The week started on a positive note.  I exercised for three days in a row.  I realize that isn’t a big accomplishment for those of you who compete in triathlons, but it was a goal that I gave myself over the summer that I never could quite achieve.
On Thursday, I rested, and all of the endorphins in my body crashed.  I went into a dreary funk, which in the bizarro upside-down world of creativity, pushed me into doing some interesting Instagram photos.
Why is moody and dark so cool in photography, but if I said, “I feel depressed today” on Twitter, I would be ignored, especially by those too busy promoting their book titled “Helping Those with Depression.”
By Thursday, these dark thoughts were swept away by a change in life that required my total concentration and focus — the updates to the Facebook timeline.
Sure a meteor was head for Earth and I might be dead by the end of the week, but WTF is that scrolling thing on the right side of my page?! Â Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg intends to control the World in a way Ian Fleming could never have conceived when he created those over-the-top Bond villains like Goldfinger. Â Timeline, A Visual Representation Of Your Entire Life?
A single female blogging friend wrote this surprising status update after watching Mark Zuckerberg presentation:
“I don’t care what you say. I find Mark Zuckerberg super sexy. Â Smart, cocky, and arrogant gets me every time!”
Very telling. Â So, in preparation for success in my new dating life, I am working hard on becoming smart, cocky, arrogant, and a zillionaire by the end of Yom Kippur. Wish me luck.
On Thursday night, I went to see the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical “Follies.”
It is a story about former showgirls from the 1920s-1940’s who meet at a Times Square theater before it is torn down, and some unresolved relationship stories are played out against the ghosts of the past. Â I love Sondheim, and Follies has a number of Broadway showstoppers that you probably know, even if you didn’t know you knew them. Â If you ever go to a cabaret, you’ll frequently hear older women singing songs from this show, because the main characters in “Follies” are all age 60+. Commercial culture is so focused on teens and women in their twenties, and blogging is so concentrated on moms in their 30s, that it is rare to women in their 70s portrayed as having an interior life filled with as much love, regret, and passion as their younger counterparts.
Here is 84 year old Elaine Stritch, who is not in the current revival, Â singing Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” at the White House for the Obamas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvg7P05TqAThe revival was near perfect. The weakest link in the current production is the star, Bernadette Peters. Â While I love her as a musical theater actress, her personality is too bubbly for me to buy her as the somewhat bitter character, unhappy in love for so many years.
I attended the musical with two of my friends, both men. Â They have been in a relationship for years. Â Â Over dinner, they asked for my opinion on whether they should get married as a gay couple in New York State. Â It lead to an interesting, and somewhat humorous discussion. Â But I’ll save it for a later blog post.
As if this week wasn’t dramatic enough, Friday capped it all with the final episode of “All My Children.”
If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that this ABC soap opera played an important role in my marriage with Sophia. Â It was one of our special pastimes. Â Before I met Sophia, she had already been watching the show for decades. Â I grew to enjoy watching the show with her. It became a daily ritual. We would argue about the writing and laugh at the bad acting. Â I also grew to respect the show and creator Agnes Nixon’s creativity. Â You TRY writing a TV show that has to come out every single day, for DECADES, and keep it interesting.
I called Sophia tonight and she was taking the cancellation hard. But before you laugh at this, try to remember how emotional you became when your favorite show went off the air. Seinfeld? Lost? The Cosby Show? It feels like the passing of an era.
“This has been a year of loss,” said Sophia. “My parents died. Then divorce. And now All My Children.”
I can’t say that my reaction is as extreme. The writing on the show has been lousy for a years. And even Susan Lucci’s Erica Kane was getting on my nerves.
But we should embrace life lessons from wherever I can.  We all have dreams.  And we all have doubts about achieving those dreams.   But if Tad and Dixie can finally love with each other, despite divorce, murder, mayhem, switched babies, and the fact that Dixie had DIED TWICE on the show, anything in life is possible.
And thanks to this week’s Blog Crushes of the Day: Crib Chronicles, Deutschland uber Elvis, Irish Gumbo, and Wellington Road.