Theatre de la Jeune Lune, one of Minneapolis’ most respected regional theater companies, has announced that it’s shutting down and selling its Warehouse District building to pay off creditors. It’s a significant blow to the area arts scene. Jeune Lune had a reputation for producing bold, unconventional works that challenged audiences without intimidating them. I’m now kicking myself for not patronizing it more frequently. I really must make more of an effort to check out the smaller theaters around here that aren’t named “Guthrie”.

Summer has finally arrived in Minneapolis. I’m looking out my window at a cloudless evening sky, all pale blues and soft golds. A friend of mine is throwing a solstice party tomorrow and I’m trying to figure out how to gently tell my nurse that she can wait in the van once the naked dancing around the bonfire begins.

And if you’re looking for something to cleanse your palate after visiting my scruffy corner of the Web, check out The Big Picture. It features gorgeous photography based on the news of the day.

Kids, if you want an interesting career that will make you the life of any dinner party, get an advanced degree in bioethics. Everyone will want your opinion on news stories like the one about a Canadian physician who is refusing to treat an 84-year-old man in the intensive care unit. The physician is defying a court order to continue treating the man, claiming that any intervention would constitute a breach of his oath to do no harm.

The tension between courts and physicians in end-of-life decisions is something I find interesting. We rely on physicians’ expertise and judgment when deciding on courses of treatment. But we give a court of law the ability to substitute its judgment when the physician makes a decision contrary to the family’s wishes, especially when that decision might lead to the patient’s death. We’re comfortable when physicians take measures to prolong life, but everyone lawyers up when the physician and family disagree about the futility of treatment. It begs the question of how much deference we are really willing to give physicians.

Earlier today, one of my nurses asked me if I had instructions in my living will regarding life-saving measures. I told him that that there were no specific instructions and that I’d appreciate any efforts to revive me. He paused and then asked me, “Can I have your iPod if something happens to you?”

He knows something; I can tell. After years of suffering under my petty tyranny, my nurses are planning their long-overdue uprising. I’m sleeping with one eye open from now on.

This quote from a recent JK Rowling commencement speech at Harvard is lovely:
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
The world would probably be a better place if we tended the gardens of our imaginations a little more frequently. But as Rowling said, our capacity to imagine is also one of our saving graces. Our imaginations give us glimpses into the foggy realm of the possible, even while our more rational selves fold their arms and shake their heads disapprovingly.