Just Hold Me

It was a working man's bar in a beach front motel called the Surf Side Inn.

Just Hold Me[1]
Series
In The Dark
Original Broadcast Date
1994-07
Cast
Joe Frank
Format
Serious Monologue, 25 minutes
Preceded by: That Night
Followed by: Hawaii

Just Hold Me is a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series In The Dark. It was originally broadcast in 1994.

Synopsis

Joe's in a band that works at the bar in Surfside Inn,[1] a beach-front motel, near Montauk Point. They play the loudest, raunchiest rock'n'roll, a 2-week gig. Lily runs the hotel; her daughter Lorraine runs the bar; Lorraine drinks too much and smokes marijuana. Lorraine has a daughter, Helen, 8 or 9, who makes friends with everyone.

Joe and Lorraine are the only night-owls, spend a lot of late nights together.

One night Lorraine takes Joe to Montauk Point, 'the furthest, most eastern part of the US'.[2] They make love afterwards. She warns him to stay away from her repeatedly.

6 months later, after having moved on, they come back to play a wedding. Lorraine attends. She and Joe make a date to meet afterwards but Joe sees her being taken drunkenly away. At the Surfside Inn Lily tells Joe she doesn't work there anymore. Joe checks out their old haunts, doesn't find her.

6:30: Joe's in LA, staying with his friends David and Nancy, counting on Chevy Chase to get him a job. David and Nancy want him out. feeling unwelcome, Joe leaves, lives out of his 'bus', Althea. Chevy doesn't come through.

11:10: Joe meets a woman at the bar, buys her a drink, takes her home when he sees her drunk in the parking lot later. She wants him to stay with her, just hold her, not for sex.

14:20: Joe visits Danny, who has tears in his eyes, had a dream that Joe had been stabbed. They hug, breaking Joe's new glasses. Danny asks his mother, Beth, if he can have a cigarette now. Beth remembers what a good student he was at Sidwell Friends.[3] Danny asks her to shoot him.

16:30: It's the summer in Virginia; Joe and Katie are building a house in the woods on the Thornton River[4] in Culpeper County.[5] They listen to the Orioles on the radio, hang out in the lot at the 7-11, watch people. Joe feels blessed.

18:10: Joe calls his mother, who's at the nursing home in Wheaton;[6] she says they treat her terribly, wants Joe to get her out. Because Donald has borrowed the car, Joe has to take the subway.[7] When Joe arrives she's sleeping peacefully.

20:40: Katie, how wonderful she is; Joe finds it unbearable how much she loves him. Joe works on a construction site in Cleveland Park,[8] plotting to make time with another woman while Katie brings him lunch.

21:50: Joe describes a picture of Danny and his sister at their home in Garrett Park,[9] how great Danny looked, how charming and talented he was. He dropped out of college, joined the Air Force, went on bombing missions, which damaged him. He lives with his mother, who allots him a cigarette an hour.

Legacy Synopsis


  • Joe is in a band in a northeastern inn, dates a waitress.
  • Comes to LA and calls Chevy Chase. Looking for work in LA.
  • Going home with a woman from a bar who wants to be held.
  • Danny, a guy who came back from the war crazy and whose mother polices his cigarettes.
  • Visiting mother in a nursing home.

Music

Shared material

Additional credits

The original broadcast credits state: "Created in collaboration with Jack Cheeseborough and Arthur Miller. Recorded and mixed by Jerry Summers. Special thanks to William Orbit and Jennifer Ferro."

Miscellanea

  • This is perhaps Joe's most sentimental show. Joe gives a name to everyone except the woman he met at the bar; he told the story of a guy in Another Country, 3 hours, without ever saying his name. Much of it happens around Washington, DC. The stories are almost certainly fictional. His mother was living with her husband, not in a nursing home, in 1994. I don't think Joe was ever in a rock band. Wheaton didn't have a subway station until 1990, after Joe moved away. Arthur Peabody (talk) 22:56, 2 March 2021 (EST)
  • Home (Remix) is Just Hold Me followed by an edited-down version of the original Home.

Footnotes

  1. There is a Surfside Inn in Montauk NY. It had a different name before the '80s.
  2. Montauk Point is the most eastern part of Long Island, NY, not the US. (West Quoddy Head, Maine is.)
  3. a fancy prep school in DC
  4. a nice place
  5. now a Washington exurb
  6. in Maryland, a Washington suburb
  7. Service to Wheaton began in 1990
  8. a nice residential section of Washington; the Mondales lived there when he was vice-president.
  9. in Maryland, another DC suburb