The Evening Star

I remember reading about this movie scene once, and I cannot find it, try as I might.

The scene shows two people stumbling across a drunk person who had passed out face down in the snow one night, and they are deliberating as to whether it would be safe to bring him home or not.

"Why do you want to bring him home?" one person demanded of the other. "I mean, what good can you see in this guy?"

"Well, I suppose, he was once a kid too," the other replied.

The first person is taken aback and finally relents, saying "That's a good enough reason for me."
and they both lift the drunk person home.

Kissing Frogs

She is wheeled into the wards, her frazzled blonde hair a mess, her eyes hidden behind the opaque dark circles of her sunglasses. She smiles a nervous smile, like a child on the first day of school, but the doctor and nurses do not smile in return. It is a busy day on the wards, and the last thing they needed was another detoxification.

She is there for an exorcism of a truly evil spirit - alcohol - which she consults every time life got a little too big and scary.

She surrenders her body to be possessed by that demon every so often in order to leave this world and all its anxieties for a little while, but the problem was, she would always come back. With a splitting headache for company. She had decided she had had enough.

She is wheeled into a single room and the doctor comes to see her. He is brusque with her and quickly charts up the medications which would help her in her struggle to be free from alcohol. His impatience is telling of an underlying prejudice which he has not yet acknowledged.

He sees her over the next few days as she wrestled to be free of that demon, which had a possessive streak about it - like an unforgiving ex-husband it came back to demand that she return to him and many times she would have given in.

She required large amounts of the pills that came to her rescue - they would quiet down the trembling of her hands, and the fluttering worry of her heart.

He gets to know her better over those few days, and slowly but surely she is improving. He finds other things to talk about so that her mind is taken off her need for the bottles of temporary forgetfulness.

He notices a folder which she had brought in, sitting in a corner of the room.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Oh, that's my portfolio," she said. "I used to be an artist, so I've brought them in to make me happy."

"May I have a look?"

She smiles, and her dull, wrinkled eyes come alive as she brings up her portfolio to her lap and as she turns the pages as if she were looking through a photo album.

The pictures are stunning - his eyes are wide open and his jaw slightly slacked as he took in photo after photo of her artwork.



She shows him her earlier works for her university. Here was a painting that she did for a friends' child's bedroom. There was an advertisement that she did for a local shop. There were local newspaper articles detailing her work for charity; he sees a younger version of her smiling happily at her sold-out art exhibitions. She even had her own art on a postcard, and every flip of the pages of the portfolio fleshed out her person more and more.

He reminds her how talented she is, and makes her promise to take up art again instead of reaching for the bottle. She smiles a little self-consciously as she half-believed her own worth, and nods.

He walks out from her room as he proceeds to the other patients, but he knew that he had learnt a very valuable lesson that day.