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Mary Mallon

from Open Arms Race by Plan A Project

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Mary Mallon was an irish immigrant who came to America and worked as a cook for affluent families in NYC. She was also a asymptomatic carrier of Typhoid fever. She was quarantined by the government on an island in the east river of the Bronx in what was a public display of "Protectin g the people from disease"After her second apprehension, Mallon spent the last 23 years of her life as a virtual prisoner in forced isolation, adding to the three years from her first stint on North Brother Island. Although hundreds, if not thousands, of asymptomatic carriers who had been identified walked the sidewalks of New York freely, Typhoid Mary alone lived in exile in large part due to the public opinion that turned firmly against her after her failure to stay out of the kitchen. Today Mallon’s case is archetypal in bioethics literature, as scholars debate when the government is justified in depriving someone of her freedom for a perceived greater good—an issue with renewed public resonance when health workers returning from Ebola-ravaged West Africa are quarantined against their will. But Mallon’s case also endures as a symbol of a transitional moment, before antibiotics, when microbes were first revealing themselves to science. Neither Mallon nor the public quite understood what she was being accused of, which must have felt like something akin to thought crime.

Mallon died in 1938, after more than two decades on North Brother Island. She never lost the sense of persecution she evinced in a 1909 letter to a lawyer, feeling herself a “peep show for every body.” The medical staff and residents, she wrote, would see her and say, “There she is, the kidnapped woman.”


I wrote this song in parrarell with Mary Mallons story. We can spend so much of our life imprison ourselves. With whatv we tell ourselves we come to believe. " I have a hand grenade and a prayer" is the sign of desperation. If I die in your arms i'll make you a believer is what judgement whether self or by other people creates our world. Hence, Mary Mallon. What the public believed, she died in thier arms making them a believer of thier judgment.

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from Open Arms Race, released May 8, 2019

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Plan A Project New Jersey

Plan A Project were a punk band from Northern New Jersey. Started in 1995 with Bassist/ Vocalist Danny DeSimoni, Guitarist/ Vocalist Dennis DeGraw and Drummer Kieth Wyland. Possesing an uncanny amount of energy, desire and spirit that demanded respect. In the duration 3 EPs were released and 2 studio albums (Go Kart records) with drummers Dennis Zyla, Tim Caspare and Pauklie Yaremko. 1995-2003 ... more

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