VIVA LA VIDOO part i

Here’s for the girl you meet down the street:
Cheers.
And: I wish we could chill together sometimes, before you die.

Here’s a Yaqui tale to illustrate why I am not being melodramatic:
One evening, many years ago, like 4 or 5, two girls were jumping on the bed, out of rhythm to Rammstein.
One was an Italian dopehead.
The other was an English Hassidic girl.
Then the Hassid flipped over and fell, and the Italian caught her clumsily, pulling her skirt a mite, and exclaimed, ‘Why, your thighs are all scratched!’
And the Hassid pulled up her skirt and retorted rudely: ‘So what? None of your business.’
So the Italian said, ‘But it’s gross. Why d’you do it?’
And the Hassid replied another question, ‘No one will ever see it, not even my husband.’
And because the Italian was afraid she was treading on glass, she swallowed that answer and never spoke of it more, not until many years later when the Hassid was dead and she herself wasn’t a dopehead any longer.

She told me that when I met Vidoo and a whole bunch of other self-inflictors.

Here’s another Yaqui tale, and as you all know, they’re all true stories, even the talking coyote ones:
Once upon a time, there lived a young girl in New York City.
That girl was fine and good and obedient. Maybe not obedient – she didn’t do anything wrong, nor did she do anything right. She was passive and quiet.
Yocheved was a little member of a big family, a little student in a big school, a little human in a huge world. And Yocheved drowned daily. Sorrow and solitude suffocated her life.
Days would pass before she uttered a complete sentence. Months before someone offered her a single good word. Years that she’s been left untouched by another soul.
So of course, she began to die.

Now this might as well be too melodramatic, and it is. But here is how people die:
They get used, and molested, even physically. Or just neglected. Therapy is offered in small or irrelevant sessions. They begin to pop pills. They can’t sleep, they can’t stay awake, they can’t breathe, they can’t stand the voices in their heads, they cut.
Then they might turn to other sources for pills, other forms of chemical silence and an expression of solitude.

Then somebody met Yocheved – now known as Vidoo, and decided to send her to Israel. Since her family were not ready to deal with her profligate ways, that person fund-raised her trip and tuition.
That’s where I come into the picture, as she entered one of the therapeutic programs I run.

continued on Viva la Vidoo ii