After Andie, Katie and I finished dinner at Angus McIndoe, the ladies shared a dessert, a decadent chocolate-raspberry concoction. Then we walked over to Theater 5 (311 W. 43rd St.) for NEUROfest, four one-act plays centered around a neurological disorder, which I thought was a clever idea.
We wanted to be there to show our support because our friend Kelly wrote one of the plays, Vestibular. The neurological condition she referenced was Ménière’s disease, characterized by a constant ringing in the ears and loss of balance from frequent dizziness. Her characters, a classically trained dancer and his nurse, converse about independence and balance, related both to the disease and, by extension, to their lives in general. It was well done and probably had the best acting and best written dialogue.
The other plays were a one-man show starring a creepy bearded guy and his trunkful of hand puppets, a woman who could taste colors and moan the letter “O” for seven-second stretches, and one that had something to do with dementia and was appropriately hard to follow.
An excellent touch was that afterwards, a panel convened on stage, comprised of a moderator, Kelly, a doctor familiar with aural neurology and a woman with Ménière’s. It was an informative discussion on a disease I didn’t know existed. It’s often misdiagnosed because of its rarity, and it most often affects the left ear of women in their 30s or 40s; no one knows why. It was flabbergasting to hear what she goes through—taking Antivert (meclizine) to combat vertigo, never again playing the oboe (which used to be her passion), avoiding salt and stress, and the worst, living with constant tinnitus. I was suddenly hyperaware of my sense of hearing and newly thankful that my auditory nerves are still helping me keep upright when I should be.