Emma and Drew go over some highs and lows from the first season.  Well, not really the lows...those are still secret.  Joshua drops by to discuss plans for next season and Earl describes the funniest thing he's seen in a meeting, recently.

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Friends since childhood, Mio, at 13, couldn’t work the fast lane like Jason. Their paths diverged and they didn’t meet again until their early 20’s when Mio had a little more street cred. He even showed Jason how to chop and snort cocaine. The party was on. Mio, however, couldn’t sustain the hard partying and went to AA. For Jason, however, it remained go-time. Still, Mio was able to convince his friend to attend a meeting with him. Not well received. Especially the idea of not drinking; at all; ever! Jason escaped to England and started working as chef - and drinking like one too. A long awaited visit from sober Mio saw Jason sick and bloated out of all proportion, still drinking. Mio finally left knowing he might never see Jason alive again. But there was a surprise in store for him. 

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Like an anthropologist observing a tribe untouched by civilization, South Asian Jay’s first AA meetings were more a curiosity than the solution to a problem. A binge drinker by nature, Jay didn’t really believe he had a problem. His neighbour, however, did; his neighbour, the actor, whom he’d drunkenly once heckled while he was on stage performing. Jay, gifted with dry wit, ultimately attributes his sobriety to that neighbour, who also became his sponsor. Had it not been for their discussions between meetings, Jay admits, he never would have come to see how the first of the twelve steps explained his difficulties with life, drunk and sober.

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From prodigious young hockey talent to the highest rung on the pro ladder, Jim still found more excitement in booze and blow than he did the game itself. While drinking and drugging shortened his career he wasn’t ruined. Fame, money and family disguised the growing anguish and anxiety his addictions imposed on him. But, when he finally settled into the program, relief was realized when he recognized that helping others, paradoxically, helped him in ways he couldn’t have imagined.

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Armed, dangerous and impaired, gangster Geri was on the super-highway to hell. Yet there was a nagging awareness that her life of crime, prison, booze and drugs was spiraling out of control.  That was abruptly underscored when her family arrived to tell her she needed help and, if she hoped to part of their lives, she had to go to rehab. With a quiet sense of relief Geri complied and that, coupled with the identification she experienced hearing others share, led her to surrender.

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This pair met attending a small theatre school in New York. Mercurial Bryce, just 18 and already sober in AA, had been a child actor who’d experienced OD’s and drug/alcohol induced psychotic breaks, all by his mid teens. A little older, Mark was the brooding, misunderstood artist whose ever present Irish whiskey helped him romanticize his situation. If Bryce’s alcoholism was volcanic, Mark’s was a slow burn that would, regardless, turn into a fiery blaze. Recognizing that drinking was jeopardizing his life and sanity, Mark recalled when Bryce briefly admitted to him that he went to AA. That stayed with him, and a few months later, when he ‘hit bottom’, Mark finally got to a meeting. To this day, each remains sober in AA.

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“Emotional growth begins when drinking and drug use halt”, is a statement oft heard in the rooms of AA. It goes a long way to explaining the childish behavior of adult alcoholics, or, in the case of Nadine and Catherine, the maturity of two young women who’d entered AA before they were legally entitled to drink. Weaving raw tales of sexual abuse, gang life and teenage pregnancy, this pair of friends now speak with the wisdom and insight of battle hardened veterans. They prove, if we’re never too old to recover, we’re never too young to begin.

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After years of sobriety, or mere months and weeks, why do alcoholics relapse? Jowita, mother and alcoholic, doesn’t believe in “slips”. Instead she experienced relapse as a “fuck it” moment immediately preceding a conscious decision to ‘let go [of AA] and let Smirnoff’. Condemned to the purgatory of lying about drinking while occasionally attending meetings, it was the mental dissonance, born of dishonesty that finally proved unbearable for her. Recommitting wasn’t easy but she eventually embraced those elements of the program that sensibly enabled her to build her sober life within and without AA.

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Earl H., high profile AA conference speaker, is known and respected in AA circles around the world. His story of recovery is just as well known. But in this chat Earl doesn’t till the familiar soil, instead he speaks to a surprising and especially meaningful personal encounter; an encounter so unexpected and joyous, it defied all statistical probability. But, as Earl tells it, it wasn’t the unlikeliness of the encounter that so overwhelmed him, rather that in sobriety he’d changed enough to be wholly present and receptive to this chance encounter that had moved him to tears. His message here is important for all who may be struggling in early sobriety or those who believe that abstinence from alcohol and drugs is the endgame when, in fact, it is merely the beginning.

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Josh and Lisa describe their first day(s) in Alcoholics Anonymous and what led them there. Articulate, ironic and occasionally outrageous, each portrays the unique set of circumstances - in one case prosaic, in the other, well, call it hallucinogenic - that brought them to their first meeting and their first day(s) of long term sobriety.

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