Small shows. A single vehicle and a couple of entertainers. But they were the ones who engaged the front line troops. They went to the battle, to the, places where the USO didn’t go. They saw the war as it was and helped the soldiers to their do their job. They also found themselves in adventures of their own. .
An excerpt from Chapter 15 of Robert O’Connor’s novel “Jeep Show: A Trouper at the Battle of the Bulge.”
Available from Amazon and bookshop.org.
The day has come. The hour has arrived. The troops are deployed against an insurgent stronghold. And Professor Effson has gone to the battlefield to study, to observe, to see how the residents behave in combat. One small change and with that change, her work hangs in the balance.
A preliminary visit. A warning shot at an awkward time. A suggestion that the local population might not as welcoming as they might appear. An angry research director, who had to drag a research team to the battlefield when they claimed that they could do conflict research from the safety of their laboratories. Military and scientific research. Pressure is applied and the mixture goes badly in Act 4 of “Your Results May Vary.”
Posting for Act 3
The end of the town. Don’t go down. Don’t ever go down, as the song says, if you don’t go down with me. Preparing to visit the battle. Learning to negotiate a small town only a few miles from the conflict. Two things that are not that different when the town is Kapu Varo. Alec Effson gets a dramatic lesson in Act 3 of “Your Results May Vary.”
The Dark Angel visits the battlefield.
She carries her paperwork and her description of research to be done.
How close does one ever come to death?
Can we refuse to accept it just the way we refuse a mistaken delivery?
Alec Effson has her own questions. Act 2 of “Your Results May Vary.”
The story begins.
A distance battlefield.
A recent defeat.
And a woman who needs an answer to the question “How close I have been to death?”
Professionals need professional help.
Dr. May visits his colleague Dr. X-Tra over his psycholinguistic crisis that is driven by one, very specific word.
Dr. X-Tra, in his turn, has many ways of thinking about this issue.
A third scene from the practice of a San Franciscan Black Psychiatrist.
Warning: This episode contains language that some may find offensive.
Produced by San Francisco Recovery Theatre and HWMS Audio Theatre
For any mental heal professional, one patient follows another.
When the walls are thin enough, (as they often were for Black doctors in the 1960s, one patient can hear the session can hear the prior session.
So now our psych faces a patient who objects to the advice given in the an earlier patient. He has “do no harm,” try to provide a little help to a patient in need, and make sense of his own thoughts at this time.
A second scene from the practice of a San Franciscan Black Psychiatrist.
San Francisco
Once the Harlem of the West.
Once a city with a vibrant and exciting Black culture.
It then faces the Civil Rights movement.
The Black Power Movement.
And a pair of Black Psychiatrists trying to make sense of of this thing called racism