a happy knack for the horn, and within a couple of months of making my first noises on the trumpet I was playing in the school band. I was also singing in the church choir, and I even got to sing a solo, “Wonderful Words of Life”, which I still remember bits of to this day. (Sings: “Sing them over again to me/Wonderful words of life”). But I digress.

            Over the years I kept playing the trumpet, playing in the elementary school orchestra as well as the band (I never sang in the school choir, which frustrated the choir director, Miss Graeber, who also lived down the block from me). I also got a taste of acting in the various school plays I was in. By the time I was in high school, I was playing trumpet in six school bands, singing in the choir and was active in the drama department. I’d also finally gotten a drum set and some guitars and started learning how to play them. I even tried my hand at songwriting, which was not exactly a smashing success.

            When the time came to pick a college to attend, I wasn’t really all that certain what I wanted to do with my life, and nobody was exactly saying to me “You should try THIS!” I had visited Berklee College of Music in Boston during one of their high school jazz fests. I liked it, and without any other options open to me, I auditioned and got in. Thirty-eight years later, I’m doing a podcast.

            And I think at this point I should take a break, get something to drink. We’ll be back with more of the Creative Care Unit in just a moment.

            Welcome back to the Creative Care Unit.

            So why now? Why a podcast? Well, with most things in my life, this starts with an idea from my Long-Suffering Wife.

            Most of the work I‘ve had as an actor in films and television has been of the background kind. I don’t work so often that the jobs all run into one another, and I really pay attention when I’m on set, so I come home with a pretty full picture of what I experienced, so that when my Wife asks me, “How was your day, dear?”, I can give her a fairly complete account. I can also give that account to any friends of mine who ask me what I’ve been up to.

            Problem is, my wife would be around when I told and re-told these stories, and she got tired of hearing them over and over again. She finally said to me, “Why don’t you write these down so that I don’t have to hear them again?” Now I didn’t think that I would, until I’d written a reply to a photographer friend about what it was like to work as a stand-in on a Vanity Fair cover that Annie Liebovitz was shooting. The reply was three pages long. Once I saw that, I thought, “There might be something there”, so I started writing. This later evolved into my blog, “Don’t Blink!”, which I’ve pretty much neglected at this point. You can still find it if you look for it, it’s out there. It got to be a pretty useful exercise, though. I’d write down the stories, I didn’t repeat them as often around my wife, and they made space for any new stores I’d have from anything else I’d have working on.

            Now at the same time, I’d had some issues with my body that needed to be dealt with. Most of the medical issues that I’ve had hadn’t kept me out of action for very long, and they’ve been few and far between enough so that, like the background work, I can remember details fairly clearly and I can tell someone exactly what happened when things went wrong, and I can also tell them how the treatment went. After 56 years on this planet, I’ve acquired quite a backlog of stories about my diseases and how they were dealt with, and a lot of them haven’t been told yet.

Now let’s add to this what my wife calls my tendency to speak in monologues. When someone asks me about something, they get details, lots of them. Even at my Hideous Survival Job (and you’ll be hearing more about that later, I promise), when a customer asks me where something is, I give them directions where to find it that are so clear that they can’t miss it.

For example: a customer will ask me where the bathroom is, and I’ll say to them, “OK, you see that wall of chemicals there?” “Yeah.” “Go all the way down ‘til you get to that wall. To the right of that wall of chemicals there is a door.” “Uh-huh.” “Go through the door, make a left…” “Yeah?” “Go to the end of the hallway. Once you get to the end of the hallway, there is a door. Open the door, there’s the bathroom. You can’t miss it.”

And they never do.

Now this translates into my social media posts, which has led more than a few friends to suggest that write a book about my life. OK. What’s wrong with that? The problem is, over the years my fingers have sustained a lot of damage from the typing that I did at other jobs that I had, so I can’t really do much typing for a very long time. Now on days when it got really bad at this one job I had, it was better for me to hold a pencil in my right hand and hunt-and-peck my way through work. I got through it-pretty efficiently. One of my bosses actually said, “I’ve never seen anybody do that.”, but I know it wasn’t exactly what was needed, and my hands were just hurting, so I really couldn’t do that for too long. And if I do it now, even though I don’t type as much, inevitably it starts hurting. Now, the idea of going through a lot of pain for a book about my life just really didn’t appeal to me.

            A podcast, however? THAT’S a different story! Lord knows I can talk-pretty obvious-so I can tell my stories with a minimum of stress on my body parts, sitting very comfortably in this nice rocking chair I’ve got, thank you very much. And once those stories are told, they can make their way for other stories to come out that I’ve forgotten about, and so on, and so on, etc. and so forth.

            So, I’m inviting you to come along on this journey with me. I’ll talk about the various maladies I’ve had in body and mind, how I dealt with them as well as how I dealt with the medical professionals who helped me deal with the illnesses. Along the way, you’ll learn a bit about me-quite a bit about me, actually-and I’ll try not to bore you to tears too often.

            I also invite your comments about and your suggestions for the podcast. Lately a lot of friends of mine on this one Facebook group that I’m in have been having had all kinds of issues: one friend with cancer, one with a broken hip, Yours Truly with the heart attack, a friend of mine was in a car crash…it seems to be piling up at our age. And I’m sure that there’s a lot of other topics that we can talk about that are not related to anything I’ve actually gone through, so I’d love to hear from you.

The only thing I do ask that you use your real names when commenting, and that everyone please be courteous and polite to each other, no matter what the topic is, or what the opinion is that the person has. This is a very deeply personal area we’re going into, and some things are touchier than others. I have literally no patience for making anyone at a party I throw uncomfortable, so please respect those wishes. My show, my house, my rules.

            I think that I’ve said enough in this first episode, don’t you?

                      

            Roll the credits!

            Support for this podcast is made possible by my long-suffering Wife (who lets me do this), copious amounts of caffeinated beverages and listeners like yourselves. If you’ve enjoyed this program, please like our Facebook page, which has links to our transcripts of the show blog and links for you to make a donation to keep this show going. 

Creative Care Unit is recorded in The Danger Room Studios of Glimmer Productions, located in the heart of Bucks County, PA. I’m Michael E. Russo. We’ll see you next time, and until then, stay well.