 Okay, without further ado, this is the story of someone like you or like... This is the story of a former creative, so you keep on your pants. There's no... Some salient features of post-industrial capitalism. And it operates in our society today. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you hot off the presses, the Adventures of Gogo Girl, episode 29, Crisis Intervention. We start, ladies and gentlemen, face of a donkey. He's exposing the worn out teeth, his teeth. Why is he so rousely, shall we? Because this is the donkey that is raising his upper lip in the matter pictured here and issuing out, ladies and gentlemen, is that spectacular sound which only will come back to that sound and to this moment a little bit later because patient assigned to room 222 is a mental health patient who has been waiting for placement in a mental health facility for several weeks now and receiving no treatment, no therapy, just sitting there in room 222 because there's not enough mental health facilities in the state of Vermont and there's nowhere for him to go, gentlemen. Because while Gogo, the patient in another room, the patient in room 222 took off his hospital gown, walked down the hall, down the street, stark naked yelling, they're trying to kill me, they're trying to kill me in there. I'm not kidding. This really happened. Sent to a nonviolent crisis intervention training topped by the local sheriff's department. Crisis intervention PowerPoint in which he learns about adopting the supportive stance and using the risk likelihood decision making matrix and understanding which looks a little bit like a kite, as you can see. In her role-playing exercises, Gogo Girl plays the part of a patient refusing to cooperate with emergency room staff but because she wants it to be realistic, Gogo Girl spits a large loogie at one top, takes another one in the shins, takes them to stand for Advanced Crisis Intervention Strategy. Takes a look at the landscape of distant hills and the broad and she says, at least I have this pastoral eyes on. She looks at her donkey chewing peacefully in the greenery and says, at least I can gaze upon this pure. Learn to regain my inner, then she realizes that Nikolai the donkey is standing in the middle of her guarded parrot. Every last one and is now started on a row of once beautiful cabbages. I won't describe what happens after that in very much detail. I think it's just important to get on with the story. When she gets inside, Gogo Girl pours herself a glass of whiskey and sits at the kitchen table to read the mail. On top of the pile is the alumni magazine which Gogo Girls College faithfully sends every few months to make her feel a lot better about having racked up all that student debt. Hey, remember which Gogo Girl got those neat degrees in history. College years is that one introduction to abstract painting professor who kept touching my breast during final critiques, but look all these years later and I'm finally done paying for it. Well, now starring in a new opera in San Fran, when you pursue your dreams in a busy urban metropolis like I don't know, New York City. Of course, when you choose to live countryside-like and when you practice an unconventional rattle, it's just harder to get noticed and win prizes and have fancy careers or get your book public. And then she turns the page and there's a whole article about comic book artist alumni Allison Bechdel who also lives in Cal, Vermont. All about doing since she won her MacArthur genius award and giving her son to the next piece of mail. But before she can open the envelope, the phone rings from Save the Children asking Gogo Girl whether or not she cares about starving children around the globe. Gogo Girl says, doctors without borders and partners and health and I really don't have money in my budget right now. What do you mean you don't have room in your budget? The voice on the other end of the phone says, what do you do for a living? Nurse, you're a nurse, says the voice. Nurses make Gogo Girl, but I work part-time and well, I also, well, I support some creative habits with creative habits. The voice on the phone says, what good are those for the rest of the world? Well, I make puppet shows. Good causes. You're a nurse. You could volunteer where there's an Ebola outbreak or work on an immunization initiative somewhere like Angola. Don't be one of those people who just thinks about doing the right thing. It takes a village. Be the change you want to see. I'm sorry to say, but instead, petulently be the change I want to see. I'm tired. She hangs up the phone, ladies and gentlemen. And here we see her pouring herself another glass of whiskey. She keeps envisioning thousands of un-immunized children in it. What the hell? Let's make it a double. Administration, income will be upon retirement. Prints so small. Those are really two zeros. Where are those reading glasses? And when she finally finds a decimal point and if she keeps earning at her current pace and retires at age 65, she will indeed receive $802.17 a month to live on. It's not too bad. Could be way worse. Go-go girl says to herself, it's a good thing I'm still with the glasses. Ah, it's a woman. I'm a torment with no life savings, a questionable art-making hobby, an unruly donkey, and a monthly retirement income of $802.17. Oh, shit-oh, shit-oh, shit-oh, shit-oh. But that night, she falls asleep, ladies and gentlemen, and has a very peculiar dream in her dream. She's back in crisis intervention class, but somehow the class is, and she is being forced to revisit all of her life choices using the risk likelihood decision-making matrix. Oh, but she's not sure where to situate each life choice on the continuum. Time and the pencil tip keeps breaking, and the workbook is filled with pages and pages of to-do lists, but the items on the list are all strangely abstract things like make something of yourself and don't waste your life. But go-go girl can't decide whether or not she can scratch any of those things off the list. And the pencil tip. Oh, picture here, you can't quite see it. The pencil tip keeps on breaking. Finally go-go-go-girl throws down the pencil in disgust. Wait a minute, she shouts, don't you know this entire country is in crisis? She grabs a piece of chalk and starts writing furiously on the blackboard, excruciating Supreme Court nomination hearings, the dismantling of the EPA, the robber baron lying misogynist criminal in the White House. Sit down, the instructor shout at her, but she has already gathered her fellow nurses out on the hospital lawn and is teaching them how to sew their nursing scrubs into verbal escalation kites. Stop it, the instructors scream, but the nurses continue taking off their clothes and start chanting. We are starts and waving them around like flags and the kites pull them up into the vast tattered, cloud-tattered sky and the wind picks up. But then the air is torn apart with a sound unlike any other, a deep-fitting sound. Go-go-girl wakes with a start sweating in her bed, but the sound continues, furation. The sound seems to be coming, eruption of all earth. But now, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the supernatural part of our story because begins to change. The sound expands somehow. It is the sound of fierce engagement and boundless energy. The sound, it is the sound of go-go-girls, dear darling to her at the crack of darling to her to start another day.