A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 27

This is the eighth year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: Homeless Man Once Catered to Stars at Beverly Hills Hotel — Now They’re Helping Him.

They called him the “poolside prince”: Svend Petersen spent more than 40 years running the iconic poolside area for the Beverly Hills Hotel, hosting stars including Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant.

When he fell on hard times — such hard times that in recent months he has sometimes survived on only two bananas a day — his friends helped him film an appeal to the hotel’s well-heeled clientele. And they responded.

Oscar winner Sandra Bullock, for one, contributed $5,000 to the cause. The campaign’s goal was $5,900, and it now has $17,900.

“Everything is going to be ok!” Bullock wrote in the comments section beneath her donation — a quote she attributed to her seven-year-old son, Louis.

“I’ve been homeless for 5 months and I’m calling on you because indeed help, real bad,” Peterson said in his video message. Organizers also created a Twitter account to showcase some of Petersen’s fans, like Faye Dunaway, who posed for a famous photo beside the Beverly Hills Hotel pool the morning after she won the Best Actress Oscar for 1977’s “Network.”

I got in touch with my inner 80s movie self for this one. Why not invert the dynamic? Super rich businessman (or woman) who lives in some tony area like Darien, Connecticut. This guy — let’s call him Ronald — is an Class A jerk. Lousy husband, absent father, tyrant boss, and worst of all, a nightmare customer. Even though he’s the head of some big company dealing with Big Time Players, one of his favorite pleasures is making the lives of The Little People who work in retail — waitstaff, limo drivers, IT technicians, ANYBODY employed in a service related job — a living, miserable nightmare.

Ronald breaks the law. Not a super big law, but one which puts him in front of a local judge… who as it happens is the father of a young woman we see in the story setup driven to tears by Ronald when she is his waitress at the local country club. It’s revenge served cold time!

The judge gives Ronald two options. The first is to spend 1 year in jail. Or 30 days working at the very same country club to which Ronald is a member. That means bus boy, swimming pool attendant, maid, front desk clerk, valet services, bell hop, any job which puts him face to face with club members who order him to do things for them.

[You may be thinking, “If Ronald is so damn rich, doesn’t he have a super powerful attorney who would wrangle his way out of a conviction?” Yes, he does have a top lawyer, but in a later revelation it turns out that Ronald has screwed with his son who caddied for Ronald for 18 excruciatingly painful holes, the boy having only recently gotten out of rehab after spiraling into post-Ronald drug abuse. So it’s also the lawyer’s chance to see some rough justice served Ronald’s way!]

If this were the 80s, Ronald would — of course — bond with the blue collar workers, finding a surrogate family there who would show him the error of his ways, and he would become a better husband, father, boss, etc. But this is 2017 with the world in a veeeeerrrry dark place. So how about this?

Ronald actually gets worse. He becomes a more terrible human being to the point where everyone in the community goes after him with murderous intent. I see the ending something akin to the original Frankenstein:

That’s right, dude ends up dead. And know what? The audience feels GOOD about it because Ronald deserves his cruel fate.

How’s THAT for a dark comedy?

There you go: My twenty seventh story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.

For other posts in my A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2017) series, go here.