‘Are we just taking really great care of him and getting him in tip-top physical shape so he can get full-blown dementia, where he doesn’t recognize me or the dog?’ Jo Giese poses this question to the doctor of her ailing husband, a patient with no hope for recovery from a disease causing severe mental decline. This is among many agonizing issues raised in ‘A Caregiver’s Diary,’ a 30-minute documentary Giese created to air on National Public Radio the weekend of July 16. Following her instincts as a journalist, Giese began recording conversations with her husband, with doctors and with friends during the last year of his life. The result is an exceedingly intimate and honest portrait of the despair and uncertainties faced by a wife caring for her dying husband. Dr. Douglas Forde was a physician who practiced in the Palisades for over 25 years, retiring in 1991. He suffered from multi-infarct dementia, a condition related to Alzheimer’s disease that causes a steady loss of memory due to small strokes. Forde required round-the-clock caregivers for the last 13 months of his life, time which he spent mostly in and out of a hospital bed in the living room of the couple’s Malibu home. He died at home last February. ‘It’s work I never wanted to do,’ Giese said during a recent interview with the Palisadian-Post in the light-filled beach home she once shared with her beloved spouse. ‘But taking care of my husband while he was dying is the most important work I’ve ever done.’ Giese first began her ‘audio diary’ with no clear purpose in mind other than to help her endure the trauma of her ongoing plight. It was only later that she realized it had the potential to help many others who are in the same situation. ‘It’s by far the most personal story I’ve ever done,’ says Giese, who is accustomed to looking inward as a writer and public radio correspondent. Her award-winning series ‘Breaking the Mold’ ran for three years on pubic radio’s ‘Marketplace,’ where ‘Life on Fire,’ her ongoing series about a family who lost everything in last year’s devastating fires, is currently airing. According to a recent ‘Newsweek’ article, Americans in 20 million households are looking after loved ones who are ill. Giese’s documentary touches upon many of the issues these men and women face. ‘The emotional and financial toll is staggering,’ says Giese, who had six caregivers rotating in and out of her home at a cost of $1,000 a week. The psychological price’giving up any semblance of privacy’was especially high, with Giese posting a ‘No Entrance, Please Knock’ sign on her bedroom door after one too many intrusions. ‘I was really running a mini-hospital,’ Giese says. ‘I couldn’t do it without them, and I couldn’t do it with them.’ Early on in the documentary, Giese makes it clear to a prospective caregiver just what their respective roles are: ‘Whoever I hire here is responsible for his care, but I’m responsible for his life.’ Throughout her husband’s illness, Giese never felt comfortable traveling a distance more than 20 minutes from home. Caregivers loomed large in Giese’s constricted household and consequently they emerge as major players in the documentary, with listeners getting to know people like Siony, a 53-year-old woman from the Philippines who had once been the beautician to a Saudi Arabian princess, and Viki, 27, a Bulgarian with a master’s degree in economics hoping to get her green card. Douglas Forde had stipulated in a medical directive form his desire never to be placed in a nursing home. ‘As a physician, he had been in those places hundreds of times,’ recalls Giese. ‘He didn’t want to do it.’ Had her husband lived and the disease progressed, Giese likely would have had no alternative. ‘The literal cost, combined with the emotional and psychological toll, is simply too great,’ she says. Giese heaps praise upon her collaborators, producer Wendy Dorr and Ira Glass, host and producer of NPR’s ‘This American Life,’ the show that will air Giese’s documentary. ‘Originally the focus was on caregiving,’ Giese remarks. ‘Ira has a genius for making things intimate and he brought the focus back to the relationship between me and my husband.’ That relationship is captured in the gentle, patient tone Giese has with her husband despite his often gruff demeanor, something brought on by the illness and medication. Giese used small white boards to remind her husband of the names of his caregivers, a sad irony given his former ability to not only remember all his patients’ names but also their telephone numbers. At its core, the piece is a heartbreaking love story on tape, one that allows the listener to bear witness’from a wife’s perspective’to the slow deterioration of a once brilliant and funny man. ‘He was the best listener ever,’ Giese fondly recalls of the man with whom she spent 17 years. ‘It was a rare privilege to live with him.’ Giese feels the process of editing the documentary has helped her grieve. ‘I’m drowning in it all over again and it’s all out in the open. ‘I have a Buddhist perspective in that I believe you can take suffering and turn it into something positive. That’s the blessing in my life. I’m able to do it again and again.’ With a laugh, she adds ‘But a little less suffering wouldn’t be so bad.’ ‘A Caregiver’s Diary’ will air on NPR’s ‘This American Life’ Friday, July 16 through Sunday, July 18. Check local radio listings or visit www.thisamericanlife.org for times.

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Special to the Palisadian-Post When literary critic Majorie Perloff published ‘Wittgenstein’s Ladder’ in 1996, the last thing she expected was to be asked to write a memoir. The book, which traces philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influence on 20th century art and literature, includes a brief reference to Perloff’s own Viennese origins. James Laughlin, the founder and publisher of New Directions entreated her to write her own story for the press. At the time, she didn’t think much of it. Yet Laughlin had planted a seed, and when he died the following year, Perloff took seriously the idea of writing a memoir. Although she found many books about the Holocaust, none told the story of fully assimilated Jews who considered themselves Austrian before all else. Overcoming the fact that she was 6 when she emigrated in 1938, and had few memories of Vienna to relate, her chronicle would focus on the role of the ‘High Culture’ her family so enjoyed and their own relationship to race and identity. Furthermore, ‘what happened to Viennese culture when it was forced to assimilate into the democracy of the United States?’ The result, ‘The Vienna Paradox,’ has just been published by New Directions. Perloff, who has lived in Pacific Palisades since 1976, arrived in America as the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz, and from that moment on she badly wanted to be an American. When she entered the Fieldston School in the Bronx at age 13, she changed her name to Marjorie after she received a letter from her ‘big sister’ at the school, Margie Leff, who also happened to be the most popular girl in her class. She was eager to have ‘a golden Manhattan name rather than the ‘foreign’ Gabriele.’ Upon arriving in New York, Perloff’s father, who had been a successful lawyer, returned to university so he could make a living in this country. He then went to work for a Wall Street firm, while his wife returned to school, eventually becoming a professor of economics at Columbia University. Yet, for all their professional success, Perloff maintains that her parents never really belonged, ‘never felt at home in this country.’ Although they lived in post-war America, their hearts and minds remained in a Vienna long since gone. Perloff did not suffer from their hesitancy, and after high school went to Oberlin College before returning to New York to finish her bachelor’s degree at Barnard. Although she was an excellent student, her parents had little concern about what she would do with her life other than that she marry well. She met her husband, Joseph Perloff, a young doctor from New Orleans, and they married when she was 23. Two daughters soon followed, and although Perloff held several odd jobs, she knew she wanted to return to graduate school to study literature. Living in Washington D.C., at the time, the only university that offered a Ph.D. in literature was, ironically enough, Catholic University, where she was a student and later an assistant professor. After a long academic career spent at the University of Maryland, USC, and Stanford, where she is now professor emerita, Perloff will return to USC in the fall as a Scholar in Residence. In her critical work, she has focused on poetics, with books on Yeats, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, and another half-dozen titles dedicated to avant garde poetry. Only in preparing to write ‘The Vienna Paradox’ did she read deeply in the Germanic literature and history, including the works of Robert Musil and Joseph Roth, that she had resisted as a youth. In addition to telling the personal story of her family, Perloff writes a great deal about the paradoxical reality of Vienna, at once ‘the great imperial city, with its opulent, gorgeous, erotic painting and design’ but also ‘Hitler’s Vienna, whose housing was so substandard that young men arriving to seek their fortune in the capital often ended up in bedbug-ridden shelters that were breeding grounds for violence and political upheaval.’ Perloff has wrestled with the city’s contradictions for decades, as recently as a couple of weeks ago when she read about the opening of the city’s Liechtenstein Museum. While she would ‘love to see it,’ she dreads traveling to such an anti-Semitic city, to a country that she believes never ‘de-Nazified.’ Trying to make sense of the complicated relationship between being Jewish and Austrian, Perloff’s cites her maternal grandfather, Richard Sch’ller, the Austrian foreign secretary under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations, who ‘was regularly begged by his superiors to ‘allow’ himself to be baptized.’ For his refusal, his wife was not allowed to attend the hundreds of state dinners he was obligated to attend. In fact, much of Perloff’s family seemed unaware of how anti-Semitism affected them, considering it ‘something that concerned other people.’ She writes in the book: ‘The Nazi takeover of Austria and immediate expulsion and torture of Jews came, as my mother notes, as a terrible’and unanticipated’shock.’ Still, her family was lucky enough to be able to escape Vienna, while many of her relatives did not. One, the painter Helene von Taussig, found refuge in a convent before being sent to die in a Polish concentration camp. Perloff also notes the hesitancy of intellectuals of the time to write about and protest Nazi policies. In the correspondence between philosophers Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, there is little mention of the atrocities being committed against Jews by Nazi assailants. As Perloff has lectured from the book, she’s been surprised how many people conceive of the Holocaust as a single, unprecedented event. ‘It was a culmination of what had been happening for 10 years, not a unique concept. The world knew about these events; if you go back, you’ll find it all over the newspapers of the time.’ Her memoir has also changed the course of her own academic work. Perloff recently gave a paper on Samuel Beckett, stressing that his early writing was all about the war, not an abstract notion of alienation. She thinks the very fact that this has not been mentioned in the critical literature reveals just how many of the French were Nazi collaborators. ‘I think we’re at the beginning of a period of discussion that will ask what really went on during this time,’ she said. Perloff completed her book over two years ago, and feels like she would have been less laudatory of America if she had conceived of the book after 9/11. Although she thinks her family was fortunate to have emigrated here, she worries about our political climate and ‘American’s apolitical nature.’ In ‘The Vienna Paradox’ a critic has found a political voice, which stresses how important it is to privilege ‘diversity and democracy’ over a ‘high-art culture, a national culture.’ Perloff’s book reminds us how difficult it is to maintain the privileges of a free society. Marjorie Perloff will read from and discuss, with UCLA Professor Michael Henry Heim, ‘The Vienna Paradox’ at the Villa Aurora next Tuesday, July 20, at 8 p.m. Contact 454-4231 for reservations. Shuttle service starts at 7:30 p.m. on Los Liones Drive.

By Brenda Himelfarb Palisadian-Post Contributor Michelle Danner likes to tell the story about the first time she walked into the Santa Monica space that is now the home of the Edgemar Center for the Arts. As she speaks, her haunting brown eyes stare straight ahead while she recalls what she considers to be a magical moment. The space, she says, called out to her. ‘My dream of opening a place to keep on creating live arts began a long time ago,’ says Danner, who is the executive artistic director of the one-year-old theatrical center. ‘So, when I walked in here so many years ago with a flashlight, in the dark, I knew this was the space. There was a certain energy. Now that we’re open, the energy that I felt so palpably when I sneaked in here in the middle of the night is still here. And others feel it, too. So many people come up to us after a reading or a show and talk about what they feel here. There’s just something about this space.’ Now, we’re not talking just any space. We’re talking a Frank Gehry space. A retail and restaurant complex that this notable architect designed in 1989, and a portion of which was occupied by the Santa Monica Art Museum until 1996. What Danner explored that dark night, in 1999, was a bare, concrete shell of a building. True, there was an electrical system and a few flimsy walls. But there were no bathrooms. No offices. No nothing. She knew that there was a lot of work to be done. But Danner, as she says, heard the sound. Saw the light. She knew this was the right place. Eventually, Danner and her partner, acting coach Larry Moss, with whom she has worked since 1990, raised over $1.5 million from donors who include former students. There was Kate Capshaw, who had studied with Moss in New York. She and her husband, Steven Spielberg, contributed $500,000 towards the project. Contributors Patricia Heaton and her husband, producer David Hunt Jones, have dressing rooms named after them. And Jason Alexander, Tom Hanks and Neil Simon also helped get the ball rolling. Today, the 6,350-sq.-ft. Edgemar Center for the Arts is buzzing with creativity. The facility houses a 99-seat main stage for productions, as well as a 65-seat second stage that hosts solo shows such as cabarets, works in development and readings. Revolving art exhibitions from established and up-and-coming artists represented by Gallery C, dress the walls of the Bradley A. Jabour Gallery, which is the center’s lobby. There are a couple of small offices and dressing rooms. And, yes, there are bathrooms. ‘It’s amazing to know that none of this existed,’ says Danner, like a proud mother. ‘We sacrificed the offices to have a main stage, because we wanted a place for the art.’ The ‘we’ Danner is referring to is her management team that includes, along with Moss, the artistic director; Brian Drillinger, creative director; Deb LaVine, director of creative affairs and Alexandra Guarnieri, managing director. ‘The artistic vision of this center, lies in their hands,’ Danner says of her cohorts. ‘We’ve always planned on having this facility all encompassing,’ says Guarnieri. ‘It’s about theater, children. It’s about outreach to all.’ To that end, the center has collaborative partners for afterschool programs, including L.A’s Best and YMCA, each of whom does their own writing, acting and costuming for their productions. And Edgemar is the home of Assemblies in Motion, a nonprofit organization of hip-hop artists who perform at socially minded assemblies for high schools, detention centers and foster homes. ‘What I’ve always wanted for this space was collaboration,’ says Danner. ‘I wanted to reach out to programs that needed a space to do their work. We know we change children’s lives. In fact, we started many of these programs before we even finished construction.’ This summer, the center is offering acting workshops for kids and teens that include improvisation and on-camera work. Those in the acting workshop will perform a showcase for parents and agents at the end of the session. At the end of the on-camera workshop each student will have an edited copy of his commercial on DVD to add to his reel. A morning workout for actors called ‘Actor’s Daily,’designed as a ‘creative jump-start,’ is also in progress with unlimited classes at a minimal monthly fee. Some of the center’s presentations have evolved from workshops that focus on emerging artists and new works. An early production, ‘The House of Yes,’ evolved out of Moss and Danner’s acting class, as did ‘Counting for Thunder,’ currently playing at Edgemar. Other offerings have included a country jazz singer and classical pianists. ‘We also have a group of volunteers in our literary department who call agents and get scripts for consideration,’ says Danner. ‘Every script is read by three different readers and, if approved, a reading of the entire script with the writer and producer is done. We usually do this on a Sunday, and the place is filled.’ On tap, too, is ‘Edgefest,’ a film festival, as well as other events devoted to the works of Neil Simon and Tennessee Williams. And there is a plan to reach out to hospitals, convalescent homes and battered women, to teach them self-esteem through performance. But building an arts center from scratch is not an easy task and fund-raising is always a challenge. And like any other nonprofit these days, the center is always looking for funds and other donations. The entire space can even be rented for special events. ‘My position as artistic director is one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done,’ says the undeterrable Danner. In the center’s lobby a monitor plays a continuous video of celebrities who support the center and attended the grand opening of the facility, including Spielberg and Capshaw, Helen Hunt, Christian Slater, Kimberly Williams, and Sally Field. At one point Spielberg remarks to the interviewer, ‘Edgemar is a tremendous new watering hole for us to go fishing in.’ These words are music to ears of Moss and Danner. ‘Edgemar is the idea of bringing 42nd Street to Main Street (the street on which the center is located),’ says Moss. ‘Are you an actor? Are you a singer? Are you a writer? There are some kids who can’t be anything but artists. That’s who they are. This place is for them.’ As teachers, Moss and Danner understand that creativity, that drive. Their job is to support and feed that innate talent. One part of Edgemar’s mission statement reads ‘to invite the community to observe, engage and interact, to add its voices to our creative discovery.’ ‘We’re starting out. It’s just the beginning,’ Danner says. ‘We encourage the community to get involved in the theater and be a part of it.’ Danner and her team have lovingly built the center. Now they want you to come. For a performance schedule, contact 392-7327, and for class information, contact 399-3666 or www.EdgemarCenter.org. The Edgemar Center for the Arts is located at 2437 Main St., Santa Monica.