Posts factual backstory to a fictionalized ("based on actual events ") libretto

I well recall the very first time I first read, in the book "YELLOW MAGIC", how five gallon carboys of incredibly delicate penicillium slime effluent were daily - and carefully - taxied through NYC's hellish traffic all the way from Brooklyn to a hospital at the top of Manhattan.

All in a desperate effort to save lives and how, despite best efforts, the material often arrived destroyed and perhaps another life lost as a result.

At that moment, I shouted out to Rebecca : "MOVIE, MOVIE, MOVIE - finally a science story just made for the Big Screen !".

Too often a movie about an incredibly important science breakthrough has to compress time and 'gussy-up' the long drawn out and usually boring activities to make it dramatic enough for the camera.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson's little Manhattan Project was a story so incredibly cinematic they would actually have to tone it down to make it seem creditable.

Others, I am sure, will make movies of Dawson's efforts (lots of movies because my writing has all been assigned to the Public Domain).

But I won't take any part in it : why set my sights so low ?

I began to see that Dawson's tale was really the tip of a much bigger story and that cinema's commitment to realism would only graze the surface of its emotional core.

I began to see a sung-through pop-idiom musical, designed to be performed by amateur young people - High Schoolers and University undergraduates, or in church youth groups.

The musical would be set entirely in Dr Dawson's Presbyterian Hospital,in the period between October 1940 and August 1944 (with the final scene, in May 1945, set at his other hospital, the Goldwater).

In each of the musical's thirty scenes, the actors not singing at any particular moment would miming silently but broadly the appropriate physical activities for that scene.

The supporting actors would play many different roles, but within one broad type, indicated by three different colored garbs : patients and their families' green johnny shirt, good guys' white lab coat, bad guys' blue suit jacket top etc.

But the few actors playing the main roles ---representing (a) key individuals who were also (b) present through most of the four and a half years of the actual events --- would remain the same.

The facts of the story says there were only about seven - two patients and the four to five members of Dawson's tiny team.

Dawson's real life opponents were very many and each appeared in his part of the hospital too infrequently to be accurately cast as Dawson's 'main opponent' in the musical.

Think of them as a broad collective, "The Suits", rather than anyone living breathing individual.

A huge screen at the back of the stage would play faux newsreel type film footage, setting the contemporary context that month of the war for each scene.

I have long felt that amateur-oriented plays that force all would-be actors to be part of the live drama excludes many amateurs who might convincing play roles, if put in a situation where their role is filmed without a live audience, in little bitty takes, with opportunities for many retakes and then 'fixing in the edit.'

So this all this background newsreel material should be obviously recreated, clearly faux and well 'guyed up', to fit in with the staginess of the rest of the musical.

The volume of these backstage pre-recorded "voices & sfx off" would automatically dip down ("ducking") whenever the front stage live actors sing or talk in brief asides.

Spoken asides only, because there is no dialogue but plenty of feisty alternating singing duets and trios.

A single scene might have as many as six different solo voices and I very much see the voices as being untrained and of widely different timbre and singing capability.

This differing vocal timbre and vocal capability will help muchly to convey the conflict between the differing stakes for each person in each scene.

Instrumentally, the verse, chorus, bridge, intro, outro, solo etc remains much the same on each repeat but the lyrics above won't (though their vocal melody remains the same.)

But these differing lyrics will remain lyrically coherent because they remain fixated upon the same issue/conflict, merely expressed slightly different takes on it, upon each repetition.

For example, a patient gets bad news and expresses horror about her situation the first time her verse music comes around, then resignation the second time and finally a renewed commitment to fight it on on the third go around.

The music below her vocalizing, in terms of melody, metre , tempo, etc sounds roughly the same but is actually subtly different - going from minor to major, faster slower, etc to reflect her changing mood.

Basic opera stuff really (cantabile and cabaletta) but the music and the lyrics are more like Michael Stipes's verses in such songs as World Leader Pretend or Night Swimming.

It is singing but it sounds almost like conversational ad-libbed thinking aloud.

Currently, opera and musicals, to my mind, are self-hobbled by making an earlier technical requirement (the need to be profitable required big theatres which meant big voices before the era of microphones) into an aesthetic choice towards prioritizing big voiced singing.

I simply want them to embrace microphones in the same way they embraced electric lighting and the use of the internet to sell their tickets.

But before you can fictionalize a real life story, your potential Musical goers must know that real life story --- because half the fun is seeing it compressed artistically to wring out every last emotional bone in it.

So this blog's fact-correct posts (the more narrative ones in particular) will do that.

I don't plan them to become a book in the conventional sense ( but again as they are all in the Public Domain, for the Public Good, so others are free to do just that).

But for times away from a connection to the internet (and for those people who simply hate reading anything lengthy online), I will bundle the six or so character vignettes that represent the events of each scene seen from a wide number of perspectives, into little EPUBs and printable PDFs of about 10,000 words each.

Five acts, each representing about a year's worth of events but also representing the real life 'ups and downs' in the real life dramatic arc.

Thirty scenes, each set on one particular day but incorporating the backstory since the last scene ; each with about six separate character vignettes.

About 300,000 words in total.

The libretto to the "based-upon-actual-events" Musical, I will eventually publish, as a book, albeit into the Public Domain.

I will try, in words, to describe the music I hear for each set of lyrics.

But I doubt very much that I will actually try to write out the musical notes ----- or try to sing the complete demo of the Musical.

Let others fill out my skeleton ----- or reject it entirely.....

John Dominic Crossan and yellow MAGIC penicillin

The idea that Jesus scholar Crossan has anything substantive to say about wartime penicillin would come as a surprise to most people , John Dominic Crossan most prominent among them.


But if one regards the sheer amount of resistance medical orthodoxy put up (for twenty wasted years) against the idea of injecting native penicillin into dying patients , one can see the application of Crossan's concept of 'magician healing' : which he regards as all healing that lies outside outside the orthodoxies of the day, medical or otherwise.

Jesus's healing being his prime but by no means only example.

We never did get commercial white man-made penicillin : all the penicillin during WWII and ever since has been grown naturally , natively, by tiny yeast like beings.

Virtually all of our antibiotics are still mere modified versions of WWII's original native penicillin.

Medical orthodoxy today swears by native penicillin and all its life saving derivatives.

Mea culpa is more a word Jesus would use than one many MDs are comfortable using --- but would it really hurt - just this once - to admit that the elders of their profession got it 180 degrees wrong back then in the darkest days for humanity, infected or otherwise .....

Updating J D Ratcliff's wartime penicillin classic, YELLOW MAGIC

I like to think that my "UN-SUPER HEROES" is an 21st century updating of JD (John Drury) Ratcliff's written-to-order 1945 popular science classic "YELLOW MAGIC" .

Ratcliff wrote the facts as truthfully he knew them in 1945 (or was told about them by the few penicillin participants he was able to contact firsthand).

Since late 1941, Penicillin had been surrounded by an ever more effective wall of wartime censorship all over the Allied world.

This allowed anyone involved in wartime penicillin's development to spin their own take to Ratcliff, without fear Ratcliff would have any access to paper documents to query their oral account.

Since 1945 , many of the paper documents have been archived or made public via scholarly articles and books.

But no one has since tried to do with the dramatic tale of wartime penicillin what Ratcliff ( following somewhat upon Paul de Kruif's style) did so well in his little volume.

JD could make any Science story come alive simply by re-telling it in a series of dramatic scenes.

And by freely adding his purple imaginings whenever his participants' eye witness accounts of specific incidents failed to actually recall much color or specifics.

Remember - unlike with the contemporary workings out of atomic energy and atomic bombs - no participants in this particular medical story had any sense - until mid 1943 - that they were making world-shaking history instead of just making penicillin.

So the drama and the little personal details were generally liberally 'recalled' later - after penicillin had become world famous - rather than being accurately recorded at the time.

So we only know the distinctive smell of wartime (crude) penicillin because an otherwise ordinary 1945 war nurse recounts the smell , in passing , in her much later memoir of combat hospital experiences.

Like all writers and historians, JD had to first hear all and read all of the varying accounts about wartime penicillin and then insert his reasoned opinion as to which composite account was mostly likely to be correct.

I can't tell you what SBE patients Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson felt like on October 16 1940 - but I can and will tell you how SBE patients their age tended to act at that stage in their disease.

The same with the smell of Dawson's crude penicillin as that first historic ampoule was broken ---- I'll have to use that wartime combat nurse's description - his penicillin , being much cruder, could only have smelt worse.

 I do not know how the specific ward nurses looking after Aronson and Alston on October 16th 1940 felt about a new medicine that smelt like a return to dirty dank moldy old basements.

But we do know lots about the house-proud nurses of the 1940s , in the days before handling high tech machines replaced pails and mops in the priority list of nurse training !

I won't invent speech inside quote marks - if it is inside quote marks, it will only be there because it is a direct quote from a contemporary document.

Instead I will use a lot of an old fashioned form of free indirect speech - something quite common until the 20th century , when authors were strongly discouraged from commenting inside their own works .

I will freely intermingle my comments (my opinions) in a sound alike version of those particular participants' voice, as I try to imagine what typical participants of their age, nationality, class, gender etc would likely say at that place and point in time.

I call my book a drama in five acts - so dramatizing each scene really isn't much of a stretch  ....

"Code Slow", the wartime SBE patients and Hearst's "Code Yellow"

What really happens whenever a family directs a hospital that its relative receives the full and rapid CPR response ("Code Blue") in the event of their quickly fatal cardiac or breathing arrest ?

Most the time, the medical and nursing staff will do their damnest to bring that patient back from the imminent grave.

But at times, the medical and nursing staff will form a silent consensus that they will just pretend to "code blue" a patient, but will actually merely go through the motions.

This is known as "Code Slow" and it is a serious breach in medical ethics.

The staff do so because (a) they believe that particular patient isn't worth saving ----(b) or less controversially , they honestly believe that particular patient at this point in their illness can't really be saved by fullout CPR and will merely experience additional pain en route to their death.

Reasons (a) and (b) are often mixed confusingly in actual practise ---- patients judged (subconsciously) as less valuable are more often also judged less able to benefit from full out CPR on strictly medical grounds.

WWII 's own "CODE SLOW"

During WWII, the millions of young people worldwide who had e potential to suffer the invariably fatal disease known as "Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis" (SBE) as a result of endemic Rheumatic Fever, were viewed by both Allied and Axis medical elites alike as 'useless mouths' during a total war.

They consumed a lot of scarce medical care and even if 1% of the time their illness was checked , it always returned a few months later and no one was ever known to survive a second or third hospital stay while suffering SBE.

True, by early 1943, Martin Henry Dawson had cured a few SBE patients , at least the first time, with moderately high amounts of what little public domain penicillin was available between 1940 and 1943 , but the Allied medical elite decided his success had to be discounted at all costs.

For if his success with SBE was accepted and publicised , it would lead overnight to a sudden sharp public demand for enormous amounts of penicillin.

(The thinking being that ordinary doctors would believe that if penicillin can cure SBE, the Mount Everest of infectious disease, then surely to God it could easily cure their patient's less invariably fatal infection.)

This would guy the game for those who hoped to use penicillin as a secret weapon of war - keeping it secret from the Allied public and hence the Axis-friendly diplomatic corps, so it was only available  to the Allied side during the big D-Day push.

It would also guy the game for those who hoped to hold off the public demand for this miracle drug until it had been safely synthesized and patented, when Big Pharma would finally freely sell it to everybody dying of bacterial infections ---- provided the dying or their families also had big wallets.

The hope was to keep Dawson's success out of the public eye until penicillin had been both patented and had been a surprise success on D-Day - mostly by denying him anymore public domain penicillin to repeat his feats.

He was known as not the type to 'spill all' to the press if he was denied more penicillin.

The SBEs wouldn't be denied all medical care and simply left to die, tempting as that was, because that could backfire and clash fearsomely with the Allied talk of the Four Freedoms.

Instead, they would be "code slow"-ed to death : given enormous amounts of useless (and abundant) sulfa drugs so their families would think something useful was being done for them, when it actually was not.

Unfortunately for these schemers, a fiery Italian American doctor,Dante Colitti, armed with his own private grudge against a medical elite for being prejudiced against allowing Italian Catholic cripples to get medical licenses, was far more willing to go to the media.

He got the master of the Yellow Press, Citizen Hearst and his paper chain, to go full out on behalf of this miraculous Yellow Magic stuff.

The rest, as they say, is history.

For in the end, "Code Slow" proved no match against "Code Yellow" .

A "Good News Story" from the "Bad News War".....

Wartime Penicillin intended to be secret and synthetic

It ended up public and 'public domain' natural, thanks to Henry Dawson and his supporters.

The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.

Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.

The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.

That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.

Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.

So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.

But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.

A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti,  got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....