Notes From A Bear's Journey

      They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway.  After watching Smash and seeing the difficult and somewhat fictionalized life of getting a show onto Broadway, I've often wondered if that star-struck Disneyana feeling remains once a show makes it "there."  Apparently so since nearly 12 years later, the heavy-hitting producers of Smash such as Stephen Spielberg and Robert Greenblatt (former head of NBC) are doing just that and bringing the show to Broadway (although early reports says that it "will depart liberally from the series")...wait, what??  The Broadway version will have the same producers, the same song writers, and perhaps even a few of the same cast members (but that is looking doubtful although the original cast reunion  sold out in 15 minutes when they did a fundraiser in 2020).  But never mind all that because what stuck with me about that original series were the dancers, those "extras" that line the back of such shows and ...

  Home eye chart test:  Safe Eyes America       Stigma: a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person, as in  "the stigma of having gone to prison will always be with me" defined the Oxford dictionary.  But my "stigma" was more related to my eye exam; the world is round, but not really since our planet actually bulges slightly in the middle, which was now sort of like my eye.  It had somehow gotten out of roundness, if that makes sense.  The vision change was noticeable for me, as if I had woken up and my left eye (normally sharp for seeing distance) now matched my right eye (which was great for seeing close but not so good for far off).  The combo always worked, said my optometrist, because each eye was compensating for the other; I would likely never need reading glasses (and so far, still don't).  But now that I'm older, that may be changing.  I'll admit that I had been lazy in getting mys...

     When I bumped into Joe, he was on his knees and waving away at passing cars.  Big grin, although most of his teeth were missing.  He looked road-weary, as if anticipating that his life ahead was about to be as beat-up as his torn cardboard sign.  "Slipped on the ice," he told me, "doing construction.  They told me I need a new hip."  He was sitting on a grassy median, the entry point for cars driving into the small shopping center, an awkward place since card couldn't really stop unless they had a passenger who could wave a few dollars out the window.  It was not the best of places for Joe to park himself, but perhaps it was indicative of another bump in the road ahead.  What would happen to him from this point?  He was now 53 and a widower for 8 years.  And in the scheme of things, he wasn't alone.  In the book The Unclaimed , sociologists Pamela Prickett & Stefan Timmermans write about the nearly 1500 cremated r...