'Remembrance' playwright draws on mother's 'frightening' battle with Alzheimer's
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Recalling the duty of care

The play “Remembrance” just closed its off-B’way run.

Topic? Being a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. Evaluation: it’s challenging. As someone who has firsthand experience with this situation, I question my willingness to endure the hardship again.

To help others facing it.

Playwright Patricia Goodson, who lived with her mother, is an educated lady. Polished credentials. She says: “Mom could not be alone. She would follow me around. Then get lost. We’d search everywhere and finally find her. It was scary.

“Frightening things began about 12 years before the end. My mother, for 25 years, was an educated lady with A-1 credentials. The first issue was memory. In the beginning a caregiver would drop her off at home in a cab. She’d start screaming. Throw keys in a box. Say she had no money.

“One day they lost her. Bills lay tucked under the front door. To her it all looked unfamiliar and she didn’t know where she was. When we finally got her to her room it was unfamiliar to her. She wouldn’t let me in.

“We took her to the hospital. She wouldn’t let me in the room and she failed their test. We then tried a senior center. An adult care person would return her.

“She could not be alone. I had home care people. Even adult day care people. Then a babysitter. Then we tried professional adult sitters care people. Then I went to my mom’s volunteer center. The big argument was bedtime. I would wash her. She didn’t even know how to get out of the tub. Me walking into her bedroom? She’d see me and freeze. Then scream all night long. They call that sundowning. I would put her to bed. She’d start talking to the person in the mirror.

“I went to my priest. I sought grief counselors. I had to find some way to honor my loved one. My mother! Many of us caregivers are going through similar experiences.

“What happens is your brain just goes somewhere else. And it mostly happens to women.”


In plane clothes

Meanwhile, life in whatever form continues on. Martha’s Vineyard did a film festival. Model/actress Carol Alt arrived on Cape Air from JFK. However, her luggage chose to go to Saranac Lake. Sports Illustrated fans recognized her and helped her into town and then to the Harbor View Hotel’s Bettini’s restaurant in time for a dinner.

Being I’m an equal opportunity writer, I knew you’d want to know this.


Earn $tyle points

Enough already with every actress hustling goo that’s good for your behind or foot or back or undersection or whichever of your parts need affection.

Jessica Simpson’s now shoving out her “White Lotus Energy.” Which whothehell knows what that is. Sunglasses start at $40. Espadrilles, $99. Cowboy boots, $379. Prince Harry — formerly of England — might bicycle over to grab a little something for his wife the cashier.


Uniform laffs for ‘Dutch’

Wait. More Page 2 — or 3 — news. Comic Denis Leary, who plays a loudmouth colonel in the Fox sitcom “Going Dutch” — which Hunter Biden probably tapes — says this Netherlands US Army base is great because it gets your laundry done, plus it allows prostitution. Whether Hegseth does the ironing, this I don’t know.


New Jersey intro: “Ladies and gentlemen, I now present to you former Sen. Menendez. He came to his job with only 20 cents in his pocket — and $12,000 in the lining. Plus his tall wife.”

Only — temporarily — in freedom, kids, only temporarily in freedom.

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