A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 11
There’s that new TV series on NBC starring Sarah Jessica Parker “Who Do You Think You Are?”. The show’s hook is genealogy, digging into a celeb’s family tree. I’ve heard genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies in the U.S..
So when I saw this item — “Getting to Know Her Gangster Aunt” — that got my brain going:
Standing upright on Sherry Altman’s table was a dulled, unfired bullet, supposedly taken from the jailhouse murder scene that sent Aunt Irene to prison. Beside it, a spread of yellowed newspapers and letters from Missouri State Penitentiary.
For decades, Altman’s family spoke little of Irene McCann. They had put away the records and hushed the old stories of Altman’s great-aunt, the hard-edged gangster in high heels.
“Most everybody in the family didn’t want to talk to her, but I always asked,” Altman said with a giggle.
In August, Altman’s mother died, leaving sealed cardboard boxes stacked in the Clayton home they shared.
Altman and her daughter found a trove of family history — including relics of Aunt Irene from a time when the press and police turned Depression-era robbers and gangsters like John Dillinger into almost mythical antiheroes.
There’s the photo of McCann, beaming, in the Missouri State Penitentiary courtyard circa 1931. And on a tattered magazine page, a writer traces a young woman’s criminal rebellion and her battle with the law. “Irene has lived hard, and dangerously,” columnist Fred Allhoff wrote in a series called “In the Crime light.”
“The newspapers made ’em look glamorous,” said Rick Mattix, a crime historian. “They vilified them, vilified them in a way that made them really a lot larger than life.”
You could go a lot of ways with a story idea like this, but the one that I’ll throw out here is akin to Fried Green Tomatoes (1991):
Evelyn Couch is having trouble in her marriage, and no one seems to take her seriously. While in a nursing home visiting relatives, she meets Ninny Threadgoode, an outgoing old woman, who tells her the story of Idgie Threadgoode, a young woman in 1920’s Alabama. Through Idgie’s inspiring life, Evelyn learns to be more assertive and builds a lasting friendship of her own with Ninny.
The narrative structure of the movie is two stories: Evelyn’s plotline in the present and Idgie’s plotline in the past. The movie interweaves the two, actually going ‘into’ Idgie’s saga, so in effect the stories not only have their own beginning, middle, and ending, Evelyn’s emotional and psychological growth is influenced by the unfolding mystery of Idgie’s past.
Why not do something similar but different with this story conceit? The Protagonist could be an adult woman. When her mother dies, among the things P inherits is a sealed box. She opens it and discovers that her grandmother is not lost to history, someone the P’s mother never discussed, but was a criminal, a life shrouded in mystery. The question of what happened to the P’s grandmother becomes a point of obsession for the P who sets off to discover the truth.
This could be a straight drama or P’s journey might uncover secrets that unsettle some folks, perhaps violent people who would just as soon see P dead in order to keep the past buried.
If you go the straight drama route, P could meet various people along the way who recount their knowledge of what the grandmother was like — and ala Citizen Kane, the story could bounce back and forth between the present and past.
I suppose it’s even possible that the grandmother is still alive.
But the journey into the truth should influence the P, perhaps helping her to decide what to do with a big choice confronting her.
What would you do with a story set-up like this one?