An actor finds health and you paint the Mona Lisa
Also some items that aren't nearly so cheerful
This newsletter is free. I think Substack would rather I charge you money, which is understandable and not what I wish to do. But it does take time and effort to provide the world with the newsletter and the Depresh Mode podcast.
If this enterprise can’t raise enough money from listeners/readers, I swear to God, I’ll turn this show around. Don’t think I won’t, mister. If you’ve already donated, thank you. If not, go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows. And thank you.
Patrick Page on the Pod
I wasn’t in awe of the esteemed Broadway and screen actor Patrick Page when I interviewed him for this week’s edition of Depresh Mode, but not being in awe of him took a little doing, I must admit.
For one thing, his dang voice. It’s incredibly deep and rich, the kind of voice you’d want to hear playing something like King Lear, which he did recently on stage in Washington, D.C. Patrick has used the voice (and the rest of his acting toolbox) to play a lot of baddies over the years on stage, including The Grinch, Scar in The Lion King, and Iago in Othello and on screen like in the recent series Schmigadoon.
I could also be intimidated because I went to the same college that Patrick Page did, Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He graduated two years before I ever showed up but he was still talked about constantly as being A Great Actor. Dude played King Lear when he was a college senior and, I’m told, he absolutely slayed. As a semi-former actor myself, I could be intimidated by Patrick’s long and incredibly impressive resume.
But I wasn’t intimidated because I’ve interviewed a lot of people with depression before and I know how that disorder, that pathology, operates. Patrick Page talks in the interview about his first experiences with depression dating back to age five and how it took him a long time to figure out what was going on, not getting diagnosed until he was 27 years old.
We also talk about the myth of the artist and medication. Patrick did his best to avoid taking antidepressants because he figured they would make it much more difficult to access the range of emotions he needed to be an actor. Finally, he was assured by a castmate (after a breakdown at a Hamlet rehearsal) that this wasn’t the case and he found that being on medication actually made his acting better. He was able to get to the emotions in a more healthy way and it helped him do better at his work.
I’m not intimidated by Patrick’s voice but I am still a bit awestruck. Like here:
The mental health toll of, well, the planet these days
The story I saw from NPR was specifically about the Maui fires
But the scale of the inner damage can be seen in the 5-year-old girl that Maui's chief mental health administrator John Oliver saw the other day. The girl came with her mother into the Lahaina community health clinic, next to the main burn zone, clutching a green and purple plushy stuffed animal. She seemed withdrawn and afraid.
"I got down to her level and I asked her name and how she was doing, asked about her stuffed animal. And she just offered up that 'I'm sad.' And I said 'I'm so sorry, why are you sad?' And she said 'I'm sad because I saw a lot of dead bodies.'"
I think there are many stories to be told about the rapidly accelerating climate crisis that we’re all dealing with. There’s a climate story, of course. There’s a political story about what we are and are not doing to address the situation. And the story I’m beginning to follow more and more closely is the mental health story. Because we’re all coming out of the frying pan of covid, and all the attendant trauma that we haven’t even started to process, and we’re landing in the fire of fire.
The mental health toll of climate change is huge already and it’s getting huger. There’s trauma in dealing with the climate events and there’s trauma in knowing that it’s just getting started and there’s no end in sight.
Suicide rates are at an all-time high
Here’s a good breakdown of the whole statistical analysis by Kaiser Family Foundation.
We saw a small dip in the rates during the covid years, which surprised a lot of people. Didn’t surprise me. You can look at historical precedents of other pandemics and events like world wars and see that a kind of survivor mentality kicks in during times of crisis. It’s after the major threat has passed that we normally see suicide rates climb and that’s happening again here.
Clone-a-Lisa
It’s an online game where you try to make something as closely resembling the Mona Lisa as possible. Freehand. Using some very clunky MS Paint-like tools. I got up to 64.7%, which is so dramatically overstating the similarity of what I made to the real thing. I created a mess. But it feels good to be told that I mostly made the Mona Lisa in the space of a minute, despite this being a LIE.