CIE Views on Baby Essences

Ralph: Yes, interesting. Half of the audience were mentally ill people from the Mental Health Association. They all came in their van, and they all lined up and went in there. It was like the old days. They behaved themselves OK, it happened to be the night they all had their tickets. They had three plays on, the middle play we really enjoyed. Because it was about a man who was a chronic alcoholic who kept coming home from the club drunk every night. And his wife got so tired of this and he came home and he passed out drunk. When she called the doctor over, the two of them decided they would play a trick on this man. When he woke up they would pretend that he was dead and not there. They would talk about him as if he was dead, and try to persuade him he was a ghost. And they did that, and they were talking between each other and he was yelling at them and they didn't hear a thing. And finally he was rapping on a table to give messages to his wife. All of this to convince him so that he would stop drinking, that he had died from drinking. In the middle of this he finally got convinced he was dead because nobody would hear him. Nobody reacted to him. And his wife and the doctor planned to get married to each other. And this made him jealous. At one point, he yelled at them, "Stop it, I'm only a Baby Ghost and I don't know what to do with all this." Cathy and I got to laughing. They got the script. They finished it up with him laying down on the couch and the doctor went over and started doing heart massage, you know, and the guy came out. "Oh, you're alive now. You have been dead for two hours. This was a new type of resuscitation." The whole thing was a play act con job to persuade him to stop drinking and we just thought that this baby ghost idea was really – he could only go so far and he didn't know what to do with all this. But people were just having fun and doing nice things and being able to talk about non-upsetting subjects, and I wasn't crying about anything. I don't have anything right now to moan and groan about. Cathy knows what the troubles are so I'm not going to tell her anything new to her. The big trouble is I don't know what to do anymore. I haven't had any practice. It is all different now with adults. That is the kind of thing – do I upset her if I do this or don't do that. I just don't know. I don't have any track record.