Phantasmagoria presents: A Christmas Carol & The Canterville Ghost

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If you are looking to kick off the Holiday season with a taste for the macabre, then join Phantasmagoria as they present  “Ghost Stories” this Christmas season. They will bring to life and the bitter sweet taste of death to not one but TWO whimsical classics. The well-loved A Christmas Carol, A Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens, followed by Oscar Wilde’s rollicking The Canterville Ghost.

I sat in on a dress rehearsal for the show at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. The set felt like an abandoned attic with carousel horses flanking the stage. Projections on a large screen behind the set changed the settings with ease. I fell in love with the faint flickering candle light that illuminated the various corners of the stage.  That meant I needed to keep the scene dark so the candles could shine.

A Christmas Carol is a well loved and very familiar classic. Phantasmagoria added its dark and vaudevillian steampunk styled flair to the story. John DiDonna as Scrooge lived in the old man’s skin. I have seen him perform this roll many times over the years. Daniel Cooksley as Marley, draped in chains did an amazing job filling the stage with his his twisted and agonized self. Of the three ghosts, the ghost of Christmas future was magnificently designed. Much larger that life, the dark draped figure gestured with gnarly black branches for hands.

The Canterville Ghost offered a much lighter tale full of light hearted dance. It was the yin to Dickens dark and foreboding Yang. There are two more performances December 3–4, 2022 at the Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater, in the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, 8 p.m. and 2 p.m. Tickets are about $35.

After Pulse: Candice Crawford

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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.

Candice Crawford is the CEO of the Mental Health Association of Central Florida. She is a member of the board of the Plaza Live as well. The night before there was a shooting of singer Christina Grimmie at the Plaza Live. The board came to this board room to try and deal with the repercussions of that tragedy. They were pretty shaken up about it. That board meeting happened all afternoon on the Saturday before the Pulse massacre. An 8am conference call was scheduled for 8AM Sunday morning 12 June 2016.

She got up just before 8AM and got a cup of coffee. When the conference call began the conversation was about the mass shooting. At first she thought the mass shooting might have happened at the Plaza, but no, they were talking about the Pulse Nightclub. What in the world is happening?  It was quite the weekend. She called several members of her staff after the conference call ended. They needed to have someone at the Mental Health Association to answer the phones. Phone call could be forwarded to one of the staff members in case anyone called looking for help. There were lots of calls.

The next day they needed several counselors in the offices. On the first day one person came in and the next day 4 or 5 came in. She decided that a Pulse directed counseling program would be needed. She realized there would be a lot of young people at that club who did not have insurance and they would need counseling. Fundraising began to get the program up and running.

Orlando United Assistance Center (OUAC) gave referrals and others sough help on their own. Everyone who has sought help has gotten help. At the time of the interview 118 people had participated in the counseling program. Confidentiality was of the utmost importance.

Town Square

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Under Musk‘s ownership, Twitter stopped taking action against tweets breaching its Covid rules, as of Wednesday, 23 Nov 2022. Twitter had previously suspended more than 11,000 accounts for Covid misinformation as of September 2022.

The former president who promoted and supported an attack on the Capitol to stop the certification of the presidential election was also invited back. His account was permanently suspended after the insurrection. Apparently 62,000 suspended accounts have been re-instated. Twitter also reinstated the personal account of US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, banned in January 2022. Now that accounts that spread misinformation have been given amnesty, it is unclear if they will return, or new ones will be emboldened to share incorrect information, that could influence the decisions people make about their health.

I have used Twitter extensively throughout the pandemic to learn about the latest research and trends as the virus spread. I have been seeing these Twitter feeds report that they are loosing thousands of followers after Musk took control of the company. Republican politicians on the other hand are gaining thousands of followers. Notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Representative Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif.; and Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., lost about 100,000 Twitter followers since Musk bought Twitter, while Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, gained more than 300,000. Exactly what is causing these trends is not yet known.

Musk fired thousands of employees which will clearly result in far less moderation of hate speech and the resulting violence. He was forced to pause the initial launch of an $8 per month Twitter Blue service after users abused the system by purchasing blue check marks to impersonate brands and famous people. Drug company Eli Lilly, who manufactures Insulin, had to apologized for a misleading tweet in which someone pretending to be the company wrote, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”  After that debacle, the drug company suspended advertising on Twitter worth millions of dollars. Musk banned some impersonators before he shut the service down, raising questions about his definition of free speech.

Experts have argued that there has been an exponential increase in hate speech, harassment and misinformation on the platform since the billionaire purchased the social media site. Barbara F. Walter, has written about the potential for social media to fuel a decentralized civil war. She studied civil wars and insurrections in foreign countries for the CIA and realized that eh United States is backsliding towards armed conflict as well thanks in part to social media promoting extremism. Extremism generates more clicks.

 

 

 

Multi System Cluster Bomb

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Research led by Monash University has highlighted the need for General practitioners and physicians to know the COVID history of patients they treat. The study published in MJA looked at hospitalizations that had causes other than respiratory complications. COVID-19 is not a simple respiratory disease. CODID is not a cold or the flu.

Data from laboratory confirmed COVID-19 cases prior to the vaccine rollout were compared to hospital admission data prior to Omicron. “The incidence of hospitalization within 89 days of onset of COVID-19 was higher than during the baseline period for several conditions, including myocarditis and pericarditis, thrombocytopenia, pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, and cerebral infarction.” Simply stated “there are considerable risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection beyond the initial COVID-19 illness”, said epidemiologist and PhD candidate Stacey Rowe.

“You are 15 times more likely to acquire myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) requiring hospitalizations following COVID-19 compared with beforehand,” she said. “Things like heart attacks, or acute myocardial infarction occur quite proximally to getting COVID infection, but other conditions such as the clotting conditions – pulmonary embolism, for example — that risk was highest later in the course of COVID illness, highest around 14 to 60 days following COVID illness.”

COVID-19 is a multi-organ disease, it’s not just a respiratory infection. Rowe and colleagues recommend vaccination and “other mitigation strategies”. You are better off not getting COVID. The problem of course is that Americans are done with mitigation strategies of any type. In a pandemic, 15% of people make decisions that help, 15% make decisions that hinder their survival, the rest just follow the herd. The herd has decided to let the virus rip.

Crealde 5 minute pandemic sketches

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At Crealde School of Art for one of my Urban Sketching Classes I pose for the students and then students pose in turn for 5 minutes each. My quick sketches serve as demo to show how to get the figure on the page and start to think about the environment around the student pose. In this sketch one figure is isolated and the second sketch I added a student sketching in the foreground and a background with a hint of a table and windows. This is a rare case where I didn’t throw some watercolors washes on the sketch. I also never touched a pen and only worked in pencil which is how many beginning students work since they fear they may have to erase mistakes. In the short duration of 5 minutes there is never time to erase.

Edwina Andrews

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Dr. Edwana Andrews is the director of Social Justice and Advocacy at the University of Central Florida. Early in life she realized that not everyone appreciates or accepts or values individuals who identify in the LGBTQ Community. The church that a friend grew up in was not inclined to host a funeral when he died. She had been taught that you should love your neighbor. Why would the church not allow the funeral?

This became the catalyst for her to do her doctorate and dissertation on the gay, lesbian and bisexual experience in the black church. She interviewed individuals who had a religious experience in a black church. She defined a religious experience as the person attending church at least twice a month. None of the individuals she interviewed continue to attend the black church. None of them identify as religious, but they do identify as spiritual. They experienced a lot of hurt and homo negativity in the black church.

While in their parents roof, they had to attend church. When they went to college, they took that opportunity to take a step back from the church and re-evaluate to find perspective as they tried to rationalize their own sexual identity.

She interviewed individuals from Florida, Texas, Atlanta Philadelphia, and California there were no geographic restrictions.

The oral history was cut short by a fire alarm. The line work was finished in the 30 minutes we had, and I added a few washes afterwards from memory.

Foxconn

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Protests erupted at Foxconn the huge iPhone manufacturing plant in Zhenvgzhou China.Police in hazmat suits clubbed the factory workers protesting.

Last month, the factory was locked down due to rising COVID cases. Some workers scaled the fences to break out and go home. Former workers estimate that thousands have fled the factory campus. The company then recruited new workers with the promise of generous bonuses.

Rumors circulated that new recruits were being asked to share dormitories with workers who were Covid-positive. When new workers arrived they were told they would not get the bonuses promised until they had worked at the much lower pay for several weeks. One protestor via a live stream said, “They changed the contract so that we could not get the subsidy as they had promised. They quarantine us but don’t provide food.”

Foxconn has established closed loop operations at the plant, keeping it isolated from the wider city of Zhengzhou. Workers are not supposed to leave. The Zhengzhou plant employs more than 200,000 people. It is not known how many are infected with COVID. “It’s now evident that closed-loop production in Foxconn only helps in preventing COVID from spreading to the city, but does nothing (if not make it even worse) for the workers in the factory,” Aiden Chau of China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group, said in an email.

Foxconn has apologized for a “technical error” in its payment systems, a day after its iPhone factory in China was rocked by angry protests. The iPhone factory apologized for the violence against employees. One new employee was paid 8,000 yuan ($1,120) and was set to receive another 2,000 yuan ($280).

China has recorded its highest number of daily Covid cases since the pandemic began,

 

After Pulse: Joe Saunders

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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.

Joe Saunders is a former State Representative and a senior political director at Equality Florida and formerly staff at the Human Rights Campaign. He is an Orlando LGBT activist. Pulse opened while Joe was a student at UCF. The club anchored it’s outreach around college students. His roommate became a bartender at Pulse. His first apartment was just a few blocks from Pulse.

Joe was in North Carolina doing political response work. He had worked crazy hours like 15 hours a day. At 2AM his phone lit up with a text chat thread from a group of friends in Orlando. He was till working at 2AM. People were saying something is happening at Pulse. One friend was in an apartment within view of the club.  He kept hearing bangs which could be multiple gun shots.

The text thread search began, who was out and where they safe. After waking the next morning by 10AM he had to return home to Orlando. After a quick plane flight be got to the gay and lesbian center for a press conference held there. The Center is not a huge space. A huge bouncer was a the door directing people. The windows had fogged up. You had to carve your way through all the reporters and cameras that were packed into the room. The space was full to capacity. Equality Florida announced at the press conference that they wanted to do a vigil at Lake Eola.

Plans began for the vigil began right away. The city of Orlando was concerned about security. Could a copycat shooter show up at the vigil? The city ultimately decided the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts would be a safer option and easier for police to defend. Police snipers were on the roof of the Methodist Church and City hall just in case anything went down. Joe was the MC for the vigil. The vigil became one of the most important visual moments of the Orlando community response to Pulse and it came together in 6 hours.

After Pulse: Equality Florida

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Hannah Willard was the Public Policy Director, for Equality Florida. At the one year mark after the Pulse massacre, she released the following statement…

“Yesterday it was our time to march – and now it’s time to turn this March into a Movement. We must ensure the lasting memorial of the Pulse massacre is the real change of uprooting anti-LGBTQ hatred, discrimination, and violence in our culture.
As news broke of the Pulse massacre that claimed the lives of 49 people, mostly LGBTQ and Latinx young people, our shock and disbelief turned to grief and anger. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed people from around the world reached out to ask how they could help. Our answer was clear and has remained consistent: Honor Them With Action.
It’s not enough to mourn those taken from us. It’s not enough to celebrate our collective resilience. We cannot allow the Pulse massacre to be yet another national tragedy. This must be a national turning point that spurs us to new action.
At a moment when some sought to meet fear with fear and hate with hate, we saw a community come together, united in a commitment to challenge bigotry and hatred, not nourish it. A deep resilience emerged from survivors, victims’ loved ones, Orlando residents, elected leaders, LGBTQ people and our allies around the world. People held vigils and fundraisers to directly aid the families of those killed and the survivors and committed to combating hatred of all kinds.
As we think about all the ways in which our world is different one year later, I challenge you to join me in uprooting and challenging hatred of all kinds, and to take action each and every day to make the world different, better, and safer for all of us. We need you to step up and speak out against all forms of violence, be they mass shootings, genocide abroad, everyday gun violence, vandalism at houses of worship, and yes, even hateful words spoken from a pulpit, a pew, or over the dinner table.
The love and support from around the world has buoyed the Orlando LGBTQ community over the last year. Thank you for standing with us to do the work of fully addressing and combating hatred wherever it exists.”

After Pulse: Chevalier Lovett

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Chevalier Lovett didn’t go to Pulse often but the club meant the world to him. He would celebrate two events each year at the club, one was his birthday and the other was a celebration of identity. On June 11, the day before the shooting, friends were insisting he go out since he hadn’t yet celebrated his birthday, he decided they should go to Pulse. Everyone was on board. He changed his mind, later that night, and texted everyone that he was going to stay home. He suggested that they should go to City Walk instead.

Chevalier turns off his phone when he goes to bed. He woke up at 8AM to 101 text messages and about 72 voice mails. One message said, “I hope you are safe, turn on your TV.” He doesn’t own a TV, so he checked the news on his phone. People he hadn’t heard from for a while were texting and since his phone was off there was more anxiety to the messages.

He started searching his group texts to see which of his friends might have gone to Pulse. They were all a City Walk when the shooting happened at Pulse. On Sunday, there were so many phone calls and comforting. The names of the 49 victims came out Sunday and he knew five friends who were on the list. He went to the vigil, where multiple news outlets interviewed him. Of the seven or so interviews NPR stood out as the most genuine and heart felt.

in 2004 Hurricane Charlie hit. In a time of disaster that is when you see a community come together. The way the community came together after Pulse eclipsed that. Pulse changed his life. It is everyone’s history.