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Elizabeth Zelvin
Members of Alcoholics Anonymous have a special name for New Year’s Eve. They call it Amateur Night. It’s the night when everybody else goes out and tries to behave like genuine drunks. Being amateurs, of course they fall short. They drink ghastly punch with sweet juices and chemical sodas and who knows what ill-conceived combination of hard liquor, cheap champagne, and cloying liqueurs thrown in. They throw up and pass out. No self-respecting alcoholic who values his or her sobriety would be caught dead out on Amateur Night. Who needs New Year’s Eve? As my protagonist Bruce says in Death Will Get You Sober, it’s a holiday with no traditions whatsoever, apart from getting blitzed and counting backwards from twelve. Glad to let everybody else make fools of themselves, they may stay home or drop in on one of the AA meeting marathons that offer round-the-clock support on major holidays to those who have chosen living over drinking.
Most working people get the holidays off, including Christmas and New Year’s. A friend of ours counted it as the busiest time of his working year. Was he a caterer? A salesman in a toy store? Nope. He was a blood tech in the emergency room of a hospital on Long Island. Around midnight, when his shift began, on Christmas Eve and again on New Year’s Eve, they would start wheeling in the bodies. An article that appeared on Automotive.com a few days before last New Year’s Eve says alcohol-related traffic deaths jump on New Year’s Eve and supports it with statistics.
Cars are not a big issue in Manhattan, where I live. But the noise on the streets long past midnight and the increased number of passengers being sick on the subway make New Year’s Eve a good time to stay home. Since the kids, now long grown up and moved out, started making their own plans for the evening, we’ve usually made ourselves an elegant dinner to eat by candlelight. Manhattan! you may say. Don’t you ever go to Times Square to watch the ball drop? Nope. Never. My son went once, I think it was his first year in college. Wisely, he neither asked my permission nor told me he’d gone till New Year’s Day. With typical city-kid aplomb, he reported: “It was one-third tourists, one-third college kids, and one-third muggers—and even the muggers were friendly.”
One reason to go out on New Year’s Eve in the past was that it was a rare opportunity to dress up, whether for a party or dinner in a fancy restaurant, in our increasingly dress-down culture. Since I became a mystery writer, I no longer need that excuse. The invitations to Mystery Writers of America’s annual holiday party and to the Edgars awards banquet in the spring, MWA’s answer to the Oscars, usually stipulate that we should “dress to kill.” And nobody even gets hurt.
So I’ve already attended my dress-up event for the season, and a few nights from now my husband and I will finish our delicious home-cooked meal, get into our jammies, and may or may not turn on the TV. And at midnight when the ball drops and all the frostbitten tourists (and college kids and muggers) sing Auld Lang Syne, we will probably be fast asleep.
Showing posts with label Alcoholics Anonymous. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alcoholics Anonymous. Show all posts
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Bill W. and Dr. Bob
Elizabeth Zelvin
I saw a terrific play the other day, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is tricky material for a general audience, as I know, since my own first mystery has a recovering alcoholic protagonist. In the course of selling it, I found the theme of alcoholism acted as a kind of litmus test for agents and editors who read it. And I’m still waiting with some apprehension to see how mystery lovers receive it when it comes out next year. So I was heartened by the enthusiastic reception the play got from a mixed audience. The New York Times called it “an insightful new play,” and the New Yorker said it “paints an endearing portrait of friendship and human weakness with warm humor.” I know the audience was mixed because when Robert Krakovski as Bill Wilson spoke the opening line, “My name is Bill, and I’m an alcoholic,” about half the audience chorused, “Hi, Bill,” immediately getting it that we were in an AA meeting.
For those who don’t know the story, Bill Wilson was a stockbroker with a big ego and a bigger alcohol problem whose last-ditch attempt to stop drinking before it killed him led to a meeting with Bob Smith, a surgeon and equally hopeless drunk, in Akron, Ohio in 1935. After having tried everything, including religion, the two men found that talking to another alcoholic—someone who’d been there too—made it possible to stay sober for just one day, and then another and another.
They made every mistake in the book, taking drunks into their homes, lending them money, and overselling their method instead of listening, while their long-suffering wives wondered if the remedy didn’t leave them as lonely and overburdened as the alcoholism had. But it worked. Two men in Akron in 1935 have become a fellowship of more than two million worldwide.
What was then deeply stigmatized as an incurable moral weakness has become understood as a chronic but treatable disease. The success of AA has led not only to additional self-help programs for those suffering from a variety of addictive disorders and those who love them but also to effective professional treatment: counseling, therapy, and addiction medicine.
It’s a small world. I know of playwright Janet Surrey as a fellow addiction professional and feminist psychologist. (Her coauthor and husband, Stephen Bergman, is a highly regarded novelist and playwright under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) And I once shook Lois Wilson’s hand, when she was a frail but still feisty little old lady of 93. Dr. Bob, the older of the two men, went to medical school in 1898, to give an idea of the time span involved. I could have chosen a lot less risky theme for my mysteries, but I write about recovery from alcoholism because it’s a life-changing experience. I have seen this transformation many times, and it is always inspiring—awesome in the true sense of the word. At some point in the play, Bill and Dr. Bob are accused of calling everything a miracle. I don’t blame them. I’d say recovery is a miracle every time.
I saw a terrific play the other day, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is tricky material for a general audience, as I know, since my own first mystery has a recovering alcoholic protagonist. In the course of selling it, I found the theme of alcoholism acted as a kind of litmus test for agents and editors who read it. And I’m still waiting with some apprehension to see how mystery lovers receive it when it comes out next year. So I was heartened by the enthusiastic reception the play got from a mixed audience. The New York Times called it “an insightful new play,” and the New Yorker said it “paints an endearing portrait of friendship and human weakness with warm humor.” I know the audience was mixed because when Robert Krakovski as Bill Wilson spoke the opening line, “My name is Bill, and I’m an alcoholic,” about half the audience chorused, “Hi, Bill,” immediately getting it that we were in an AA meeting.
For those who don’t know the story, Bill Wilson was a stockbroker with a big ego and a bigger alcohol problem whose last-ditch attempt to stop drinking before it killed him led to a meeting with Bob Smith, a surgeon and equally hopeless drunk, in Akron, Ohio in 1935. After having tried everything, including religion, the two men found that talking to another alcoholic—someone who’d been there too—made it possible to stay sober for just one day, and then another and another.
They made every mistake in the book, taking drunks into their homes, lending them money, and overselling their method instead of listening, while their long-suffering wives wondered if the remedy didn’t leave them as lonely and overburdened as the alcoholism had. But it worked. Two men in Akron in 1935 have become a fellowship of more than two million worldwide.
What was then deeply stigmatized as an incurable moral weakness has become understood as a chronic but treatable disease. The success of AA has led not only to additional self-help programs for those suffering from a variety of addictive disorders and those who love them but also to effective professional treatment: counseling, therapy, and addiction medicine.
It’s a small world. I know of playwright Janet Surrey as a fellow addiction professional and feminist psychologist. (Her coauthor and husband, Stephen Bergman, is a highly regarded novelist and playwright under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) And I once shook Lois Wilson’s hand, when she was a frail but still feisty little old lady of 93. Dr. Bob, the older of the two men, went to medical school in 1898, to give an idea of the time span involved. I could have chosen a lot less risky theme for my mysteries, but I write about recovery from alcoholism because it’s a life-changing experience. I have seen this transformation many times, and it is always inspiring—awesome in the true sense of the word. At some point in the play, Bill and Dr. Bob are accused of calling everything a miracle. I don’t blame them. I’d say recovery is a miracle every time.
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