EXT. FRONT YARD, VENICE - DAY
...where I look up from sipping my strange pomegranate flavored soft-drink to find a late-sixties woman smiling as she approaches me.
HER: Are you the one who has written something about a trauma unit?
ME: Uh... yeah... Its-- its a TV pilot.
(Awkward pause as she smiles and I wonder, "Where is this headed?")
HER: I worked in an ER in Brooklyn back in the 60's.
ME: Really, which one?
HER: I don't remember the name, but it was affiliated with Einstein College of Medicine.
(I nod, look for my wife.)
HER: You know, in all the time I was there, I don't think I ever saw a gunshot victim. Or even a knifing.
(I casually stand, finishing my drink so as to have a reason to exit.)
HER: Isn't that odd. Three years and I don't remember any violent deaths. I'm sure they happened, its just I don't seem to remember them.
ME: (I nod, holding up my empty Pom-Soda) Y'know, I need to get another--
HER: What I do remember? The girls from the illegal abortions. One a week. Sometimes two. This was before Roe V. Wade of course.
(I sit again.)
HER: They'd come in looking like ghosts. Napkins or dishtowels or sometimes even sheets under their skirts. Some of them had been bleeding for days. Most were not women of means and they were desperate. Desperate from the pain and the guilt and the being told by their priests it was a sin to use birth control and being told by their boyfriend and husbands that it was a crime against the marriage to deny sex and then once they were in the "family way" they were told they just had to stay that way, well... at some point you have to stand up for yourself, right? And what does standing up for yourself get you? It gets you alone and scared, dying of septic shock in some hospital.
(And her face is little flushed, her eyes angry.)
HER: That's what I remember 40 years later. Young women... at least a hundred in my three years... dying 'cause they finally stood up for themselves.
ME: (breathless) Jeff. My name is Jeff.