CRISS-MESS 2025 

... or SOMETHING MASQUERADING AS A CHEERFUL END TO 2025

Someone asked me recently if I had plans for the days ahead. It took me awhile to realize she meant the holiday season and not the total collapse of civilization.

At best it’s been a difficult year, watching everything I believe in and have fought for all my life—like equality and justice—being destroyed and dismantled by an IQ-challenged senile maniac intent on reimagining our country to be as ugly and miserable as he is.

Still, we persevere. Hugh and I live our idyllic and insulated life together and are grateful Victor can still be home under our care. We do our best but it’s not easy.

I remember when I was a lot younger picturing most old people as folks sitting on park benches talking endlessly about their gall bladder surgeries and who kacked. Now I find myself to be one of them. 

I was in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism in early October and if it hadn’t been for Hugh, whose EMT training kicked in just in time, I probably wouldn’t be here sitting on my own virtual park bench whining about my health issues. I’m getting better now but the friggin’ DVT is still in my lung and I’m taking meds to dissolve it. Way too slow a process, says I. 

Aside from that, everything is really okay. Hugh has been working out of town a lot this year building challenge courses all over the country, as his early years as a slave laborer working for his dad’s oil rig construction company in New Mexico has paid off bigtime financially for him. Caring for Victor by myself is honestly a lot for me—someday in the not-too distant future I think he’ll need better care than I can give him, heartbreaking though that day will be. 

Let me stop sounding like ol’ Ebenezer for a minute as there’s been good stuff too. Felipe Havranek, the producer and filmmaker extraordinaire who brought me to South America and Spain to teach acting intensives and for whom I work here in LA each spring, has commissioned my surprisingly successful book Waiting for Walk to be made into a feature film. Although I deferred his request for over a year for me to do the screenplay, while Hugh was off toiling in Amherst for two months last summer, I gave it a go. I was reluctant because the screenplay I wrote for the feature film adaptation of my play Surprise Surprise was criticized by many critics as being too much like a play—I’m good with dialogue but that visual “EXT. JACUZZI, sunlight streams in” thing isn’t my forte.

Still, I had the time and I went for it. To my surprise, Pipe loved what I created and is going to use it. He plans to shoot a teaser for W4W  in NYC in January and here in March, so I’d better get my act together fast. I’m busy basically casting it myself right now as Pipe lives and operates in Montevideo, Uruguay. Luckily, I’m privileged to know and love a heap of mighty talented people who so far all seem eager to be a part of the project. 

Next month begins my 39th year reviewing and writing about theatre on a regular basis, originally for Entertainment Today, BackStage, and several other national publications, but for the last few years since the near-demise of the print media exclusively here for my own website (click on CURRENT REVIEWS, although until mid-January new projects are far and few between). I am also still active as a member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, something I hope I never get so creaky I have to give up. I told Hugh 13 years ago when we first discovered this improbable thing called love we share that he didn’t want to stick around with me long enough to one day have to help me down the aisle of the Pantages in my walker, but now that those days are getting closer, he oddly seems not to mind. He's always been a tad blind, you see, serendipitously for me.

 Art heals, as it’s said, and have to admit I desperately miss acting, the most satisfying and euphoria-producing of all my creative outlets. After a long dry spell I recently did a reading of an amazing new play by one of my favorite playwrights that’s going from our workshop stage to a full production next year. I don’t know if I’ll be considered for it through to fruition but I sure hope so. I played two beautifully written characters who even appear onstage simultaneously, a richly complex pair of old duffers, one coincidentally based on a long-gone and most notorious celebrity-adjacent friend of mine whose weekly newspaper column I used to edit for over six years for Tolucan Times and the Beverly Hills Post.  Both characters die before the aptly named “final curtain,” so I’d get to kack twice live and in person each and every performance. Good practice for me turning 80 next October, maybe? All I know is, simply preparing for the reading made me feel better and stronger physically than I have in a long time. Create, create, create—it’s medicine for the soul, if indeed it turns out there is such a thing.

By the way, elsewhere on this site there’s a page labeled TRAVIS MONOLOGUES 2025, featuring two short pieces Felipe shot of me at my old home, the Victory Theatre Center, while he was here and we were conducting his annual month-long acting intensive last spring. I’d love for you to check them out if you haven’t seen ‘em already.

That’s about it… oh! After two years of my endocrinologist bombarding my insurance company to agree to cover it, I’ve been on Zepbound since mid-May and have lost almost 70 lbs! I’m still losing and although I do feel better, without the extra fat to pop out my wrinkles, I’m now beginning to look like Margo when they took her out of Shangri-La. Everything’s drooping and my poor body looks like a wet sack of rice. Still, I’m much healthier even if I am turning into the Cryptkeeper, but life is all a trade-off, isn’t it? I might not have survived my health scare last fall if I’d still weighed 963 lbs, so I’m grateful and it’s not just an undigested bit of beef or an undercooked fragment of potato, it seems.

I’m not painting much these days due to arthritis in my hands but if all the other crap solves itself, surgery at some future point might alleviate some of that. How’cum no one ever told me getting old is a goddam fulltime job? Or did they and I was having too much fun to listen?

Since Hugh is away creating more magic for kids soon to be enjoyed at Camp Ozark in Hot Springs, Arkansas this holiday season, he and I are taking off when he gets home for a long overdue adventure and to see our pals in New Orleans early in the new year. Hope that fucking ICE has left our beloved home-away-from-home by then. I could get myself in deep doo-doo if I ever have to confront them in person.

And you? Hope all of you are well and less depressed and disappointed with the state of the world and its future than I am. It's an overpowering feeling I just can’t shake.

Let’s try  for some happy holidays, yes?

I’ll do my best.

TravisTee

…and of course, Hugh, Victor, and our dear Missus Melody Lingerzohn