A Night at the Theater
Usually a trip to the theater is frustrating because getting any of the dialogue is such a challenge. Even the headphones available in larger theaters most often don’t do the job for me. But last weekend I went to see my friend Steve Cooper play a leading role in Blinders, a political satire put on by the Out of the Blue Theater Company at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater. The company is staffed by both veteran and up-and-coming actors in a small, intimate theater next to the campus of Boston University. And this time, I had two things going for me that made going to the theater enjoyable again. Read more
The Noises That Inhabit My Head
Sometimes I still hear the insistent screeching, like an angry flock of birds or the screaming of the wind in a hurricane. It’s the same unearthly noise that millions of bat-like creatures made as they swarmed out of the open gates of hell in a horror movie I saw once. But now the noise only creeps in at the edges of my consciousness during quiet moments, like a barely remembered bad dream. It’s one of the many strange sounds in my head that have come and gone since the day I woke up with severe hearing loss several years ago. Read more
My Story: The Day the Music Died
Until I lost much of my hearing overnight two years ago, I had excellent pitch. My brother and I grew up around music, and both of us could always carry a tune. My dad is a gifted, self-taught piano player whose range spans from Chopin Sonatas to Ragtime to English Music Hall favorites. I took piano lessons, played in the school band and sang in the school chorus. I had enough formal and informal education to appreciate all kinds of music and at different stages of my life was enamored of many different forms — rock and roll, classical, Top 40, jazz, you name it. But on the day of my sudden hearing loss, I discovered that music had become completely unintelligible to me. Read more
