Word: stroke
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Where Do We Go from Here? There's no question that the crisis has gone so deep that it cannot be halted by one stroke. Banks and other financial companies around the globe are struggling to pull themselves out of this mess. Rebuilding will take time, vast amounts of money and constant attention. Sooner or later, the hundreds of billions (or trillions) of dollars that the Fed and other central bankers are throwing into the markets will stabilize things. Sooner or later, housing prices will stop falling because no financial trend continues forever...
...fight with the London producers of his 2002 trilogy Damsels in Distress. (He wanted the plays to be staged in repertory, but after mixed reviews, the producers dropped most performances of the two weaker shows.) Then, in February 2006, Ayckbourn's machine-like productivity was interrupted by a serious stroke. He was back to directing within several months, but in June 2007 he announced that he would step down as artistic director of his Scarborough theater at the end of this year, to concentrate on writing and directing his own work...
Ayckbourn, 69, is explaining this in the sunny and spacious Scarborough house (actually three Georgian townhouses that he connected) where he lives with his second wife, former actress Heather Stoney. The effects of his stroke are visible. He walks unsteadily, and his left hand is fairly useless, reducing his two-finger typing method to just one. Yet his speech and mental acuity are undiminished. ("My head's working fine," he says - though "I still have a problem with a group of people, if they're all talking at once.") He laughs frequently, dives into anecdotes with an actor's relish...
...some trepidation about returning to writing. But once he plunged in (Life and Beth is his first post-stroke work), he found it came as easily as before. Ayckbourn writes quickly, typically barreling through a complete draft in 10 days. "My attitude with plays is they're like pictures, in a sense," he says. "You have to write them in the frame. If you stop in the middle of a picture, I imagine, leave it for several weeks and start again, you're going to get a lopsided composition. Some of my best writing comes from serendipity. [Unexpected] things drop...
Although Greer said that an increase in viscosity could lead to a stroke, he said that the correlation between the beverage and heart problems suggested by the study is rather tenuous without further research...