“Good morning. Ah Thank you.”

“Annabelle sure is growing up fast.”

“Yes…”

“Pretty soon she’ll be off to college!”

“About that…I was hoping that maybe she could be home schooled instead…”

“What for?”

“I don’t know that you’ve noticed, but she’s different.”

“

Resonance disaster is defined as a the destruction of a building or mechanism caused by extreme mechanical resonance. This can cause the structure to oscillate and eventually with enough energy, topple over. When constructing buildings  and other structures, engineers study the effect of resonance to ensure safety. Examples of countermeasures to resonance are “shock mounts” and a “tuned mass damper” such as the pendulum found in the Taipei 101 building.

The house is quiet. I couldn’t sleep so I went over to the baby’s room to check on her. She was fast asleep. Her breath came out slowly and evenly. She looked so calm and peaceful. Yesterday I was outside, cleaning the garden when I looked up at the oak tree. Nestled in its trunks was a birds nest. Two young chicks were inside waiting for their mother. Then it came to me.

The unconditional love. These birds loved their mother unconditionally and their mother felt the same. Birds did not express themselves the way people do, but they showed their affection in different ways: providing food and shelter for their offspring. I realized that all those years that my mother had cared for me and my father, she did purely out of love not duty. She would have loved me unconditionally, flaws and all. So why should this be any different for my baby? Sure she wasn’t exactly what I expected, but that doesn’t change her being my daughter…

She slept calmly that night. It was a beautiful full moon outside the window. The house was still. I wrapped Annabelle in a blanket to keep her warm and quietly closed the door.

The first few days were rough not because Annabelle was colicky or difficult to care for, but because Layla had a hard time trying to set aside how she felt. She constantly burnt things she was cooking, dropped plates and would absently stare off.

It’s a reassuring feeling knowing that the people you care about will accept you for who you are…

Now here, it’s an exuberantly bad-taste comedy about the drug scandal of the 1950s and 1960s, whose songs include Talk to the Flipper (‘Cos the Face Don’t Care). Fraser was born with phocomelia – a birth defect that causes stunted limbs, in his case arms – after his mother took thalidomide while pregnant. “I don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he says. “Yeah, I am angry about the way those corporate bastards got away it. And finally I’m getting to stick the knife in.”

The story is a romance between phocomelic Glynn, and Katie, his soul mate, whose love Glynn can’t accept until he has come to terms with his disability. It’s rebelliously sick, from lewd lyrics to comedic car crashes. But there’s a serious side, too. Glynn’s journey of self-discovery is to some extent, says Fraser, a “cartoon version” of his own.

Like his lead character, Fraser has always been an angry young man. “Oh, the joys of being the dope-smoking rebel at 17,” he says. “Far better than being called the local flid.” He grew up kicking out against every kind of “ism”, yet refusing to acknowledge his own disability. He lived in denial. “The D-word was not mentioned. I avoided all young children, ‘cos you know what their first question’s going to be, ‘Mister, why are you like that?’”

Fraser formed his first band in the sixth form. Sixteen years and six bands later he was still drumming, and living the rock’n'roll life. “I stopped short of heroin but I indulged heavily in everything else,” he says. An average Monday night in front of the TV would consist of “half a crown of charlie, an eighth of black and one of those little quarter bottles of blue-labelled 50% Smirnoff … That was my idea of a good time. If that isn’t self-hatred I don’t know what is.”

Then a number of things happened. One was a flesh-eating infection that made him aware of his drug-ravaged immune system (“My legs look like I’ve been peppered with a shotgun”). Another was an encounter with actor Mary Duffy at an international thalidomide conference. Around the same time he met his partner of 14 years, Patou. “I came in one day and my flatmate came scampering down the hallway saying there’s someone in the living room you’re just going to love. I’m a very physical person, and all the boxes were ticked immediately.”

A gradual conversion began. “I’d been on all the women’s rights marches and Mandela marches and realised that my political anger was actually about my disability,” says Fraser. “Slowly I became very dissatisfied with the nothingness of what I was doing.” He describes it as a kind of “coming out”. He took up acting and became a high-profile figure in the disabled arts scene, crossing over into the mainstream in programmes such as BBC2′s Every Time You Look at Me. He gained a reputation for pushing irreverence for his own disability as far as it would go as a presenter on Channel 4′s Freak Out.

Thalidomide!! is a manically physical show, in which the two performers do everything themselves, from puppetry to tap to costume changes. Mention the dancing and he covers his face with his hands. Writing himself a salsa dance was a mistake – he has, he moans, “northern European hips” and hasn’t hit the dance floor since it was cool to pogo.

Anna Winslet, his co-star and sister of you-know-who, was, however, a gift. He admits to doing a very cruel thing at audition: having let each actor sing and rehearse some dialogue, he would say, “Before you go, could you do an impression of me?” Most froze in fear. Fraser insisted: pretend you’re in the playground mimicking me behind my back. “Some of them would begin to sweat,” he says. Not Winslet. “Not only did the tops of her wrists weld to her shoulders, but she walked on the inside of her feet and stuck her tongue into her bottom lip,” he recalls. “I think we all fell in love with her at that point.”

Like Winslet, Fraser comes from a family of actors. His parents met touring the 1961 production of Salad Days. “Mum used to open a drawer in the dressing room and line it with blankets and plop me in.” That was his father’s second marriage, and it failed for the same reason as his first – he was gay, and had fallen in love with another man. He left when Fraser was nine, but the family remained close. When Fraser came to acting in 1995, even with no training “it all felt alarmingly familiar”.

It’s an upbringing that seems to have left him part punk, part hippy. Patou is a “herbalist, environmentalist and ecologist”; both are vegetarians and cat lovers. They are also black belts in “dynamic self-defence”, a discipline Fraser has been pursuing as an alternative to drugs since he discovered he got a better high from martial arts than coke. He is a regular attendee at cage fights and even had a go himself. “I wasn’t particularly good at it. But I wasn’t unconscious, I was still ready, had my lungs been able to work …”

In the musical, Glynn finds his retaliation to the world in humour, and bad behaviour – traits that have become integral to Fraser’s artistic output. He says he has done his time as the irate militant for disabled rights: “Saying the same thing for 10 years is not good enough.” And yet, you could argue, much of his work so far has been about his disability. “I had the lead in a 90-minute drama on BBC2. I waited around thinking I might get a character part in a series.” He makes that strike-out noise from Family Fortunes. “I have found that I achieve more success and notice and money, if I stick to disability stuff. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish someone would give me a fucking job in a drama. It’s not happening. What could I do? Go and write Thalidomide!! A Musical”

· Thalidomide!! A Musical is at The Albany, London SE8 (020-8692 4446), on Thursday. Then touring.”

Emma John “Finally, I’m going to stick the knife in”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2005/nov/07/theatre

“So is she going to be ok, Dr. Brown?” Tom asked.

“Yes, everything seems very normal. Both her and the baby will fine… Although you can imagine that it might be difficult. Although the baby is overall healthy, we can’t be sure of any other unforeseen effects. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. “

“What could have caused this?”

“Well, we can’t know for sure. Sometimes these things are just natural. Or there may be outside factors involved. Your wife is lucky to be alive.”

“Yes…yes she is…Thank you Dr. Brown”