Not Ready for 2025? You May Need One of These Fictional Therapists For Your Real-Life World

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On the morning the Trump administration took power in 2017, I awoke from a dream in which a kind female voice was telling me, in the manner of an arresting officer reading my Mirandas, “You have the right to a therapist. If you cannot afford a therapist, one will be appointed to you.” A prescription for therapy seemed like what everyone in the world needed, and probably still needs. But even if there were enough therapists to do the job, would everyone accept the offer?

In my case, it would depend on the therapist. When I was in my 20s I had the astounding good fortune to work with a wonderful woman who had a profound impact on my life for more than 10 years. The problem is that no other therapist since then has measured up to the high bar that she set. 

Ideally the therapist-patient connection is one of immense trust, maybe more so than any other relationship in our lives. It takes time to build that architecture. You have to start with basic rapport, add some humor, then layers of increasing vulnerability until eventually you can walk right into their office, plop yourself down, and commence with the weeping (hot tip: any therapist who doesn’t keep a box of Kleenex within easy reach isn’t worth your money!).

During times when I couldn’t find a good therapist, or couldn’t afford therapy, I bushwhacked through the wild wilderness of culture for fictional therapists to study and adore. There was Barbra, wasn’t there, in “The Prince of Tides”, expertly shepherding a young patient through a terrible childhood trauma (although she did sleep with her patient’s brother, which, IDK… ethics?). There was also the therapist in, “What Lies Beneath”, calm and kind in his muted office with his dish of spicy candy, gently guiding freaked-out housewife Michelle Pfeifffer toward the realization that her marriage wasn’t quite what it appeared to be. Lorraine Brocco steadfastly dug down into Tony Soprano’s psyche, despite being horrified by what she found there. Uzo Aduba’s deeply intelligent and flawed therapist on “In Treatment” reminded me that the best healers often need healing of their own.

One of my favorite fictional therapists came to me on an ordinary day at the Library, in the pages of a novel unlike anything I’d ever read before. The protagonist is a young Black woman from the South, an artist working through intense childhood memories of a family betrayal that continues to haunt her adulthood in New York City. The story is told through the voices of her lovers, friends, family, each of whom takes turns narrating the events of the plot from their perspective.

In between these chapters, the woman has an ongoing dialogue with her therapist that gives deep insight into her heart and mind. The quality of her therapist’s work is revealed in his questions, which are so simple and calm that you could almost miss how skillful he is, how he draws the woman out of her pain and into a series of revelations that she can finally process and make sense of. 

The book is, “Liliane” by Ntozake Shange, and it has remained in my top-ten list for decades. Its language is so powerful, so fluid and sensual, that you remain riveted from chapter to chapter. This is certainly true of any good book, but this particular story could have gone completely off the rails, with so many characters and time periods moving in and out of the central narrative position. The effect, rather than being disorienting or disconcerting, is deeply compelling, and beautifully dream-like in parts.

Shange was the author of novels and poetry, but is best known for her award-winning play, “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough”. Much of her work contains a robust poetic sensibility that makes reading her words aloud feel like singing. “Liliane” is especially musical, and each character’s voice has its own rhythm and spark that summons a vivid picture of the speaker, and the time and place that they inhabit. 

Some of the book’s themes are extremely disturbing, describing the terrifying effects of Southern racism on the lives of Black people who are struggling to make sense of the world around them. Liliane’s community is made up of educated, worldly people that have prospered through hard work, and a belief that they must rise above others and become leaders in their community. But she wants something more than the stolid, super-secure married life that her father, a prominent judge, urges her to pursue. She is a budding visual artist who dreams of exploring far beyond the bounds of her hometown and her family’s wealthy but still second-class community. When her mother suddenly leaves the family and is rendered persona non grata, it shocks Liliane into making big changes of her own. 

Through it all Liliane recounts her innermost thoughts, desires, feelings and fears to her kind therapist, and he remains solidly by her side every step of the way. He doesn’t condescend or cajole her. He takes her moods and visions seriously, recognizing her tremendous creative capabilities, and encourages her to trace her own path to healing. Sometimes she is suspicious of his lack of judgment toward her, fearing that she will discover a limit to his goodwill. But gradually she comes to trust him, and herself, enough to face her darkest fears. What she creates out of that chaos is a beautiful new sense of self, not without pain, but strong enough to weather whatever comes. 

There aren’t enough healers to treat all of us, all of our pain and fear and shock and hope. We’ll have to make do with whatever support we can find in ourselves and the good people in our lives. Fictional therapists can help us visualize how to talk to ourselves, and how to approach our own pain and process with radical self-acceptance. I keep collecting images of powerful healers, sharing them with friends when life feels dark. I also interview real-life healers in the pages of Womancake, so we can have access to resources that might otherwise be invisible or inaccessible. Somehow all these voices coming together, real and fictional, makes the idea of collective healing possible. Art is what we had before Xanax, and it will continue as long as we give it faith and breath.

This article originally appeared on Womancake.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org

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8 Old-Timey Baseball Radio Podcasts, from Mysterious Crimes to “Clownpires”

8 Old-Timey Baseball Radio Podcasts, from Mysterious Crimes to “Clownpires”

As the World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers starts this weekend, I thought it’d be appropriate to share some baseball podcast episodes I’ve recorded for your listening pleasure. We’ve done A LOT of baseball-themed or baseball-linked programs over the past sixteen years. Detectives such as The Saint, Bulldog Drummond, and Boston Blackie have all had baseball-related capers. So this is not an exhaustive list by any means.

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My latest podcast, the Old Time Radio Snack Wagon, features bite-sized podcast episodes and we’ve already featured some baseball-related snacks.

Of course, we’ve featured Abbott and Costello performing their famous “Who’s on First” sketch.

Then, we also played an episode of The Adventures of Babe Ruth, a series dedicated to the most iconic player who ever lived. A man so larger-than-life that he inspired this series of fictitious and fictionalized adventures.

Most recently, we featured a rare 1947 interview of the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, by a group of teenage baseball players from New York’s Police Athletic League.

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In the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, the number of episodes that have some baseball tie-in is quite high. However, not every episode features a Baseball Hall-of-Famer, and in honor of both of this year’s World Series teams, we have shows featuring both a Yankee and a Dodger Hall-of-Famer.

In “The World Series Crime,” Ellery Queen is called in to find a star baseball player’s lucky bat before the start of a World Series game. Ellery Queen featured a panel of “armchair detectives” who would hear all the evidence that Ellery was provided and then guess at the solution before the radio audience was told who did it. One of the armchair detectives was Yankee second baseman and reigning American League MVP Joe Gordon. Gordon would go on in a few weeks to win the actual World Series that year.

Of course, Gordon didn’t act in the radio play. However, Dodgers legend Jackie Robinson did make a radio acting appearance in an episode of The Adventures of the Abbotts, in which Pat Abbott tries to solve the murder of a baseball catcher.

Of course, if you don’t care about Hall-of-Famers or your traditional baseball detective boilerplate stories, you might want to check out one of my favorite oddball episodes. It’s the only surviving episode of the New York anthology series The WOR Summer Playhouse. It’s a little story entitled “The Mystery Of The Perfect Throw From Left Field And The Conga Dancer’s Aunt.” It’s a quirky story about a part-time “clownpire” who can also play detective (and don’t even start to ask him about his day job).

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During the spring of 2020, when the Major League Baseball season was on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I did my bit to alleviate baseball fans’ hunger with a six-week mini-series. I’ll highlight three of these.

Gary Cooper stars in The Lux Radio Theater adaptation of his classic film Pride of the Yankees, where he plays all-time baseball great Lou Gehrig, whose greatness on the diamond was only matched by his courage and class in dealing with the tragedy that ended his baseball career and would eventually cost him his life.

Destination Freedom was a Chicago-based Golden Age radio series that told the stories of Black Americans. In “The Ballad of Satchel Paige,” the series tells the story of one of the game’s all-time greats and larger-than-life figures with appropriately epic musical accompaniment.

Finally, a bit further removed from reality is the X Minus One story “Martin Sam.”  Now, X Minus One isn’t alone in imagining sci-fi baseball. In the 1990s, I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which often came back to the game, with it even being played on the Holodek. The Klingons, Bajorans, and Ferengi were similar enough to humans that they could easily play the game. However, Martian Sam asks what if we encountered an alien completely different from us, and he wanted to play baseball, and it was impossible for humans to beat him.

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Whether you’re wanting to hear the voice of one of the game’s greats, relive a great story or hear a far-out adventure involving a Conga Dancer or an alien from outer space, I hope you’ll find these enjoyable listens, either in between games or when you get hungry for baseball in that long season when true fans are waiting for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training.

This article originally appeared on GreatDetectives.net and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.

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