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californiadreaminghq · 5 years

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Oh good, you made it!

Did you guys know Rose was coming? She brought Birdie May, The Heart of Glass! And just on time! Grab a drink, find a spot, and make sure you finish everything on the checklist. The band is just getting started – you have 24 hours to send in your account! We’re so glad you’re here!

I. OUT OF THE STUDIO

NAME/ALIAS: Rose

AGE: 23

PRONOUNS: She/her

II. ON STAGE

DESIRED SKELETON: The Heart of Glass

NAME: Birdie May

FACE CLAIM: Lily James

AGE: 28

OCCUPATION: Concertina/Keys for Indigo Dusk

III. INTERVIEW

Answer the following questions in your character’s voice:

If you could do anything in the world for a living, what would it be?

“This! I’m doing it, aren’t I? I mean, sure, I’d love to get my go at the guitar once in a while, maybe do some writing, but other than that, it’s hard to imagine wanting anything else. This is the dream, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Nothing in the world could compare to this right here.”

If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?

“You know, it’s funny. I spent my whole childhood wishing I could get away, but now that I’m away, I’m just wishing I could get back home. It’s been a long while since I left, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a sky as blue or night as peaceful/…listening to cicadas in the summer…sittin’ on the porch, some sweet tea…Joey runnin’ ‘round the yard chasin’ Red…” She lost herself in the memories, that too familiar yearning for a time long gone. No amount of wishing could make it all come back - even if it could, she knew the memories were sweeter than the reality. “Of course, Los Angeles is beautiful, but you know…“there’s no place like home”! That starts to seem more true each and every day.”

What is one thing that makes you different than anyone else?

“My winning smile! Nah, I’m just kidding you! I don’t think there’s anything that makes me all that different from anybody. I’m just another girl who loves music. There’s lots of us out there, especially in LA. But I don’t know, maybe my name? You don’t find too many people named Birdie, do ya?”

IV. BACKSTAGE

(death cw, alcoholism cw, restrictive diets cw)

The woman we know today as Birdie May was actually born May Beth Dixon. Sixth child to a farmer and a seamstress in rural North Carolina, little May had to fight to get even a hint of attention. Her older brothers and sisters had their loud shouting voices to break through the crowd while May was, what it seemed like at the time, cursed with an itty bitty bird voice. What were her chirps to her siblings’ roars? If it weren’t for her little brother, Joseph, or Joey as May liked to call him, it’s likely she’d never be heard at all. Joey was everything to May - her sun, moon, and stars, and she’d never let him forget it. Every morning began with a big ol’ “I love you”! and every night ended with the same. They were a team, Joey and May, especially when the family was hard up for cash, which was pretty much always. More often than not, they had to ration a day’s worth of food to last a week, and it was four to a bed in their tiny cabin, but somehow, they made ends meet. That is, till Joey got sick.

It didn’t happen often, someone catching an illness in the family, but when it caught, it never let go. The doctor said it was some kind of flu, but that didn’t really matter in the end. By the time, he was able to get checked out, Joey was already gone. He was eight years old.

In times of trauma, a family can act in one of two ways: they get close or they grow apart. In the case of the Dixons, there was nothing good to come out of their grief. May’s dad tried to manage with a bottle. And another. And another. He’d end up drinking so much that he’d pass out and lay in bed all day. Of course, the effect this had on everyone else was nothing short of devastating, especially considering they were dealing with Joey’s death too - or at least trying to. It’s hard to grieve when you gotta make sure the cows are fed, the crops are watered, and there’s some kind of food on the table. Mama grew distant, and May’s brothers and sisters did nothing but work. There was no time to breathe, no time to think, no time to live.

Sometime during her 16th year, May ran away from home. She took her father’s old guitar, a flask of whiskey for courage, and the one picture she had of Joey. Hitting the road, little May hitchhiked her way West. Where exactly she was going, she didn’t know, but that didn’t matter. She just had to get out of there. If she was gonna survive in this life, she couldn’t stay in that tiny cabin. She’d die in there - just like Joey.

Hitchhiking cross country might not’ve been the safest thing to do, but thankfully, minus the occasional creep, she avoided any huge bumps in the road. For the most part, people were friendly and happy to help out a wayward traveler, especially one with such a spirit. Since she had no money, May would thank her saviors with a song or two, if they were up for it. She’d sing them her favorites: Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly. If they were enjoying themselves, she’d give ‘em an original or two - if she was feeling frisky, she’d make one up on the spot. This was how she got herself all the way to Los Angeles. It was unlike any city she’d ever seen (granted, the only “city” she knew was Boone with a population at around 3,000), and May could feel it in her bones, this place was gonna last her awhile.

With the success of her musical hitchhiking adventures, and virtually no skills aside from farming and the instruments she picked up when she was young, May decided to try her luck at busking. It got her a few dollars - enough to grab some food, but it definitely wasn’t enough to live off of. This was when she met her first love. Well, he was a love at the time through May’s eyes, but anyone not clouded by cupid would recognize the ugly truth. She saw him as her knight in shining armor, while he saw her as a cute country hick he could use for a little bit and then toss back onto the street. The end of that relationship initiated a string of similar relationships: May finding someone who promised their heart, only to have them crush hers instead. All the while, she kept playing her music, not knowing if anything would come of it, but it felt right. Through everything, there was the music.

Eventually, her persistence paid off: May was discovered and started playing in a band. From then on out, things were looking up. Were. Since joining the band, her professional life has certainly grown by leaps and bounds, but her personal life, well…let’s just say, you can take the girl out of the mess, but you can’t take the mess out of the girl, and if there’s one thing the celebrity news media loves, it’s a mess. She tries to stay out of it, but there comes a point where she’s also gotta live her life. The only thing is, how do you do that without adding fuel to the fire? With every new headline, she wonders if that’ll ever be possible. And is it all even worth it? Yes. Yes, of course it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard.

V. ENCORE

first of all, i know i said danielle campbell, but we’ll ignore thataslkjfh

i’m really excited for miss birdie’s growth. right now, she still depends greatly on others for her happiness, but i hope to see her independence grow as she’s developed and interacts in the plot!! honestly, my ultimate goal is for her to grow into a no bs-having, fully confident in herself dolly-like figure. we’ll have to see if that actually happens for her!

also, i tried to keep her initial involvement with indigo dusk vague in the bio since i don’t wanna step on visions of how the group was actually formed!

i made a pinterest board for her here and a playlist for her here! (tbh, i’ll probably be adding to them until the submit closesasjkdfh)

a headcanon i have: when may joined indigo dusk, it was decided she needed a stage name (may beth dixon didn’t really have the kind of ring to it they were wanting), so she kept her first name as her last, and came up with “birdie” because that was the nickname joey gave her whenever she’d sing to him.

#accepted

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mrb-neiu-102 · 6 years

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Week 4 - Marc Maron - The First Marriage

I guess we can start at the end but it’s really the middle. Let’s just call it the really bad part. My second wife, Mishna, brought it to my attention that I had an anger problem. She didn’t say it like that. What she said was, “I’m leaving.”

Then she took her vagina and left.

I had it coming, I guess. I knew from the start that all I was doing was trying to hold on to her because she gave my life purpose and she was fucking stunning. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a person. Maybe if I had just relaxed, trusted myself, trusted her, didn’t freak out, everything would have been okay, but I am not capable of doing any of those things. We were fighting the odds from the beginning. When I met her I was a miserable drunk and she was just a kid. I was also married.

***

My first wife, Kim, was a nice woman. I loved her. I shouldn’t have married her. I did it because I didn’t know how to break up with her. I was too scared. It was too comfortable. She was a bit naive. I was a bit out of my mind. I thought that’s what marriage was rooted in: fear, comfort, and lies. The triumvirate. I had grown to believe that I would never be happy but if I at least were married I could rest my chaos on a firm emotional mattress, that marriage would make things okay, normal-ish. They weren’t. I felt like I was drowning in my bed.

I understood exactly what I was getting into with my first marriage. It was 1995. I was a thirty-two-year-old comic. When I met her, six years before we got married, I was just starting out. Comedians in their infancy are generally selfish, irresponsible, emotionally retarded, morally dubious, substance-addicted animals who live out of boxes and milk crates. They are plagued with feelings of failure and fraudulence. They are prone to fleeting fits of manic grandiosity and are completely dependent on the acceptance and approval of rooms full of strangers, strangers the comedian resents until he feels sufficiently loved and embraced.

Perhaps I am only speaking for myself here.

I was looking for something that would make sense of things. I didn’t know what. It was vague to me. I had an itchy soul.

My brother was getting married. He asked me to be the best man. I was all fucked-up on drugs at the time. I go to the wedding and it’s a big Jewish event. We’re all under the chuppah. My brother’s marrying this woman. She’s got a hot Jewish maid of honor who is giving me some heat. I’m looking at the bride-to-be through the haze of a cocaine and booze hangover and thinking to myself, “If she’s going to take my brother, I’m going to take her friend.” That’s sort of like love at first sight.

So I charmed her friend, aggressively. Fortunately for me, she lived in the same city, Boston. So within a few weeks, I’d moved my boxes into her apartment and terrorized her into loving me, sweetly. I was the black sheep, the brother failing rehab who had hung his hopes on a dream of show business, and was nothing but fucking trouble. Somehow, she found all of that very appealing. I was her ticket out of middle-class Jeweyness. She was my ticket back in.

I was with her for about six years before I asked her to marry me, which only means one thing: I shouldn’t have done it! If you wait six years to get engaged, you are on the fence. I should have known that. I should have known when I bought her a ring and proposed to her in front of the Phoenix airport. She got off a plane, she got in the car, I took out the ring, I said, “So you wanna break up or do this?” I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like that. And she agreed to marry me.

From the minute I got engaged to that woman I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I was not stable, I loved her but was not really in love with her, I was not a good man. I was just looking for something that would make me normal; make everything make sense. I figured: bourgeois, middle class, Jews. That should do it. Her dad was a psychiatrist. In retrospect he must not have been a very good one. I mean, he let her marry me. How did he misread the signs so badly? Or maybe I’m that good an actor.

As soon as I put that ring on her finger a switch was thrown. Rooms were being rented, bakers called, invitations sent out; family members were bickering and I might as well have been standing on a dock waving goodbye to a boat sailing off without me. Or maybe my body was on board, dead-eyed and vacant, but my mind was still on the dock, waving.

At first I thought we were going to get married on a mountain at sunset. But there were Jews involved, so that wasn’t going to happen. Her mother put the kibosh on that plan with one sentence: “Esther can’t make it up the hill.” There’s always an Esther and she’s not going up the hill.

The other switch that got thrown the moment I got engaged was the one in my head that dropped the needle into this groove: How the fuck did I get into this? Why am I in this? How do I get out of this? Right up to the day of our wedding I was thinking, “I can’t do this.”

As I got closer, the fantasy started to take shape: “What if I just walk out on the altar?” That would’ve been amazing.

Can you imagine if you were up on the altar and the rabbi said, “Do you take this woman?” and you said, “You know what, I don’t! HA HA HA!!!” What a cathartic, profound moment that would be. At that moment everyone you know in your life would think you were a fuckin’ asshole and you would be truly free. How often do you get that opportunity? “Yeah, fuck all of you!” You could just step out from under the chuppah, walk slowly past a crowd of stunned faces, climb onto a horse, ride to Mexico, and become a cowboy. That’s how real cowboys are made. Show up at a bar in Juarez and say, “Hola, amigo. What can I get for this ring?” Clink.

I didn’t do that. I married her. I married her for the wrong reason—because it was safe. I believed at that time that people got married when they had that moment, when they’re looking at themselves in the mirror and say, “Holy shit. I’m going to compromise my dreams, get fat, sick, old, and die. I kind of want to have someone around for that.” You don’t want to be sixty, fat, sick, and alone saying to your reflection, “Look at me. I’m a fat failure.” No, you kind of want someone around to say, “It’s okay, baby. You look great. Let’s go get some Tasti D-Lite, cowboy.” You’re thinking, “I’m not a cowboy. I missed that window. Ah, Mexico.”

We were living in Manhattan but when we got married we moved out to Astoria, Queens, to be married people.

Right away I started to bust out. I had a barrel of monkeys on my back. I liked cocaine, I liked pot, I liked drinking. I was trying to keep it all under control. I was married to a woman who wouldn’t tolerate it but it started to sneak up on me. I was going on the road hanging out with gypsies and freaks and pirates and I’d come back all sweaty and broken saying, “I don’t know. I think I caught the flu on the plane.” It was nuts.

Yes, pirates. Real pirates. I don’t know what your experience is, but if you’re on a three-day blow bender, you’re going to meet a pirate. At some point after you’ve been up for about seventy-six hours in a strange apartment or hotel room you’re going to hear yourself say to someone else in the room, “Dude, why is there a pirate here?” and that person is going to say, “Be cool. He brought the coke.” And you’re gonna say, “Okay, he’s cool, but does the talking parrot have to stay? Because I’m fucked-up, man. It’s freaking me out.”

“Marc, there’s no parrot. You have a drug problem.”

“That’s what the fucking parrot said! Are you two working together? Why don’t you both get the fuck out of here and I’ll talk to the pirate for six hours.”

***

I was starting to bring the drugs home. I was not a weekend cocaine user. I’d say I was more like a half-a-week cocaine user. It’s amazing how much you can rationalize when you’re on drugs. I could actually say to myself, “Look, I’m only doing blow Wednesday through Saturday” I didn’t think I had a problem. I thought I was completely under control. I thought, “I have parameters here. I have a schedule. It’s Wednesday through Saturday.” It took me a long time to realize, “Wednesday through Saturday? You know what, Marc? Regular people never do coke! It doesn’t even cross their minds.” I would get to the drug dealer’s house early because I thought if I started early I could be done with it by nine or ten and get on with my day. Like that ever worked. Have you ever heard anyone say, “No, no, I’m good. I’ve had enough blow. Time to get on with my day”?

One day I got to the coke dealer’s house in the late afternoon, before it was dark. I was the Early Bird Special guy. When I got there he was pulling down the shades and then there was a knock on the door. A short old Colombian man with a ponytail walked in. He handed my dealer a wad of tinfoil in exchange for some cash. He was the source. I said, “Let me do some of that!” My dealer said, “Okay, just a line.”

He opened the foil to reveal what seemed to be a jewel of blow. He flaked some off the rock into two lines. I snorted them. I felt a tingling behind my eyes that spread up through my brain like a wildfire of joy coursing through my nervous system. Apparently I had never felt the effects of pure cocaine. I said, “Holy shit! Why don’t you just sell that?” He said, “Because people would never leave me alone.” Then he crushed the gemstone and dumped it into a Baggie of last night’s stepped-on crud. It was heartbreaking.

My comedy career was stalled. Dramatically stalled. I was all bloated and sweaty and fucked-up. I was hosting segments on a local TV program on the Metro Channel, which I don’t think even exists anymore. It was awful. I would interview people on the street at a desk we would haul around the city. It was a “talk show on the street” segment. It was cute but like being dead but accepting it. I was married to a woman who had just added prenatal vitamins to our kitchen vitamin lineup. I was thinking, “That can’t happen.”

I’d surrendered. I’d given up. I would lie in bed blasted on coke with my heart exploding out of my chest, next to somebody sleeping comfortably, and I wanted to wake her up to tell her I was dying but I would’ve rather just died.

***

I thought that was the only way to get out of my situation. I wanted my heart to explode. I didn’t have the guts to leave her. I didn’t have the guts to be honest. I was fucked. My career was done. I was bitter.

Then a miracle happened, I guess you can call it a miracle. I’m going to go ahead and call it that even though it ended up the disaster with which I opened this chapter. But at the time it seemed like a miracle, a silver lining. Maybe it was just foil.

I’m at the Comedy Cellar in New York. I’m hanging out. I’m sweating. I’m talking to a few young comics. I’m probably having one of these conversations: “Well, I think if you really want to talk about the history of it, Pryor was really the first....” You know the rap. Holding court. And this woman comes up to me. This woman like a spirit, an apparition. I didn’t know who she was. What she was. But this six-foot-tall, spectacular-looking being walks up to me and says, “Hey, you’re Marc Maron, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am,” I say, defensive but as charming as possible.

“What happened to you? You look like you’re going to die.”

“Huh? Yeah, well . . . what? I’m cool, I’m good. What do you mean? What’s the deal?”

“I’m just a big fan, and I don’t know, you look like you’re in trouble. If you want to get sober I can help you get sober.”

“What? You mean like meetings, AA and that kind of shit? Like the God thing? Are you a God person?”

“I can just point you in that direction.”

“Uh, okay,” I say.

In my mind I had no desire to get sober or even live, but every part of my mind and body wanted to be as close to her as possible, so I said, “Yeah. Hell yeah, I want to get sober. I need to get sober.” But in my mind all I was thinking was, “I’ll do anything with you. I’ll go anywhere. I’m going to follow you home now even if you don’t want me to follow you home.” And I did.

We walked thirty-five blocks. I smoked. We talked about cigarettes and about addiction and about comedy and about everything else. We got to her apartment. It was a walk-up on Forty-sixth Street. I’m in her living room smoking a joint, holding a Foster’s, and saying, “So, get me sober! Come on. What do you got?”

I start going to meetings, to lunch, to dinner, to wherever this perfect woman wanted to go. I fell in love as much as a newly sober, insane, angry bastard who was miserable and married could be in love, but I was in love, which meant I was going to hang every one of my hopes on this twenty-three-year-old girl. I was thirty-five.

Of course, I was married to another woman. That put a crimp in things a little bit. Courting is difficult when it has to be shrouded in mystery and secret pager codes. There was no texting then, just pagers. So we had numbers that meant, “I love you,” “I miss you,” “What are you doing?” I was running around the city, sweating and beeping.

Love is love and being in love is being in love. Wherever your loyalty is, whatever rules you think you won’t break in your life, sometimes you just can’t fight being in love. Some of the best memories of my life are moments like following her up the stairs of that Forty-sixth Street fourth-floor walk-up apartment. Watching her move up the stairs in a plaid skirt, watching her smoking cigarettes, and then laughing on her old couch, lying in her bed after we had sex and listening to her piss, feeling impressed and ecstatic, like, “Holy shit! Listen to that! It’s so powerful!” I told my friend Sam about my fascination with the power of her stream and he said it sounded like I was talking about a Thoroughbred horse. I think I was. I thought, “Maybe this is my chance to disrupt my bipolar Jew gene line.”

I didn’t know what to do. I’m in love with this woman, I’m married to this other woman, and I’m in trouble, so I call my two friends. That’s all I need, two. I need the main guy and the guy I go to when I drain the main guy.

The guys at that time were Sam, a bitter and brilliant writer, who was married and had just had a kid, and Dave, a comic and borderline sexual predator. I call Sam first and I say, “Dude, I’m in love. This is crazy. Things have been over with Kim and me for years. What should I do, man? This woman is perfect. I’m getting sober. It’s everything I wanted.” He says, “Man, you’re married. Be responsible. You made a commitment. Try to honor it. This thing will pass.” I say, “You know what, man? Take a day off.” Then I call Dave. “Hey, Dave! What’s going on? Take a break from pursuing eighteen-year-olds online and talk to me. I’m in love with this woman. She’s twenty-three and I’m married but I’m getting sober and I think it’s the right thing.” And Dave, thank God, says, “Ah, dude . . . you gotta go for it! What the fuck, man?! You only live once. This is it! This might be it!” And I’m like, “You’re right, man, thanks. I knew I could count on you.”

We all have the right to cherry-pick the advice given us in order to do exactly what we wanted to do in the first place.

As I said, courting is a little difficult when you’re married and when you’re newly sober and when the woman’s only twenty-three and you’re a dozen years older. I just know that in traditional courting this is not a conversation you should have after sex:

Me [yelling]: So, are we doing this, or what? Because I’m going to fucking leave her. Are we doing this? Do you fucking love me? Do you fucking love me? Are you taking me? Are we doing this?

Her [crying]: I don’t know!

Me [still yelling]: What the fuck!? Yes or no? Are we doing this?

Her: I guess so.

Me: Good enough. I’m on it.

If you don’t believe in magic, if you don’t believe that there are phrases, incantations, mantras, that can change the universe completely, literally change the entire course and trajectory of your life, even the objects in your periphery, you are wrong. There are. This is one of them: “Honey, I’m in love with someone else, and I’m having an affair with her.” Abracadabra! Locks are changed. Objects are moved and missing. You are dispatched into exile to a sublet on the Lower East Side, where you will remain alone, isolated, broken off from the world you knew. You deserve it. You have cut yourself off from a wife, a family, a future, your money. Everything.

But I had that girl. Yes. I had that girl. And she was enough.

We embark on this crazy thing, this girl and I. I’m getting sober. I’m going to meetings all the time. I’m writing a book. I’m doing a one-man show. Things are okay. I know some of you are thinking, “What about that other woman, you heartless fuck?” Yeah, what about her? She was a good person, I know. I felt like shit, but I had to do what I had to do. And some of you may think, “Well, you didn’t have to do that.” Well, yeah, I did. I did have to do that. It saved my life. I divorced that woman and married that girl and she eventually left me. Karma? Sure. She got me sober, though. I am still sober. I have her to thank for that.

I actually use sobriety to try to frame the pain of my second divorce. I was at the Comedy Cellar one night, miserable and in the middle of it. I was talking to the late Greg Giraldo, who was always struggling with drugs and alcohol. A struggle he eventually lost. I asked him how much money he had spent over the years on rehabs. He said, “About two hundred and fifty grand.”

My divorce cost me less than that. And I am still sober.

***

In the middle of my second divorce, from this once-magical woman, I was a broken man. I was fucked-up on all levels. I was on my way to my mother’s in Florida, which means I was in real trouble because she is really the last person I ever want to lean on. Not that she’s a bad person; she’s just a bit boundaryless and draining. I’m at the airport in Los Angeles. I’m walking through the terminal to my gate, trying to catch a 6 A.M. flight. Shattered. My duffel bag was even sad as it bounced off my butt as I walked. I was about four months into my separation from Mishna. I looked up from my drudging and that’s when I saw her: Kim and her new husband, standing with their luggage at the gate I was passing.

I think, “I can’t handle this. There’s no way” So I do that thing where you put your hand up over your forehead, look the other way, and think, “There, I’m invisible.”

I know she knows everything. Her best friend is my brother’s wife. She has to know all about the disaster that my life’s become. I get past the gate and I think I’m out of the woods but then I hear, “Marc!”

I turn around and there’s nine years of history running toward me with a very familiar gait. She gets to me and asks, concern in her eyes, “How are you doing?”

I explode in tears and uncontrollable blubbering. I cannot stop it. And without missing a beat, my first wife says, “Not so good, huh?”

I was so happy she had that moment. I deserved it, she deserved it. And the sick thing about me is that right after we had that exchange there was a part of me that thought, “So, are we good? Can I go with you now?”

Works Cited

Maron, Marc. Attempting Normal, Spiegel and Grau, 2013, pp.19-28.

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nancygduarteus · 7 years

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The Truth Teller

If you run into a left-leaning “consultant” these days, there’s a fairly good chance they used to work for the Obama administration. Scores of federal officials and bureaucrats have resigned or been fired since President Trump’s inauguration, some after realizing their goals were not in line with the new president’s.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wasn’t one of them. In fact, he seemed surprised at the suggestion that he might do something other than what he’s been doing since he began leading the institute in 1984—trying to protect people from diseases like Ebola, Zika, and HIV.

This is despite the fact that some of Trump’s policy proposals seem to directly contradict his efforts. Trump has proposed cutting funding for a program that provides HIV drugs to people in poor countries by 17 percent. Not long after, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS resigned, citing "a president who simply does not care.”

Repealing the Affordable Care Act—a move Trump has supported—would cut a key infectious disease fund in half. And Trump’s decision to reinstate a law that withholds global-health funding from organizations abroad that “perform or actively promote abortion” could hamper AIDS-relief efforts, as my colleague Joseph Frankel reported. As if that weren’t enough, Trump has also aired anti-vaccine views.

I asked Fauci if he was daunted by all these developments, and if not, how he planned to do his work in spite of them. An edited version of our conversation, which took place at the Aspen Ideas Festival, follows:

Olga Khazan: I know you've worked for every administration — you've worked for Bush, you worked for Reagan, Obama …

Anthony Fauci: Clinton.

Khazan: Clinton, he was in there too. [Given that many civil servants have resigned from the Trump administration] … when Trump was elected, did you ever think, “I can't do this one, I'm going to have to sit this one out?”

Fauci: No, not at all. I am embraced by every administration from Reagan [onward] because they realize that I speak truth to them even when they don't like it. Even if ideologically they’re very different. When I'm with Reagan, I told Reagan some of the things that I felt he should do with HIV/AIDS. He didn't listen to everything. He was a good guy but he was afraid to go public and make the bully pulpit and say, “hey everybody this is a problem, we gotta address it.” However, when I got to George H.W. Bush I became very good friends with him.

When he was vice president, he knew that you had to address the AIDS issue. I was very well-known as the AIDS person of the government because very few people were working on AIDS. And he said, “I want you to teach me about HIV. Show me, show me patients.” He wanted to learn. So it's my old adage, be nice to everybody in Washington, because one of these days they're going to be really powerful. So I was nice to the vice president and very soon thereafter he was president, so then I had a friend in the White House. I gained a reputation that I would tell you the truth, even if it was something that you didn’t like.

So the word got out that you call on this guy [Fauci], he is completely apolitical, and he'll give you the advice that you need. So I did it with George H.W. Bush, I did it with Clinton, I did it with George W. Bush and I did it with Obama. I developed the [President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] program with Bush. I mean for him to give me the opportunity to go to Africa and put together a $15 billion dollar program, that was really nice. With Obama, I was in the situation room like every week, with Ebola and then Zika and H7N9, potentially pandemic flu.

So when the next president came I'd be more than happy to advise, I'm not gonna say, “no I'm not gonna do that.”

Khazan: How do you stay motivated, since this administration has pretty openly wanted to cut a lot of global-health funding, foreign aid, AIDS research? A lot of the things that you would probably work on.

Fauci: It doesn't interfere with my motivation. I'm driven by the problems that I have to solve. Sometimes you do it with a lot of resources and sometimes you do it with less resources. I don't say, “well I'm gonna get out because we have less resources.” And as a matter of fact, we don't know what the resources are gonna be because we don't have a budget yet.

Khazan: When you look at things like Zika coming to the U.S., do you consider that to be caused more by climate change and related issues or more by human travel?

Fauci: It's much, much more human travel. I mean you may increase the range of mosquitoes during a period of time, like at the end of June they may go up to Florida. But the major determinant of Zika in the continental United States is travel-related, people who are infected in South America and Puerto Rico who travel to the United States, and that's exactly what happened. We had about five to six thousand travel-related cases of Zika that came from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, and so far we've had a total of about 220 [locally] transmitted cases, meaning people that never left Florida.

Khazan: Is a Zika vaccine ready and deployable right now? Or are we still working on it?

Fauci: We have a DNA vaccine for Zika and it's of interest. [The new vaccine uses] platform technology. The idea of growing a virus and having to kill it and then injecting it, that's so passe, as my daughter says, “so 20th century dad.” You don't want to do that. What it is right now is that we take platforms like DNA, MRNA, virus vectors, and all you need is to insert the gene of whatever protein you want expressed. In Zika it's the PREM protein which is the protein in the outer part of the virus. We have done that, done preclinical and animal, gone into phase one and we're now in phase two in Puerto Rico and in Texas and we're going into phase 2B in countries in South America depending upon what the burden of Zika is. Going from the time we sequence the Zika virus to the time it went into humans in a phase one study was 3.6 months, which is the fastest in the history of vaccinology. Which tells us we could really cut down that time from when you recognize a new infection to the time you get a vaccine at least ready for trial.

Khazan: What do you anticipate being the next thing like Zika? Or is it impossible to predict?

Fauci: The answer is we don't know, but there are certain things you need to keep your eye on. For example, will Zika come back in some South American countries where it didn't hit hard last time? Next December will be the third [hot] season in Brazil. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more cases in Puerto Rico as we get into this July and August when it's moist, humid, and a lot of mosquitoes. So I'm keeping my eye on Mexico and the border between Mexico and Texas, particularly around the Brownsville area, where you always see that jumping over the border of emerging infections. And it could be in Puerto Rico. So I'm not through with Zika.

Then the other thing is what about Yellow Fever in Brazil? If it goes into the aedes aegypti mosquito, will that then become ... there are two phases of yellow fever. One is called the sylvatic phase which means that woodsmen go into the woods chop down trees for the lumber, they get bit by a mosquito that bit a monkey, the monkey's the reservoir, they get yellow fever, they get sick. They either die or they get better. Sometimes those people move into the city, and if they get bit by an aedes aegypti, which really likes to bite humans, and you get yellow fever established in a really populous area, then you have a problem. We could get a lot of yellow fever in South America, travel to the United States, and then you wind up getting that.

So I keep my eye on that. The other thing is flu pandemic. This H7N9 bird flu in China? It jumps from a chicken to a human but it doesn't efficiently spread at all from human to human. If that starts to evolve, that could be something. So there are always these things that you keep your eye on, but the likelihood is that it’s gonna be something that you and I are not talking about right now.

Khazan: Really?

Fauci: Of course. Whoever would have thought there would have been Zika? Zika was on nobody's radar screen.

Khazan: I would think, well, you would have …

Fauci: I was thinking about Zika, but we did not know that it caused congenital abnormalities, but it was big. So there was an outbreak of Zika in the Yap islands in 2007. There was another outbreak in French Polynesia 2013. So you could have said, “Tony why didn't you start making a vaccine in 2013?” Because I didn't think it was a particularly important disease. It was trivial. Eighty percent of the people didn't get symptoms, the 20 percent that did get symptoms got mild symptoms. They got conjunctivitis, rash, fever, myalgia, it went away in five to seven days, and they were done. Then, when you go to a big country like Brazil, where you have hundreds of thousands of cases, then you start to see something that's really worrisome, namely pregnant women get infected and they have a 10 percent chance of having microcephalic baby. So that's when we realized we're dealing with a very serious disease.

Khazan: What was the $1.9 billion dollars that President Obama had asked Congress for Zika for, since there's no cure and it’s spread primarily by people traveling from other countries. What is that money primarily used for?

Fauci: We feel that if we don't stop it in South America, it inevitably is going to come to our territories, including Puerto Rico and even to the southeastern part of the United States. So a considerable amount of money will go to the CDC to do mosquito control. To do surveillance, to do testing. To determine the natural history. That takes hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. So the CDC got a lot of money. USAID got money, NIH got money, FDA got money. We got relatively little. I mean of the Zika amount, we asked for $197 million and we got $152. And we're working on a vaccine, on drugs and stuff, but a lot of it was public-health provisions. Mosquito control became very, very important. We were doing a lot of spraying in Puerto Rico, we were doing a lot of mosquito control, [such as] genetically modified mosquitoes, all that costs money.

Khazan: Do you work on the anti-vaccine movement at all?

Fauci: We don't work on it but we try and do public relations discussions. I do TV, I do radio, I do interviews like this, to make it clear that I can understand how people are concerned, but the facts, the science, countless amounts of data from independent, non-biased people indicate that A) vaccines are safe, B) they do not cause autism, and C) they don't cause those other things that people think they do.

Khazan: Have you found any messages that resonate with people, that actually change people's minds about not vaccinating?

Fauci: Yes. There is a core of people who no matter what you say, they will not believe you. They are convinced that vaccines are dangerous or they feel they don't want to take the risk of their child, even though there's two reasons to give vaccine: one is to protect your child, the other is a duty that you have to society to keep society protected.

Yet there is also a pretty good corps of people who if you explain it to them in a non-pejorative way … one of the things that I've learned works is that you don't criticize people. That's not the way to their hearts. And you've gotta approach it in saying that you could understand their concern, but these are the reasons. In the realm of science, you have to rely on the evidence base. You can't guess, you can't do spurious things.

Khazan: You said you are known for telling people hard truths. What's a hard truth that you have had to tell this administration, or might have to tell them?

Fauci: I'm all ready doing it. There is a concern that, are the data regarding safety of vaccines really strong data? And I'm not talking about the president himself, I'm talking about the people around him. And I've already met with a couple of people who were sent to me by the administration to try and convince them or to at least talk to them about what's the situation, because they believe that vaccines are dangerous. Vaccines do not cause autism, period. And that's it. Now if members of whatever administration — this administration, the last administration, or the next administration — I'll have to just tell them what I know based on evidence. Whether they believe it or not, it's up to them.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/the-truth-teller/531561/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 7 years

Text

The Truth Teller

Olga Khazan: I know you've worked for every administration — you've worked for Bush, you worked for Reagan, Obama …

Anthony Fauci: Clinton.

So when the next president came I'd be more than happy to advise, I'm not gonna say, “no I'm not gonna do that.”

Khazan: When you look at things like Zika coming to the U.S., do you consider that to be caused more by climate change and related issues or more by human travel?

Khazan: Is a Zika vaccine ready and deployable right now? Or are we still working on it?

Khazan: What do you anticipate being the next thing like Zika? Or is it impossible to predict?

Khazan: Really?

Fauci: Of course. Whoever would have thought there would have been Zika? Zika was on nobody's radar screen.

Khazan: I would think, well, you would have …

Khazan: Do you work on the anti-vaccine movement at all?

Khazan: Have you found any messages that resonate with people, that actually change people's minds about not vaccinating?

Khazan: You said you are known for telling people hard truths. What's a hard truth that you have had to tell this administration, or might have to tell them?

Article source here:The Atlantic

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