Ugh Season in Bevery Hills

Sometimes business takes you
where you would not otherwise go.

It's Ugh season in Beverly Hills

Morning meeting's done, but not my lunch.

This place inspires my internal grump.


Nuthin says comfort like ughs, short shorts,
Egyptian cotton spaghetti strap tank
and a fine wool Burberry scarf.

Pink tie, periwinkle shirt with white cuffs,
collar & angel hair stripes.
So he's the one blowin smoke into my Venezuelan Arepa!
He appears to be talkin to himself, but no:
"Has ABC closed the door on that?"

Big haired frumpy matron in her black Mercedes sedan
pulls out the handicap permit
puts it on the mirror and off she sprints into Umberto.
I guess the meter was just too expensive for her.

Phil Spector look alike in new faded torn jeans
sports a luscious brunette on his arm.
How much does that Patek Phillipe replacement cost?

PC red wigged mullet, in buttery tassled loafers
wears that faux fir vest proudly.
In designer everything, her pants stop dowdy
too far above the ankle.

4 more in this parade,
purposely faded and frayed
but for Orange Hermes Birkin,
Chanel, Vuitton and Longchamp bags.
You won't see Coach here.

Even that maid in her baggy cotton tee
carries a Burberry bag.
I'm guessin that ain't a pop off either.

Red synthetic slinky tunic
cascades off her shoulder
rhythmically flouncing
to the tune she taps
with the wooden heels of her Tony Lamas.

Cream spandex tee stretched
transparently tight over perky breasts
padded and cooped up in Victoria's secret.
Pompom silk rose bouquets substitute for sleeves.

How did that limping Argentinian cowboy
in his big white Stetson,
polyester khakis and Nikes get here?

I'm done with my Reina Pepiada at the Coupa Cafe,
surprisingly reasonably priced.

Yum! I'm outa here!

This parking stub's gonna cost me more than lunch.
Hey, it's a write off.

Don't sweat the small stuff.

Blind Men on the Elephant, part 2

Recently a lively discussion was born on Leon Chaitow's fb page regarding an essay published by Eyal Lederman pretty much refuting the value of manual therapy altogether, except, of course, for his own 'harmonic' version of passive joint mobilization. It also challenged most assumptions about how postural variations might be contributing to back pain, by suggesting that they don't contribute much, if at all.

This got the muscle energy technique, structural integration practitioners and a few chiros knickers all in a twist. Refutations will be published in Leon's April JBMT journal.

Personally, I love when myths are scattered asunder replaced with a more sound scientific understanding. I've also invested many hours practicing meditation techniques based entirely on myths and unproven Asian world views proposing that Enlightenment can be reached in one lifetime. I guess if I'm a true believer in anything it's that here in duality, dichotomies reign.

One thing that bugs me in the bodyworking communities, and I say communities because some schools of practice seem to think their methods are far superior to the good old effleurage, kneading, compression, petrissage of 'Swedish' massage, and therein lies the rub. (Not only am I gonna squeeze all I can get outa these corny metaphors, but I'm gonna be blatant about it.) 'Different strokes for different folks' in this case should be appended to different strokes for different purposes.

The more tools a person has up her sleeves (albeit short ones while working) the better chance she has of pulling just the right one out when conditions call for it, maybe even a rabbit or two might appear. Some of this work does involve the ordinary magic of re-framing, in every sense, since it is the unconscious mind of the client that is doing all the healing, when that is the focus of the work.

It isn't always the focus of my work, thankfully. I'm interested in an ounce of prevention and in supporting the experience of open relaxed states of mind as having value in our all to busy world. I think those foci are valuable enough to stand up for, or lay down depending whether you are the active or receptive component of the mutual meditative experience a good massage can be. But that's a theme for another discussion.

I love learning from what my clients bring me and I also appreciate the serendipity that occurs in that play. Today an e-mail from one of them brought me a new link exploring this topic from a different POV. It emphasizes the importance of muscle endurance for back pain prevention. Discovering that an aspect of strength is a key factor introduces a whole new discussion of this issue, IMO, without necessarily obliterating all the belief systems of structurally oriented manual therapists, though it does poke a big hole in them. This article's studies appear to prove the importance of the specificity of the kind of back strength that prevents low back pain, which I think gets overlooked by many manual therapists. In this case, it appears that back muscle endurance is a key factor in predicting/preventing low back pain incidents.

Sometimes on Rolfing pages it seems to me that folks seem to think if they release the fascial adhesions, some of which are believed to be appearing in meridians in certain circles these days, that the structure will automatically correct and remain so. I've always thought that was a short sighted, or sided, view, if you prefer.

Some of the underlying reason for shortening/tightening of muscles or fascia around a joint or a forward drooping head is more probably a sequelae of weakness or instability in synergistic components of the structural biomechanics of that area. That's discussed well, I think, in the hammie aspect of this SIB link Ron sent me, which refutes, it seems to me, many assumptions of Rolfing/Structural Integration/Anatomy Trains/MET practitioners regarding the importance of, and their role in influencing the anterior/posterior alignment of the ilia.

The other aspect of this article I love is what the studies of ab exercises show regarding specificity as a law of adaptation. If you don't train in planes that target the obliques, they won't be firing....seems obvious, but nice to know that assumption is true. These ab studies also support Eyal Lederman's "Myth of Core Stability" essay (pdf link in green table under books on right) refuting the overemphasis and viral blossoming of myriad diverse 'core training' paradigms as essential for back health in training and bodywork belief systems these days.

In that light Paul Ingraham (who really likes Lederman's essays, not surprisingly) presents a well written expose of the over emphasis of structuralism in the fields of manual therapy. He does not, however, in this piece, propose a workable alternative view, although he espouses trigger point work as a valid manual therapy emphasis elsewhere on his site.

I'm still chewing on the cud of all this and enjoying the flavors that emerge from this mental exercise. I do think, however, that many folks with huge investments in structuralism as the basis of their work had better be prepared to amend their views a bit or be swept aside with those who once were sure the Earth is flat.

That's gonna be hard to do if you're raking in truckloads of coin teaching these methods and their underlying assumptions as CEU seminars to DCs, DOs, physical therapists and bodyworkers worldwide. The assertion that what you're teaching is worth addressing in therapy is not much more substantial than a straw dog argument in rhetorical play could feel like a bit of an earthquake. These essays are the equivalent of techtonic plates shifting. Some true believer acolytes and sychophants in the bodywork community who have invested lots of money, time and tethered their world views and careers to these assumptions are bound to get pissed off. Always happens when sacred cows get sacrificed to sound scientific discovery. Hey, those scientists who proposed the Earth is round and not the center of the universe were pretty unpopular in their communities and considered to be thinking way out on the fringe.

I'm not a big fan of encouraging the blind men to explore the elephant thinking that each has 'the' answer as to what this elephant really is. I'd prefer if we could have the humility to explore and dialogue acknowledging that we're still just feeling out mere parts of a much more interesting and mysterious whole.

Caught in the Cycle of Self Concern

Bob Thurman is a Buddhist scholar and teacher who holds an anonymously endowed chair at Columbia and does great work, IMO, from that seat.

He recently opened a talk at the TED conference with this quote from Albert Einstein:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness...
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Bob's speech at TED calls us to remember what it is we know and do that is the antidote to the messes in this world caused by greed and self interest in pursuit of rampant desire. It's worth the 20 minutes it'll take to listen to its entirety.

Here's a piece of art that also speaks beautifully revealing the specific Net of Indra made of organizations worldwide working for peace, proper stewardship, social justice. Don't forget to zoom in when you get there.

Blind Men on the Elephant part 1

The discussion of psychologically oriented bodywork was brought up in fb again, this time on Michelle Doyle's wall.

Here's my comment on Michelle's wall:

I think it's brings up important ethical questions. It also begs the question, when, in the world of alternative therapy and self help gurus, is a person practicing/teaching therapy without a license? I don't really know the answer to how the practice of psychotherapy is defined. I suspect it is probably different from state to state.

Ever feel like one of those blind men on the elephant with regard to our own little views of what's actually going on in the mind/body/spirit realm of the bodywork we share with our clients?!

In my experience, an emotional, psychological release is not always necessary. Sometimes it is and the condition doesn't resolve until that, and it's coinciding energy pattern in the emotional body or meridian system or energy body or whatever your vernacular chooses to call it, is addressed. But sometimes, not really, it's just more simple than that.

I also get a lot of athletes in my studio who have recently over-trained some part or area in playing the edge in their sports. Some of them see me weekly as part of their active recovery paradigms. In those cases it is often quite nuts and bolts. The right combination of specific massage techniques, some ice, some rehab exercises in place of whatever was recently over-training the weak link and they're good to go....and no it doesn't usually come back unless it gets re-injured.

So my view of this is that sometimes dysfunction is sourced in purely exogenous factors and doesn't require psycho-emotional release, sometimes it is a somatic manifestation of an endogenously sourced configuration. Then it's a deeper healing that must occur.

Mark Lamm and I had a dialogue about this recently, over on his fb page including speculations as to where these emotional traumas might be stored. It was long enough and interesting enough to me that I then posted on my blog with his permission. It can be also accessed from my fb wall as 'No Harm No Foul' or networked blogs if anyone is interested in that discussion.

One of the points I attempted to make in that dialogue, which I think is important and which does not usually get addressed in those schools of bodywork that are psychologically oriented, is that abreaction alone, including energy balancing, is often not enough to help a person fully integrate a newly remembered trauma, especially from physical or sexual abuse and especially if the person was young (pre-verbal) when it happened. Communication skills with loved ones and re-balancing of family dynamics is part of the integration aspect of this type of healing.

Bodyworkers, [massage therapists, physical therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths] are not qualified to do this work. We haven't been trained as psychologists or psychiatrists. I think that if we are trained in a psychologically oriented school of body work not taught by someone who is, at least, a trained psychologist we can very easily tap into a reserve of disowned material not unlike what is happening in the gulf right now, with the ooze making a mess in an untamed way and subjecting the client to ongoing unnecessary psycho-emotional pain by remaining stuck in a not fully resolved upwelling of something that was being held in the unconscious mind in a dissociative state for a reason.

Lomi body work (not to be confused with Lomi Lomi) taught by Robert Hall, M.D. and Richard Heckler in No. Cal. is a psychologically aware system originally taught by a team, one of which is a black belt in Aikido and one of which was a psychiatrist. I think the work teaches adequate respect for the complexity of the process of integration as an aspect of emotional release.

There are several schools of bodywork, however, teaching massage therapists and physical therapists to go for the energy cysts or myofascial unwindings coincidental to unremembered traumas in droves. This kind of work is being taught by physical therapists or osteopaths who have no clue about what to do to help a client integrate this material and are hubristic enough to think that it's not even necessary.

Frankly I think that's irresponsible and unethical. Since these folks have not done any population studies using Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) or another psych evaluation tool [*see below] to see if their clients are in fact better off a month, 6 months, a year after the work they will never have to know if a large percentage end up stuck in some PTSD state of perpetual victimhood.

I really have an ethical problem with their assumptions, and the hubris behind them.

*From Wiki: "Clinicians can use the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, HRSD in place of, or in conjunction with, the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, the Wechsler Depression Rating Scale, the Raskin Depression Rating Scale, the Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS), the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS)"

Al Gore's "Massage"

Over in fb land there's a fan page somewhere that's recruiting massage therapists to write complaints to ABC for denigrating our profession on "The View" in a discussion of Al Gore's acquittal of 'alleged' sexual harassment of an Oregonian therapist recently.

A lively dialogue ensued on Erik Dalton's Myofascial Therapy page, to which I made this contribution. It was a long enough and covered enough massage related territory that I thought it worth preserving here, so here's my 2 cents worth:

...I did hit the link someone posted who was trying to recruit fellow complainers to join the campaign. Actually, although I agree with Angela that these 'ladies' (on the View) have probably never had a good massage from a well trained therapist. A genuine massage professional on the show who could give great hands on demo with instructive monologue would do more to redeem our profession than a bunch of whiney complaints, IMO. Maybe those letter writers among you should suggest they invite Erik(Dalton) on to do just that.

Certainly Lizzie Huffnpuff needs a good rub out. I've seen short excerpts from the show over on Crooks and Liars when the political 'discussions' run afoul, often it's this brain dead conservative spokesperson saying something mean spirited with her foot firmly stuck in her uninformed mouth...yet again.

If you looked at the clip, she's the one who bought a massage for her hubbie as a present. When a "hot chick" with massage table and nice music in hand arrived, she freaked out. She admittedly sat in the other room wondering if he was gonna stray, probably with her ear to the other side of the door listening for the first inkling of moans or pleasure sighs wherein she would burst thru the door and save him from his 10 minutes of pure bliss. Just not having to listen to that nasal voice for a hour would be relaxing enough, IMO.

They questioned whether the therapist was legit because they heard that the rub was a 3 hour one. I, of course, tend to believe the therapist's version, but hey, I'm clearly biased in her favor. They do have state licensing in Orgegon requiring 500 hours training from a legit school and I'm guessing the hotels want to see the license before letting the table go up the elevator, unless, of course they condone hoes disguised as therapists and pay the regular fines for that or make exceptions for the likes of Al Gore, which ain't unlikely.

Gotta admit tho, a 3 hour out call in a hotel, if that really was the case, is a bit iffy on a zoftig non athlete like Gore, no matter how tall he is. So right there the therapist made mistake #1.
If she saw him more than once after he made inappropriate suggestions to her as, I think someone suggested was the case, mistake #2. If she saw him a second time after inappropriate dialogue without her tape recorder going to substantiate her version of the he said she said, mistake #3, and a doozy, 'cause the powers that be are always gonna side with the powerful man in a he said she said. Not knowing that and thinking she could report this and be believed, mistake #4.

If you guys don't think massage is still a fringe profession in a variety of circles then you need to get out more. Pick up a copy of the LA Weekly and look at all the call girls (and boys) advertising 'outcall massage' in there. Remember the guy who brought down Ted Haggert, a gay 'massage therapist'....who sold dope, with tape recordings to back up his version of the story, which is probably the only reason he was believed.

Right here in river city, at Golds Gym, the 'Mecca of Bodybuilding' there's a whole underground of bodybuilders who 'train', 'stretch' and offer who knows what other services to the known schmoes, yep, that's what they call em. Schmoes are underdeveloped lawyers and businessmen who also train at Golds and who like to be handled and squeezed, probably often with happy endings included, by the muscular strong bodybuilders and are willing to pay $450+/hr for the treat. Hey, ya gotta finance that growth hormone somehow!*&?? You don't even want to know how I learned about the schmoes, but suffice it to say, it was the hard way, no pun intended.

Ethics in our field is important. Great demonstrations of legitimate work go a long way to counter all this mishigosh which, unfortunately, yes is still being done in the name of massage.
You can't entirely fault those girls on the view for not knowing the difference. They probably haven't experienced the difference. If dibs go out for demonstrations though, I'll take Joy Behar or Whoopi. They're so baudy, funny and bold. Love those two. Someone else can educate Barbara or attempt such with fluffhead huffnpuff, if that's even possible. Maybe if it was a handsome guy like Erik or Tom Myers, she'd finish her legit massage experience cooing just like her hubbie probably did. Maybe she might even experience, in presence of the subtle silence of an aware presence, the opening to finally take ownership of some of the disowned unconscious agendas in her psyche's shadow so she could stop projecting them all over her hubbie and the rest of us.

My bottom line on all this is sorta beside the point, but here it is anyway, I HATE out calls. The balance of power, professionally, is stacked in the wrong direction, right from the get go.

No Harm, No Foul

This is from of a fb dialogue with Mark Lamm on the possible emotional storage/release mechanisms implicated in massage therapy practice, when folks remember past trauma in the massage studio.


"I agree, Mark, our views of how the body saves the stories/emotional content of our encounters with life's traumas and is stimulated to facilitate the remembering and reorganizing of them might be a bit different from each other. Reading the article I sent you, and others, like the one you sent me, is part of my effort to refine my view of the experiences I have with folks in the massage studio.

You said two things about your view of this process that interest me and seem to be different ways of looking at it.

"My understanding is that the brain receives a holographic imprint of a trauma event as can be evidenced by tomography or neuro-scanning. I believe that the recording of the event is stored in the body's tissue and when there is a stimulus that replicates any part of the original trauma event, the brain, functioning as a processor, activates the response mechanism."

There's alot there to chew on. Haven't read about any brain scientists talkin about the holographic imprint idea. If you're referring back to Dr. Hamer's ideas, those are pretty controversial, a bit iffy IMO, and generally the rings he's giving great importance to are viewed as artifacts on inferior quality MRI equipment and not of any real diagnostic significance. Perhaps there's other brain research you've found that I have not read about yet that supports your holographic view. Sounds like an interesting idea.

The second part of that paragraph coincides more with a view I'm currently embracing as well. I think the upwelling of a memory complex when we touch an injured or traumatically charged area is a form of PTSD, it is an associative phenom, but the actual memory and emotional charge are stored in the brain as processor, as you so aptly put it.

This is a quite different view than the idea of actual memory/emotion stored locally in the tissue, which you seemed to also espouse in the sentence:"it is not the animal's brain but the tissue memory". What's the memory mechanism in muscle or fascial cells capable of that kind of complexity, somewhere in the mitochondria? a change in the way the RNA duplicates, or pacinian corpuscles, meissner's corpuscles those adaptive receptors responsive to light touch, maybe the merkel cells, or somewhere more mysteriously diffused in the somatosensory system in the tissues rather than in the homunculus back in the ole brain processor, perhaps it's in controllers of protein translation or synaptic plasticity. Maybe those young scientists in the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society will actually figure it out someday soon.

There are a number of working models of how this 'tissue memory' occurs taught by several schools of bodywork as though they are facts. That bothers me, since none of them has a scientifically sound explanation for what they're teaching and some of them just don't make good physiological sense and so fall into the category of pseudo-science. Especially problematic when they get mixed together with ideas like having a dialogue with or channeling the client's 'inner physician', or asking the dolphins to inform us where the problem is by going in the tank with them to do the work and watching were they touch their noses, gadzooks!. We hear about energy cysts, tissue memory, cellular memory, myofascial unwinding as an instrument of releasing a locally stored emotional pattern in the fascia.....with the assumption that a simple abreaction alone is enough to release and integrate the stored memories.

It's that assumption regarding these ideas that I fear is ripe with possibly harmful potential, not the rash spreading of simplistic assumptions as fact, per se.

Most massage therapists, including myself, who encounter these emotional releases in their clients have little or no actual academically sourced psychological training. Therein lies the bug. Abreaction alone is not enough to release and integrate the psycho-emotional complex that fixates around a childhood abuse for example, especially if it happened early. Yet massage therapists in droves are out there pulling on legs and thinking that the ideomotor response of spontaneous movements arising are actually healing the emotional/psychological traumas embedded with this event(s). Some of these methods might address the somatic kinks in the tissues better than others. Which ones? We have no answers because the studies have not been done yet comparing them for somatic effectiveness. Yet many folks are making big bucks teaching that their methods are intrinsically effective and complete healing paradigms.

IMO, teaching that that is the case is naive, shows an incomplete understanding of healing (and ideomotor responses) and can cause those therapists who believe they have the answer to how to effectively work with these conditions to be inadvertently potentially harmful to their clients.

Attempting to understand these phenoms intellectually to refine the view of what's going on is interesting valuable and important, IMO, but in the meantime, when doing the work, if I find someone flinches when I address the inner thigh, for example, I'm going to find out if they're in psychotherapy already or find a skillful way to suggest it before I go right to the possible negative sexual encounter that might be underlying that flinch.

If abuse occurs, especially early in a person's life, it takes a lot more than remembering it to help integrate that memory into the psyche without that person malingering in a state of traumatic victimhood. It can effect their current relationships with husbands, wives, parents, children. Not all psychologists are effective at helping someone balance that information and emotional upheaval either but at least they're trained to understand that integration of the trauma of an event is something that takes time and work and is not an automatic result of simply remembering it in an altered state in the presence of an empathic observor/facilitator. Many schools of massage assume and teach that abreaction fully releases the trauma from the tissues, therefore person, and that is enough for a complete healing to occur. That assumption is what I consider irresponsible and potentially harmful to the client.

It's my hope that if we're willing to examine our currently held beliefs about the work and dialogue intelligently about it, that we can help each other to refine the view and improve our abilities to be of benefit to the beings with whom we are privileged to interact.

I think ole Hippocrates got the oath right and that we, too, should attempt to do no harm, even though we do not practice medicine. 'Course his requirement that a new physician swear to the healing gods that he/she will uphold the ethical standards, might not appeal to the Christians in the crowd, but vowing to uphold the standards as a solemn oath knowing the importance of ethics when working with other beings is the part of that act we will do well to also espouse.

I do love all the funny and thoughtful quotes you regularly bring to us and your willingness to devote some of your time to engage in this dialogue. In that spirit I'll toss you this one that gets thrown around a bit, so you've probably read it more than once, but Yogi Berra had a funny way of saying the obvious that I personally love:

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is."

"

Courage goes before us.

My clients have always been valuable teachers. They inspire me to do better and bring me stuff I would not have thought about without them. It's one of the things I love about sharing massage. The energy goes both ways.

Here's an email I received this morning from one of them. She didn't write this text, but felt it was worthy of going viral. I wish it were attributed so I could thank the woman who did write it, but I agree that it is worthy of being seen, so here it is.

This is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who lived only 90 years ago.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.

And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

Lucy Burns
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.

Dora Lewis
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold.
Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.

Alice Paul
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh MY memory. Some women won't vote this year because - Why, exactly?
We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Mrs Pauline Adams in the prison garb she wore while serving a 60 day sentence.

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.'It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I
could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say.
I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

Miss Edith Ainge, of Jamestown, New York
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion.
But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

Berthe Arnold, CSU graduate

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry.
She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said.'What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use, my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.'
The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'

HBO released the movie on video and DVD.
I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include this movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco/Bingo night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

Conferring over ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution at National Woman's Party headquarters, Jackson Place, Washington D.C.
Left to right: Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Mrs. Abby Scott Baker, Anita Pollitzer, Alice Paul, Florence Boeckel, Mabel Vernon (standing, right)

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.
The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women.
Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent - remember to vote.
Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk , Conn. Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying the banner,
'Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.'

I would go her one further. Remember to make your vote count...hold your elected officials accountable. We've had enough of the foxes guarding the hen houses. The earth is oozing her lifeblood into the gulf and soiling all of the southern shores as a result of lax environmental policies and paltry enforcement of procedures designed to protect us from a fiasco such as this one.
This is a democratic republic, not a corporate oligarchy. If the good ole boys in DC who run this dog and pony show won't hold themselves accountable for the consequences of the legislation and policies they enact, then we must value our right to do so and vote someone else into office who will.