All about Dava
I wrote the following tonight as a way to pad my word count and get through a block that has prevented me from writing any more than 600-700 words or so over the Thanksgiving Day weekend. It doesn't fit in well with the rest of the story; this is written in second-person perspective, rather than the first-person POV of my main male character.
But I think it's interesting, and after November ends and I can go back and fix some of the odd choices I've made to just keep moving, I'll find a way to make it fit.
In the meantime, here's my main female character's background story.
And if the timeline seems odd or doesn't square, keep in mind that I'm doing this fully improvisational-y, without a lot of research, just off the top of my head. I can clean it up later.
Meet Dava Galileo, semi-famous actress:
*****
In the summer of 1974, in Racine, a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a black-haired sailor came home, only to find that home wasn't there anymore.
The sailor's name was Gerald Gillicutty, the son of Irish immigrants, and had spent the previous four years serving in the United States Navy. He had signed up, in large part, to escape a chaotic home life. His father, Andrew, worked as a mechanic, self-taught, in a shop near the lake, and he had barely provided for his three sons and one daughter with his meager earnings. It had been hard to save any money at all, what with all the drinking Andrew had done.
Andrew wasn't a mean drunk. He didn't beat his wife, Sheila, or his children. He'd just get drunk every chance he got, and even some chances he probably shouldn't have. He would sing, and dance, and finally fall asleep in the light of the radio (the family didn't own a television set until the late 1980s, so much money was spent on booze).
Gerald was a serious son, the middle boy, and he commiserated with his mother during his teen years, and as soon as he'd graduated from public high school he had marched down to a Navy recruiter and enlisted. He'd spent some time near Vietnam but managed to avoid any serious conflict while at sea, and after his time was up, he came back home, to the little three bedroom house in Racine.
He should have known something was up when he'd stopped getting letters from his mother, some six months ago. She hadn't ever said anything about the rest of the family, her husband, the children. She wouldn't have - she was tight-lipped when it came to bad news. But the little house in Racine had been sold, and another family, a black family, was living there now. They knew no forwarding address.
Gerald spent some weeks trying to come up with a lead on where his parents, and three siblings, had gone to, but in the course of looking, he had met Rebecca Battle, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and had fallen in love. Rebecca was idealistic, and principled, and red-headed, and lithe, and adorable. She tried to help this orphaned sailor, and tried to keep it professional, but she failed. In just a few short months after meeting each other, they were married in a civil ceremony at City Hall.
And just ten months after that, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Rebecca gave birth to a daughter, five pounds 10 ounces, with a full head of blonde hair, little Diana Ava Gillicutty.
Diana Ava was the darling of her orphaned father. He had tried to shrug off the idea that his family had ran away from him, but couldn't. It stung. And so his wife, and his daughter, and his in-laws (who mostly lived in South Dakota) became his new focus. Gerald worked for small electrical contractors for a while, and finally found some stability working at the Milwaukee Arena in the late 1960s. Rebecca continued to work for the newspaper, and in the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War escalated and Richard Nixon's troubles mounted, Rebecca won some professional recognition for a series of articles profiling prominent protesters and activists. They bought a house.
When Diana Ava was seven years old, her Grampy Andy showed up on his son's doorstep. Gerald had been anticipating this, but even so, it came as a surprise to him. Andy was still a drunk, and unemployed, and gave only vague answers about where he had been in the intervening eight and a half years, but Gerald was able to guess that Sheila had finally gotten tired of Andy's habits, had taken the two younger kids (the eldest, Abraham, had long since gone his own way, like Gerald) and moved to Florida. Andy only needed a place to stay a while, to get back on his feet. Gerald, having had his memories softened by the love of his wife and daughter, and his satisfying job of keeping things working, agreed, and the family moved into a larger house a little further out of town.
Andy was still a drunk, and still a spendthrift, and the few odd jobs he took never brought in enough to offset the money he spent. But Gerald's blue-collar wages and Rebecca's upper-middle-class wages, along with some royalties from Rebecca's first published book, meant that the family was still able to thrive through the seventies.
And Diana Ava loved her Grampy Andy. They spent as much time together as they could, going to movies or plays. Grampy Andy was great fun for a pre-teen girl, full of tall tales and jokes, singing and dancing and teaching Diana Ava to sing and dance, too. Diana Ava's mother insisted on ballet and piano lessons, but Grampy Andy taught her how to dance an Irish jig, and songs about naughty nuns and Celtic queens.
Others loved Diana Ava, as well, as she grew. She was a beauty, with rich brown hair worn long and straight, and a figure that was kept lean and strong by her dancing. She was also a bit of a tom boy, and surprised several boys with the occasional dirty joke, or her ability to shoot whiskey. She honed her comedic timing as she grew, inspired by reruns of Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Lorraine Newman on old episodes of "Saturday Night Live".
Rebecca made the jump from print journalism to broadcast journalism, working for the local ABC affiliate, and finally becoming an anchorwoman. There was no jealousy on the part of her husband, who had moved into middle management at the Arena, now part of the MECCA complex. He was proud of his wife's professional accomplishments. But Gerald worried about his daughter, spending so much time with the drunken old man.
Diana Ava took theater classes in high school, and tried to get good comedic roles. But her beauty marked her out for more romantic roles and serious roles, which frustrated her. Her humor was incongruous. It didn't fit others' view of her. Her figure blossomed, but her desire to make others' laugh, with the exception of her Grampy Andy, didn't.
When it came time for college, Diana Ava chose the University of Chicago, and majored in history. Her parents could have afforded to send her to anywhere in the world to study, and urged her to make the most of her natural intelligence and wit. What they didn't want her to do was to spend a lot of time chasing a dream of stand up comedy. Like many only children, she disobeyed. She auditioned for the Second City comedy troupe. She was rejected, again because no one took such a beautiful woman's attempts at comedy... seriously.
She was able to get some roles on the stage in Chicago, however, and in her third year of college, a casting agent looking for starlets for a low-budget horror movie to be filmed in the Windy City took notice of her and approached her the next day. She accepted, and dropped out of school to work on the production. The movie was released the following summer, with one Dava Galileo listed in the cast. Diana Ava's, now Dava's, big scene was being killed by demon-possessed, Mad-Hatter-obsessed, serial killer. She was slashed to death by a pack of razor-sharp playing cards. The reviewers all enjoyed her screams but attributed the humor of the scene to the director, the writer, and the costumer for the serial killer. It was the height of irony, they claimed. Dava fumed, because several elements of the scene had been her idea, and yet she was only given credit for her full breasts, slender legs, and long blonde (it was a wig but she dyed it afterward for publicity appearances) hair.
Once she'd been in one movie, offers for other, similar roles came to her easily. During the filming of her second movie, news came that Grampy Andy had passed away, prompting her to leave the location, outside of Austin, Texas, to go back home to the suburbs of Milwaukee, for the funeral. Her parents still disapproved, but out of a small sense of family and respect for Gerald's father, they gave grudging approval for their little girl to continue if she wished. Perhaps she would return to more serious studies after getting this out of her system, they hoped. They couldn't bring themselves to call her by her stage name, however, which led to more than a few fights.
After the funeral she returned to the location in Austin, where she brought a light touch to a role as a prostitute with a taste for dirty limericks. She wrote all of them herself, impressing the writer and the director, and cracking up the cast and crew.
After the movie, a teen comedy about college boys on a road trip to New Orleans, wrapped, Dava moved to Los Angeles, and hired an agent to help her break into better roles. In a year's time, she had had several guest appearances on some Fox sitcoms, usually playing a stripper or waitress (the two roles are practically interchangeable). Audience reaction to her character on a short-lived show about a cat who becomes a human, where she played a Hooters-type waitress who spoke in iambic pentameter, was immediate and unprecedented enough to prompt the producers to try to spin her character off. The pilot became an underground success, thanks to it being leaked to the internet, but was never picked up by a studio. However, that success built until it led to her being given the lead role as "Mizz Miranda", in the fictional reality show "California in High-Def", one of the most-hyped new shows of the 2003-04 television season. It still wasn't a comedic role, although she brought her own sense of timing to the lines, but in such a short time she'd finally risen to the point where she could start to pick and choose the roles she wanted to take.
And during hiatus from filming the second season of "California in High-Def", after much hinting in interviews and publicity appearances, she was finally offered a lead role in a comedy, opposite another young male television star. The movie was tentatively titled "Rain Gods". It featured Dava as, obviously enough, a rain goddess who falls in love with a weather reporter from the Pacific Northwest, and it was to be filmed in Portland, Oregon.
But I think it's interesting, and after November ends and I can go back and fix some of the odd choices I've made to just keep moving, I'll find a way to make it fit.
In the meantime, here's my main female character's background story.
And if the timeline seems odd or doesn't square, keep in mind that I'm doing this fully improvisational-y, without a lot of research, just off the top of my head. I can clean it up later.
Meet Dava Galileo, semi-famous actress:
*****
In the summer of 1974, in Racine, a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a black-haired sailor came home, only to find that home wasn't there anymore.
The sailor's name was Gerald Gillicutty, the son of Irish immigrants, and had spent the previous four years serving in the United States Navy. He had signed up, in large part, to escape a chaotic home life. His father, Andrew, worked as a mechanic, self-taught, in a shop near the lake, and he had barely provided for his three sons and one daughter with his meager earnings. It had been hard to save any money at all, what with all the drinking Andrew had done.
Andrew wasn't a mean drunk. He didn't beat his wife, Sheila, or his children. He'd just get drunk every chance he got, and even some chances he probably shouldn't have. He would sing, and dance, and finally fall asleep in the light of the radio (the family didn't own a television set until the late 1980s, so much money was spent on booze).
Gerald was a serious son, the middle boy, and he commiserated with his mother during his teen years, and as soon as he'd graduated from public high school he had marched down to a Navy recruiter and enlisted. He'd spent some time near Vietnam but managed to avoid any serious conflict while at sea, and after his time was up, he came back home, to the little three bedroom house in Racine.
He should have known something was up when he'd stopped getting letters from his mother, some six months ago. She hadn't ever said anything about the rest of the family, her husband, the children. She wouldn't have - she was tight-lipped when it came to bad news. But the little house in Racine had been sold, and another family, a black family, was living there now. They knew no forwarding address.
Gerald spent some weeks trying to come up with a lead on where his parents, and three siblings, had gone to, but in the course of looking, he had met Rebecca Battle, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and had fallen in love. Rebecca was idealistic, and principled, and red-headed, and lithe, and adorable. She tried to help this orphaned sailor, and tried to keep it professional, but she failed. In just a few short months after meeting each other, they were married in a civil ceremony at City Hall.
And just ten months after that, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Rebecca gave birth to a daughter, five pounds 10 ounces, with a full head of blonde hair, little Diana Ava Gillicutty.
Diana Ava was the darling of her orphaned father. He had tried to shrug off the idea that his family had ran away from him, but couldn't. It stung. And so his wife, and his daughter, and his in-laws (who mostly lived in South Dakota) became his new focus. Gerald worked for small electrical contractors for a while, and finally found some stability working at the Milwaukee Arena in the late 1960s. Rebecca continued to work for the newspaper, and in the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War escalated and Richard Nixon's troubles mounted, Rebecca won some professional recognition for a series of articles profiling prominent protesters and activists. They bought a house.
When Diana Ava was seven years old, her Grampy Andy showed up on his son's doorstep. Gerald had been anticipating this, but even so, it came as a surprise to him. Andy was still a drunk, and unemployed, and gave only vague answers about where he had been in the intervening eight and a half years, but Gerald was able to guess that Sheila had finally gotten tired of Andy's habits, had taken the two younger kids (the eldest, Abraham, had long since gone his own way, like Gerald) and moved to Florida. Andy only needed a place to stay a while, to get back on his feet. Gerald, having had his memories softened by the love of his wife and daughter, and his satisfying job of keeping things working, agreed, and the family moved into a larger house a little further out of town.
Andy was still a drunk, and still a spendthrift, and the few odd jobs he took never brought in enough to offset the money he spent. But Gerald's blue-collar wages and Rebecca's upper-middle-class wages, along with some royalties from Rebecca's first published book, meant that the family was still able to thrive through the seventies.
And Diana Ava loved her Grampy Andy. They spent as much time together as they could, going to movies or plays. Grampy Andy was great fun for a pre-teen girl, full of tall tales and jokes, singing and dancing and teaching Diana Ava to sing and dance, too. Diana Ava's mother insisted on ballet and piano lessons, but Grampy Andy taught her how to dance an Irish jig, and songs about naughty nuns and Celtic queens.
Others loved Diana Ava, as well, as she grew. She was a beauty, with rich brown hair worn long and straight, and a figure that was kept lean and strong by her dancing. She was also a bit of a tom boy, and surprised several boys with the occasional dirty joke, or her ability to shoot whiskey. She honed her comedic timing as she grew, inspired by reruns of Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Lorraine Newman on old episodes of "Saturday Night Live".
Rebecca made the jump from print journalism to broadcast journalism, working for the local ABC affiliate, and finally becoming an anchorwoman. There was no jealousy on the part of her husband, who had moved into middle management at the Arena, now part of the MECCA complex. He was proud of his wife's professional accomplishments. But Gerald worried about his daughter, spending so much time with the drunken old man.
Diana Ava took theater classes in high school, and tried to get good comedic roles. But her beauty marked her out for more romantic roles and serious roles, which frustrated her. Her humor was incongruous. It didn't fit others' view of her. Her figure blossomed, but her desire to make others' laugh, with the exception of her Grampy Andy, didn't.
When it came time for college, Diana Ava chose the University of Chicago, and majored in history. Her parents could have afforded to send her to anywhere in the world to study, and urged her to make the most of her natural intelligence and wit. What they didn't want her to do was to spend a lot of time chasing a dream of stand up comedy. Like many only children, she disobeyed. She auditioned for the Second City comedy troupe. She was rejected, again because no one took such a beautiful woman's attempts at comedy... seriously.
She was able to get some roles on the stage in Chicago, however, and in her third year of college, a casting agent looking for starlets for a low-budget horror movie to be filmed in the Windy City took notice of her and approached her the next day. She accepted, and dropped out of school to work on the production. The movie was released the following summer, with one Dava Galileo listed in the cast. Diana Ava's, now Dava's, big scene was being killed by demon-possessed, Mad-Hatter-obsessed, serial killer. She was slashed to death by a pack of razor-sharp playing cards. The reviewers all enjoyed her screams but attributed the humor of the scene to the director, the writer, and the costumer for the serial killer. It was the height of irony, they claimed. Dava fumed, because several elements of the scene had been her idea, and yet she was only given credit for her full breasts, slender legs, and long blonde (it was a wig but she dyed it afterward for publicity appearances) hair.
Once she'd been in one movie, offers for other, similar roles came to her easily. During the filming of her second movie, news came that Grampy Andy had passed away, prompting her to leave the location, outside of Austin, Texas, to go back home to the suburbs of Milwaukee, for the funeral. Her parents still disapproved, but out of a small sense of family and respect for Gerald's father, they gave grudging approval for their little girl to continue if she wished. Perhaps she would return to more serious studies after getting this out of her system, they hoped. They couldn't bring themselves to call her by her stage name, however, which led to more than a few fights.
After the funeral she returned to the location in Austin, where she brought a light touch to a role as a prostitute with a taste for dirty limericks. She wrote all of them herself, impressing the writer and the director, and cracking up the cast and crew.
After the movie, a teen comedy about college boys on a road trip to New Orleans, wrapped, Dava moved to Los Angeles, and hired an agent to help her break into better roles. In a year's time, she had had several guest appearances on some Fox sitcoms, usually playing a stripper or waitress (the two roles are practically interchangeable). Audience reaction to her character on a short-lived show about a cat who becomes a human, where she played a Hooters-type waitress who spoke in iambic pentameter, was immediate and unprecedented enough to prompt the producers to try to spin her character off. The pilot became an underground success, thanks to it being leaked to the internet, but was never picked up by a studio. However, that success built until it led to her being given the lead role as "Mizz Miranda", in the fictional reality show "California in High-Def", one of the most-hyped new shows of the 2003-04 television season. It still wasn't a comedic role, although she brought her own sense of timing to the lines, but in such a short time she'd finally risen to the point where she could start to pick and choose the roles she wanted to take.
And during hiatus from filming the second season of "California in High-Def", after much hinting in interviews and publicity appearances, she was finally offered a lead role in a comedy, opposite another young male television star. The movie was tentatively titled "Rain Gods". It featured Dava as, obviously enough, a rain goddess who falls in love with a weather reporter from the Pacific Northwest, and it was to be filmed in Portland, Oregon.
