No Chapter Called Into Thinking — Only One Called Into Action – Karren G.
About This Speaker Tape
Karren G. from Los Angeles shares 22 years of sobriety at the 22nd Annual Canyon Conference in Hinton, Oklahoma in June 2004. Sober since May 30, 1982, she's a member of the Pacific Group in West LA and sponsored long-distance by Clancy. She opens by honoring Jim Shaw (recently deceased), telling how she took him out for double cheeseburgers and a chocolate malt the last three weeks of his life, and explaining why Clancy made her change her sobriety date when she admitted smoking pot after getting sober.
She describes her drinking years in Lincoln, Nebraska — two marriages to the same abusive ex-husband, the loss of her nursing license, stealing narcotics (morphine, Demerol, cocaine, Valium) from a nursing home, and the infamous night she poured super glue on her sleeping husband's groin, requiring two surgeons from Creighton University to undo the damage. She tells of Woodstock as a Nebraska nurse in a semi-truck hospital, two years on the streets prostituting after losing her license, and finally collapsing on Skid Row in Lincoln sucking on a bottle of Mad Dog, 95 pounds and the color of squash, with ruptured esophageal varices and cirrhosis.
Her recovery begins in an ICU where 10 AA members came to sit with her during 30 days of withdrawal. After 19 sponsors in Lincoln, an old-timer threatens to expose her for stealing meeting money unless she drives to Kearney to ask Clancy to sponsor her — which begins her real recovery. She describes making amends 35 years later to the family who saw her step naked out of a glass elevator at the Hyatt Regency on Easter morning, a $10,000 slot win in Laughlin that paid off her car, and her grandson Ryan's Budweiser-sponsored Olympic gymnastics run cut short by an AC joint separation.
Her spiritual awakening came at the 1985 Montreal World Convention watching the American flag touch the turf during the flag ceremony. She closes with the story of answering a 2 AM work call despite 72 hours on her feet, meeting a mother with five years of sobriety whose baby was receiving a liver transplant — and being handed the child's bear. Her core message: self-knowledge avails nothing, there's no chapter called Into Thinking, and it has been one hell of a walk from Skid Row in Nebraska to where she stands tonight.
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