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The Case of the Big Set-Up

Lead: Dr. Tracy Grant. Present day and entirely present tense — one evening, end to end. No flashback, no time tags, no double frames, no sepia anywhere on this page. The wall in panel 4 is the wall as it stands tonight, not as it was built.

Panels 4–5 are one landscape frame two boxes wide, the only one in the series. The wall is the page's best asset and it does not fit a square.

Radio script at radio-big-set-up.md; radio show at radio-big-set-up.html.

Source: comic-big-set-up.md

The Big Set-Up

9 boxes · 3 rows · LEAD: TRACY GRANT · panels 4–5 are one landscape frame · panels 4–5 and 7 are the same wall

Row 1 — the case (full noir · a lecture hall, tonight)

1
The ANCHOR trial. Sixty family caregivers, twelve weeks, a support group with a trained facilitator and a skills curriculum we spent a year building.
And it worked. Strain went down and it stayed down. You get to stand at the front of a hall and say a thing like that out loud about twice in a career.
2
Then a woman near the back raised her hand. Six years running a caregiver group on Thursday nights, and positive but anecdotal results. No formal curriculum, no formal training. She had driven a long way to hear somebody say whether those things really mattered or not.
Do I need to buy your program? Or have I had the thing that works all along?
3
That is an excellent question. Let me get back to you.
Two suspects with a getaway car. But who was driving, and which was just along for the ride?
I had a filing cabinet of answers ready to go and not one of them was to that.

Row 2 — the wall, and the turn

4–5
One card for every visit, straight across, and string from each card down to the measure collected there. Stand back far enough and it looks like the wall in a picture where somebody is about to rob a bank.
Everything measured twice, beginning and end. Strain gets extra attention every Tuesday. That's a lot of calls and visits for sixty people and twelve weeks. The more the merrier, but only if merry was a measurement.

Nobody stands in front of a wall like that and asks what it won't be able to tell them.
6
Anything I can do?
Not unless you can go back and ask them something I never thought to ask.
All I ever asked was the same four things. Every Tuesday. Twelve times.
…Say that again.

Row 3 — the answer

7
I cleared the board. Down came the protocol. Up went the data. Pins and rubber bands. And there it was: strain down by week 4, and there it stayed.
But everything else? Just the starting line and the checkered flag. No help there. I still couldn't say who was driving.
8
But I discovered something even better.
She doesn't have to buy a thing - at least not yet. Four questions once a week with the group she already runs. It either lands inside of a month or it won't land at all.
9
Funny thing. She came to me to stop guessing. Now she'll know the answer before I do.