Snake and Mouse

According to choreographer Vince Paterson, Robin Williams pulled him aside as they were shooting this scene and said he was tired of playing "the straight man," and wanted something funnier to do. Paterson pitched the bit as The History of Dance in Thirty Seconds, and taught it to him behind the walls of the set. After seeing it for the first time, director Mike Nichols said the sequence was wonderful but unnecessary. Williams fell to his knees and begged Nichols to shoot it again properly. According to a biography of Nichols, when they were unsure how the bit should end, it was Nathan Lane who came up with the punchline: "But you keep it all inside." Remembering the scene nearly twenty years later, Paterson said, "We never thought it would become what it has. It’s iconic."

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

I know there is a lot of discourse (tm) around this right now but listen to me

If I were lean down and say “unfortunately the big beach ball for some reason fills you with such an unadulterated rage that is beyond human comprehension that you scream until you pass out, so mama had to remove the beach ball from the premises until you can better regulate your emotions” she would simply stare at me like I had 3 heads full of equal betrayal.

the procedure to remove me is medically and legally a late term abortion. i was aborted, and it saved my life. if they hadn’t aborted me, my mother and i would both be dead, my siblings would have been left with a dead mother, and i would have never even gotten a chance to live a single day. and now, people are being denied this procedure and dying because it’s literally an abortion!! mothers and their babies are being killed because their doctors are not allowed to perform life-saving abortions.

on the same note, my sister was recently denied an abortion. which is to say, cleaning out the already dead fetus after she had a miscarriage from a wanted pregnancy. they refused treatment unless the DEAD fetus was actively killing her, because the procedure to remove it is medically and legally an abortion. they basically said to her “come back when you’re dying of an infection or sepsis or something, until then you just have to bleed out.” my sister could have died from this, people HAVE died from being denied abortions after having a miscarriage. if she was one of these people, my sister would have been dead, my mother would have to live the rest of her life without her daughter, and my nephew would have had to live the rest of his life without a mother.

read it, now read it again.

this procedure is an abortion from a legal and medical standpoint. laws that target "abortion" include this and more.

miscarriages are abortions ffs

and Shirley Exemptions are no way to protect anything

They straight up do not care that people have, will, and continue to die. Especially the 'wrong' kinds of people.

And keep in mind the people signing these bills, rich mfs that they are? They'll always ALWAYS have access to getting their mistresses, daughters, anybody THEY want, to get an abortion.

They had a woman come in maybe 2 months after Roe v Wade was overturned. She was a day or so post-miscarriage. It was her 2nd miscarriage. She and her husband had been trying for YEARS. They were paying THOUSANDS for fertility treatments and thought it would work this time. She was sobbing. Her husband was sobbing.

But more importantly... they came in because she had just collapsed and was having bouts of dizziness.

An ultrasound my friend performed confirmed 2 things:

She had had an incomplete natural evacuation. There was still a fair amount of tissue in her uterus, which would definitely be decomposing by that point (the uterus is not a sterile environment).

There was no heartbeat. None. Not a single contracting cell.

They called Legal, because they knew exactly what was going to happen. This woman, unless given an artificial evacuation (aka... an abortion), would become septic. Legal said, "You can't until her vitals drop. In the eyes of the law, if she could technically pass the tissue naturally until the moment before you intervene, you have performed a medically unnecessary abortion. Anyone who assists will be stripped of their medical credentials and put on trial for murder, and the hospital cannot defend you and will not be held responsible."

There was nothing the woman or the family could sign. There was no loophole. My friend went over the vitals collected by her nurse all night, but she hadn't crashed yet. Just slowly became more and more delirious from the infection spreading from the dead tissue. The only medications they could even give to ease her suffering were meds/doses approved for actively pregnant women.

Her husband could only sit there and watch.

When the woman's blood pressure suddenly dropped, they rushed her into the OR for the evacuation/abortion, which they'd had prepped for her. At that point, my friend's line of care was over. The doctors who took over the case said she was being recommended to internal surgery because her uterine tissue has started going necrotic as well, and would need to be removed.

This meant her chance to have her own baby would drop to almost nothing.

Before Roe v Wade was overturned, this would have been an upsetting in-and-out trip to the ER after a terrible, terrible day. My friend barely would have batted an eye after the 5 minutes of sympathy she could have afforded before moving to the next patient.

But because it happened after, this woman lost her baby, nearly lost her life, and permanently lost any ability to carry a child to term in one long, shitty, horrific weekend. Infections like that are extremely damaging to the body as well; she may have permanent side effects.

FOR DEAD TISSUE. Dead. The baby was dead already. It was already gone. It was so dead and gone that it was ROTTING inside her.

While much less damaging, my friend and her team were permanently scarred by this event. She'd been in this small town ER for almost a decade by that point, she went through the COVID shutdown in that hospital, she's seen UGLY, haunting things and told me the HIPPA versions with a completely straight face.

She could barely get the words out on this story. She choked on the guilt. She cried, and she'd never cried over a medical story to me before.

I told a Pro-Life woman this story once. I told her, "If your daughter has complications with her pregnancy, you have to get her to [state where abortion is legal] immediately, no matter what it costs. This is what is happening here."

She cried. She cried just hearing about it, third-hand. Because of course she did. It's horrifying. It's undeniably WRONG.

And when she claimed that this must have been some cruel twist of a law taken too far, some unfortunate, unforeseen side effect... I reminded her that this is what was happening before Roe v. Wade, and in living memory of the Supreme Court and sitting members of congress. Because Roe v Wade was ruled on in 1973. And those old fucks all remember 1972.

They just don't care about making exceptions, because exceptions mean loopholes to them, and what's the trauma of a few unknown nobodies to politicians when they have their pearls to clutch and votes to secure?