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It's August 2007. Lauren Marks is a 27-year-old actor and a PhD student, spending the month directing a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She's in a bar, standing onstage, performing a karaoke duet of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'... and then a blood vessel in her brain bursts. When she wakes up in hospital, days later, she has no internal monologue, and a vocabulary of only forty words.
This is a rerun of an all time fave Allusionist, but with a few extra little bits added.
Content note: this episode is about a medical crisis (everyone survives, though!), and has some Category A swears in it.
Put your headphones on to listen: Martin Austwick composed a special score for it, based around 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'. (RIP Jim Steinman.)
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS:
Lauren Marks has compiled a big list of aphasia resources.
You can also see pages from the journals she started keeping as part of her language therapy.
Did Catherine the Great really die during sex with a horse, though?
Here's a deep dive into the video for ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.
And another!
AND we go right into it in Answer Me This episode 379.
Here's an aphasia special edition of the original version of the episode, with no music, only the speech.
And here's Martin's music from the episode, no speech.
Also! A few other podcasts I was a guest on have just come out! On Go Fact Yourself, I am set a quiz on one of my favourite topics, themed towns of the USA; on Follow Friday, I get to talk about people I think are underrated; and the ABC just reran Richard Fidler’s interview with me on Conversations, where we talk about secret languages, oppressed languages, invented languages, and the colour and taste of languages.
YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
intrigant
CREDITS:
Lauren Marks has written a book about her aphasia experiences, A Stitch Of Time, out now - find out more about it, Lauren, and aphasia at astitchoftime.com.
This episode was produced by me, and scored by Martin Austwick. Martin does nearly all the music on this show, as well as his own - find that here, and the rest of his very varied work at martinaustwick.com. He also co-hosts the podcast Song By Song, examining the songs of Tom Waits in chronological order, and wrote, produced and scored the kids’ science podcast Maddie’s Sound Explorers.
Find me at facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/helenzaltzman and instagram.com/helenzaltzman.
To support the show, head over to patreon.com/allusionist.
