Laurie & Dag: The Story Behind The Story Part IV

(Warning: This article recounts how I developed and where the story ideas for Laurie and Dag came from. It does contain numerous spoilers. If you intend to read my stories, then you can start by using the links on the right to navigate to The Kid & Me Part One where it all began. Thanks for stopping by)


One of the most important characters in Laurie and Dag is somebody that is never seen, never speaks, but there is no denying her impact. I’m talking of course about Norma Riley. The influence of Norma and what happened to her very much affected many of the decisions Laurie had made over the years. In the original version that I wrote and uploaded to The Sims 2 web site, Norma in fact did try to commit suicide but was unsuccessful and she along with her family moved to another town.

The following is the text from the original:

I walked into the bathroom to get into my suit, slamming the door behind me.

“Hey! I didn’t mean it that way,” she hollered at me through the door. I don’t care who a woman dates. But in this town, at our school, it would not be a wise course of action. You remembered what happened to Norma Riley don’t you?”

I knew exactly what she was talking about. In junior high, a rumor had gotten around that Norma Riley was gay. She had been caught kissing a girl from another school underneath the bleachers in the gym. They insisted they had only done it on a dare, but from that day forward, Norma’s life became the constant butt of every awful gay joke one could think of, along with the usual awful taunts such as, “Hey, here comes queer Norma!” In the locker room, when Norma would walk in the girls would cover up with a towel and holler, “Cover up, Norma might get an idea!” I hated the cruelty and lack of conscience in so many of the kids that occupied our school and probably most other schools."

The town I lived in had always been backwards and closed minded in its way of thinking. The most telltale sign of just how backward the people in this town were was that sixty six percent of them had voted for Bush. Eventually, Norma had a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide by splitting her wrists. The student body was given a strong lecture at a special assembly but as usual most of it had gone in one ear and out the other. Afterwards, Norma had not returned to school, and her family left town.

This is the version I wrote for this blog:

I knew exactly what she was talking about. In our last year at junior high, a rumor had gotten around that Norma Riley was gay, or as the kids put it at that time, a lesbo. She had been caught kissing a girl from another school underneath the bleachers in the gym. They insisted they had only done it on a dare, but from that day forward, Norma’s life became the constant butt of every awful gay slur one could think of, along with the usual awful taunts such as, “Hey, here comes Norma Van Dyke!” In the locker room, when Norma would walk in the girls would cover up with a towel and holler, “Cover up, we don’t want to give Norma any ideas!” Or sometimes one of the girls would drop a towel and ask, "Hey Van Dyke, do you think I'm hot?" And those were the lesser of the vulgarities they would taunt her with. Finally too afraid and unable to tell her parents or the faculty, Norma ended the cruelty herself by splitting her wrists on the fifty yard line of the football field late one night.

Of course, her parents and the faculty would be forever searching for the reasons why. And even though the students knew, nobody was talking including yours truly. I don't know how many of the kids actually felt guilty over what had happened but I did. I had nightmares about it for what seemed like an eternity. I could have tried to stop it as well as anybody but in the end had done nothing for fear of being labeled with the same stigma and suffering the same fate. Nothing was worth going through that hell.

I think you can understand why I rewrote it. One of the advantages of uploading the story to this blog was that I could hit a little harder whereas on The Sims 2 site, I always had to make allowances to fit in with their criteria. But still, if I were writing strictly for and older teen and adult audience, or writing the story as a real novel, there would undoubtedly be even more changes.

I also changed the way Laurie had presented the story at graduation. Laurie didn’t mention the girl she was referring to by name in the original version, and of course the fact that Norma had lived made that possible. In the rewritten version, I just felt that if Laurie was going to bring up the incident, she would do it in a way so that there would be no doubt as to whom Norma was and what had happened. It was the only way that Laurie could get rid of some of her own demons.

So how did Angela come to be? In the outline of the story she did not have a name. She was simply “Laurie develops a crush on classmate.” It was to be an integral part of the story. The only problem was, I wasn’t sure how to write it at first but sometimes these things just take care of themselves.

I had read many stories of gays and lesbians and their first relationship with somebody of the same sex. Sometimes it happened late in life, sometimes as early as junior high school (Norma again.) In a few stories, some of these relationships started in a similar fashion as the relationship between Laurie and Angela did. One usually knows they are gay, the other friend thinks they might be gay and sometimes things develop from there, but more often they do not. It was kind of strange as I was writing the scenes between Angela and Laurie because even in my imagination they seemed so simpatico. It was completely different than any relationship Laurie had experienced. And although she couldn’t acknowledge it, there was no doubt that Laurie had fallen in love, as Angela had with her.

I always wondered how I would have handled the situation if Angela hadn’t moved away. We know the first kiss they shared was in a moment of anguish, but would Angela have ever worked up the nerve to tell Laurie she was gay? It would be something to explore and if I ever write Laurie’s story as a novel, I would give some thought to changing it although having Angela leave certainly was necessary to give Laurie a chance to come to terms with her own feelings.

Many parents do not readily accept the fact that their child is homosexual. Although I have no statistics at hand, I would guess that the percentage that don’t is much higher than those who do. It was suggested to me that the way Joe and Bettie handled the fact that Laurie was a Lesbian is not what most teenagers face. I’ll agree with that. But you have to remember that I wrote Joe and Bettie to be a certain way even in The Kid & Me. They were both very progressive in their thinking and it would not have been true to their characters for them to go bonkers when they found out about Laurie.

However, by having Angela become such a major character, I was able to use her parents, Phil and Louise, to show what happens in a great many homes when a teenager is discovered to be gay. So I thought it balanced out the story quite well.

And then in at least the following instance, my own personal life played apart in writing the story.

I was dating a woman some years ago who had a teenage daughter. We’ll call the woman Sally and the daughter Gertie. It was quite obvious to me that Gertie could possibly be a Lesbian. When Gertie finally did tell her Sally, Sally blamed herself, cried a lot, wondered what she did wrong and all of that stuff. No talking on my part would convince her otherwise. What was one of the things that had made me suspect Gertie was Lesbian?

When we had moved to another town, Gertie had stayed behind with a “friend” in order to finish her junior year of high school. When she came down for the summer to visit, she very much wanted to go see the movie, Personal Best and in fact was very emphatic about seeing it. (Yeah, I know. A bell just went off in your head, didn’t it?) Sally had to work during the day so it was necessary for me to take Gertie there by way of city transit, especially since Gertie had no clue as to what the bus routes were.

As it turned out, the film was only playing at one of those out of the way art houses that play films that generally aren’t screened at the multiplexes. Well, just sitting there watching some of those scenes with Gertie made me very uncomfortable (just as it did Bettie) and the reaction of Gertie was about the same as Laurie’s. The ending totally pissed her off and from that point on I pretty much knew for sure and on her next visit home, she let the cat out of the bag to Sally.

In the story I had uploaded to The Sims 2, the scene with Bettie and Laurie watching Personal Best was not in it because I didn’t think including it would pass the muster so to speak because it was an R rated film. But I paid homage to the film in that version because I gave Laurie’s counselor the name, Chris Cahill, in reference to Muriel Hemingway’s character in the movie. I also took a real life event and used it as one of those things that gave Bettie reason to suspect Laurie was a lesbian. In fact, the whole idea of Bettie being the one to bring it out in the open was based on another true story I had read.

In many of the stories I have read on the official Sims 2 site, you will find that having unprotected Sex and having babies out of wedlock is just one big party. There are very few stories if any of what the consequences of these actions often are. I tried to address this in a small way in The Kid & Me, when the first time Joe has unprotected sex, he gets someone pregnant. Those of you who read that story know what that led to.

I have to say it really did bother me that so many teens pictured their first night of sex as some glorious experience with fireworks going off and pure ecstasy. I suppose so, as each and every person is different although experts say that’s more of an exception than the rule of thumb.. That’s the main reason why I downplayed Joe and Bettie’s wedding night in The Kid & Me, because it was her first time, and since she was the first person Joe had ever made loved to that he was in love with, he was nervous also.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m about as far away from being a prude as you can get. But on the other hand, there’s no use trying to hurry young teens into adulthood by constantly glamorizing the event. But I also know that teens will be teens, which is why I think that teaching abstinence only without teaching methods of birth control is not just useless, but dangerous and deadly. Because when push comes to shove, when those hormones take over, when a girl in love thinks she just has to, she isn't always going to give a jolly rat's squat about any purity ring someone is wearing or some vow of chastity she may have taken to score points with the Reverend down at the local church. To many teens, as long as they don't do "it", there's a whole list of other things they can participate in and in their minds still remain technically a virgin.

I had made up my mind to address some of these issues in Laurie and Dag also, such as what happens when you have unprotected sex. And that is where Gail came in. I always wanted her relationship with Chuck to be on the crappy side because I knew that despite her dreams of becoming a football star’s wife, she was going to have to deal with reality eventually. So as Laurie’s story went along, I hinted whenever I could that Gail was headed for trouble. And those of you who have read it know what happened.

The funny thing was, as I approached that part of the story I gave serious thought to dropping it. I did not really feel like getting into a debate about a woman’s right to chose because you’re totally wasting your breath in that argument anyway. Plus by that time I was getting a bunch of emails griping about the direction Laurie’s story had taken and dealing with that was beginning to wear me down. On the exchange, the two parts of the story that were downrated the worse was the chapter in which Laurie tells Kurt she is a lesbian, and the chapter dealing with Gail’s problem. Coincidence? I think not.

But I felt it was important that there be at least one story on the exchange that demonstrated what having unprotected sex could lead to, but if it does happen there are choices that can be made and that every woman should have the right to make that choice regardless of how many Jordin Sparks there are out there holding up signs. And after spending so much time building up to what happened, it would have been kind of stupid not to go ahead with it.

The only other allowance I made for The Sims 2 about Gail’s problem was to make it clear that she had already turned 18. The truth is, I wanted her to be seventeen, and no I don’t believe in parental notification laws because many anti-choice advocates want all or nothing. With many of these so called parental notification laws, a girl often has to have the permission of her parents, regardless of whether or not they are abusive to her. With some of these laws that have passed (but never upheld although it could be now with the new supreme court), a girl who is raped or is carrying the child of their stepfather or father would actually be required to go to him to get permission to have an abortion.

At least one person wrote to tell me they weren’t happy with the way the Gail/Laurie relationship worked out at the end of the story. She never said exactly why she didn’t like it, but I’m thinking that she thought Gail should have just kept on walking. For her, the reconciliation was too fast and too easy. Perhaps, but even if she had kept on walking, Gail would eventually have to reconcile with Laurie one way or another. They had been best friends for life and Laurie had helped Gail in her most urgent hour of need.

Let’s face it, the climax of the story was really Laurie outing her self at the commencement exercises. To go off on another long storyline at that point just to reconcile the two just wouldn’t have worked for me. The quick reconciliation did although it does have roots in another film that I was inspired by.

Do you remember Prom night, when Laurie and Gail are in Laurie’s room having their girl talk? At first, Laurie is looking out the window, contemplating her future, and unbeknownst to you, probably contemplating what will happen at graduation. She thinks Gail is asleep but as it turns out she is not, and they end up having their talk, one on one or girl to girl whichever way you want to phrase it. The inspiration for this chat, Gail not finding out about Laurie until her valedictorian speech, and the reconciliation all were inspired by a sequence in a film called The Trouble with Angels.

In the film, Hayley Mills and June Harding play two teenage girls who have been going to a private Catholic boarding school run by nuns. Hayley plays Mary Clancy, who is constantly getting into trouble and causing trouble, and June plays her sidekick and follower Rachael Devereaux. The film actually covers a three year period, and as each year goes by we watch as the girls steadily mature from prank playing sophomores to mature young adults. If you’ve never seen the film the following is a major spoiler so you may skip it if you please.

Without going into the long whys and wherefores, Mary is thinking about becoming a nun, although like Rachael we don’t know this. Just before graduation, Mary and Rachael have a similar talk such as the one Laurie and Gail had about their future. It is obvious that Mary wants to tell Rachael of her decision, but is unable to (partly because the writer and director wanted to keep the audience guessing for a while longer) Just as the girls are about to graduate, an announcement is made as to which girls are going to enter the convent, and Rachael finds out just as we do. Not understanding why Mary would become a nun, Rachael views her as a traitor.

Later, just as Rachael is getting ready to leave on the train, they reconcile at the very last possible moment with a little help from Reverend Mother (Rosalind Russell). So that is where my inspiration for that came from and you can compare what you read to the video. Please note though that in the video between the late night talk and the graduation there is a rather startling event that seals Mary’s decision. I have edited it out but if you want to see it, you can either buy the DVD, rent it, or wait for it to show up on Turner Classic Movies (but I think they lost the rights after the DVD came out.) But again, watch it while you can because you never know how long these things are going to stay up. Although the clips are quite different from what I wrote as they would be considering the two very different story lines, there is no doubt that you can see how I was inspired.

It was early in the writing of Laurie and Dag that I came up with the idea of Laurie coming out at her graduation. I was a bit troubled though, because I was afraid that too many people would not believe that someone would actually do such a thing. Finally, I did find the story of someone who had done something similar. It was a girl who had come out in front of the whole school, but I believe it was at an assembly and not graduation. So finding that out did ease my mind quite a bit, especially if someone were to question it.

And guess what. That’s about all I can think of right now so this pretty much wraps up my look back at Laurie and Dag. Of course, if you have any comments please feel free to leave them and I will do my best to respond. Or you can write to me at clydesplace@hotmail.com.

So where do I go from here? I want to write a new story with new characters but it is going to take some time to get started. I have decided to go ahead and post the other story that I wrote about Laurie and the Baker family, starting with a preview. So be watching for that. Thanks once again to each and every one of you who have read these stories either here or at The Sims 2. I appreciate each and everyone of you, and I hope that you will enjoy Laurie’s Wonderful Life also. You can click on the picture to go to the preview of Laurie's Wonderful Life.