On October 15, I went on the Arena Stage website, logged in to buy two tickets to see their highly praised production of Damn Yankees. Because we were about to leave town for two weeks, I ordered tickets for the Saturday November 8 matinee. The final performance was scheduled for November 9.

I selected two seats (there were limited choices) and pushed the button to pay my money.

I thought no more about it until yesterday, the morning of the performance. My first thought was whether I had them leave the tickets at the box office, or whether they had sent them to me. My second thought was that I didn’t remember getting anything from them, including a confirmation of my purchase.

I looked at my Quicken account and saw I had recorded the purchase the day I bought the tickets, but there was no evidence of purchase on my Arena Theatre account, and there was no record on my Master Card account. I spoke to a very nice young lady at the box office who looked everywhere she could and found me nowhere. She could get us standing room tickets only, and I declined.

My fault.

So instead, we took a walk around the neighborhood.

We had a nice dinner with friends last night, and the conversation at one point turned to the Supreme Court’s decision to let the Trump administration require passports to state the gender assigned to the holder at birth.

Now there are many topics I am not expert in, and gender identification is one of them. I knew a few trans people of my generation and a few of the generation of my daughters. But it seems that so many of our friends’ grandchildren have gender issues. Assuming that there have not been any significant changes in human structure over the past decade, I can only assume that this represents some new found freedom. And who can argue against a new found freedom?

I understand there are issues. Although findings seem to feel that most people who change gender identity are happy with their new gender, clearly there are some who find life more difficult. This can be with family relationships, sexual relationships, psychological problems in general, practical problems, athletic endeavors. But none of this relates to passports.

To the extent that a passport serves as a piece of identification, you would think you would want the listed gender, like the displayed picture, to show the holder’s present status. What possible utility, on the other hand, does the gender at birth show? All it does is enable someone looking at the passport to recognize the holder as trans, for whatever mischief that could lead to. Just think: someone is identified as male at birth, becomes female after undergoing surgery and hormone treatment, definitely looks female, has a female name, and has to carry a passport that says male. What can possibly be a good reason?

The good reason is that a major goal of the administration is to sow chaos, to keep us off balance, and yes, to destroy our individual identities.

Finally, we’ll over a year ago, I said that Elon Musk’s major aim was to be the world’s first trillionaire. And look at him now!