Every day is Christmas: Harold Lloyd's Christmas tree

All right, I guess I've put this off about as long as I can. It's time to deal with the little issue of Harold Lloyd and his Christmas tree.

Harold was a Christmas fanatic. He was a fanatic about a lot of things, including painting, handball, microscopy, the Shriners, and beautiful women with no tops on. But let's stick to the Christmas tree for now.

When he was a boy, growing up dirt-poor in Nebraska, they probably had something - you'd have to be pretty impoverished not to be able to cut something down in the woods, drag it home and decorate it with some paper garlands and strings of popcorn.

But once he was in the chips, Christmas took on a whole new meaning.

I sometimes get a mental image of Harold rolling around in dollar bills and throwing them up in the air, not because he was greedy (though he was apparently a lousy tipper), but because it was fun to have money at last.

Never again would the family have to skip out in the night to avoid paying rent that they didn't have.

As you can see here, some of these ornaments were absolutely huge. Most were handmade European things that remind me of Faberge eggs. Over the years he amassed an incredible 10,000 ornaments (hard to believe, but this is Harold Lloyd, folks, and he never did things by halves), most of which were kept in a vault somewhere in his huge estate, Greenacres.

It took weeks for him to decorate this thing, which was constructed from three gigantic fir trees lashed together. Then one year when he was about to dis-assemble it, he decided, ah, hell, isn't it really Christmas all year long? So the tree stayed up.

This pose with a red-jacketed Harold is obviously an earlier incarnation because you can still see parts of the tree. It doesn't have that bulged-out/pregnant/I-think-I'm-going-to-explode look it took on in later years.

In fact, this tree looks really nice to me. Has a nice shape, a nice sparkle, and TONS of ornaments already. But Harold never knew when to stop.

The little girl in the red pajamas is Harold's granddaughter, Suzanne, now keeper of the Lloyd legend. Due to family circumstances, Harold was like a father to her, and it must've been fun to have a grandfather like that, even if he was hard to keep up with. This surely must have been taken in the middle of the decorating frenzy, given the appearance of the tree in the first photo.

It always strikes me that the great geniuses of the world are little boys who never grow up. They retain that mental flexibility and ability to dream and actualize those dreams without adult restraints. They also retain temperament and a degree of childishness, which Harold did. He had a hairtrigger temper by all accounts - hey, folks, I learned that from Kevin Brownlow's superb documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, a major source of information for my research, and it was Harold's brother-in-law who said it. I'm not just making up stories. He really did have flaws. I say this because I sometimes wonder if I somehow inadvertently pissed off someone in the Lloyd family by portraying him as less than perfect in my book. At any rate, the silence from them has been deafening. But as I've said before, Kevin Brownlow has been wonderful to me, so maybe I'd better be happy with that.

It's still possible to buy some of those 10,000 ornaments today. In fact, they're listed on eBay right now, eight ornaments for $2500.00 USD.  That's uh, three hundred and. . . that's lotsa money per ornament. Eight would be about enough for my tree.

POST-POST POST: As you well know, Wikipedia is my Bible, especially when I don't feel like plodding through a dozen web sites for information which may or may not be right. It's a sad and poignant story, what happened to Harold's estate after he died in 1971. The upkeep on the gargantuan place was basically unworkable. The huge lot had to be subdivided and sold off in parcels in the '70s, but the house still sits on top of the hill in Benedict Canyon, somewhat updated from its falling-down days. It's nice to know it's still there and being looked after.

Several movies were shot at Greenacres in the '70s, including a Lylah Clare-ish, Sunset Boulevard-esque, cheesy TV movie called Death at Love House with Robert Wagner in it (Harold's close friend), but the video clips I could find were so Godawful I could not include them here. I couldn't even make a decent 3-second gif.

History after Lloyd's death

Plans for preservation and a museum





Christmas tree in 1974

Lloyd left his Benedict Canyon estate to the "benefit of the public at large" with instructions that it be used "as an educational facility and museum for research into the history of the motion picture in the United States." For a few years the home was open to public tours, but financial and legal obstacles prevented the estate from creating the motion picture museum that Lloyd had intended. Among other things, neighboring homeowners in the wealthy community were opposed to the creation of a museum hosting parties and attracting busloads of tourists.

In October 1972, the Los Angeles Times visited the property and noted that it had "the feel of Sunset Boulevard," bringing to mind the line spoken by the young writer when he first visits Norma Desmond's home: "It was the kind of place that crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s."The house appeared to visitors in the 1970s to be frozen in time at 1929. One writer noted that nothing had been moved or replaced, changed, or modernized, from the books in the library to the appliances in the kitchen and the fixtures in the bathrooms. 

Noted columnist Jack Smith visited the estate in 1973 and wrote that "time stood still", as Lloyd's clothes still hung in his closet, and the master bedroom and living room "looked like a set for a movie of the 1930s." A Renaissance tapestry presented to Lloyd as a housewarming gift by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks was still hanging in the hallway.

The house also had Lloyd's permanent Christmas tree loaded with ornaments at the end of a long sitting room. Jack Smith described the tree as follows:

"At the end of the room, dominating it like some great Athena in a Greek temple, stood the most fantastic Christmas tree I had ever seen. It reached the ceiling, a great, bulbous mass of colored glass baubles, some of them as big as pumpkins, clustered together like gaudy jewels in some monstrous piece of costume jewelry."

POST-POST: I just thought of something else. As usual! Somewhere, I know not where, I read in my research that there was a TV special called Citizen Lloyd which aired shortly after Harold's death. There was scant information about this, but I can't help but see the title as an allusion to Citizen Kane and Xanadu, the great echoing mausoleum inhabited by Charles Foster Kane. Parallels have also been drawn to Sunset Boulevard with its algae-choked swimming pool and demented German manservant with the duelling scar. 

Though Harold never employed Eric von Stroheim to look after the place, there is an eerieness to all this. Perhaps it's Stroheim's ghost that haunts Greenacres. I know Annette Lloyd got to tour the place at some point, and I never will. I'll die before that happens. In spite of all my efforts to flog it, the book I toiled over for seven years has fallen off the face of the earth. Except for wonderful Kevin Brownlow, no one connected with the film industry has shown the slightest interest in it, or in helping me actualize my dream.

A few years from now, I have a feeling "someone" will make a movie about Harold Lloyd, and it will have all my ideas in it. There are enough copies circulating, all of which seemed to fall into the Grand Canyon without an echo. And because I am so utterly powerless, there will not be a damn thing I can do about it.

But I wonder what happened to that TV special, if someone still has a tape of it moldering in their basement and will some day decide to put it on YouTube.

Stranger things have happened. But not much.

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A tribute to Robert Loggia

     

Santa Dave

Hey listen. My dearest friend, David, has been in the hospital for a LONG LONG time with every ailment you can imagine, greatly affecting his mobility. And yet, with few exceptions, he has been remarkably cheerful through it all. I think this should be celebrated, and what better way than with a Blingee. The top one is a pose in his fairly-Brother-Dave-ish hospital gown. The second one, made last year, is too good NOT to repeat.

Special Bonus Bling!

"Sometimes these things just happen"

NEWS IN BRIEF  December 3, 2015

VOL 51 ISSUE 48 News · Guns · Violence

SAN BERNARDINO, CA—In the hours following a violent rampage in southern California in which two attackers killed 14 individuals and seriously injured 17 others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Wednesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Michigan resident Emily Harrington, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep these individuals from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what they really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past six and a half years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

BLOGGER's LAMENT. I haven't said a lot about the almost-daily bloodbaths in the United States of late. Nor can I comment about the frantic spewing-out of statistics insisting that gun violence is now at an all-time low. The message seems to be that we're just overreacting and should settle down and feel grateful that we're so much safer than we used to be.

I have no idea what to say. When this horror happens AGAIN, I do the same weeping and fuming and turning away that a lot of people do (I won't say "most" or "everyone", because those are idiotic assumptions). 

Nearly every time this happens, the blame goes to "the Muslims", which makes me quake with terror (not to mention outrage). Soon it will be open season on people who are as anguished as everyone else about the situation.

I get flipped into a mix of powerless anxiety/rage by the strangest things. There was an item on the news yesterday about poisonous rat traps set around city parks in Vancouver, and about how people were finding dead rats lying around who had eaten the poison. Someone actually had the idea their dog might get sick from eating one of these, and that it wasn't a good idea to leave poisoned rats out where small children might find them and pick them up.

The inevitable authority figure/parks board guy came on and blandly said, "We have never had a complaint about these traps hurting pets or children." And that was the end of the story.

What does this have to do with bloodbaths in schools and at Christmas parties, and with people saying, don't worry about it because gun violence is actually down?

Nothing, directly.

It's that idiotic "we haven't had any complaints," a statement which makes people say, "Oh," and walk away, because this is an Authority Figure and they've just had the last word.

Because we've swallowed the bait.

"We haven't had any complaints" means "you shouldn't be complaining now because nobody else has. What's wrong with you?"

"We haven't had any complaints" means "it's OK, folks, there's no danger. And if you think there is, you're a screwball."

And of course, it means there can never BE a complaint in the future. It's against the laws of physics.

It's the same kind of reassurance which is meant to make you shut up, walk away, and not do anything more to try to change the situation.

Nobody complains. There's not much point, because we don't really have a problem here. Do we?

(I confess the article appeared in The Onion. But these days, it's hard to tell the difference.)

The Wizard of oz- The jitterbug ( DELETED SCENE)

The Jitterbug! I used to tell my friends at school that this was a song from The Wizard of Oz (which we all watched slavishly once a year in glorious black and white, taking a little chunk out of the technicolour surprise of "I guess we're not in Kansas any more"), and they would look at me like I was crazy.

I'd get that look a lot in my childhood. I might as well have gotten used to it.

I had a record with the songs from The Wizard of Oz on it. I am not sure now if it was by the original cast. But I think not. I wore out the grooves on this thing, and most especially I noted a song about The Jitterbug, which I assumed was a dance of some kind.

I don't know how many eons later I found out that it HAD been a song in The Wizard of Oz, one that was deleted for various reasons. The video/gifs here depict the rehearsals, and I have highlighted the choreography between the Tin Man and the Lion.

These guys were expected to stumble around on a soundstage covered with fake leaves, under broiling hot lights, sweating buckets in their confining, 50-pound costumes for take after take. . . and they weren't even dancers. Or they sure don't look like it here.

Jack Haley was, maybe, but I can only picture him doing the Old Soft Shoe with a top hat and a cane. Lahr was a vaudevillian by trade and by nature, a sort of aggressive carnival barker type - and yes, when he played the lion, he barked! "With a rrrrroof. And a rooooroof. And a rrrRROOOOOOF!" He was most people's favorite character in the movie, with his big fur coat and his waving tail and that incredible song he sang, "If I Were King of the Forest". Here he does a dead-on impersonation of every hammy, pretentious singer that you've ever heard. Kids just think he's funny, but adults recognize a "type", giving his broad humor a sly edge of parody.

Anyway. The poor Tin Man really stumbles through some of these takes (and you can tell they're different takes by what the trees are doing in the background. The one on the right is the most active, waving and clapping its "hands". In the video, we see that they're really giant puppets with guys in behind them, moving the branches and the mouths. And throwing the apples.) Jack Haley nearly falls down in some of them, leaning forward to avoid a backward-falling, immobilizing disaster. The lion just sort of clomps around, trying to find the rhythm.

But in any case, the number was pulled. It wasn't the fact that the jitterbug was just a dance craze and thus likely to "date" the movie (and who cared? No one even knew that television would exist, and that it would give what was essentially a flop a brilliant second life.) It wasn't even that Lahr and Haley danced so badly. It's the fact that it was just so totally out of character for them. The best part about this movie is the sureness with which all the actors inhabit their characters, so to make them do this - . There was an extended dance scene with the Scarecrow that was cut, and it's a shame, but I saw it once and I see why. He ricochets off the rails of a fence in one shot, then appears to ricochet backwards when they reverse the film - and the rails of the fence vibrate BEFORE he hits them. It just didn't work. Too bad, because he was the only real dancer in the lot.

OK: so we know all that. But the real issue here is, who is my favorite character? It's not quite the witch, though I think Margaret Hamilton deserved an Oscar for the razor-witted sadist who still freaks kids out to this day (and who can forget that nasty, macabre music?). No. . . my favorite is one that absolutely nobody else picks.

Toto.

Why Toto? 

Without Toto, there would be no Wizard of Oz.

If Toto hadn't bitten Miss Gulch, she wouldn't have taken him away in her basket. And if she hadn't taken him away in her basket, he wouldn't have jumped out and run back to Dorothy. And Dorothy wouldn't have gotten all paranoid about losing her dog and decided to run away from home.

And and and. Shall I tell you more? Had she stayed home and fed the chickens and slopped the hogs like she was supposed to (and a more unlikely farm hand than Bert Lahr you will never find), she would've been hunkered down safely in the storm cellar with the rest of the family.

And the whole thing never would have happened.

But wait: there's more.

It's Toto who bravely confronts the Lion and barks at him when everyone else is cringing in terror. It's Toto who fearlessly leads the Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow back to the Witch's castle where Dorothy is imprisoned (and I confess I ALWAYS cry when Auntie Em appears in the crystal ball). And it is Toto, my friends, who ends the story as dramatically as it began: by pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz as a fraud.

So do you get it now? Do you? I'll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too.

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Santa Claus, Punch & Judy (1948) Violent Puppet Show

Almost as mind-blowing as the Star Wars Holiday Special. It gets points for extra violence. NEVER let a child watch this! This guy was one of the frontrunners in my Santa Smackdown, but lost by a whisker (heh-heh) to the demented, frightening Santa in the stop-motion classic, Hardrock, Coco and Joe.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (With Cartoon!)

No. . . .No.

No, no, no, no, no.

You think this is bad.

You think this might be VERY bad. You're wrong.

It is an abomination.

It is a cheesy '70s mess, not even a parody but a bloody hash featuring characters from the movie involved in utterly ludicrous situations. Yes: all the main Star Wars characters are here, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, R2D2, even Darth Vader and (shudder) Princess Leia, and they are all played by the original actors, so they must have either been willing to do this, or were contractually obliged.

Try to imagine the worst music video you ever saw, because every once in a while one of the Wookies (and most of the characters are Wookies making that abysmal sound) looks into a primitive pre-Commodore 64 computer screen and "someone" (in one case, Diahann Carroll) bursts into song. Carroll is dressed provocatively and purrs and croons at the Wooky patriarch, supposedly to turn him on..

BLECCCCHH!

Harvey Korman in drag as a cooking show hostess, making some bleeding meat dish a la Julia Child. Art Carney, looking like he's not sure what he is doing there, just bumbling around and ad libbing because they didn't bother with a script. More Wookies. And. . . choke. . . Bea Arthur, who always strikes me as being in drag, even though she's a woman.

There is a plot. Oh. OK, let's say there is. As with Festivus ("for the rest of us"), Chewbacca must be returned to his home planet in time for the grand celebration of Life Day. I guess they had no Jesus on Planet Wookie, but he had to get there anyway, like Spock when he suddenly got way horny and had to go home. The question is: why?

But it's worse than that. (He's dead, Jim!) This show is dead, but somehow it has been resurrected. It was shown just once in 1978, pre-empting Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. This was a blatant attempt to keep Star Wars in the public consciousness between the wildly popular original movie and the release of the sequel, probably made back-to-back, The Empire Strikes Back.

They didn't need this show. In fact, it amazes me anyone WENT to The Empire Strikes Back after this. Perhaps amnesia was somehow subliminally encoded in the thing.  George Lucas must have signed off on it, legally I mean, and allowed it to be broadcast, although now he feels suicidal whenever he thinks of it.

And now, here it is on YouTube in its entirety, including a cartoon so atrocious it makes Rocket Robin Hood look like Fantasia. By the end of it, you will long for The Adventures of Clutch Cargo and his Pals, Spinner and Paddlefoot.

Holiday warning. Don't watch all of this. Skip through it. I'd provide a list of highlights, except that there aren't any. I hadn't even heard of this before I saw something on Facebook about it, and my first reaction was, "It can't really be that bad." 

It really really is that bad. There are various compilations on YouTube, but they really don't get to the "good" parts. Just watch it in snatches until you feel the need to run to a 97th-floor window.

How many times can you say "whaaaaaaaaat?" in an hour and a half?

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Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

Every year it's the same. (No it isn't, because this is only the second year I've done this.) Nowhere do you find creepier Santa images than in old kiddie shows, cartoons, puppet shows and the like.  Santa at his worst can be nearly as disturbing as a ventriloquist's dummy, or, worse, a clown.

In this one, I get an uncomfortable feeling from what Santa is doing under the bedclothes. And that narcissistic glance in the mirror just won't do. You'd think Santa was on Facebook or something.

Is this Black Peter? No, it's Santa in blackface, shaking himself down like a dog. The grimy ashes on the floor might be a pain to sweep up on Christmas morning. Myself, if I found footprints all over my living room floor, I'd be worried.

A butt joke. Rubbing your butt in front of the kiddies might not play well nowadays.

One does wonder why Santa laughs so much. At least, THIS Santa.

And this Santa looks like he might've gotten into the eggnog.

This one is from an extremely bizarre puppet show in which a cat with huge glassy eyes pretends to be Santa. Or trades places with Santa, at least. Santa pretenders are allowed here, since so many people dress up like him anyway. Though not many are cat marionettes.

Here, an evil-looking Santa meets his doppelganger, Santa Cat. The dog in between them is obviously trying to keep them apart.

The trouble with marionettes, I've found, is that they can't keep still. Because they're on strings, they bob around and shudder like Parkinson's patients. Adds yet another dimension to the creepiness.

True evil. So much for the "right jolly old elf". I haven't seen eyes like that since The Exorcist.

There has been a movement afoot to remove all images of pipe smoking from Santa pictures. Obviously they didn't give a fuck back then . (Oops, just slipped out.) The exact quote: "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,/And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath." Here he is so wreathed in smoke that you can barely see the old blighter.

Papa in his kerchief or whatever-it-is - nightcap, I guess - is so terrified by this intruder that he ducks behind a chair. Santa appears to be having some sort of seizure. And how does he carry loose toys like that? Where is his sack? "A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,/And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack." Forgot the pack, I guess. Or do all of them contain electromagnets so that they can't come apart? Will he leave an enormous fused wad of toys sitting under the tree?

Oh, but he can dance! Or is he conducting some invisible orchestra? The dog is apparently not too impressed.

All right, enough of that shit. Let's get down to the REALLY Kreepy Kringles. Santa with that innocent little boy squicks me majorly.

I call this Third Reich Santa. Here he seems to be extolling the virtues of the Master Race. There is a certain swagger, even a nastiness to this Santa. It's that wagging beard that does it, I think. "Deuschland! Deuschland uber alles!"

This Santa is creepy mainly because the movie is about a million years old - around 1898, in fact. In spite of people's insistence that all of Santa's accoutrementes were invented by the Coca Cola Company in the 1930s, this guy is pretty much decked out like a conventional Santa. He's pretty thin, but things are tough all over, and most Santas now rely on padding. No one can tell what colour his robe is. I like the fact that he totes around a Christmas tree (?), and that supernatural touch at the end.

But here we have it. The. Creepiest. Santa. Or, at least the creepiest one I've found to date. It's from a stop-motion short called Hard Rock, Coco and Joe. I thought hard rock was a form of music, or a cafe of some kind, but - . Still, I have no doubt at all that this Santa is creepy enough to win the 2015 Creepy Santa Smackdown.

I think he won last year, too. Haven't made too many Christmas gifs lately.

HONORABLE MENTION!  I just keep finding these things, usually late at night when I'm in a kind of surreal  state. And this, believe me, is surreal. It's done with a form of animation which I really wish had never been invented. It took me many years to warm up to stop-motion, but this is way worse: it's a sort of stretch-face-motion. I've seen similar videos of Dylan Thomas and Edgar Allan Poe reading various things, and this one is The Night Before Christmas. It goes on and on. Much effort has gone into making it look "old". This guy would have won, except he just isn't very Christmassy.

To be hopeful in bad times (and I need to hear this today)

It is not the critic who counts

Sober 25 years? Maybe it's just a start

   

Make a Blingee!

Blingees didn't exist back in 1990, but I did. I don't mind telling you I was hanging by a thread. It wasn't just alcohol that threatened to finish me, of course. There were other factors that I still struggle with on a daily basis.

But a quarter of a century has gone by, and I haven't needed to drink. Imagine that.

I come from a very long line of drunks, Irish on one side, English on the other. My paternal grandfather and my father were severe alcoholics, and my two uncles on my mother's side were falling-down drunks. I watched this behaviour practiced daily all around me, but was also sucked in at around age 15, when my parents began to fill up my wine glass at the dinner table. And refill it. I gratefully drained it, needing no genetic encouragement.

I remember I went on an Oxfam walk back when they were 30 miles long. I finished it, but was so exhausted I was crying in my room. My Dad, ever compassionate, brought up a double shot of whiskey and said "here, this'll make you feel better". At least once, my sister did the same thing. I think I was 13 years old then.

Not much later came the drunken parties that my older siblings (5, 10 and 13 years older, respectively) took me to, where I was the mascot, encouraged to get shit-faced and groped by a great many married men 20 years older than me. Some of them had wives in the next room.

When I finally began to find my way to recovery at age 36, the family felt intense shame - not that I was alcoholic; they pretty much knew that. No, the shame came because I went so whole-hog into recovery, revealing (at least to my fellow AA members) that I was seeking a better life through sobriety.

Imagine. Our daughter. . . being in . . . AA. THAT was the shame, the excruciating thing, the thing that made them squirm. No one in our family should ever land in that place.

I shouldn't be dwelling on the roots of this thing, but the fact that I did get better. But it was a hard battle, and I finally had to leave those people behind. They seemed to be completely oblivious to the damage they had done, and in fact probably continue (those of them that are still alive) to believe they were doing me a social favour by allowing me to go to those parties.

I realize now that it was a miracle I didn't get pregnant, or just kill myself. (I do remember both my parents yelling at me, "Go ahead, then! That's what we want!" This is no lie, nor is it even exaggeration. It is reporting, which is what all writing actually is.) One of the guys who hit on me, 35 and married, used to date me, take me to movies, send me roses to the house, which my parents set on the dining room table. They knew about all of it and did/said nothing.  Later on, unemployed and bereft of family and awash in alcoholism, the guy put a bullet through his head.

So this is where I came from.

"You can't give away what you never had," the truism goes. Nonsense! I am 42 years married now to a wonderful man. He is the best person I know. I did my level best with my kids, though I am sure I made major mistakes. But I KNOW I am an awesome grandma, I need no one to tell me. It's my life's sweetest reward. 

AND I DID IT ALL SOBER.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/little-sexpot-or-smooch-and-snuggle.html

POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. As usual, I have something to say about this. I realize I come across a bit smug. All right, a LOT smug, as if I didn't have any help in doing this. I did, and it was hard, because I often felt the program of recovery was rigid and dogmatic. But hey, I'm sober today, as they like to say. I did have to schlep myself to all those hundreds and hundreds of meetings. Now I barely think about alcohol. To constantly "tell my story" and go on and on about the horrors of boozing doesn't help me move away from booze. It rubs my nose in it over and over again. Somehow I think it's more helpful to move on and just brush the thought aside, which gets easier over the years. To obsess over it is to set yourself up to fail. At least, that's what I think. 

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My silver anniversary - let the bells ring

By the power of grace and with the help of some wonderful people, today I celebrate 25 years of sobriety. I can remember what 25 days felt like, so it amazes me that this much time has gone by. Personal transformation is a long hard road, with many a winding turn, most of which we can’t see coming at all. I can’t control the vagaries of Fate or the sometimes-traumatic emotional turns of my life, but I CAN choose to be sober today. It has given me my life back, and continues to be the best choice I can make.

Was blind, but now I see

This article (below) fascinates me. I remember the controversy over "multiple personality disorder" in the '90s and how it was related to childhood sexual abuse. Unfortunately, it spawned innumerable Geraldo Rivera-type TV shows with the most lurid misrepresentations of the disease and its causes, and a flood of books that may or may not have been based in reality. The whole subject (along with "recovered memory", a concept that triggered a World War III in therapy circles) became more and more sensationalized, so that a serious assessment of what was actually going on became almost impossible.

Then, as with so many other controversial phenomena, it virtually disappeared from the public consciousness. A few years ago I saw a bizarre article by one of the authors of The Courage to Heal (the Bible for survivors of childhood sexual abuse) exhorting women to forgive their families, particularly their fathers, and make reparation to them wherever possible. The whole thing reeked of "lawsuit" (another murky and often hateful manifestation of this whole mess).

This was the first time I have read about multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder, perhaps to distance it from its Geraldo-esque roots) in years and years. How times change. And things. And public opinion.

The blind woman who switched personalities and could
suddenly see

Hamilton Spectator

By Sarah Kaplan

It had been more than a decade since "B.T." had last seen anything.

After she suffered a traumatic accident as a young woman, doctors diagnosed her with cortical blindness, caused by damage to the visual processing centres in her brain. So she got a Seeing Eye dog to guide her and grew accustomed to the darkness.

Besides, B.T. had other health problems to cope with — namely, more than 10 wildly different personalities that competed for control of her body.

It was while seeking treatment for her dissociative identity disorder that the ability to see suddenly returned. Not to B.T., a 37-year-old German woman. But to a teenage boy she sometimes became.

With therapy, over the course of months, all but two of B.T.'s identities regained their sight. And as B.T. oscillated between identities, her vision flicked on and off like a light switch in her mind. The world would appear, then go dark.

Writing in PsyCh Journal, B.T.'s doctors say that her blindness wasn't caused by brain damage, her original diagnosis. It was instead something more akin to a brain directive, a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.

B.T.'s strange case reveals much about the mind's extraordinary power — how it can control what we see and who we are.

To understand what happened with B.T. (who is identified only by her initials in the journal article), her doctors, German psychologists Hans Strasburger and Bruno Waldvogel, went back to her initial diagnosis of cortical blindness.

Her health records from the time show that she was subjected to a series of vision tests — involving lasers, special glasses, lights shined across a room — all of which demonstrated her apparent blindness. Since there was no damage to her eyes themselves, it was assumed that B.T.'s vision problems must have come from brain damage caused by her accident (the report does not say what exactly happened in the accident).

Waldvogel had no reason to doubt that diagnosis when B.T. was referred to him 13 years later for treatment of dissociative identity disorder, once called multiple personality disorder. B.T. exhibited more than 10 personalities, varying in age, gender, habits and temperament. They even spoke different languages: some communicated only in English, others only in German, some in both. (B.T. had spent time in an English-speaking country as a child but lived in Germany.)

Then, four years into psychotherapy, something strange happened: just after ending a therapy session, while in one of her adolescent male states, B.T. saw a word on the cover of a magazine. It was the first word she had read visually in 17 years.

At first, B.T.'s renewed sight was restricted to recognizing whole words in that one identity. If asked, she couldn't even see the individual letters that made up the words, just the words themselves. But it gradually expanded, first to higher-order visual processes (like reading), then to lower-level ones (like recognizing patterns) until most of her personalities were able to see most of the time. When B.T. alternated between sighted and sightless personalities, her vision switched as well.

That's when Waldvogel began doubting the cause of B.T.'s vision loss. It's unlikely that a brain injury of the kind that can cause cortical blindness would heal instantaneously after such a long time. And even if it did, that didn't explain why B.T.'s vision continued to switch on and off. Clearly something else was going on.

One explanation, that B.T. was "malingering," or lying about her disability, was disproved by an EEG test. When B.T. was in her two blind states, her brain showed none of the electrical responses to visual stimuli that sighted people would display — even though B.T.'s eyes were open and she was looking right at them.

Instead, Waldvogel and Strasburger believe that B.T.'s blindness is psychogenic (psychologically caused, rather than physical). Something happened — perhaps related to her accident — that caused her body to react by cutting out her ability to see. Even now, two of her identities retain that coping mechanism.

"These presumably serve as a possibility for retreat," Strasburger told the neuroscience site Brain Decoder. "In situations that are particularly emotionally intense, the patient occasionally feels the wish to become blind, and thus not 'need to see.'"

It's not actually all that uncommon for people's brains to stop them from seeing, even when their eyes work fine, the researchers say. When your two eyes see slightly different images — when squinting, for example — the brain will cut out one image to keep you from being confused by the contradiction. Your brain also intervenes in visual processing when you focus on particular objects in your field of vision.

Responsibility for the information "gatekeeping" that kept B.T. from seeing everything she looked at may lie with the lateral geniculate nucleus, a sort of neural relay centre that sends visual information down synaptic pathways into the brain's information processors.

Perhaps more interesting than what it says about sight, though, is what B.T.'s story tells us about dissociative identity disorder (DID), the condition apparently at the root of her vision loss.

Though DID has been listed in psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, since 1994 (and was recognized as "multiple personality disorder" for a decade and a half before that), there is still a large amount of skepticism about the diagnosis among experts and patients alike.

For years before it became a psychiatric diagnosis, DID was known along with a host of other psychiatric conditions as "hysteria," a term that gives you a sense of how it and its sufferers were viewed.

Modern critics of the diagnosis point out the absence of consensus on diagnostic criteria and treatment, and blame sensational stories of DID patients like the 1976 TV movie Sybil for creating an "epidemic" of MPD diagnoses. The 1990s saw a spate of lawsuits from patients subjected to dubious treatments for multiple personality disorders they said they didn't have, and many began to believe that DID was not so much treated by psychiatrists but induced by them through the power of suggestion.

At the very least, it's thought that DID may only be a product of fragmentation at high levels of thinking — a breakdown in a brain dealing with complex emotions.

But Strasburger and Waldvogel say their finding is evidence that DID can unfold at a very basic, biological level. After all, it was not just high-level cognitive functions, such as reading, that were affected by B.T.'s condition; even basic things such as depth perception were difficult for her. And B.T.'s doctors could see all of that playing out in her brain right in front of them on the EEG.

The case study shows that DID "is a legitimate psycho-physiologically based syndrome of psychological distress," Dr. Richard P. Kluft, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine, who was not associated with the study, told Brain Decoder.

The condition is not just a product of culture and psychiatrists' suggestions, he said; as in B.T.'s case, it "represents the mind's attempt to compartmentalize its pain."

The Washington Post

(P. S. A word to those who read this. I copy and paste articles only because posting links tends to be a waste of time. Nobody follows them, any more than I do. It's a little different on Facebook because it gives you a preview with a photo, but without that visual cue, people won't click. I'm not complaining because I'm the same way. I want to give credit wherever possible. Clicking on the author's name will take you to the original article. I did not write this! By the way, the Hamilton Spectator didn't write this either. It appeared originally in the Washington Post, and I can't find the name of the author, whom the Spectator didn't feel compelled to list.)