Douglas Whaley

    I’ve been acting on stage throughout my life, most particularly doing live theater steadily since I retired from full time law teaching in 2006.   The parts have ranged from huge (Lear in “King Lear”) to small (Mysterious Man in “Into the Woods”), plus I’ve directed a number of shows at five different theater companies here in Columbus.    As Lear, after the show, with family   However, with the exception that is the chief subject of this blog post, I believe my acting days are now over.   As I settle into my late 70s it’s become clear that good parts for a man my age are scarce, and now is the right time to rest on my slender laurels, relax, and watch others display their terrific talents.   But I’m going out having played one of the two wonderful parts in a terrific new Zoom play being produced by Evolution Theatre Company.   It is entitled “Dr. Smarty and the New Normal,” written by Andy Reynolds and directed by my husband, David Allen Vargo—to be made available to the world

        In my life I’ve usually been properly labeled as an optimist but during 2020 I’ve flipped into a pessimism so dark that it’s been hard to find any light in the world.   The coming presidential election was going to pit Donald John Trump against whoever the Democrats chose, and when my favorite candidates dropped out, one by one, only Joe Biden was left standing.   That didn’t look good for defeating Trump, and my pessimism turned darker.   Then in mid-March I flew to Las Vegas to visit my sister and while I was there the pandemic suddenly changed all our lives dramatically and for the worse.   My flight to Vegas was routine, but the flight home was filled with paranoid people eyeing each other suspiciously and hoping no one would cough or sneeze.   It happened that fast.    So we all cancelled our plans and hunkered down.   We, the good citizens, bought masks and learned to observe social distances from each other.   Both my husband David and I are in high risk categories,

                                    I have always been an optimist, and sometimes had to deal with ribbing about this.   But 2020 has stripped away that sunny view of the world, and Donald Trump (sigh), more than the virus, is the reason why.        I’ve known for some time, of course,   that the man is a charlatan, cheating his way to the top, being so bad at running businesses that they always ended up in bankruptcy, succeeding only because his father’s death dumped a fortune into his hands just as he became a TV sensation for a weekly show demonstrating his cruelty.   When Trump made business deals he subsequently told the other side that he would only pay a portion of what he had contracted to pay—take it or leave it—and that trying to sue him would only cost more than accepting his current offer and writing off the rest.   Great way to do business.   When Trump had a best seller with “The Art of the Deal” it subsequently turned out that he hadn’t actually written any of it;

My sister lives in Las Vegas so I decided to visit her for spring break between the two courses I was teaching this year at the Ohio State Moritz College of Law.   My husband David could not go with me, as he did two years previously, because he was in a play about to open at CATCO [“Moonlight and Magnolias”—the plot has to do with the creation of the screenplay for the movie “Gone With the Wind”] and it would have its first performance just as I was returning from Vegas.   Covid-19 was a problem, but a small problem on March 5th when I left for Las Vegas, but once there all of a sudden it exploded into the pandemic that all of us are still dealing with (sometimes known as the “collapse of civilization”).   I was staying at The Mirage Hotel and Casino, and sitting at the gambling tables, routinely handling chips hundreds of others had touched seemed like a bad idea, so I abandoned casino gambling (which I’ve loved since the 1970s).   The visit with my sister and her husband wen