Here We Go Again: Book Banning in Florida

By Margo Hammond

          Lately I’ve been experiencing Yogi Berra’s déjà vu all over again, that dreaded sense of being caught up in an endless loop like in the movie Groundhog Day.

          Except that in this loop, the events that are being repeated are getting scarier and scarier.

          I’m talking about book banning in Florida. It has had a long history. Back in 1991, when I was book editor of the St. Petersburg Times, I wrote a column about book banning:  

“Poor Clay County. People there in rural North Florida are so ignorant that they wanted to ban My Friend Flicka from their elementary schools because it contains the words “damn” and “bitch.” Can you imagine? They also objected to William Steig’s Abel’s Island because it depicts a wine-drinking frog and — can you believe this one? — Little Red Riding Hood because that little girl on her way to grandmother’s house was carrying wine in her basket. How could anyone be so backward? Poor book-banning Clay County.

The inclusion of the Clay County cases on the American Library Association’s list of “Books Challenged or Banned in 1990-1991” certainly might give you the impression that its citizens are narrow-minded and backward. The ALA list, however, leaves out one important fact: Those parents in Clay County (and it was only two) were unsuccessful in their attempt to ban these books. The books were not used for two or three weeks while the Instructional Materials Review Committee, a group of about a dozen parents and teachers appointed by the School Board, reviewed the parents’ complaint. But then they were returned to the shelves, as the committee unanimously recommended.

Instead of receiving ridicule, Clay County should be commended for its fight against censorship.”
.. 

          I'm no longer book editor at the St. Petersburg Times. The newspaper isn’t even called that anymore (it changed its name to the Tampa Bay Times in 2011). But after 32 years—32 years!—there are still attempts being made to remove books from Florida school libraries. Except this time the challenges feel different.

          Back in 1991, the process to hear out complaints about individual books, while worrisome, felt like democracy in action. Parents’ concerns were addressed. In many cases provisions were made so that they could choose to have their child’s access to the books restricted – but the books were placed back on the shelves for other children to read.

          Now the attacks on books are more ominous, more organized and, alas, more successful. We are a long way from worrying about wine in Little Red Riding Hood’s basket. These aren’t just challenges to books with curse words and wine-drinking frogs in them. These are targeted assaults against whole categories of people. Today’s book banners are questioning people’s right to tell their own history — or to exist at all.

“I’m With the Banned” mug offered by BooksWares

           In Hernando County after fifth grade teacher Jenna Barbee was reported to the state for showing Strange World, a Disney movie written by acclaimed playwright Qui Nguyen with a biracial, openly gay character in it, 600 people showed up to voice their opinions about book banning at a school board meeting that lasted eight hours.

          “Men are to be men. Alpha males. Do you understand me? You have awakened all of the alpha male blood in this country with your leftist, woke ideology you’re pushing in here,” one man told those who were objecting to the removals of books with gay themes.

          “We do not want to have equity and inclusion in our schools,” said Shannon Rodriguez, the school board member who reported Barbee to the state because parents were not notified ahead of time about the movie’s airing (Rodriquez’s child was in Barbee’s class). ”We want to keep our schools traditional, the way that they were, we don’t want any of the woke or the indoctrination.” During the last elections, Rodriquez was backed by the conservative group Moms for Liberty.

          According to PEN America, which tracked book bans in schools from July 1 to December 31 of 2022, Florida ranks second–behind Texas–as the state with the highest number of book removals. The number of removals in Florida may even be higher, the group pointed out, as new laws signed by Governor Ron DeSantis have encouraged broad, state-level “wholesale bans” that restrict access to “untold numbers of books in classrooms and school libraries.”

          In March the American Library Association (ALA) reported that 2022 saw the highest number of attempted book bans (1,269) since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago, nearly doubling the 2021 number

          Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the gay and transgender community and people of color, according to ALA.The fourth most banned book in America from the 2021-2022 school year was, in fact, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the story of a Black girl who thinks she’s ugly because she doesn’t have blue eyes.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Study Guide available at teacherspayteachers.com

        

          That was the book that prompted a complaint in January in Pinellas County. Yes, only one  complaint from only one Palm Harbor University High School parent. As a result The Bluest Eye was pulled off the shelves of Pinellas County Schools for three months. 

          Like my Clay County example in 1991, that request for censorship was eventually rejected — after parents and students came out in droves at a Pinellas County Board meeting to protest. And, as I did 32 years ago, Tampa Bay Times columnist Stephanie Hayes applauded the committee for weighing in on the literary merit of the book and sent it back where it started: "in high school libraries for whoever wants it, and on select classroom syllabuses with the option for parents to opt their student out.” But Hayes also added, “It’s all just so exhausting. It’s difficult to feel elated at the tail end of a drawn-out process that never had to happen.      

          I’m feeling that same fatigue.   

          What are the book banners afraid of?

          “Well, we all know: They are afraid of readers—especially young readers—learning the truth about humans, about American history, about, perhaps, their own lives,” Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres, wrote in a recent article in The Nation.

    

          “If you’re afraid of knowledge, if you want to ban books, you’re not afraid of the books, you’re afraid of learning,” agreed LaVar Burton in an online talk at the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss the State of Banned Books with Times editor Steve Padilla. “This is very punitive and very puny. It’s small of soul to ban books.” Burton, famous for his roles as Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots, has long been a reading cheerleader. He was the founder of the popular PBS series Reading Rainbow, a program that encouraged the love of reading and books among children. Last year the series was revived as Reading Rainbow Live, an interactive virtual version streaming on Looped. According to Burton, Reading Rainbow Live is preparing a special on banned books.  

          What drives book banning?

          “There is somewhere in there a desire to protect their children,” Burton acknowledged, “but protecting them from knowledge and protecting them from a real understanding of the world we live in is not good parenting.”

          The comparison with the Red Scare in the ’50s doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to me anymore. That’s the time when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy teamed up to support bans of such books as Richard Wright’s Invisible Man, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (which, they said, encouraged men to protest American law and order), John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (which focused on pain and tragedy, making workers blame the rich on the Depression) and Robin Hood—Robin Hood!—(because he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, promoting Communism).

          In addition to encouraging bans at home, in 1953 McCarthy sent two aides, Roy Cohn (yes, the same Roy Cohn who inspired the character in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America  and who advised Donald Trump) and David Schine to search US Information Service Libraries in Europe and Asia for “subversive” books. Embassy libraries in Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore reportedly even burned a few suspect, prompting cartoonists of the day to compare such McCarthy-inspired censorship with the Nazi book burnings of 1933.

          Among the subversive books singled out were ones by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Langston Hughes, Upton Sinclair, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Their books, McCarthy argued, were making the U.S. look bad and aiding Soviet propaganda against the West.

          But it was the ban of references to Robin Hood in Indiana State textbooks that turned out to be the last straw for five students at the University of Indiana. After librarians across the country began to pull Robin Hood off their shelves, the students launched a unique protest against McCarthyism and his attack on freedom of speech: They donned the silly green hats topped with a feather worn by Robin Hood and his Merry Men and launched The Green Feather Movement. Soon Merry Men protests spread to other campuses (giving rise, some say, to the political activism of the ’60s).

          Reading about those creative Merry Men protests got me thinking. What is the best way to combat this latest wave of book banning? Don a goofy hat like those Indiana students did to attract attention to the dangers of book banning and censorship? Perhaps.

          But meanwhile, here are a few other creative ideas to consider. . .

Donate to Organizations
Filing Lawsuits Against Book Banning    

          PEN America (a writer’s advocacy group), Penguin Random House (the country’s largest publisher), five authors whose books have been challenged, and two Florida parents who have children in the state’s public elementary schools have filed a federal lawsuit to fight back against the book bans in Escambia County (which includes the city of Pesacola).

          A single person in that county — an English teacher, no less — challenged more than 100 books for explicit sexual content and inappropriate language, including And Tango Makes Three, a picture book meant for elementary readers, based on a true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who adopted a baby penguin. As a result of challenges, Escambia School District has removed or restricted more than 150 books (so much for Governor Ron DeSantis' claim that "no books have been banned in Florida."

          The suit against the Escambia ban alleges that these recent bans and restricted access to books in school libraries by conservative teachers and parents have disproportionately affected books that address racism and LGBTQ relationships, therefore violating constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection under the law.

          “I think the days of protesting in the streets are probably over,” Dr. Lindsay Durtschi, an optometrist who is one of the parents who joined this lawsuit, said on the Katie Phang Show on MSNBC.  “The days for writing letters are done.”

          By the way, another federal lawsuit also has been filed by the authors of And Tango Makes Three against another Florida county school board that has banned their book. In their lawsuit against Lake County School Board (and the state of Florida which they hold responsible for encouraging these bans), the authors also claim the ban of their book has partisan, non-pedagogical motives. As the lawsuit points out, of the 40 books that have been restricted in the Lake County school district, 37 make reference to the LGBTQ community and the three others contain content about LGBTQ issues and themes.

       

Make Banned Books Available

Free to Children and Teens 

at Creative Outlets Outside the Schools 

     

          Columnist Stephanie Hayes, to combat her fatigue while Pinellas County was fighting over Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, began slipping copies of the novel into Little Free Libraries in Dunedin, Palm Harbor and Tarpon Springs.

          When she reported on her “act of rebellion,” she received hundreds of emails and comments supporting her. “More than 120 letters so far, more than 400 TikTok comments,” she wrote. “One reader drove around looking for one of the copies I donated and sent a photo of her teenage daughter holding it.”

           "Book banning goes against our core values," says the LittleFreeLibrary.org, "and the issue is near and dear to our hearts." You can see a few of the ways we've been working to protect books from being banned here.”

          A Banned Book Library has been set up in the lobby of American Stage at 163 3rd Street North in downtown St. Petersburg, thanks to Keep St. Pete Lit. The group’s founder, Maureen McDole, also created a gift registry for banned books at Tombolo Books.

Foundation 451’s logo

          Adam Byrn Tritt, a high school educator in Brevard County and founder of Foundation 451, a free and inclusive library of challenged and banned books, held a pop-up giveaway at the Unitarian Universalists of Clearwater where young people were able to pick up two free books of their choosing. Children up to age 15 needed to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. Young people over 16 were invited to show up on their own.

Read Banned Books
and Encourage Lively Discussion
of Their Content with Others

         

Tombolo Books’s Banned Books Book Club next meets on August 24 via Zoom

          Even if you don't live in St. Petersburg, you can join the Banned Books Book Club offered by one of our independent bookstores, Tombolo Books. The club meets on the fourth Thursday of every other month at 7 pm online via Zoom. The next meet ups, hosted by hosted by Serena Utz and Kimberly Skukalek, are August 24 and October 26, 

          To receive email updates for this book club, sign up here. They have already read the young adult novel Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell and, of course, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. 

As a Last Resort, Try Satire 

(Cartoonists Are a Big Help) 

          To make a point that laws promoting book banning can backfire, two former Pinellas County educators filed a complaint with the Pinellas County schools against the presence of the Bible in school libraries, using the same criteria used to challenge dozens of other books lately in the county.

          The Good Book should be banned, Adam Graham and Brian Hawley argued because, after all, like The Bluest Eye it contains sex and violence. To drive their point home, the two also complained about two other beloved texts – Syd Hoff’s Danny the Dinosaur, a book which has been used in classrooms since 1958, claiming it teaches “gender identity” (all its male characters wear pants and all its female characters wear dresses) and the 1997 picture book Four Famished Foxes and Fosdyke because it promotes the F-word.

          Graham, a former English teacher at Pinellas Park High, and Hawley, who taught language arts at Largo Middle School, said, of course, they are not for banning any books. They actually want to protect all books from being banned, including the Bible. Their complaints, they out out, demonstrate how any book could be censored given the ambiguous language of House Bill 1467, the recent legislation signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis. That law, which has been dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law has encouraged the recent spate of book removals. If the books they have singled out can be realistically and intelligently challenged, they point out, then every book is at risk.

         Like the Merry Men, here are a few cartoonists who have understood how satire can be yielded as a deadly weapon in the fight against banned books. I begin with a cartoon by Clay Bennett, one of the cartoonist on staff when I worked for the St. Petersburg Times. He is still "getting in good trouble":  

 

 

NOTE: A version of this story was first posted in Arts Coast Magazine on April 25, 2023. 

A Cast of One

By MARGO HAMMOND   

NOTE: A version of this story was first posted in Arts Coast Magazine on April 25, 2023.  

          Remember the classic pitch--A Cast of Thousands!--that Hollywood used to seduce us into movie theater seats? Now stage theaters are luring us with "a cast of one."

          Blame it on the COVID lockdown when we became accustomed to seeing actors one at a time in little square boxes. Blame it on the financial crisis facing theaters that have made them shy away from plays with large casts. Or just call it a trend. Here in West Central Florida in the past six months these type of plays have been flourishing.

          Two of the plays with casts of one that I recently saw here illustrate another reason these plays are so popular here: They have been staged in small theatrical spaces which lend potency to the experience. Although many solo plays certainly have been performed successfully on proscenium stages, the distance between the audience and the stage at those more traditional venues works against the intimacy that one-person plays thrive on.    

          In December I went to see The Year of Extraordinary Travel, written and performed by Becca McCoy and directed by Vickie Daignault (I wrote about the experience for Arts Coast Journal; you can read my piece here) at the Studio Grand Central in St. Petersburg.

          And in April I traveled to Sarasota to see Backwards Forwards Back by Jacqueline Goldfinger, performed by L. James and directed by Brendan Ragan, at the Urbanite Theater. Both venues are small black box theaters – Studio Grand Central seats 55, Urbanite seats 75. 

          At both of these plays, I watched a single actor on a nearly empty stage tell a very personal story in a very small space.

          In Goldfinger’s Backwards Forwards Back that intimacy was crucial. Actor L. James plays a soldier returning from war. Seated in an armchair with a Virtual Reality headset, he talks to us about the VR therapy he is undergoing to rid him of his PTSD nightmares. A screen behind him projects the scenes he is seeing during his therapy – a desert, a burning building.

          But it is the images of his war experience and its aftermath — including his detention of a boy whose entire family is annihilated by an incoming rocket and a harrowing scene at a Fourth of July celebration when he returns home — that remain with me still. They are the vivid images that James conjured up with his riveting performance just a few feet away from me.

In Backwards Forwards Back, a one-actor play at Urbanite Theater in Sarasota, L. James plays The Soldier, a man returning from war who is undergoing Virtual Reality therapy to try to deal with a severe case of PTSD.

          That close proximity gave me an intense experience that a larger theater would have had difficulty to match.

            Good actors, of course, can always project from a larger stage, but when it comes to one-person plays, size matters to me, I guess--the size of the theater, that is. Here's a case in point: I saw the play The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman play written by Joan Didion, based on her book of that title, three times--with three different actresses and in three different theaters. It was only when I saw it in a smaller venue, however, that I really got what Didion was trying to tell me.

         The Year of Magical Thinking tells the story of Didion’s wrenching and disorienting year after her husband’s sudden death.The first time I saw the play was in 2007 in a Broadway production directed by David Hare at the massive 800-seat Booth Theatre. Vanessa Redgrave was playing the role of her friend Joan Didion. Didion was even in the audience that night. I had read the book and loved it. You would think all the ingredients for success were there. But the play left me cold.

          Then in 2013 I saw that Roxanne Faye, a local actress I like, was offering the play at  The Studio@620, a creative space in St. Petersburg. It was directed by one of The Studio’s founder, Bob Devin Jones. I decided to give the play another chance. When Faye delivered the opening lines, “… it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you,” I remember having the distinct impression that she was talking to me and me alone. The fact that I was sitting only a few feet away. I was deeply moved by the play this time. Was it the intimacy of the space that changed my experience of the play?

          The positive impact a smaller space can have on the success of one-actor plays was reinforced when I saw The Year of Magical Thinking a third time in 2017, directed by Karla Hartley. This time  Vickie Daignault, another local actress (now a director) I admire, took on the solo Didion role. It was held at the 99-seat Stageworks Theatre, the longest running theater in Tampa, where Hartley is producing artistic director. Again, the play worked for me.

          All three actresses I saw in The Year of Magical Thinking made the work their own. Redgrave perhaps captured most accurately her friend’s demeanor as she faced down the emotions of grief. Faye showed me the normally cool Didion's struggle to fighting off those emotions. Daignault allowed me to see Didion’s open wound more clearly. Each embodied Didion’s grief and her difficulty in dealing with it.

Vickie Daignault in The Year of Magical Thinking at Stageworks Theatre

          But it was the size of the venue where I saw that grief projected that made all the difference for me as a spectator. I could almost reach out and touch both Faye’s and Daignault’s anguish, which undid me, while Redgrave remained a remote figure to me.

             There is another surprising ingredient that adds to the success of one-person plays for me, plays where a single actor holds me enthralled in a darkened space. At most of these plays I've seen, the single actor turns out to be only technically alone. Each time, an amazing number of people showed up onstage.

           Consider the four one-person plays I've seen recently at The Studio: Ann (about the legendary brash and, yes, feminist Texas governor Ann Richards), Wonderful Life (based on the iconic film It's a Wonderful Life), Roshin’s Wake (the tale of an Irish immigrant mourning her daughter's death on the Oregon Trail) and Every Brilliant Thing (the story of a boy who begins a list of things that make life worth living).       

          In Wonderful Life, St. Pete actor, drag performer and playwright Matt McGee, using his considerable acting chops summoned up no less than 15 characters. Actually, the entire cast of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life. American Stage producing director Helen R. Murray and Jason Lott adapted that classic film for this stage version.

          With only a slight turn of his body or change of his voice, McGee transformed himself into George Bailey and George’s wife Mary and Mr Potter and George’s brother Harry and Uncle Billy and the floozy Violet and, of course, Clarence the Angel. There wasn’t a prop in sight (except that pair of glasses on Mr Potter).

          McGee performed the engaging play in December at four locations here: The Studio Coastal Creative, and the James Museum (all spaces in St. Petersburg) and at Gulfport’s Catherine A. Hickman Theater. Earlier last year he appeared in a one-person play at freeFall, another St. Petersburg theater venue, portraying James Beard in I Love to Eat. Talk about earning your wings.

Matthew McGee bringing the town of Bedford Falls onstage in Wonderful Life          

          Or consider all the voices that I heard at Every Brilliant Thing, thanks to that play’s cleverly orchestrated interaction with audiences. The one-actor play by Duncan McMillan with Jonny Donahoe is about a six-year-old boy who began a list of brilliant things to convince his suicidal mother that life was worth living – and who continues to add to the list all his life.

          In the script the actor is instructed to use members of the audience to shout out the items (which were printed on numbered slips of paper and distributed by the actor beforehand). The script also calls for audience members to be used as stand-ins for the people who populate this touching story (also negotiated by the actor before the play began).

          So picture this – we are seated in the round at The Studio with actor Dylan Barlowe (who plays “the Narrator”) in the center. He is explaining to us how at six he came up with the idea for the list when he suddenly calls out “Number 1” (the first item on his infamous list) and the woman next to me exclaims, “Ice Cream.” Later, when Barlowe says “Number 4,” someone in the bleachers across the way yells out, “Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose.” And so on.

          As he continues to tell us his heart-breaking but ultimately life-affirming story, his father, his school counselor Mrs. Patterson (and her sock puppet Booger), a lecturer and girlfriend Sam miraculously materialize, all thanks to audience members willing to play these parts. At one point, to cheer us up, Barlowe (who attended the Pinellas County Center for the Arts) even gets all of us to do the wave.

Dylan Barlowe bringing the audience into the story in Every Brilliant Thing

          The audience also became part of the drama at Ann, which I saw in October, and Roshin’s Wake, which had its world premiere here in December. Ann, written by Holland Taylor who originated the role, begins with the governor addressing a graduating class. We in the audience are, of course, the stand-ins for the students.

          At Roshin’s Wake, a story written and performed by Dorothy Hershman of an Irish immigrant traveling across the Western territories on the Oregon Trail – programs were handed out to us making it crystal clear that we were once again expected to play our part: “Imagine yourselves ‘In-Role” as fellow travelers on this wagon train.”

          The Studio first presented Ann to sold-out crowds in the spring of 2022. In October the biographical play made famous by Holland Taylor on Broadway was back at The Studio by popular demand. All of the original creative team returned, headed by the indefatigable Bonnie Agan as Ann. Lisa Tricomi, who directed the Studio’s production, called the play “a love letter to democracy.”

          Ann started out in the auditorium of a college graduation, but the setting quickly expanded to a convincing re-creation of the office of the governor of Texas (thanks to production stage manager Marcus Wehby), complete with American and Lone Star State flags.

          There, Agan as Richards launched into a full, multi-tasking frenzy, yelling at her pokey speechwriter, giving a filmmaker a quote about abortion rights, telling a dirty joke, talking to Bill Clinton (who was then in the White House), ordering cowboy boots for her staff, debating whether she should issue a last-minute stay of execution, fixing the fringe on the American flag and acting as referee as she plans an outing with her kids.

          At play’s end, I found myself with tears in my eyes, first from laughing so hard at Richard’s saucy personality and then in sorrow when Ann described her own funeral. It is a tribute to Agan’s gutsy performance to say that I would swear that there were dozens of other people onstage with her as she switched seamlessly from phone call after phone call to conversations with her assistant (who is a pre-recorded voiceover) to rants about the need for more political participation.

Bonnie Agan portraying Ann Richards on the detailed set designed by Marcus Wehby

          In contrast to Ann’s elaborate office mise-en-scene, the setting for Roshin’s Wake was chillingly stark – just a tree stump and a wooden cross.

The stark stage setting for Roshin's Wake, and Dorothy Hershman, who wrote, directed, and performed Roshin’s Wake, during the play’s final talkback at The Studio@620 – photos by Margo Hammond

          The play tells the story of Oognah Donohue whose daughter has just died in childbirth. When the play opens, Donohue is mourning at her daughter’s gravesite which she will soon have to abandon when the wagon train she is on moves westward.

           And just as the program predicted, Dorothy Hershman, who wrote, directed and performed Roshin’s Wake (with a convincing Irish accent), addresses us directly as if we were indeed her fellow travelers, inviting us in the end to join the others for the Irish wake that they are holding to help her through her grief.

           Hershman, an award-winning actor, moved to Gulfport from Texas in 2000 to take a job as a drama specialist for the lower grades at Berkeley Preparatory School in Tampa. It was there that she got her inspiration to write Roshin’s Wake.

          When the 5th graders were learning about the Oregon Trail, she would help them do improvisations — or what she calls “process drama, exploring a subject by going into it and living it” — to make the period come alive for them. (Read her interview with Bill DeYoung in the Catalyst).

          In 2015 she retired from Berkeley, but she never left the Oregon Trail. During the pandemic lockdown she tapped into the many years of research she had done on that period and wrote down the story she tells in Roshin’s Wake.

          Roshin’s Wake was produced by Francine Wolf whose Largo-based ZaZu Productions L.L.C. created a promo for the play’s world premiere at The Studio@620.

          Wolf herself is no stranger to one-woman performances. She presented her own solo play based on her life, Please Don’t Tell My Kids!, this month at the Tampa International Fringe Festival (and will be presenting it at the Fringe Fort Myers in June). Her Tampa performances were held at Screen Door, a 36-seat microcinema in the historic Kress building in Ybor City.

     

Poster for Francine Wolf’s solo play Please Don’t Tell My Kids!

Getting Personal: Tchaikovsky and Me

          Yesterday I went to hear the Tampa Bay Symphony play Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony at the Straz Center in Tampa. My friend Ruth Kern plays the cello in this amazing, all-volunteer orchestra. It was the second time I heard the TBS play the piece. As I sat in the darkened theater, listening to this monumental work, I thought back to the first time I heard the TBS play Tchaikovsky's final piece of music at the Palladium in St. Petersburg.

          It was on February 18, 2014, the day I learned that my childhood friend Tom Valeo was dying of cancer.

          Tom and I had grown up together in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I adored his mother who, like me, was of Scandinavian descent. I was a bit in love with his Italian father who was a labor leader. He never laughed at my youthful opinions about the state of the world. Our families thought Tom and I might end up getting married, but it wasn't like that. He was like a brother to me. A brother without the baggage of sibling rivalry. 

          We both ended up working as journalists. He got married, had three kids, moved to Chicago (where he covered the theater scene for the Daily Herald), and got divorced. I got married, got divorced, became a travel writer, eventually moved to St. Petersburg to take up a more sedentary job as book editor of the St. Petersburg Times and remarried. We kept in touch no matter how far apart life took us. 

          Then suddenly, miraculously, he was living again in the same town as I was. I had introduced him to a friend and colleague of mine, Karen Pryslopski, and they had fallen in love. He moved to St. Petersburg and moved in with Karen.

         

          When they finally got married, Tom asked me to be his best "man" at their wedding, which took place, appropriately, in their kitchen. They were both amazing cooks.

          For years I would tell people that pairing up Tom and Karen was the greatest accomplishment of my life. I had never seen two people so happy together. 

          Recasting himself as a science writer, Tom first worked at their kitchen table and then in an office that Karen fixed up with posters of Chicago and a photo of Tom meditating under a Florida tree (used to illustrate a cover story he wrote on the benefits of mediation as we age). In addition to writing about science, he gave lectures on the art of writing and ran workshops encouraging people to begin their "existential memoirs." He saw writing as an act of meditation, a chance for deep self-reflection. 

          Karen was still working full-time at the newspaper, but both of were freelancers by then. We would meet in the afternoons over the cappuccinos that he would whip up with his amazing state-of-the-art machine to talk about our work and the state of the world.

       Then in 2014 four days after Valentine's Day (a holiday none of us were very fond of), I got a call from Tom, asking me to stop by. He said that he had something important to tell me. Karen was at work. He was in the kitchen, as usual, making us cappuccinos. When I walked in, he dropped the bombshell: He didn’t have long to live.     

           He asked me not to tell Karen that there was no chance of recovery. When he had felt a pressure in his upper chest, the science writer in him knew immediately what a doctor confirmed: He had an advanced case of esophageal cancer. He was prepared for what was to come. Karen needed to keep hoping for a miracle, he told me. I promised him I would stay by her side with all the support I could muster.

          That night I went to the Palladium in St. Petersburg to hear Tchaikovsky's 6th with my friend Ruth at the cello. As the piece opened with its mournful bassoon solo, I began to cry and never stopped until the music ended. I gave myself over entirely to the symphony, letting it carry me through its themes of life and death. At the end of the fourth and final movement instead of the usual triumphant, Ta Da I was used to hearing at the end of symphonies, the music merely faded away. I walked out of the theater, knowing I would never forget that day or that music.

          Tchaikovsky called his 6th Symphony the Pateticheskaya Symphony, using the Russian word which means passion or emotive. The French translated that word as "pathetique," which suggests something emotional, evoking pity. That moniker, which is how the piece is known today, seemed all-too-prophetic when Tchaikovsky died only nine days after he conducted its premiere in St. Petersburg (the other St. Petersburg of course) in 1893. Was the symphony a suicide note? Did Tchaikovsky know he was dying? Did he mean to evoke pity?

          There has always been a great deal of mystery surrounding Tchaikovsky and his last symphony. Some have speculated that he was writing his own requiem because the truth of his sexual orientation was about to be made public. Others say that is nonsense. He contracted cholera after the premiere and couldn’t possibility have known that he was about to die when he was writing the work. 

          There are several facts that are undisputed. We do know that Tchaikovsky had tried to commit suicide in the past--after his marriage  to Antonina Miliukova, a former student, spectacularly fell apart. We do know that he was gay. But there is evidence that he was comfortable with his sexuality (his orientation was an open secret among musicians and those close to him) and that 19th century Russia was not as intolerant of homosexuality as present-day Russia is. 

          "Biographer Alexander Poznansky, the first scholar to access Tchaikovsky's extensive letters--previously suppressed by Soviet authorities--convincingly argues against the suicide theory," says my cellist friend Ruth in the program notes she wrote for TSO's most recent performance of Tchaikovsky's 6th.

          We’ll never know, of course, what Tchaikovsky really was thinking when he composed the Pathétique, but I do know that night in 2014 when I first heard the Tampa Bay Symphony play it, his music transcended biography. His notes rattled my heart.

. . .

          I had many months to say goodbye to Tom before he died on Earth Day in 2015. We had several more dinners together, many more days of laughter and I was able, repeatedly, to tell him how much he had meant to me in my life, how much I was going to miss him.

          That was a conversation I was never able to have with Karen. She unexpectedly died just under six years after Tom's death. It was early 2021. From a fall perhaps. We don’t know. When she didn’t answer our calls, friends went to check up on her. They found her unconscious in her bed. She never woke up. We had braved that first year of the pandemic together, only to have one of us die of something that had nothing to do with COVID.

          I had kept my promise though. I had stood by her as best as I could. We marked every Earth Day with a dinner al fresco on Beach Drive. We audited classes together at USFSP and tried out new restaurants. She cooked for me. I brought her wine. A mutual friend who plays violin with the Florida Orchestra got us tickets to dozens of concerts.

          Karen had never been to a symphony orchestra. "What should I wear?" she asked, the first time we went. "It's Florida," I told her, "Anything goes, but shorts." At every concert after that, she delighted in pointing out to me someone who had come in shorts. She always insisted on sitting as high up as possible so we could see the entire orchestra. She called the first violinist her “boyfriend.” She had never seen a musician so animated.

          Last fall when a friend invited me to go hear a Florida Orchestra performance at Mahaffey Theater, I was delighted that his tickets were in the mezzanine, Karen's favorite spot. I found myself looking around for a guy in shorts. I laughed when I so easily spotted someone. Tchaikovsky was on the program. Not his 6th but his 4th. 

          Tchaikovsky's 6th, of course, will always remind me of Tom–and you might imagine that now the Pathétique, linked to the composer’s sudden and mysterious death, would also make me think of Karen.

. . .

          But it is Tchaikovsky’s 4th that I associate most with her. Tchaikovsky wrote his 4th symphony after that failed suicide attempt when he was trying to be happy once again. Its bittersweetness and triumphant finale addresses perfectly the time I had together with Karen after Tom's death, when both of us were trying to cope with sadness.

         Describing his achingly beautiful second movement, which opens with the melancholy sounds of an oboe solo, Tchaikovsky wrote:  “Life has you tired out. Many things flit through the memory… there were happy moments when young blood pulsed warm and life was gratifying. There were also moments of grief and of irreparable loss. It is all-remote in the past. It is both sad and somehow sweet to lose oneself in the past. And yet, we are weary of existence.”

          But it is Tchaikovsky's comments about the last movement of the 4th, with its joyous sound of cymbals, that made me realize why I will forever link Karen to this work of art. His words underscore how important it is to turn to others when you are grieving a loss:

           “If you cannot discover the reasons for happiness in yourself, look at others. Upbraid yourself and do not say that the entire world is sad…

          “Take happiness from the joys of others. Life is bearable after all."

       

          Hearing Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony again this week, I found myself once again grateful for the healing power of music. I was struck by the thought that Tchaikovsky's symphonies are in a way the musical equivalent of Tom's existential memoirs, deep dives into the composer's angsts as well as his triumphs. The fact that an artist shares with us his or her personal reflections--whether they take the form of music, writing or any other art-- is our gain. Through that sharing, we are encouraged to reflect on our own personal joys and losses. What else is the point of art?

          Tchaikovsky once said, “Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.” Listening to his final symphony this week, to that I would add, truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for the music of friendship.

A version of this essay was posted last year in Arts Coast Magazine, prompted by a question the editor of that online magazine posed to those of us who are regular contributors. Sheila Cowley asked us, "Is there something in a work of art, some detail you noticed, that made that work special for you?" At first, nothing came to mind. Then, all of a sudden, I thought of Tchaikovsky and how his two very personal symphonies had become very personal for me.