Showing results by author "Beth Alderman" in All Categories

It is almost the year of the millennium, and Melissa meets her college friends Sarah and Doug and her first and only true love John for a reunion in Hyde Park. All four are in the midst of their careers. All struggle with the compromises that have marred their happiness. All wish to change the world, each in a different way. Sarah has left her government job for a new life as a yoga teacher. Doug is helping to birth a new value-based economy. John is a successful academic doctor. Melissa is ailing.

It’s the early 1970s. Melissa and her friends begin their first year of college in the inner city of Chicago at a time when post-assassination riots, Great Society scholarship programs, and veterans returning from Vietnam create a sometimes explosive confluence of urban and rural, rich and poor, white and black, educated and uneducated. Coming of age in a violent, unjust, and yet hopeful time, they struggle to reconcile their hopes and opportunities with the shadows of war and the tragic limitations of colliding ideologies and ambitions.

After a fifteen-year search, the author found a doctor whose elimination diet relieved her brain fog. This enabled her to complete her self-study and to construct an actionable new diagnosis: chronic ambient poisoning. Unseen by doctors and obscured by a myriad of false diagnoses, chronic ambient poisoning defies late modern, fragmented, accuracy-challenged medical systems. It also reveals that human-caused habitat injuries that afflict birds, bees, and other species are also affecting humans while driving evolved life toward death as asteroid strikes have done in the past.

Colette, Melissa’s childhood friend, abandons her marriage and home in Maine and flies to Melbourne. There she is taken in by her friend Reggie, who seems to know the secret of joy. Colette joins in the lives of striking individuals who lead her to view sexuality as a manifestation of the sacred.

Melissa’s deathbed request catapults her son Aaron on a journey from her family’s Mississippian clinic to the Salish Sea to claim a mysterious legacy. Meeting his niece Rafa en route, he continues overland with her, and uncle and niece come to know and depend on each other. On arriving at the Saltspring Island Research Center (SIRC), Sarah, now the keeper of the center’s narratives, confesses that Aaron’s legacy is a task: to apply his mother’s philosophy to SIRC’s lifeways in order to revitalize it.

A decade later in Australia, Parvati and Björn give up on effecting meaningful restoration there. Dirk, while on his annual circuit of the north, arrives in Jokkmok for the annual Sami gathering to learn that SIRC is in crisis.

Having come to know the community, Aaron receives his legacy as a series of enactments of SIRC’s history. The surviving members of his mother’s old friendship group—Sarah, Doug, and John—join the audience and performers in processing and adapting their shared narrative. In the intervals between enactments, Rafa undergoes initiation while Aaron explores the composer, an instrument that enables a player to evoke memories with images and express the player’s responses as soundscapes.

It’s the late 1980s, and Connie Martin, a doctor working for the Epidemiology Intelligence Service of the CDC, is called to Colorado to investigate an alarming outbreak of birth defects. Born illegitimate in the San Luis Valley as Consuela Martín, a name known only to close friends and to her beloved gamer and programmer husband, she arrives as an unknown. Joined by environmental activists who suspect the state’s Superfund sites and by doctors and parents who fear for its children, Connie attempts to discover the link between habitat destruction and damage to innocents.