The Cast: “Night Of Four Skits:” Barb, Joan, Allan, Sylvie, Peggy (Madeline was sick and resting)
I was at the Mansion Tuesday for our weekly rehearsal of “Night Of Four Skits,” four short plays written for seniors by Bi-FOLKal Productions, with minor modifications by Susan Ostrowski and Dr. Peter Dixon of reading2connect, the publishers of the reading and memory books I’m reading at the Mansion.
We have about 6 weeks of regular rehearsals, and that, I think is a good thing. I guess i’m the Producer and Director. I was an executive producer once, but that was in television, and I did help direct a news documentary. But this is quite different.
We assembled the cast today for the rehearsal. Barb, Joan, Allan, Sylvie, and Peggie have all agreed to be in the show, Madeline also, she was resting from a cold. We have some practicing and polishing up to do, but we had a spirited rehearsal. I took a video with Barb and Allan performing, they did a great job playing a jaded married couple. The skits are short and funny, the actors and residents love hearing them.
Joan can’t see the script so me or a member of the Mansion staff will whisper the words into her ear, and she’ll shout them out on our “stage.” She’s excited to be in one of the skits.
Theres one about going to the doctor and getting ready for winter as well.
We’ll rehearse again next Tuesday. The performance will be held in the Mansion Great room at 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in May (still figuring out the exact date.). Families and residents will be invited, people from town can come also.
I’ve got to figure out some special lighting, the Mansion will offer some refreshments. This is great fun, hard work for them, but the rehearsals are paying off. Each actor will have a script to read on stage, and I will be right alongside to help if there is trouble.
Friday, another milestone. I volunteered to run the Friday night Bingo Game. It will be my first bingo game. Maria and a friend are coming also (whew.) Everyone seems excited.
I saw the most beautiful breakthrough since I started my reading program at the Mansion, using reading2connect stories and workshop books.
The books were written by Susan Ostrowski and Dr. Peter Diamond to help the elderly restore memory, find voice and read independently.
Until today, it was just me working with Joan and some others. It was going very well, but I wanted to go farther. And today, we did, much farther.
Joan has severe memory loss but has become deeply engaged in reading these workshop books. In elder care, people can become passive, are affected by the aging process, medications, and the sometimes restrictive life of the elder care facility.
Reading can be a great help to them, and when people suffer memory loss, they often give up on it. I hope this work helps revive memory and sparks a return to independent, not directed, reading.
At first Joan could not complete any of proverbs int he work book, now she is tearing through the books with humor, insight and confidence. Her stumbles don’t bother her, and she has changed before my eyes more than I might have thought. More and more, she is correcting my mistakes. Two weeks ago, I would not have imagined this video possible. Take a look.
Barb is a resident at the Mansion, an avid reader.
She often gets exasperated with Joan, who can be forgetful and sometimes drifts in out of the moment.
She loses patience with her, and can be abrupt, even cutting, though I doubt she means to be.
My own sense of Barb is that she is highly intelligent, a passionate reader – she reads all day – and is somewhat frustrated by the limitations and stresses of an assisted care facility. She misses controlling her life, and that many not be possible for her again in this life.
Barb sometimes pushes Joan like an impatient parent. Joan is profoundly sweet, she is always trying and my sense of her is that she mostly needs to be encouraged and supported. In my volunteer and hospice work especially, i have learned to accept people for who they are, and try to love them for who and what they are.
I have come to love Joan in this way, we have a real connection, and I admire and respect Barb as I get to know her.
For these reasons, I asked Barb if she would agree to work with Joan and I. As an avid reader, I thought she would connect with this idea, and she did.
Barb and I talked about being patient and supportive – she is very quick, and it is difficult for her to deal with a world that is often slower. She gave me one of her laser-like stares, but i knew she heard me. She wanted to do this work.
She said she understand, she cared about Joan and would be supportive of her.
I have a good relationship with Barb and we talk openly and easily with one another, even if she is in one of her legendary bad moods. And Joan and I have become close and connected, there is great affection between us and we always can communicate with each other.
You can watch the video and see how good this experience was for both of these remarkable women. This is significant for many reasons, one of the most important is that the reading we are doing is drawing in other people. That’s the big idea.
I think Barbara needed to find a way to show the compassion and intelligence that she doesn’t always have a chance to show. When they started reading together, she and Joan clicked in a way I had not seen before, and Barbara was encouraging and engaged. So was Joan.
For the first time, I sat mostly on the sidelines, jumping in occasionally. But it was them doing this reading..
One of the program’s goals is to encourage people in elder care to back away from passive activities like TV and re-engage themselves with the practice of reading, as good for the mind as exercise is for the body. in fact, reading is an exercise of the mind, doctors have found.
Ostrowski and Diamond mean for the people in elder care facilities to eventually read away from staff and volunteers and more by themselves.
This seems to be a step in that direction, Barb, who misses nothing and can be quite organized – she takes care of the parakeets – said she would be happy to continue reading and working with me and Joan. I’m not quite ready to leave them alone yet, but I’m looking for the chance
This is amazing stuff, and I am loving working in this way. We also had rehearsals for our skit, “Night Of Four Skits,” now scheduled for May.I’ll post a video of that rehearsal later tonight. Barb has joined our cast.
It is a wonderful thing for me to see Joan improve and restore some of her memory, it is an amazing thing to be part of it and see it happening. I will keep up this work.
I considered paying for the $3,000 training program meant to go along with these new books, but I have decided against that, at least for now.
There is just way too much going on in my life right now. Friday night, I volunteered to run Bingo Night. I have never played bingo in my life and have no idea how it works. It will be exciting to see.
If you wish to support my work with the Mansion residents, there are lots of needs to fill. This work is made possible by your donations. You can contribute to this work by sending your contribution to Jon Katz. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal.
Your letters to the Mansion residents are much appreciated (as are your notecards!). The Mansion residents who wish to receive your mail and messages are Winnie, Jean A., Mary, Gerry, Sylvie, John, Diane D., Alice, Jean G., Madeline, Joan, Allan, Bill, John K., Helen, Bob, Alanna, Bob, Barb, Peggie, Dottie, Tim, Debbie, Art, Guerda, Brenda, Wayne, Kenneth, Ruth. The address is The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.
I’ve taken a lot of photos of Maria, but this is my favorite, I just brought it home.
I brought it to my printer, Carolyn Brogan of the Image Loft in Manchester, Vermont, and her very skilled associate Sandy.
It cost $197.53 and when I got it home, I pulled open the plastic cover and took this picture of the portrait, still wrapped up.
The portrait is 6 x9 plus 1 inch borders. It is a fine art print, on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, as all of my photos are, cotton acid free paper, archival ink, Conservation Custom Framing. The best.
It is now hanging above my desk in my study, and every time I look up at it my heart rises and my soul sings.
The picture captured a bit of the complexity of this strong yet gentle woman, my wife. She is full of emotion, surprises and artistic impulses, they go surging through her like water pumped furiously through a small pipe. At the moment, she is falling in love with our snail, Socrates.
This might seem startling to other people, but it is not surprising here.
I see Maria sitting and starting at him, drawing him, reflecting on his amazing ability to move and float up and down, drawing him, talking to him. Today she told me she is sure he knows when she is in the house, he sort of dances up and down when she is there. This does seem to be true.
It would be quite ironic if I were abandoned for a snail, but it did occur to me that this could be serious, she loved the “Shape Of Water” which we both saw together. She is quite capable of falling in love with a snail.
I remember the first time Sally Hawkins saw the “monster” in the water, it is the same look Maria has when she is looking at Socrates.
Soon Socrates will be a piece of art in some way, and this too shall pass. Maybe I’ll be a piece of art one day too.
Maria has a million infatuations – trees, flowers, animals, people, hills and desserts, rocks and trees. She loves life, completely and fully. I think she even loves me, another of the strange creatures in her life, and we are beyond infatuation now, we have been together for 10 years, each one better than the one before it.
Watching her evolve over these past ten years is like watching a never-ending burst of shooting stars or comets blazing quickly over the sky.
Carolyn is, along with Sandy, an amazing printer and framer. She prints ever photo I sell, and makes me look better than I am.
I’ve known her awhile, and she remembered that it was years before I dared to take a photo of Maria’s face, she was like a deer, startled by a light.
Maria is the reason I began taking pictures, every one of the was and still is a message to her, a way of talking when we didn’t know how to talk. A way of encouraging me to take pictures when no one else in my life did.
She told me of her reasons to be afraid of photographs, and I treaded very lightly, but I never stopped wanting to have her portrait hanging on my wall.
I started photographing her at a distance, then the back of her head, then closer and to the side, and finally, after five years, her face. As she came to trust me, she permitted me to take her portrait. It was a big turning point for us. She can only do it once in awhile. And no posing.
Carolyn was laughing about it.
I think this portrait captures both her vulnerability and her great strength, and every time I look up at it, I am filled with love and admiration. I’m so grateful to Carolyn and Sandy for making such a beautiful portrait of Maria for me, I will look up at it every day of my life that I am home, and smile at coming to see that miracles can happen in our lives.
I thought I was heading for the end of a loveless life, I never imagine my life would be filled with love.
Fate is as close to a wild animal as any dog I have had. She always wants to be outside, is impervious to cold, snow or ice. In the mornings now, the pastures are somewhat muddy and when Fate comes out after working and running, she rolls up and down and back and forth in the snow. You never have to give Fate a bath.
She has fun wherever she goes, whatever she does. She would be happy living out in the wild, she digs holes to be warm and cold, eats berries and bark, is aware of everything that moves.
If you wish your daily feel good vitamin from the RISSE Amazon Wish List, you may have to hurry this morning, there were two Toysmith jump ropes on the Wish List (everything else is sold out) and I bought one of them for $4.32.
I actually thought it would be greedy of me to buy the last thing on the list, it might still be there. It costs $4.32.
The RISSE staff is struggling to keep up with us, a good predicament to have. You are doing wonderful work with that list, and I hope it feels as good for you as it does for me.
If you have any pennies or dollars left, I could use some for my own ambitious refugee wish list, the upcoming work I’d love to do with the RISSE soccer team. I believe we have raised the $2,100 for the Powell House retreat, I won’t know for sure until I get the mail at my post office box, if the storms will just ease up a bit.
I’ve committed to paying for the soccer team to enter the Session 3 Indoor Soccer Tournament at Kevin Smith’s Sportsplex Complex in Half Moon, N.Y. The kids are desperate to go and this tournament will run over the course of eight weeks and set the soccer team up for an important championship before the regular season begins.
I’ve begun negotiating with Kevin, the tournament registration fee is $1,100, which is not a problem for the combined efforts of the other team parents, but is a problem for the RISSE team, their parents can’t help.
So I want to do this and Ali and I think it is important. I think I can get the cost down below $900, but not much lower.
I also hope to raise funds to send the team to a one-week camp at the Quaker Powell House Youth Center during the summer, they need to get out of the city and be free. I don’t have a cost on that yet. So if you are so inclined and the jump rope is already gone, here’s another way to do good today:
{Please consider donating to my refugee fund, Jon Katz. Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816., or via Paypal, [email protected].
We are helping these people in different ways, from different vantage points. We are doing good, and thank you, however you choose to help. This is a great and worthy cause. We are a community of faith, a fellowship of the weak and the vulnerable.
