Twelve Steps Are Muscles You Exercise Not Problems You Massage – Holly M.

About This Speaker Tape

Holly M., sober since November 11, 1954, returns to the Fall Frolic in Lincoln, Nebraska to tell her story as a seasoned old-timer with decades behind her. She frames her life around 'the glass crutch' — a radio play about a woman alcoholic whose title haunted her for six or seven years, beating under her heel plates and ticking from the wall clock until she finally picked up the phone. She walks through her drinking from a first sip of her grandfather's rock-candy-soaked whiskey at fourteen, through two failed marriages ('marriages are like vaccinations, they don't take'), raising two children alone while their gambler father threw money away faster than she could drink it up, and a twenty-year run tending bar because she 'believed in on-the-job training.'

The centerpiece of the tape is the legend of the white butterfly — a crippled boy whose father brings him moccasins from an old Indian chief with a story attached: capture a white butterfly while wearing them and you will recover. The boy progresses from wheelchair to braces to crutches to cane, discovering along the way that his legs had only ever been massaged, never exercised. Holly uses the parable to walk the listener through all twelve steps as spiritual muscles: honesty, open-mindedness, willingness, integrity, self-respect, patience, amends, preservation, gratitude, and usefulness.

She threads the teaching with stories — burying wine bottles upright in her flower bed until the yard bristled with them, trying to drink through a straw while weeding, an Avon-lady friend who sold her own samples to buy more wine, and a humiliating afternoon at a Catholic parish celebration where she hit a parishioner with a barbecue rib and splattered the nuns' white bibs with red sauce. The priest later extracts a 'gentleman's agreement' from her: no drinking until he takes a woman into his house. She is sober within days of calling the number in the phone book after a woman tells her, 'You have got to do something on the count of you.'

The tape closes on gratitude — the shepherd's crook that touches an injured sheep so the flock can pass, the frog who opened his mouth mid-flight and lost what he had, the eagle whose talons sank too deep into the seal and got dragged out to drown. Her message: recovery means exercising the muscles, not massaging the problem, and walking as a free woman because 'God could and would if He were sought.'

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens with Clancy jokes about her plane ticket and introduces herself — Holly, alcoholic, sobriety date November 11, 1954
• 4:00 First drink at fourteen — grandfather's rock-candy-and-herb whiskey that he used for arthritis, which she stole and 'crippled away' after
• 9:00 Orphan childhood in Ohio, expelled repeatedly from schools, 'AA is the only thing I've ever been in in my life that I haven't been exiled from'
• 14:00 Friend's olive oil remedy for hangovers — 'instead of a long tall puking drunk I was just a long tall greasy puking drunk'
• 18:00 The Glass Crutch radio story — the title follows her for six or seven years, beating in her heel plates, ticking from the wall clock, appearing on every word of the newspaper
• 24:00 Flower bed with buried wine bottles, and the Catholic parish wishing-well disaster with the barbecue rib and the nuns' bibs
• 31:00 Priest's gentleman's agreement — no drinking until he takes a woman into his house — and her immediate six-pack rationalization, 'God, I didn't mean beer'
• 36:00 Calls the number in the phone book, woman on the phone tells her 'you have got to do something on the count of you,' not for the children
• 42:00 The legend of the white butterfly begins — crippled boy, moccasins from the old Indian chief, progression from wheelchair to braces to crutches to cane
• 58:00 Bag-of-bones parable for Step 5 — the handsome man carrying the spirit of his murdered friend on his back, flesh falling off, stench growing, until admission lets him walk upright again