See one, do one, teach one

Today was a good day!

I've been spending a lot of my summer in my supervisor's various clinics, and today I got to go watch him do some scopes (endoscopes and colonoscopes). He's been great at letting me jump in and get my feet wet, so to speak -- in his other clinics I've been (gasp) taking real patient histories and (faint) actually writing on real patient charts. Today, I got to direct the endoscope camera for a bit -- I think I'd be way, way better at that if I'd ever played video games as a kid, but as it is, I suck. So if you have kids and they like video games, never fear! It's actually good training for something! I also got to start a couple of IVs, the first with a lot of coaching from a very nice nurse, and the second with no coaching at all. I feel good about this.

The med school adage relating to procedures is "see one, do one, teach one". It's not an ideal -- more a description of how things tend to be. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but I'm becoming gradually more confident in my ability to learn on that steep of a curve. I've gathered that, really, there's no way to prepare for the real world in these matters -- interviewing standardized patients and starting IV lines on prosthetic arms only goes so far. At some point you need to jump in. This summer has been great for teaching me not to be scared of that. Although I still am, it's getting better.

Have a good long weekend, everyone who has one.

~isolde

Labels: clinic, good days

The charm dissolves apace

I didn't think I'd be back on here for awhile yet. But William Hutt has died, and I can't just let that slide without saying a couple of things.

I don't remember when I first saw William Hutt onstage. I've known his name for a very long time -- this is what happens when your parents are Stratford festival devotees. I do remember the last time I saw him onstage, in his final role as Prospero in The Tempest, in 2005, at 85 years of age. That show was a remounting of the Festival's production of The Tempest a few years previously, which at the time was thought to be Hutt's final farewell. I also clearly recall seeing him play King Lear. He was, however, internationally respected for his flexibility -- one of the few actors to play both King Lear and Lear's Fool, one of the few to take on both serious and comic roles. In fact, he may be best remembered for playing a 6-foot-two Lady Bracknell in drag, for The Importance of Being Earnest -- a production that was remounted three times in four years, due to popular demand.

I'm finding out things about William Hutt from reading the news reports around his death. I didn't know that he served as an army medic in World War II, winning awards for bravery. I didn't know that this experience was so powerful and important to him that he wished his epitaph to read "Soldier and Actor". I did know that he was a longtime friend of Timothy Findley, a compatriot and a peer during the inaugural Stratford Festival season, but not that he was a friend of Edward Albee, nor that Albee wrote a role in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? with him in mind. I did know that he was openly gay (The Globe and Mail says that he was bisexual), but not that he had been so for so long, during times when that was quite dangerous to accept that identity. I didn't know that, while playing King Lear to a restless high school audience during the Canada-Russia hockey game of 1972, he called out on one of his exits that Canada had won, 6-5 -- to the biggest cheers he ever received.

But I do remember, from my own experience, that he owned the stage and owned the audience's attention while he was on it. Never speak unless it improves on silence, he said. Never move unless it improves on stillness. He was as intrigued by things not spoken as by things spoken. He felt that thought and thinking acted itself, without the help of words or movements. When he was silent on stage, the theatre became super-quiet, the kind of quiet that reflects a room full of expectant minds and hearts.

He wasn't afraid of his characters, wasn't afraid of their emotions, or of inhabiting their frailties and failures entirely. And once, I fully recognized how much of a life-changing, life-sustaining craft acting was for him -- as he spoke this soliloquy, on the eve of his retirement from theatre:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Certainly he was Prospero, watching the end of Miranda's mystical wedding masque, thinking of her growing up, of his growing old, and of the transience of life. But he was also himself, I think, for a minute or two -- in kinship, an old man preparing to rest his life's work and exit the stage, as Prospero must have been planning even at that point to lay down his mantle and his magic, and accept his mortality.

The Tempest is quite the play to end with, really, for an actor. So, in tribute, I will leave you with its epilogue -- the last words William Hutt spoke on the Stratford stage.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

~isolde







P.S. And in other news, the Spice Girls are having a reunion tour. Seriously -- it's that nostalgia time of life, already.

Labels: nostalgia, obituaries, theatre