Inverness resident Dan Morse is a convivial fellow and a good real estate agent. Even more important, he is a regular advertiser in The Light, but that provided him no protection a couple of weeks ago when he came into the newsroom at deadline and asked me to publish photos for two unrelated events at the Dance Palace.
One was a staged reading of Liz Strata, an updated version of Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy Lysistrata. Paki Wright of Inverness park wrote the satire with encouragement from a $3,000 Marin Arts Council grant. Morse was part of the cast.
The second event was a tango party featuring Argentinean dancers Ana and Nazareno. Argentinean cuisine was served, and guests got a chance to try their own moves on the dance floor.
Morse, as often happens when people bring in publicity for events, urged me to personally attend the shows. They would be great fun, he assured me.
Although his invitation was polite and hospitable, I took the opportunity to vent some of the frustrations that go with being a newspaper editor. I hoped that because he is a friend he’d understand.
"Do you realize," I asked him, "that whenever people drop off publicity for an event, they invariably try to convince me to show up myself?
"It’s the same way with nonprofit organizations, which fill The Light’s mailbox with hundreds of news releases every week. For some bizarre reason, groups that put me on their mailing lists to get publicity also put me on their mailing lists for solicitations. Day after day, I receive heart-rending letters about the deplorable state of plumbing in Bangladesh, the un-spayed cats that are multiplying like crazy, the need to help the Sierra Club make life miserable for the working poor, and the importance of maintaining the Second Amendment so we can shoot any of the poor who happen to resent their misery.
And then there are my writer friends. "You’re another writer," they usually start out, "so I thought you’d like to take a look at my latest manuscript." Some of the manuscripts are indeed very good, but finding time to read them is almost impossible. For two years, I’ve been trying to finish Where the Hell is Pago Pago? A Polynesian Adventure by John Doss of Bolinas. It’s a good story, but whenever I have an hour or two to spare, I usually spend it on my own book-in-progress.
All this leaves me constantly feeling slightly guilty. I don’t attend enough of my friends’ concerts and dramas. I don’t read enough of my friends’ books. And I’m not even making much progress on my own book, given all the distractions.
This week, the distractions finally caught up with me. Several weeks ago, I noticed pain below one molar, so my dentist X-rayed it and discovered that after 57 years of chomping, I’d developed two vertical cracks in the tooth.
He prescribed penicillin and Vicodin and then went on a month’s vacation. The penicillin did knock back an infection under the tooth, but last weekend it returned with a vengeance. Sunday and Monday nights I couldn’t sleep without doping myself with painkillers. My jaw swelled until I looked like a cartoon character that should have a bandana wrapped around his head.
By Tuesday, I’d had enough. The staff at my own dentist’s office called around until they came up with an oral surgeon, Dr. John Johnson, on Las Gallinas Avenue, and in the late afternoon, he was able to extract the tooth with a minimum of fuss.
Those of you who have had teeth pulled probably realize it’s not particularly painful. The dentist generally swabs your gums with a topical painkiller so needles won’t hurt during several injections of anesthetics. Then the tooth is split and pulled out in sections. The whole ordeal takes two or three minutes. Easy as pie.
The one fascinating part of all this is that dentists are now switching to topical painkillers that taste like piña coladas. They taste so good, in fact, they could easily become addictive. If you begin seeing a bunch of folks running around without any teeth, you’ll know why.