Monthly Archives: March 2012

Health, News

Whooping Cough (Pertussis) Cases Vault Past Epidemic Threshold in Washington State

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(Image: Washington State Department of Health)

A month ago, we asked if Washington State was losing the war on whooping cough. We just made national news yesterday, with ABC reporting that we have been “hit hard by whooping cough.” Last year this time, Washington had seen 88 cases of pertussis. This year, it’s 549, and officials believe we’ll likely surpass last year’s total, breaking 1,000. Treatment for pertussis (aka whooping cough) is a five-day course of antibiotics.

Locally, you can get the vaccine at Bartell Drugs ($75) and Walgreens ($64), as well as hospitals. (You may want to call ahead to make sure your location provides immunizations. For Walgreens, for instance, it looks as if some locations provide flu shots but not other immunizations.) Swedish Hospital breaks out vaccine recommendations for you. Here is a statewide list of federally funded health centers, which can help the uninsured.

UPDATE: In King County, people who need help with affordable health care can call the Community Health Access Program (1-800-756-5437).

Washington is only the latest state to struggle with the highly contagious bacterial disease, which takes the heaviest toll on infants. (Per the CDC: “From 2000 through 2008, 181 persons died from pertussis; 166 of these were less than six months old.”) The most significant outbreak nationally was in California in 2010, when “9,143 cases of pertussis (including ten infant deaths) were reported.”

(Image: Washington State Department of Health)

Skagit, Jefferson, Cowlitz, Kittitas, and Snohomish counties are among those with the highest incidence in Washington. “For the first time this year, federal health officials are recommending that all adults get the shot, which also protects against tetanus and diphtheria,” reports the Everett Herald.

Snohomish County is making the vaccine available “free to low-income and uninsured adults during two clinics. The first is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Sea Mar medical clinic, 17707 W. Main St. in Monroe. Another free event is scheduled from 4 to 8 p.m. April 4 at Cascade Valley Hospital, 330 S. Stillaguamish in Arlington.”

On Sounds of Pertussis, a few Snohomish County residents are trying to raise money to send a postcard around warning of the outbreak, and advising vaccination.

Outbreaks are sometimes blamed on anti-vaccination fears, which you can see being stoked, real-time, in this Seattle Times Facebook post’s comments section. A 1998 study published in Lancet found that: “Pertussis incidence was 10 to 100 times lower in countries where high vaccine coverage was maintained than in countries where immunisation programs were compromised by anti-vaccine movements.”

But it is also true that, at $65 to $75 per shot, vaccination costs represent a financial burden for families. As I mentioned in a post about prescription discount programs, “by the end of 2011, Washington State was estimated to have a million uninsured, or almost 15 percent of its total population.” If a mother, father, and child get vaccinated, that’s around $200, purely for whooping cough prevention. That doesn’t include a flu shot.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

Hard Rock and Paper Houses at The Annex: Scissors, Please

Perhaps you heard about this production of Paper Houses (at the Annex Theatre March 28-31; tickets: $20) from the promotional spots on KEXP, a reportedly reliable source for taste-making in music. Indeed, the music is great.

Seattle duo Pony Time is playing an awesome evening of hard rock at the Annex Theatre this weekend. There will be dancing. Stacy Peck will loom at you over her drum kit and make sure of it. Also, Luke Beetham’s guitars are things of beauty and deserve concentrated admiration while his fey vocals and agile finger work make for hipster happiness. However their sets are interspersed with theatrical scenes, and the less said about those scenes the better.

It might be preferable just to talk about the actors. Correy Harris stands out from the get-go as a fine actor foundering in text and direction that work to hide his talents. The intimations of character and relationship suggested by Harris’s presence in the role of Nick are also evident in the work of Patricia Bonnell as Iris and Anna Giles, as Abby.

Robert Harkins has perhaps the most challenging work in this play in the role of Stanley, a man suffering from dementia, though he is freed from the need to make sense of his lines. David Cravens-O’Farrell, connects with the audience sporadically in the central role of James. His accent is similarly sporadic but let’s chalk that up to his late addition to the cast.

The only role more thankless than that of Stanley may be this play’s villain, Bartman (Jay Hill), and not only because he shares the name of a dubious novelty dance from the early years of The Simpsons. In lieu of character, Bartman is a collection of negative stereotypes of current American conservatism. Hill appeared to be unsure of his lines, though his were not the only scenes in which vast pauses separated one character’s line from the next.

In the aim of promoting better theatre a few observations of the play are in order: Curtis Lee Fulton has tried to pack way too many themes into this narrative. These themes do not add up to actual content or articulated ideas. There are so many unmoored references that no time remains for establishing relationships through interactions; instead the relationships are simply named.

The most prominent flaw in this play (aside from the implausible situations, characters and relationships—such as they are) is that it is set on the catwalk of a billboard. This places large demands on the set, the actors, and ultimately the audience. The set fails to suggest anything more than a billboard that might as well be at ground level; the actors are inconsistent at best in the ludicrous shimmying that indicates the platform’s height. The audience is left to try to justify all that happens on this strangely deep catwalk–including the arrival of the band set-up on wagons for a rehearsal, and later performances, that ostensibly take place on the catwalk. Possibly the wagons are actually floating several feet in front of the catwalk and at a deadly height off the ground.

That said, Fulton is to be commended for taking some risks and experimenting with the integration of a rock band with a stage play. One hopes he would have learned from more successful forays in this field such as The Dresden Dolls’ production of A Clockwork Orange or The Negro Problem’s Passing Strange.

While Paper Houses is a failed experiment there may be further opportunities for the material. Verisimilitude seems beyond the reach of anything associated with this project but going bigger and more artificial could make for a dynamic performance. Let the angst-laden screeds stand alone, screaming down from a billboard high above a dance floor. Spotlight the senile and the socially diseased, do everything this play does only bigger and stagier. Dispense with narrative and plot, even give us a dunk-tank clown like poor Bartman and, please, have the band play more!

Arts & Entertainment, Visual Arts

Glimpses: “Spring is in bloom.”

As we recently learned, one of a Seattle spring’s most lovely sights may lose its timeliness over the next century as ugly ol’ climate change continues to rear its head. However, while the cherry blossoms are appearing ever earlier on the other coast, they seem mostly on schedule this year for their annual delighting of visitors to the University of Washington quad (“the first week of spring quarter,” we remember noting during our time as an undergrad). Thanks to hardlylove for snapping this shot just as the white-pink blooms began their cotton candy mimicking. Want to see for yourself? The UW Visitors Center helps you track it over here. But don’t wait too long – by mid-April they’ll be gone, leaving only shirtless frat boys playing frisbee for your viewing pleasure.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Save Body Expression While You Still Can with JC Brooks and The Uptown Sound

JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound, gracing us at El Corazon this coming Friday night, don’t have their own Wikipedia entry yet.  Good.  Means I can make up any damn thing I want and get away with it, which is always a good feeling.  Heck, I could say they came from Area 51 and somebody out there might believe me.

I tried a track at random and okay, they don’t come from Area 51. But they’ve got people dancing again.  Actually, they’ve got people dancing still, but dancing is an endangered species as I type this (seated).  Don’t believe me?  Stick your head out the window.  (Just for a second, I punched up the weather report.)  See any damn dancing?  a-HA!

I tried another track at random and found Mr. Brooks inclusionary, welcoming fans of other-than-societally-approved body configurations.  Of course he has to mention his hot auto but he’s a red-blooded American male and we expect no less.  He relates drug use to love with an endearingness to transcend the fundamental alone-ness of getting high, drifting, smearing, moving (usually) not towards but away from others.

AllMusic’s Steve Legget brings forth the description “Otis Redding fronting the Stooges,” but JC Brooks is not (yet anyway) Otis; and the Stooges, heaven love them, don’t often essay this specific species of choogle.  That said, though, Brooks believes in what he puts out, the band’s together on the one with a dryness of sound that sometimes recalls, okay, those boys from Detroit.  Sometimes their dryness flakes away, actually, but I’m still confident about this gig because believers such as this–believers in the dance, believers in body-heat communion, believers in taking the audience up in their balloon–always sound much better live than not-live, anyway.  They require a congregation, and they’ll get one.  Now I’m just hoping for someplace to rest my bad back now and again..

Arts & Entertainment, Music

The Kronos Quartet, Mostly Live at the Neptune

From left to right: John Sherba, Jeffrey Zeigler, David Harrington, Hank Dutt. (Photo: Jay Blakesberg).

Back in 1973 when the quartet was formed, violinist David Harrington explained to the audience at the Neptune last Friday night, he and his wife lived at La Paz Apartments in the University District, and so this neck of the woods was very familiar–he’d gone for a walk around the old neighborhood before Kronos Quartet took the stage that evening. There were a few empty seats at the back of the balcony, but otherwise the Neptune was full of fans who applauded even more upon learning that the show was being recorded for a “Live from the Neptune!” release, as Harrington joked.

“[I]t’s never clear if you’re listening to a byte or a human,” wrote Andrew Matson in the Seattle Times recently, about THEESatisfaction’s sound, but it’s also true of Kronos Quartet. The official close of the concert, Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11, called for a “total of three string quartets, one live and two pre-recorded.” (A lengthy encore included an arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” and “Sim Shalom,” based on a recording by the Jewish cantor Yechiel Karniol, to name a few.)

For many, the chance to hear Reich’s new work was probably enough, despite the $55 ticket price. It’s a harrowing piece, uniting the terror and humanity of 9/11, opening with the violin mimicking an open phone line, and with the anxious voices of air traffic controllers laid, via a “stop-motion sound” technique over the instruments, so that they, too, are instruments. Later come the voices of women who kept vigil over the dead, with the musicians under a red light in front of a red velvet curtain, which shadowed into black at the bottom.

Reich’s piece was preceded by Missy Mazzoli‘s Harp and Altar, a “love song to the Brooklyn Bridge” that draws upon Hart Crane’s famous poem. Fragments of “The Bridge” (pre-recorded and electronically distressed) sung by Gabriel Kahane have a ghostly quality, while the violins trade lyrical shimmer for dense jitters. It’s not a long piece, but it’s transporting, which also happens to be true of Laurie Anderson’s Flow.

We also heard Clint Mansell’s Requiem for a Dream Suite, arranged by David Lang, familiar to both fans of Aronofsky and people who watch movie trailers in general, as the sawing zig-zag on violin captures something both portentous and exhilarating that seems to work for exploding cars as well as tense personal dramas, and never get earwormily old. (Beethoven’s Ode to Joy used to be a similar bait-and-switch go-to, thundering in the trailer but not appearing in the movie itself.) Clint Mansell, I was reminded by the program notes, is a founding member of Pop Will Eat Itself.

It’s a commonplace that a Kronos Quartet program is eclectic–this one included Bryce Dessner’s Aheym (“homeward” in Yiddish), Ramallah Underground’s Tashweesh, Midhat Assem’s Ya Habibi Ta’ala (arranged by Golijov), Omar Souleyman’s La Sidounak Sayyada (arranged by Jacob Garchik), Michael Gordon’s Clouded Yellow, and Nicole Lizée’s Death to Kosmiche.

Different pieces stand out for different listeners: one patron told me he was all about the blurry harmonies in Clouded Yellow, while I was still replaying Kosmiche‘s “musical hauntology” (Lizée likes to introduce actual Atari sounds, as well as instrumental imitations) in my mind.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

The Village Theatre’s It Shoulda Been You Coulda Been More

Cast of It Shoulda Been You (photo: Jay Koh)

The Village Theatre’s new musical, It Shoulda Been You, tells the story of the wedding of a nice Jewish girl to a nice, sweater-tied-around-the neck Catholic boy, and their families who don’t want them to get married. (Tickets available now through April 22 at the Gaudette Theatre in Issaquah and April 27–May 20 at the Everett Performing Arts Center.) While the production is enjoyable and has good musical moments and performances, it can’t quite escape the stereotype gravity that surrounds it. Oy.

In the program’s authors’ notes, Brian Hargrove (book and lyrics) and Barbara Anselmi (composer) state that this is a story that only seems at first glance seems to be about clichéd characters in a clichéd situation. But though there is developing complexity in the story (and somewhat in the character development), it never loses its cliché veneer. Then again, maybe the Seattle liberal in me can’t turn down my PC radar far enough just to relax and enjoy it for what it is.

At the heart of the production is Leslie Law, who plays the bride’s mother, Judy Steinberg, with gusto. In the Broadway version, she’d be played by Linda Lavin, Patti LuPone, Tyne Daly, or anyone else who has played Mama Rose in Gypsy. Law’s Judy is loud, demanding, praising of her skinny daughter, and critical of her not-so-skinny one. While Law manages to have the audience on Judy’s side even while she’s berating her daughter, the groom’s mother, her husband, or her daughter’s maid of honor, it’s hard to see Judy, as written, as anything other than someone’s idea of the “typical Jewish mother” stereotype. And yes, I know there is a longstanding relationship between stereotype and comedy, it just seems like this was a missed opportunity to add more depth to the character.

Equally derivative is the groom’s mother, Georgette, played by Jayne Muirhead. Drunk from the first moment we see her, she’s all St. John and Bellevue hair. In the Broadway version, she would be played by the amazingly talented Christine Baranski from The Good Wife. Her best moment is a funny and somewhat poignant song about her blatant attempt to ensure that she is always the center of her son’s attention and affection. In “Where Did I Go Wrong?” she sings about all she did to keep him, going so far as to try to turn her son gay by taking him to musicals as a boy. Anecdotal evidence might support that methodology, but still, that’s a bit much.

The appearance of the bride’s ex-boyfriend Marty on the wedding day gives us the title song and the best number in the show, “It Shoulda Been You.” Beloved by the bride’s family, Marty comes in to stop the wedding. They tell him it should be him their daughter is marrying, not the Gentile who “speaks Yiddish like he learned it from a nun.” Those of us who have been the family favorite but didn’t get the girl (or boy) can all relate.

The audience sees the show through the eyes of the bride’s sister Jenny, played by Kat Ramsburg. Ramsburg has a big, clear, expressive voice that takes her from a Disney princess-like “I Never Wanted This” to the bluesy, ballsy “Jenny’s Blues,” that is her “When You’re Good to Mama” moment. She is perfectly cast for the sister who plans the wedding but is doubtful of her chance to have her own.

It Shoulda Been You is a still a new work in development, so there is still opportunity to turn down the “oy”s to a more respectable level before it moves on to other theatres, as it will likely do. This show does tackle some tricky, contemporary themes that would, in my view, be more impactful if the characters were a bit more real.