Mary Poppins

     In the slack times last winter, one Saturday night, I watched nearly all of Mary Poppins.  The television show was hosted by an old Dick Van Dyke, starred a young Dick Van Dyke.

     When Dick, the baritone of our barbershop quartet, invited us and our wives to attend Mary Poppins at the local dinner theater, I had some misgivings.  How could live theater come close to the special effects of the movie, or the perfected musical numbers coming through the television speakers?

      No worry.  The live performance, somewhat different than the movie version, was far superior to the movie.  The small orchestra in the pit (which we were privileged to see up close at hand), the live singers, left the canned version in the dust

    Mary flew all over the stage and even floated across the auditorium to light in the balcony near where we sat.  Bert walked horizontally up the brick chimney and did a few back flips over the London chimneys of the backdrop.

     Two major sets rolled on and off, the family front room and the kids’ bedroom.  A tree which Bert reproduced in paint on canvas (I didn’t remember Bert being an artist as well as a chimney sweep) took us to the park.  Pillars suggested street scenes and the bank.

     The statuary in the park got my attention.  The three-person figure rolled on and sat there during a couple of songs and dances.  I was half-asleep when one of the figures leapt off the sculpture and joined the song and dance.  What! That was a live person?  Soon the other two brass figures leapt off their perch.  I woke up.  How could they have remained motionless for so long?

      The evening didn’t start so auspiciously for the acting company.  We arrived, were seated and enjoying a libation by 6:30 or so.  About fifteen minutes before show time, the lights suddenly dimmed.  Time for the show?  No, the background music stopped with the lights.

     I took a little trip out the balcony, through the door, down the narrow hallway to the stairs down to the main lobby to the men’s room.  Two guys were trying to contact an electrician who would come help them find the faulty breaker causing the problem.  They couldn’t find it.

     On my return to our tables in the balcony, the four of us stood next to each other.  One of the wives looked at us and said, “If you guys sing, I’ll hide.”  To demonstrate, she lay down on two chairs below table level.

     The show wasn’t starting, so we headed for the narrow hallway, closing the door to the balcony so as not to disturb other patrons.  We sang ”Hi Neighbor”, softly, a song we are trying to learn.

     About half through the song, this young lady in gown, obviously one of the acting company joined us.  When we finished, she said, “Time for Lida Rose isn’t it?”

     “Do you know the descant?” Rex asked. 

     “Well, maybe.  I’ll try it.”  We sang Lida Rose, she sang the descant, but when we sang together with her it didn’t go too well.  While we were singing together, four or five more members of the acting company came around the corner leading to the stairway into the narrow hallway to observe.  They roundly applauded us even though our efforts ended not with a bang but a whimper.

     We had been gone long enough, better get back to the ladies.  One of the ladies informed us that there had been an accident on a nearby street corner.  A transformer box or some such electrical device was a casualty, causing the theater’s brownout.  Nothing to do but wait until the power returned when lights and sound could function.

     Meanwhile, Marsha reversed her field.  “People are bored.  Go down.  Sing for them.  Go on, get down on stage and sing,” she ordered.

     I tucked my shy bones in the middle of the quartet as we filed down the walkway.  The two outgoing members struck up conversations with patrons sitting at the tables along the walkway, softening them up against our audacity in taking over the stage of our own volition.

     Up the steps and onto the stage, we were surprised to see musicians sitting patiently and invisible to the audience in the small orchestra pit.  Rex announced we were a barbershop quartet and we were going to sing a number or two while we waited for the power to come back on. 

     The orchestra guys smiled and teased us a little and offered to give us a pitch, but Dick pulled out his pitch pipe and said we were probably better off using it.  We sang happy birthday to honor the birthdays.  One of the birthday gang was Mary Lou, so we sang “Hello, Mary Lou” to her. 

      Not wanting to overstay our so far nice welcome, we prepared to leave.  A few people said sing one more.  As Dick was trying to blow the pitch for “When I’m 64”, the PA system suddenly came on.  The power was back.  Somebody somewhere shut the speakers down, we did “64” and left to good cheers.      

       As we filed back up the pathway towards our place in the balcony, we got lots of high fives and “Good Jobs” and “Way to go’s.”  We missed the emcee’s thank you to us as we were mounting the stairway and filing down the narrow hallway to our seats.  During the intermission when the actor-waiters delivered the dessert, our guy informed us that the manager had “comped” our dessert as a thank you for helping entertain his audience during the power outage.

      After the show, as we worked our way through the lobby, some folks complimented us and thanked us.  One gal wanted our contact information to hire us for some program she was doing.  Wouldn’t you know it, none of us had a business cards with us.  Not very good boy scouts, not being prepared always, were we.

       We have had a phenomenal run of good luck in performing for appreciative audiences lately.  Now to avoid swollen egos.  If enough people tell you how good you are, it’s easy to believe it.  I can see how performers and musicians get such big egos.

      All four of us agreed it was a good thing the power outage occurred before the show.  We would never have had the nerve to follow  the real performers.  In the end, we flew our kite for a brief moment, and it was fun.

    

           

Clueless in Seattle

  

      A genius like Albert Einstein can distill the fundamentals of the universe into one poetic, mathematical statement.  Lesser mortals have to be content with a glimpse of a great natural law now and then, most the time when we have violated one.

     I violated one, the one that says, “Thou shalt not take a vacation from the farm in June.” 

     Ultimately, the date was dictated by graduation ceremonies at “You-Dub”, colloquial for “University of W[ashington]”.  Of course, there were other considerations, like a small load of furniture to be hauled or shipped, which came from Honolulu and now rested in Seattle.

     So we saddled up Rocinante II, a 1998 Ford Ranger with 48,000 miles on it, that was pretty much purchased to make this trip.  Rocinante II replaced Rocinante I, the 1992 Dodge Dakota with 200,000+ miles and rather shabby appearance that forbade us to trust it, or be seen in it, maybe.

       We had a hired guide, a Magellan GPS.  It proved to be one of those untrustworthy characters that takes your money, leads you away from civilization and abandons you in the wilderness.  It worked great until we reached Washington.  It showed signs of fatigue in the fruit country where we stopped to visit the nephew. 

    It tried, after several urgings, prompts, and restarts, to lead us to the bedroom the Goodwife found on Airbnb, in Shoreline north of Seattle proper, but I had transposed numbers.  Our reliance on that machine ended right there.  I had Mapquested our Airbnb address.  It was easily found.  The GPS never worked after that.   It couldn’t find itself, let alone direct us.

       There we were, alone in the wilderness of tree-lined streets that twist and curve and dead end, that go up and down hills that put San Francisco to shame, with narrowness that rivals European Medieval towns.  Normally, I would have pulled over at the first wide spot in the road when traffic got heavy, placed the Goodwife in the driver’s seat, grabbed a map and began to navigate.

     I feared for Rocinante’s clutch. I dreaded the killed engine, the rolling backward down the hill during restart, the collision with the car following too close behind at the stop light.  So I drove.  I am a terrible city driver.  I cannot drive and navigate at the same time, too much going on all around me.

     The Goodwife is no navigator.  So there we were, no driver, no navigator, no guide.  We had to call the sister-in-law every morning.  “We are lost.  We are at blank blank and blank blank.  How do we get out of here?”  Finally, Sunday morning, our last try, we found our way to the in-law’s house without an SOS.

     Getting back to our lodging was quite another problem.  Finding our way on to a main artery north was trouble.  There’s nowhere to make a left turn.  The inhabitants know to wind up this hill, take this street, dodge over to that street, come down the hill on the other side of the main drag and merge onto the arterial from the right.  There are no road signs to help you do this maneuver. 

     Three bridges cross the water to take us “home” for the night.  I never figured out how to get onto two of them.  I always got going the wrong way down the street to the third one, but I would drive the half-mile or so to an intersection where I could make a U-turn, and we would find our way to our bedroom.    

      At the first sign of trouble, I should have bought a detailed street map of Seattle and found my way, but honestly, Rocinante had all four wheels back in the great state of Wyoming on our return trip before that thought ever entered my head.  I think the great thinkers, the ones capable of such feats, the Plato’s and Aristotle’s and Einstein’s, must have a way of quelling anxiety, panic, frustration, whatever things get in the way of logical thought.  Logical though was beyond me on this trip.

     We made it there and back.  We accomplished some of the purposes of our journey, bringing back a couple of chairs and “end tables” that were shipped from Honolulu to Seattle where the mother-in-law now resides in an assisted living facility. 

     Plans to go through jewelry, figurines, and pictures had to be abandoned in favor of graduation exercises and celebrations.  We missed the Thursday afternoon ceremony honoring the journalists, one of the niece’s majors, as we were crawling along I-5 towards our lodging.  We made the astronomy program, the second major, on Friday afternoon.  We rode with the in-laws, so I didn’t have to drive!

      On Saturday the boys and the graduate rode the bus to the You-Dub campus for the main ceremony.  The girls took the car to get the graduate’s grandmother, so I avoided driving again.      

     The graduation was held at the football stadium.  The football field was filled with empty chairs when we arrived.  Three hours later, every chair had been filled and emptied, every graduate (6000?)had walked across the stage, we had been addressed by several dignitaries, including Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, a You-Dub graduate.

     Sunday was the day for the family party.  Much of Sunday was taken up getting ready for the party, though the Goodwife, her sister, and mother did have a meeting with a lawyer Sunday morning.  The brother-in-law and I transferred the furniture from the bedroom to Rocinante.  We took our leave from the in-laws Sunday evening as the graduation party wound down.

     Our final attempt to get on the right road in the right direction failed.  I found my U-turn intersection and we found our way to our Airbnb host.

     Monday morning found us creeping south on I-5 to the intersection with I-90.  Safely out of Seattle, we stopped for breakfast.  Our three-day journey homeward had begun. 

     We arrived safe and sound.  Front range traffic congestion seemed mild in comparison with Seattle.  When you get where you are going, you can find a place to park, another real problem in Seattle.

      Meanwhile, back at the farm. . . . 

Toenail Fungus

      Once I heard my mother say, ”A young man talks about his sexual exploits, an old man about his bowel movements.”

     Let us add a corollary:  An old man, or woman, will talk about personal health problems.    

     Fungal infections have been a nemesis of mine since first I entered the field of athletics.  I picked up my first case of athlete’s foot from shower and locker room floors at the old school that no longer exists. 

      A trip to Oklahoma during my career as a “wheatie” would infect me with both athlete’s foot and jock itch.  Somewhere in middle age, I developed toenail fungus.

     The attempt to cure:  I have taken oral prescriptions twice in my life.  They get rid of the jock itch and the athlete’s foot.  They can clear up toenail fungus, too, but there are a couple of drawbacks.  The newer concoctions are expensive.  All, as far as I know, take a toll on the liver.  When the athlete’s foot has disappeared after six or eight weeks of swallowing the prescription, the toenail fungus will be less than half-gone.

     You need to save the liver for filtering out the ill effects of healthy doses of wine or beer.  So, patent medicines:  Traditional athlete’s foot powders and salves won’t touch toenail fungus.  The ones for the toenails are expensive, and the “guaranteed to work” ones have an oral component that must be taken at the same time you apply the stuff to the nails.  Out of consideration for my liver, again, I have never tried any of those.

      Home remedies:  Most are ineffective, such as Vicks Vapor Rub or any of its knockoffs.  It smells great and gives your toes a warm glowing feeling.  The fungus likes it, too, I think.

    Chlorine bleach, straight or diluted with water, won’t do much.  The toe skin can get pretty sore from dipping the toes in chlorine, and the fungus doesn’t abate.

     Hydrogen peroxide doesn’t do anything except lighten the ugly nicotine color of infected nails a little bit.

      Listerine, like Vapor Rub, gives your toes a warm fuzzy feeling, especially nice on a January morning,  Repeated dippings will have no effect on the infected toenails.

     What works?  By far the best “cure” is good old-fashioned white vinegar.  (Most of the patent cures have an acid as the active ingredient.) No, don’t drink the vinegar.  Dip your toes in it, as in bleach or Listerine, for 15 minutes or so.  You see the problem.  Who has the time or patience to sit still for 15 minutes with toenails immersed in vinegar?  (I use two cottage cheese or sour cream containers.)

      I suppose daily treatments would be very effective, but I have never been able to do more than two or three treatments in a week.  At that rate, I “cured” my worst nail, the left big toe.  After about six months, the old discolored nail fell off.  The new nail came in clean.  Other nails were much improved, but not clear. 

     I backslid, treating only once a month or so.  The nail fungus came back.

     Three or four years ago, someone gave me a copy of the McCook (Nebraska) Gazette with an article on toenail fungus.  It touted Columbia Foot Powder. 

      Grain-of-salt time.  I’ve read a lot of articles in Reader’s Digest or Farmers’ Almanac or other such publications on “home remedies that work.” You didn’t think I came up with all those “cures” I’ve tried all by myself, did you?  Most don’t work.  I probably got the idea of using vinegar from one of them, so I can’t declare 100% failure rate.

     I didn’t try the foot powder right away.  I couldn’t find any at local or even huge chain drug stores.  I found it on the internet.  It was expensive, nearly $30 by the time I paid the shipping.  I did finally bite the bullet and ordered. 

      I have been using it for over a year with pretty good results.  I’m not cured, but I’m improved.  The yucky color has abated.  The nails are not getting worse, as they did when I backed off the vinegar treatments.

      A few weeks ago, I decided to read the label to see what the active ingredient of Columbia Foot Powder is:  zinc oxide.  Now I carry a small tube of zinc oxide in my shaving kit so that when I don’t want to carry the big foot powder bottle, I can still treat my nails every morning when I put on my socks.

     It’s too early, and treatment has been too sporadic, to say if works.  But there you have it, my years of original research into dealing with toenail fungus.

     If you can come up with a way to apply vinegar without all the cumbersomeness of toe dipping, say a “toe stall” like a thumb stall, or something more clever, I will do my best to get you a spot on “Shark Tank.”