ANIMAL HOUSE

THIS IS MY HOSPITAL?...............by Coralynn

WandaSue is escorted, or rather, dragged into the large old builiding. She has on her straight jacket, but unfortunately, her mouth is still operative.
"This is not the hospital I'm supposed to go to!" she protests, "This place is a dump!"
The intake person talks to the guard who has brought WSue. Papers are exchanged and information shared while WandaSue stands there steaming.
"Well, damn, babydoll!" she thinks, "Maybe Carson was right: I overdid it! I mean, look at this place.....it looks like something out of a horror movie!"
The guard leaves as two very strong looking men in white uniforms take WandaSue by the arms and walk her down a hall, into an elevator, then, when they reach the fourth floor, take her down another hall to a room with a locked door. The small glass window on the door is fortified with mesh and there is evidence of housekeeping's futile attempts to remove graffiti from the outside of said door.
WandaSue wrinkles her nose. This is where I'm supposed to live?" she asks the hospital guys, who don't reply, but, after having unlocked the door, take her inside the room.
A rank smell hits WandaSue, plus the cold and humidity. GADS! This is worse than a horror movie!
She then notices another woman in the room, who is sitting on her bed, rocking back and forth. WandaSue thinks back to the time she was incarcerated in Salem during the witch trials, and the woman in the jail who did the same motion, back and forth, back and forth.
"Hmmm," she thinks, "You've come a long way, baby! Now, instead of my cushy apartment in Pleasantville, I get this hideous place. Where did I go wrong?"

The hospital worker points to the bed WandaSue is to use, and holds up the uniform she is to don. She sees what appears to be a jumpsuit, a purple jumpsuit. "Euuuuu," she frowns, "Not my color! Do you guys have one in teal?"
They don't respond, but, just as they reach the door to exit, push a button which brings an iron grate down from the ceiling, cutting the room in half so that the other mental patient is visible but with no way for her to appoach WandaSue.
This is the only good thing so far, WandaSue thinks as she puts on the ridiculous jumpsuit.
"They could have at least given us a mirror so we can see how terrible we look," she addresses the other woman, who stops rocking, but commences to bark.
"Oh wow!" WandaSue exclaims, "Do I have to put up with that? I hate barking dogs! I feel like killing the beasts when they bark, especially at night when I'm trying to sleep!"
This proclamation has no effect on the other woman, who continues to bark, whine, bark, whine, on and on.
WandaSue is just finishing zipping up the ridiculous jumpsuit when a man in a white lab coat or something similar, enters the room and heads for her half.
"Can you make that barking stop?" WandaSue asks him.
He sits on the straight chair, the only chair in her side of the room, and takes papers out of a file he's brought with him. He looks closely at WandaSue then asks, "Are you allergic to any medications?"
"YEAH, buster, I'm allergic to barking dogs, and that woman over there is barking. What are ya gonna do about it?"
He shuffles several papers around, respositions them in the file and answers, "We put you in this room because we always keep our animals in the same room. In the next room we have a gazelle and a mountain lion. Obviously we have to keep the grate down because if we didn't the mountain lion would have the gazelle for lunch."
"You actually buy into this crap?"
"It is not for me to say whether a person's delusions are real or not," he says thoughtfully, "but we can take no chances. Oh, let me introduce myself. I am Doctor Kidder, a psychiatrist on the staff of this hospital. It is my responsibility to help you get well."
"So if I get 'well,' as you put it, does that mean I get to go home?" WandaSue glances around the room which she's decided looks like something from a Charles Dickins novel, writtten on a day when he was in an especially foul mood.
Dr. Kidder answers, "That depends. If we decide you were totally insane when you committed your crime, you may then go to a half-way house till you are deemed fit to join society. If we consider that you were less than insane enough to be responsible for your crime, you are remanded back to the penal system to stand trial."
"#%$(&%@#!" Wandasue explodes.
"Now, now, my dear, wouldn't you rather be in touch with reality?"
"In a word: NO!"
"It will be much more difficult for me to help you attain sanity if you have that attitude. Now, how long have you considered youself a cat?"
"The last five years," she says, winging it.
"And what were you before that?"
This line of questioning is getting on her nerves, so she blurts out, "An elephant. You should have seen those old biddies at the supermarket scream and scatter when I walked in the store!"
He writes this down.
"Are you daft?!" she yells at him, not believing that anyone could take her line of bull seriously.
He smiles for the first time, "My dear, I am not the mental patient here. You are."

Dr. Kidder then stands and walks toward the exit, which he opens with a key. As the door closes behind him, WandaSue sticks out her tongue and waggles her hands in her ears.
The other woman begins to laugh. Startled, WandaSue loook at her and asks, "You think this is funny?!"
"Oh yeah, it's hysterical!" the other woman says back.
WandaSue notices that the other woman is now standing, not rocking, not barking, just standing there near her side of the grate.
"What's the story with you?" she asks.
"Actually, very similar to yours. I couldn't help but overhear that silly doctor questioning you. Look, our cases are almost identical. We just might be able to help each other."
"Well that's a relief! Now I won't be kept awake nights by a barking dog! Will I?"
"Not unless one of the hospital orderlies or Dr. Kidder come in. My story is that I had to use an insanity plea after I killed my husband."
"Wow, that's big!" WandaSue is impressed, "Why'd ya kill him?"
"He beat me up, he drank, he ran around, he went to whore houses, he gambled away the money he made plus mine. We were about to lose our house because there was no money to make the mortgage payments, so I figured I was better off without him. And I was. And I am, but now I'm stuck in this house of horrors pretending I think I'm a dog, and the clowns who run the place actually take it seriously. What crime did you commit?"
"I kidnapped a whole bunch of talk show hosts!" WandaSue says proudly.
"That was you?! I read about that. They said you took them to the Arabian desert! HA! Now who's insane?"
WandaSue extends her right hand through the bars and shakes hands with the other woman, "WandaSue Skaggs here!" she says.
The other woman eagerly shakes hands and replies, "Sophia Robertson here! Glad to make your acquiantance, Wanda! Welcome to the animal house!"
They both laugh uproariously.


GROUP WHAT?!..................by Coralynn

WandaSue and Sophia stop chatting when they hear a voice come over the P.A. system:
Group "F" will now assemble in the treatment room for group."
"Group?!" WandaSue asks, "What group? group grope? group hug? What?!"
Sophia sighs, "The 'animals,' as we're called have group therapy once a day. They call us group "F" for no reason that I can come up with except it was created after A,B,C, D & E."
"Uh-huh!" WandaSue reacts, "So does this group therapy nonsense help anyone?"
"Not really. But it's kinda fun to see those other 8 people acting like whatever animal they're pretending they think they are."
"All the animals are faking it?"
"Oh sure. But the people who run this place try to include all mental conditions, and if enough people show up pretending they think they're animals, hey, they get a group."
"And these clowns don't realize these people are just pretending?"
"Look, when you work in a mental institution you get to the point where the more bizarre the better. The line blurs between real insanity and bogus insanity. We are in the latter category, but......"
"They think we're serious, right?" Wandasue finishes the thought.
"Right!"
An orderly steps into the room and gestures for them to follow him to the treatment room. The two women follow him, WandaSue looking to Sophia for how to behave.
Sophia begins to bark so WandaSue emits a good loud "Yeooowl" as they approach the room. They're the last to arrive. WandaSue looks around at the other women who are now sitting on chairs making a varitety of animal noises. One has the sound of a wolf baying at the Moon down pat. WandaSue locks eyes with that woman and winks. The woman winks back. WandaSue has a hard time controlling her laughter. This is a zoo, she thinks, in every way imaginable!