A Film and Story-Telling Festival Focuses on Disability
The program featured a dizzying spectrum of disability perspectives and concerns on film. It also included talks, photographs, parties and story-telling in presented by “The Moth.”
What to do about a Curved Spine? On Data, ‘BodyCast’ and New Directions
The NIH provides some information on scoliosis …Life is curved, usually, and maybe it’s better that way. Perhaps that was the Bocanegra’s point,
Looking Back on ‘The Normal Heart,’ and Patients’ Activisim
They were impatient with the pace of research and physicians’ protocols, and spoke out emphatically about their needs: for more research; for prevention and treatment; for easier access to new drugs; and, simply, for good medical care.
Good People, a New Play About Chance, Decisions and Fate
A short note on Good People, the title of a new play at the Manhattan Theatre Club starring Frances McDormand – It’s a simple story, at some level, about a middle-aged woman from south Boston who loses her job. She has a disabled, adult daughter who needs caregiving, and she needs money. She contacts some […]
Portrait of a Peculiar Relationship at the End of Life
Last weekend I went to see a strange, slightly unnerving play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams. It’s a sad take on the end of life, and desperation in some lonely characters. Olympia Dukakis plays an aging, vain, older woman who’s dying of an unnamed condition. She takes morphine injections help […]
A Play About the Life and Work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin
Franklin’s story starts like this: She was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in London. She excelled in math and science. She studied physical chemistry at Cambridge, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1941. After performing research in photochemistry in the following year on scholarship, she joined the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) and carried out basic investigations on the micro-structure of coal and carbon compounds, and so earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She was a polyglot, and next found herself in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l’Etat, where she picked up some fine skills in x-ray crystallography.
You get the picture: she was smart, well-educated and totally immersed in physical chemistry before, during and after WWII. Single-minded and focused, you might say –
No Quick Fix
“If it’s chafed, put some lotion on it.”
– some practical advice, offered by the character portraying Andrew Jackson, speaking toward the audience in the last scene of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a play written and directed by Alex Timbers