Eating Disorders – OmegaBooks

Welcome to the next episode of scenes or sections from the original novels that make up The Prodigal Band Trilogy that were deleted within the trilogy book. Most of the scenes or sections posted in this series were deleted for the sake of allocation of the amount of pages.

But this section here was not included in the three-books-in-one trilogy mainly because I had originally written this as a short story related to the trilogy series and I only put it into The Prophesied Band for its heart-warming, feel-good quality. When I was writing this short story that I’d incorporate into the second novel in the trilogy, I cried my way through it! And when I was re-typing from the original novel onto this laptop for inclusion here, I cried again!

The short story, by the way, made its way into a yearly publication of poems and short stories written by members of my local writers group, Texas Mountain Trail Writers. At the time I was the editor of the monthly newsletter as well as the yearly publication.

This section/story takes place within the time frame of spring, 1996, when singer-frontman Erik and bassist Keith are recovering from mild heart attacks they endured in early February (as told in the final chapter of Battle of the Band.) At the same time, Ger, Erik’s wife, is battling esophagus cancer she brought upon herself during her long bout with the eating disorder called bulimia, which involves eating lots of food and then immediately purging it by vomit into a toilet or whatever. This is told in Chapter Four of The Prophesied Band referenced here. In Chapter Six, she is seeing doctors for treatment and discovers she has the cancer, and has difficulty swallowing any food or drink.

In April, 1996, after bringing her to a doctor visit for a second opinion on this cancer, Erik decides to buy chocolate chip cookies (called biscuits in England) at a local cookie shop, but not for Ger. He has not been a worthy father to his two-year-old son, Alec, as he admitted in Chapter Four of The Prophesied Band, and he has vowed to change that–he himself never really had connected to his own father as stated in the final chapter of Battle of the Band, so he had no guidance as to how to be a good dad. He had to figure this out on his own.

But son Alec wanted nothing to do with his father, either. Erik was an alcoholic, and he smelled like it! Alec did not want to be around someone smelling of whiskey or scotch and having ‘clammy’ hands. Yet Alec also knew his father did not smell that way anymore, as the singer severely cut down on his booze consumption, only having drops of booze added to tonic water ‘for the taste of it’ by his personal assistant–who had strict charge over all booze in the house so Erik wouldn’t!

Continue reading “The Prodigal Band Trilogy Original Deleted Scenes, Part Five”

I’m taking a break from religious and cultist and new age group influence and symbology this week in this post to bring up an issue which isn’t overly important in The Prodigal Band Trilogy but an issue I am well familiar with–eating disorders, which according to my research on the fashion industry and histories of fashion models seems to be quite prominent. Several of my female characters, wives or girlfriends of my prodigal band members, were models in the fashion industry as well as celebrities otherwise. One of them had an eating disorder known as bulimia.

Bulimia is highlighted by eating–sometimes huge amounts of food–and then vomiting it up to supposedly maintain their skinny (or otherwise) weight. This is one of the more prominent disorders to maintain low weight; the more serious one is called anorexia nervosa, which is self-starvation. But some folks simply cannot starve themselves. So they eat, and then vomit the food.

For proof that fashion models and celebrities (mostly female) have been ‘forced’ to keep their weight down to a very skinny level, I have some links to articles that will verify this:

Victoire Macon Dauxerre’s fashion model experience

Eating disorder expert Dr. Adrienne Key’s report

Model Zuzanna Buchwalk’s story

Eight Famous Celebrities (some who started out being child fashion models) Who Battled Bulimia

Oh, and I too was bulimic on and off for six years–in order to attract a future husband! That is one reason my most important female character was made to be bulimic. Ger is the name of the character, and she is the woman of Erik, my singer-front man character. She is five-foot-eight with dark brown close-cropped page-boy hairstyle with a widow’s peak, and has sultry blue eyes and an enticing smile. She was born in London to an upper-middle class family, and her father owns a hardware store in Walltown, where the band is from. When her man Erik and the rest of Sound Unltd make it big in 1989, she desires to be a super model. So it went.

Continue reading “Snippets of Reality within The Prodigal Band Trilogy: Eating Disorders of Models and Celebrities”