
"The Duel"
This story was first told by Lili Taylor on episode #202: In Harm's Way
Synopsis
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Lili and her siblings are aware that her father suffers from severe bipolar disorder; he’s in and out of the hospital throughout her childhood. Even so, the events that the illness causes can be terrifying. One day when Lili is 16 and her youngest brother Duffy is 14, they come home from school to find their dad sitting in his favorite chair, dressed in a pink slip, wig and lipstick. He’d laid out every knife in the house on a table. He challenges Duffy to a duel -- telling him to choose any knife he’d like, and then they’ll go down to the basement, and fight it out like men, and only one of them will come back upstairs. Lili sneaks away and calls her mother, who rushes home to convince her husband that it’s time to go to the hospital again.Themes/Keywords: basement, Best of RISK!, bipolar, Celebrity storyteller, cross-dressing, dad, delusion, disorder, drag, duel, father, hospital, knives, manic depression, mental health, mental illness, psychiatric
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