Well, dear readers, let us move on to the second half of 2025, shall we? We shall. As most know, I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis, a strange neurological disease. I’d been seeing double for a year and also having speech issues. For a time, I thought maybe I’d had mini strokes, but my eye doctor called it correctly, I was sent to a neurologist, tests were taken, blood was taken and diagnosis was pronounced. There is no real cure for it, but it can be handled with various pills and so I was begun on a regimen of four different pills in various and sundried dosages. Not my idea of fun, but what WAS fun was, over the course of a few months, completely getting rid of the double vision and the speech issues. That was such a blessing – it happened slowly at first, but each appointment with both doctors kept seeing improvements and then both issues were gone completely. Then I began preparing to direct a new play that I’d been helping shepherd for the past three or four years, having directed two two-night workshops of it, along with a staged reading. Doug Haverty and I both loved certain aspects of it but felt it had a few issues that had to be addressed and the writer really was great about exploring various ways to do so. With each draft we got closer to finding what was working and what wasn’t. There were two big breakthroughs – the play has songs – new lyrics set to public domain tunes – but the ones he’d chosen were all sounding the same and actually very repetitious. I felt strongly he needed to use different kinds of tunes for each song and that each song had to do something the others didn’t. I gave him a list of very well-known PD songs, and we chose ones that worked, and he wrote new lyrics to them – I helped finesse those so that they were completely accurate to the scan of the original lyrics – and things really perked up then. The other major breakthrough was focusing everything through the eyes of one character – he kind of thought he’d done that, but it really needed to be strong and clear that we’re being told the entire story through the eyes of that character. Once we had that, everything worked better and we just kept chipping away at it – having it that way enabled me to make all the songs finally make sense in the way they’re presented.

In the midst of all that, my second book, Richard and Me, was released and that was a completely frustrating experience trying to book some signings or events, which proved impossible, despite one bookstore saying we could do it, then never returning e-mails or messages. I’m still hoping we can do a library event and we’re working on that. Then we cast the play, and began rehearsals, during which I continued to adjust some of the song set-ups and then the writer would take the idea and write it in his voice. We did our annual holiday show at Catalina Jazz Club – unfortunately, there was a competing show that a lot of our regulars went to because it was going to be the final show for the singers involved at a club that’s about to bite the dust. Unless we find a new venue that’s not as hard to fill as Catalina, I fear we may not have too many shows left to do, but then again, I feel we’ve made our point with 133 shows over fifteen years – we were really the only show of its kind until the imitators came along, and then it was a veritable glut of shows similar to ours, frequently attempting to use the folks we used. But we were singular and I’m very proud of what we achieved. IF we find somewhere that makes sense financially, we may have a few more shows up our sleeve. I turned seventy-eight, I need to lose fifty pounds and in 2026 I damn well will and am trying to set that up now – I think that will alleviate several other issues, especially looking like a bloated whale. There were other things – I wrote a new song a month ago that no one has heard yet and I think it’s pretty good – I helped a friend with her memoir and that turned out to be a rather major undertaking, but it came out well and she’s thrilled with it. I gave up being an Amazon third-party seller because Amazon has become a cesspool of bots, algorithms, and AI and it just became too irritating dealing with it and we weren’t really doing that much business with our Kritzerland titles. So, I moved a bunch of that stuff over to eBay, and that turned out to be a good thing, and we’ve been doing much better there. And that was pretty much 2025 – there were wonderful things, there were some trials and tribulations, there were many annoyances and irritations, but in the end the good, thankfully, fully outweighed the bad and the ugly.

Yesterday was fine and fine was yesterday. I got six hours of sleep, we had our rehearsal – Cheryl Baxter did a grand job with her number and finished it up, then helped with a couple of other things, while we worked on the act two scenes in a different room – just detail work like we’d done on act one the other night. Everyone seems to be getting sick – which is irritating but which always seems to plague every show at the Group Rep and other small theaters – yesterday, two people came in under the weather – one thought it was allergies, the other had been feeling bad at home but was feeling better enough to come in but by the end of rehearsal was feeling bad – neither were masked because they didn’t think they were really sick, but both are now and so I’m praying no one else gets whatever they have. We have two more rehearsals, and it would be good to get through them without people missing. Then everyone has two weeks to get better and come back healthy and ready to work hard. For me, I’m popping the Sambucols like crazy – just ordered three more boxes. I cannot get sick again after whatever it was that I had.

I came right home after rehearsal and rustled up a nice batch of Wacky Noodles, ate that, had a bit of ice cream as a sweet, but my tummy is just not that happy with ice cream these days and as much as I enjoy it, I think I have to go cold turkey on the ice cream. Then a bunch of new DGA streaming things showed up, so I sat on my couch like so much fish and watched the one that interested me – Nouvelle Vague, a film of Richard Linklater, all about the making of the New Wave classic, Breathless. The actors are wonderful – all playing real-life people like Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut and various other directors, Jean Seberg (played by the daughter of director Howard Deutsch and Lea Thompson – terrific), Belmondo (they found someone who sort of looks like the young Belmondo), and it’s only ninety-eight minutes long, shot in black and white and the old Academy ratio, as was Breathless. The soundtrack is comprised of classic jazz from that era. For me, it’s really almost the first film of 2025 that I can recommend to any film buffs who might be reading this – it actually succeeds what it sets out to do, it moves right along, and it’s fun in its way.

After that, I had an English muffin and some potato chips and took pill three, also accidentally taking a second Prednisone, which is not good but hopefully won’t hurt me. I also booked all the singers for the Sherman Brothers album redo for next Saturday – should take about three hours to do, then the engineer with lay those vocals into the band mixes he’s already done, and we’ll then quickly finesse those tracks. I’m hoping we can properly announce this in January of the New Year. Meanwhile, we finally have some new Kritzerland CD releases coming, too.

Today is a ME day – I will do as little as possible, I’ll keep popping Sambucol, we could use a modern major miracle, we could use some don’t get sick vibes and xylophones, so I’m just going to try and get good sleep and rest, eating good food, and then I can watch, listen, and relax.

Same goes for tomorrow, then we have rehearsals on Tuesday and Wednesday, then more resting, then our vocal session on Saturday, and then our annual Christmas Eve Do on – Christmas Eve.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, have a ME day, do as little as possible, pop Sambucol aplenty, pray for a modern major miracle, pray for no sickness, rest, eat, then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have reminisced about the back half of 2025.