LUCOM professors Doc the Halls with Osteopathic Merry Melodies performance

• Performance featuring LUCOM faculty and staff aims to de-stress students and give them an opportunity to laugh.
• This year’s performance focuses on Jesus as the Great Physician and Proverbs 17:22.

 

The Liberty College of Osteopathic Medicine is hosting its second annual Osteopathic Merry Melodies, Dec. 9 at 6:30 p.m. in the LaHaye Event Space.

 

The show, created by LUCOM staff members Christopher and Kristen Breedlove in fall 2016, follows the main characters of cousin Righty the Elf, played by Dr. Leslie Hammer and Lefty the Elf, played by Isaac Altizer, an LUCOM student worker.

 

The highly anticipated performance hopes to bring joy and hope to stressed out Liberty students, especially those in LUCOM.

 

“We are going so long every year, our student doctors are extremely stressed out around this time,” Kristen Breedlove said. “They are extremely tired. They are extremely burned out.”

 

The show features dance, song and rap brought to the audience by LUCOM faculty and staff. Christopher Breedlove said that seeing faculty in a silly light like this makes staff more relational for such a highly professional and high stress environment.

 

The show’s pilot performance was winter 2016. Kristen Breedlove said the pressure to top last year’s show is scary.

 

“Most of the time, I think scary things are God ordained,” Kristen Breedlove said. “We didn’t realize it was going to go so well. I think it was more than what we thought the Lord was going to be doing. We found out really fast it was a healing time for our faculty and staff who were in it because it was a time for them to really get to know each other on a different level than being in work from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. every day. They got to see each other on a funny, completely different level.”

 

This year, the performance is a take on Jesus as the great physician, in combination with Proverbs 17:22, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up bones.”

 

“We are going to try to ignite within them, ‘Remember when you had that passion to be a doctor?’ We want to try to bring that back to them and let them know that this is only a moment in their life, this is not it,” said Kristen Breedlove. “You can get tunnel vision with this, even when you’re working here you can get tunnel vison.”

 

The comedy’s purpose is to get the students out of that tunnel vision and up the morale at one of the hardest points in the semester.

 

“For two hours, they let go of everything, which is awesome because they need a break,” Kristen Breedlove said.

 

But the morale boost starts with the faculty and staff. The performers received their scripts in October and started rehearsals in early November. Somehow on top of their full schedules, they managed to fit in hours of dancing, singing and staging for a Christmas show.

 

“Osteopathic Merry Melodies is refreshing the souls of the faculty and staff, when we are doing that for ourselves, we are refreshing the souls of our student doctors,” Kristen Breedlove said.

 

Through energizing the staff and faculty, the show hopes to give students the energy to endure until the end of the semester, while learning a few good lessons along with the laughs.

 

“This year is focused on the student doctors and what it means to be a doctor,” Christopher Breedlove said. “It’s not the status of a doctor but the symbol and responsibly.”

 

Kristen Breedlove said the focus is about the person inside the white lab coat, which is the culture at LUCOM. Getting to the root of the issue a person may bring into a doctor’s office, the holistic, osteopathic way, is the foundation for what the Breedlove’s see at LUCOM.

 

The Breedlove’s have high hopes for this show. They want to sell out and show main campus Liberty that highly trained and professional LUCOM doctors can let loose and be funny.

 

“It’s also for other departments to see LUCOM because we are up on the hill and we never come down on main campus,” said Kristen Breedlove.

 

Tickets are $5 and can be purchased at the door.

 

“It’s all to show how much we appreciate the students,” said Kristen Breedlove.