Head Over Heels

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Encore is presenting Head over Heels which is being performed at the John and Rita Lowndes Shakespeare Center (812 E Rollins St, Orlando, FL) from through June 13, 2021. This was my first sketch inside a theater since the pandemic began in March of 2020.

This was a dress rehearsal so the audience was very scarce. Performers who were vaccinated went without masks and the dancers always wore clear masks. Thankfully everyone in the audience wore masks.

This was a musical set in Arcadia which resembled a medieval utopia. I must say the costuming in this show by the late A.J. Garcia was stellar. A live band was on the upper level and and they were a bit overbearing at the start of the show. However this musical was a delight and the show started with a high energy dance number set to We Got The Beat. The songs are contemporary so if you liked the Moulin Rouge movie I bet you will have a fun time seeing this show.

The heart of the show is a love story between a sheep herder and a princess. The king denies the match and the herder only can get close to the princess dressed as a Amazon warrior. An oracle who was first a snake later appeared as an owl in fabulous drag. The kings anger and close minded view of his subjects and his family is eventually overpowered by love. This is a great show to run during Pride week since acceptance and discovering our true self are at the core of the show.

The actor playing the shepherd, Michael Angelini Jr.,did a hilarious job jumping back and forth between his male and female roles. Lillie Eliza Thomas was regal as the queen and Laurel Hatfield was heart warming as the plane princess Phiolclea. The bottom line is that this is a fun and exciting night of theater and for someone who once sketched shows every night this was a breath of fresh air. Tickets are $39.

 

Amanda Alvear

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Advisory: Please note that this post is about the Pulse Nightclub Massacre on June 12, 2016. It contains sensitive and difficult to read content. Post written with narrator’s consent.  

On March31, 2017 Pam Schwartz of the Orange County Regional History Center conducted an oral history with Myra Alvear the mother of Amanda Alvear who was one of the 49 victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting that happened on June 12, 2016. With Myra was Antonio Alvear, who is Amanda’s older brother.

Amanda had two jobs and went to college. She was pursuing a nursing career. She wanted to become a midwife. She was very outgoing and always available for friends and family. She had a perfect mix of being comforting but firm. She had hundreds of followers inn Instagram where she shared her workouts. She inspired people to loose weight.

Amanda loved going to Pulse to met friends. It was a safe place for her.

On June 12, Amanda watched Brian’s two daughters for the day and when they went to sleep at her mom’s she knew she could go out with friends. Amanda’s father, Daniel Alvear, was the first to hear the news at 7:30AM when Nancy called and said that there had been a shooting at Pulse. He turned on the TV news and called Brian. Daniel looked at his wife asleep and didn’t want to wake her up. She had already lost a child to cancer, how could he tell her. He didn’t want to deliver this bomb. Brian was in denial hoping she was with friends. News stations were already starting to call. Brian was using social media in the hopes of finding his sister. Amanda’s phone must have had 8000 text messages. She was not responding.

Myra and Daniel went to try and get news about Amanda. They ere sent to a hotel which was a nightmare in itself. Maybe Amanda was at the hospital and unconscious. Her name wasn’t showing up. When Myra and Daniel got back home, Myra just went to Amanda’s room and lay down. The people that were not on the list of verified or taken to the hospital, were likely still inside the club. There was a bomb scare as well. They couldn’t get everybody out.

Amanda wouldn’t hide, she would have to get all her friends out. She was a fighter like her mom.

Myra became an activist after loosing Amanda. She wants to help others. She founded Hugs Not Hate. The family had a chance to no only grieve, but fight for something. At a vigil for Amanda and Mercedez Marisol Flores, Myra spoke and then hugged everybody that was there. At Amanda’s funeral she also hugged everybody. Myra needed to find out how the other families were doing and she also found those who had been injured. Every day should would try to find out who was at the hospital. She needed to reach out. Everyone was grieving in their own way. She wants the legacy to be of love, not hate.

Narcoossee’s

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This would be the first time Pam and I have eaten out at a restaurant since the beginning of the pandemic. Pam had family visiting Disney and they invited us to Narccooee’s at the Grand Floridian.

Disney still requires guests to wear masks at all times except when eating. Pam’s family reported that they had all been vaccinated, but the younger boys who were seated at the far end of the table were below the vaccination age bracket.

Eating out requires trust as we all navigate a strange grey area. Pam felt comfortable since the table spacing was decent and the waiters all wore masks and face shields. I remain undecided since I am unsure of how ventilation is handled in the restaurant.  I have to remind myself that my chances of getting infected are just 5% since I am fully vaccinated. Every sketch outing will be a case of risk analysis moving forward.

Lori was seated next to me and she is an artist herself. Her mom showed me a sketch done while the pastor was giving a sermon. Lori would interpret the sermon as a series of illustrations. She showed me a storyboard and animatic  college assignment on her phone and there was some compelling animated transitions. She is also deeply into robotics and I got to see some of her teams creations at work. I showed her a recently completed animation but the soundtrack was impossible to hear over the background noise in the restaurant. Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how loud the place was. I love creating to this excited sound of people gathering and socializing. Ive missed that energy.

I sketched quickly before the food arrived at the table, ignoring bread and appetizers. The meal was amazing. I ordered scallops served with Gnocchi. The dish had a delicious smoky flavor. Desert was a carrot cake with boba and some sweet smear on the plate. One of my most terrifying experiences prior to this evening was sucking up some boba through a wide straw while drinking a bubble tea. It was like sucking eyeballs into my mouth. I have since refrained from ever again eating boba. Destiny agreed to take the eyeballs off my plate.

In the lake outside the windows a parade of floats lit up with sea creatures like sea horses pulling Poseidon, dolphins leaping, an octopus and the Loch Ness Monster. Later all the floats were illuminated with American Flags. I was a bit disappointed that none of the floats were illuminated with a giant COVID virus.

Guess Who

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What to O.J. Simpson, George Zimmerman, Casey Anthony, The 45th U.S. President and The Duke have in common? They were all convicted a crime and got off.

Lo G and Colbonyx  are trying to send signs to the world that The Duke, their corrupt and greedy employer and CEO of a record label, is guilty for illegally supplying blood samples to Tim Nugget, CEO of a corrupt tech company called Manogen. The Duke was in a court case but was found innocent even though he wasn’t.

This is the premise for a series of illustrations I did for this local band. I branched towards caricature for the two band members in the series so things get a  bit distorted in a fun way.

Guess Who? is a two-player character guessing game created by Ora and Theo Coster, also known as Theora Design, that was first manufactured by Milton Bradley in 1979 and is now owned by Hasbro.

Each player starts the game with a board that includes cartoon images of 24 people and their first names with all the images standing up. Each player selects a card of their choice from a separate pile of cards containing the same 24 images. The objective of the game is to be the first to determine which card one’s opponent has selected. Players alternate asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates, such as:

  • “Is your person a CEO of a record label?”
  • “Is your person greedy?”
  • “Is your person wearing a top hat?

The player will then eliminate candidates (based on the opponent’s response) by flipping those images down until only one is left. Well-crafted questions allow players to eliminate one or more possible cards.

Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings

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From a September 23, 2020 Orange County Regional History Center Oral History with Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, “You have to be a bit of a realist in these processes where, no matter what you think, you won’t be able to make all the changes that need to be made in days, months. It will be decades of being in the fight. So I have been doing this now for four decades.”

“I know what I know about this. I’ve been in this fight for decades. I haven’t been sitting as a spectator in the arena. I’ve been in the arena.”

“So that is what I say to young people, ‘you want to really bring about change, you need to become the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges, the police officers,  the school teachers, the doctors, the professors in college, the researchers, the entrepreneurs. You need to become all of those if you really want to bring about change.’ ”

“Otherwise they are going to be frustrated if they think that, it is going too happen like that, They are going to be so frustrated. I think that is what we see. Sometimes when you see the violence, the destruction, it is frustration manifesting itself. Because they really don’t understand what the fight is at this point.”

COVID Kills Sperm

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A research report in the journal Reproduction stated that COVID-19 may negatively affect sperm quality and reduce fertility in men. The magnitude of that effect may depend on the severity of disease, according to Behzad Hajizadeh Maleki, a doctoral student and research assistant in the department of psychology and sports science at Justus Liebig University in Germany, and Bakhtyar Tartibian, PhD, of the physical education and sports science department at Urmia University in Iran.

The study was conducted with 84 men with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 and 105 men without the disease in Iran. Semen quality, was evaluated at 10-day intervals for up to 60 days. A urologist confirmed that all the men were fertile in the study. Most of the men in the study were in their 30s and “differed substantially” in body weight, body fat percent and Body Mass Index, according to the researchers.

Markers of inflammation and oxidative stress in sperm cells of men with COVID-19 were increased by more than 100% compared with controls, according to the researchers. Sperm concentration was reduced by 516%, mobility by 209% and sperm cell shape was altered by 400%. The magnitude of these changes were also related to disease severity. Antiviral therapies for COVID-19 may have “additional harmful consequences” on male fertility, and that further research is needed.

The moral is clear, get vaccinated or end up like Donnie Dead Balls.

Tip of the Iceberg

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The BMJ reported that as of May 3, 2021 official figures suggested that the Global deaths from covid-19 was 3.27 million. However a study from the University of Washington suggests that the pandemic’s true overall toll will reach 9.43 million deaths by September 2021. The report, based its conclusions on the past year’s deviations from expected overall mortality.

The report states that the virus is claiming about 33,000 lives a day around the world, more than twice reported figures. They estimated the true United States death toll at 905,289 compared with an official figure of 574,043.

In India the disparity between the official reported deaths to the horrors on the ground of hundreds of bodies floating down the Ganges river and crematoria unable to keep up with demand make it obvious that death numbers are far higher than reported. India is forecast to lose a further 842,000 people by September 2021.

Countries who are believed to have under reported Covid-19 deaths include Egypt, India, Mexico, and Russia. India’s death toll as of May 2021 was estimated as 654,395, which is 2.96 times the official figure. Mexico was attributed 617,127 deaths, 2.83 times the official figure. Egypt, was attributed 170,041 deaths, which is 12.6 times the official figure. Russia has the largest number of unreported deaths, they estimate, with a real death toll of 593,610, which is 5.43 times the official estimate. While some governments may attribute deaths in Covid patients to co-morbid conditions to keep their numbers low, the commonest reason for under reporting of Covid-19 deaths is inadequate testing.

Turkey and Brazil are often accused of under counting, but both were reporting more than half of their Covid-19 deaths. Many countries of central and eastern Europe were reporting only one death in three, a ratio also seen across sub-Saharan Africa. The worst under counts were found in the Caucuses and former Soviet republics.

First Fringe Film Festival

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I entered my short animated film Greyhound, in the first Fringe Film Festival going on at the Shakes in Orlando Fl. The screening was on my birthday, May 22, 2021 so I felt I had to go. I have not been documenting this years Fringe due to the ongoing pandemic, but in this instance I decided to make an exception.

The screenings were held at eh Play What You Can Stage in an outdoor tent between the Shakes and the Firehouse museum. Pam and I arrived a bit early and I started sketching the venue right away. We both kept our masks on and other audience members were split with about half wearing masks.

It felt awkward finding a seat with a view of the stage. Finding seats with a full six feet of social distancing was impossible. Before this outing, I liked to keep 4 dead body lengths (about 24 feet) between myself and anyone else. It has been more than a year since I have sketched on location. It seemed like everyone was watching us.

An artist, Gabriella Serralles, was on the stage doing Imprompto Digital Paintings which showed up on the screen. I think she was supposed to be doing pet portraits, but I can’t be sure. There were no dogs in the audience. The staging was all wrong however since she was seated right in front of the screen meaning more than half the audience could not get a clear view of shat she was painting on the screen. When the artist was finished, audience members let and a whole new crowd filled the seats.

The first film was a documentary about a metal working artist who sculpts fish. I didn’t pay close attention since I was frantically trying to finish my sketch. My film was next in line. I kind of assumed my film would be last in the lie up so I was surprised. Up until this night the film had only been screened as part of the Ocoee Exhibition at the Orange County Regional History Center. I am sure people saw it but privately with one or two people at a time. It was therefor a surprise when the audience broke into applause after my film screened. Visual artists aren’t used to that kind of spontaneous affirmation.

My second favorite film for the evening was made by Evan and Christie Miga of Miga Made. It had two robots flying a car through a futuristic world reminiscent of Blade Runner. I love how they take the simplest objects and covert them into props of a high tech world.

We didn’t linger when the screenings were over preferring to remove ourselves from the crowds. I didn’t count how many were in the audience, maybe several dozen, but it was more crowded than I would prefer during a pandemic. The seven day average for deaths in Florida was 58 deaths a day the week of the screening. Which is lower than the several hundred who died every day in January of 2021, but still not reassuring.

COVID ICU Delirium

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The Atlantic reported that COVID-19 patients have been experiencing a sort of living nightmare as they battle the virus in hospitals.

Hallucinations vary, from a feeling of falling in slow motion, to one patient felling that a nurse had taken a circular saw and cut her arm and both of her legs off. The saw then came through the wall and cut her head in half.

Patients suffering from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). Many of these patients have to be put on a ventilator. 80% of patients on ventilators experience ICU Delirium. Patients are sedated in a medically induced coma to ease the memory of the difficulties. However patients reconstruct false memories from stimulus while sedated.

Patients might look like they are resting, while in reality their brain is on fire. A patient might then wake up in a medically induced haze with a tube down their throat and wrists tied. In war time, that would be considered torture. Patients might feel they are being kidnapped or being tortured. They might see blood dripping down the walls, or people might have animal heads. Children might float by with no faces. If a patient has to get an MRI they might feel they are being put in an oven.

COVID-19 is the perfect storm for Delirium. Patients are put on a high dose of drugs, a longer illness along with absence of family and mobility. Communities around the country and around the world are going to have to deal with a tsunami of survivors who have delirium. Even when patients recover and can rationalize that the things in their head could not have happened, the terror is still very real. The delirium can last even after a patient returns home. One in Four ARDS survivors had PTSD symptoms later in their recovery. Nightmares can get so bad that the recovering patient might wish they had died. Surviving and getting your life back are two different things.

 

India’s COVID Martyrs

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In India on May 16, 2021 fifty doctors died in a single day. 269 doctors have died in the second wave of the virus in India. Last year, 736 doctors had lost their lives during the first wave. The highest number of fatalities have been reported from Bihar (69) followed by Uttar Pradesh (34) and Delhi (27). Only 3% of the doctors who died were fully vaccinated.

Five months into India’s vaccination drive, only 66 per cent of India’s healthcare workers have been fully vaccinated.

Dr. Jayesh Lele, the General Secretary of The Indian Medical Association, (IMA), told NDTV, “It is very unfortunate that we lost 50 doctors yesterday across India and 244 in the second wave since the first week of April”.

“Secondly we want to highlight that doctors are understaffed and overworked. They sometimes work for 48 hours at a stretch without any rest. This adds to the viral load and they ultimately succumb to the infection. The government needs to take measures to boost the healthcare workforce,” he added.

While the The Indian Medical Association (IMA) says that a thousand doctors have died due to Covid so far, the actual numbers may be far higher. The IMA only keeps a record of its nearly 350,000 members. India, however, has more than 1 million 200 thousand doctors. The former president of IMA, Dr. K.K. Aggarwal died on May 17, 2021 from COVID-19. The doctor was infected despite being vaccinated.

Doctors and nurses who are on the front line of the battle against the virus are being stigmatized in India. There are cases of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, being shunned by others for fear of being infected. This includes the threat of being evicted from their own apartments and general ostracism. People are frightened and superstitious. “They recognize us with our lab coats and stethoscopes. Many doctors have been asked to vacate their rented homes by their landlords as they believe that doctors staying at their houses may make them more susceptible to Covid-19,” a junior doctor at Hyderabad’s MGM Hospital told The New Indian Express newspaper on condition of anonymity.