Essays: Laurie's Wonderful Life - A Look Back

Before you begin reading this article and if you are in the process of reading any of the three stories on this blog please note there are spoilers for all the stories in this article.

Some of the reasons as to why I wrote Laurie’s Wonderful Life can be found in this preview. But those weren’t the only reasons.

In both The Kid & Me and in Laurie & Dag I had copped out in a small way. Originally in The Kid & Me, Bettie was to be killed when she was hit by that car near the end of the story until I gave her a last minute reprieve. Likewise, I originally thought I might end Laurie & Dag differently.

My idea for Laurie and Dag was to end the story with Laurie and Angela being reunited as part of the last Chapter, and then the ending epilogue would take place years later. It would have had Laurie and Angela living together as they are at the beginning of Laurie’s Wonderful Life, and they would go to that bar once again and the crazy guy would enter as he did before. Only it would have been Angela to have been shot and killed.

The reason I almost used that ending is not only because an event like that actually did happen, but because I wanted to give the reader some idea that Lesbians and Gays not only face a great deal of discrimination, but that there is always the thought that some crazy is out there wanting to take them out for whatever reason. You could ask Matthew Shepherd and Scotty Joe Weaver about that, that is if they were alive for you to do so.

But in the end I felt that after everything Laurie had went through in Laurie and Dag, that I needed to leave the reader with at least some sense of hope for the future. Maybe it is just my own wishful thinking also that things can be better. Of course, when I wake up to the news every day and see the shambles that Bush and his co-horts have made of this country, when I read stories such as this one I read last week, you really begin to wonder if there is any hope for anything and whether or not the damage they have done can ever be corrected. I mean when this country worries more about keeping a couple of the same sex from exchanging vows at the alter, or worse than that how many days Paris Hilton will spend in jail then the fact that there are over 3,000 dead in Iraq and that the President and his cohorts has made a shambles of the constitution, then they might as well start calling us The United States of Looney Tunes.

Still, I had the scene in my mind of Laurie and Angela going into that bar in my mind and it just kind of stayed there as if I needed to write it. So eventually that scene became the most important scene in Laurie’s Wonderful Life, as it was the driving force behind the whole story.

Another reason I wrote Laurie’s Wonderful Life is that I felt I owed closure to those who had been loyal followers of the story on the official Sims 2 web site. Even when I originally wrote it I didn’t expect Wonderful Life to do well on that site. Most of my regular readers had moved on after having became quite disgusted with the way the official site was being ran back then and is still being run now. I seldom use it and when I do it is to find an answer for somebody else. And as I suspected, it didn’t do well at all and was pretty much buried after being attacked by those who still held silly grudges for one reason or another including the fact that I had dared to write a story about gays and a girl having an abortion.

The thing of it is, I will probably always regret in some way that I didn’t pick up Laurie’s and Angela’s story right after the original story ended. There were several reasons for it, the main one being that because I had lost so much readership at The Sims 2 site, there would not be anybody to bother with reading it. I’m sure some of you will say that it shouldn’t matter and perhaps you are right. But writing a Sims story that is worthwhile with the pictures and everything else involved requires an enormous amount of time and effort, and you would want to think that the effort was rewarded at least in some readership. I really don’t care if someone likes or dislikes the story, but I would at least like them read. And at that time since The Sims 2 was the only outlet for those stories, it was not something I cared to pursue for that site as I knew any thing I wrote would be forever buried by those silly people with their silly grudges and narrow mindedness.

Another reason I didn’t pick up Laurie and Dag’s story right after high school is because I didn’t think I could ever do it justice. For one thing, I was clueless as to what it would be like for Laurie to struggle through College and Medical School even if I do watch Grey’s Anatomy every week. But most of all, I honestly didn’t think I could write about the Gay & Lesbian lifestyle and get it right. And if I was going to write about it, getting it right was extremely important. I had made it through Laurie & Dag by doing hours and hours of research on the internet. To go through the years with Laurie and Angela would have required researching not only what studying to be a surgeon would be like, but even more hours of research into the gay life style. And it is not that I was unwilling to do that, but to make that much of a commitment I would have to know that there were enough people out there reading it to make it worth my while.

And of course as I have mentioned time and time again, if I were to write such a story for The Sims 2 web site, I would have to constantly change what I wanted to write to fit their criteria as I did with both Laurie and Dag and Laurie’s Wonderful Life.

The graphic scene in the bar when Joe is killed was not even close to being what I wrote for this story blog. Here is the original text as Angela remembered that night. You can compare it to the rewrite I uploaded in Act One.

She had been on the dance floor with Margie. Unlike Laurie, she had not noticed the stranger entering the bar. Margie and she were just about to leave the floor when the slow dance started and Joe and Laurie had come to join them. Margie and she had decided to dance the slow dance together also. Angela had been looking at Joe, thinking that he wasn’t a bad dancer at all, when she heard the first shot, not really knowing what it was. Everything else was almost a blur of events that happened in a matter of seconds, but played over and over in slow motion in her head. She had looked over at the bar, but Jerome was no longer standing there. People stood up and began screaming. She saw a bald headed man walking towards them. It was then that she saw Joe throw Laurie to the floor, just as another shot rang out and ricocheted off the concrete walls. Both her and Margie had stood there stunned, not sure what was going on or what to do. “Get on the floor,” Joe had yelled at them again. Angela grabbed Margie's belt and started to pull her downwards. She was too late. Another shot, and blood spurted out of the back of Margie's shirt. She had been critically wounded. From the floor, Angela could see Joe headed towards the baldheaded man, and some of the other guys in the bar moved towards him also. Everybody else had ducked under tables. Laurie hadn't moved, the violent force of the throw to the floor had momentarily stunned her. If Joe had been twenty years younger, or perhaps even ten, he may have reached the gunman. But just as Joe was about to reach the bald headed man, the gun fired again, one more time, more blood, and Joe fell to the floor. It had been a direct hit, the bullet piercing his heart, and he was dead. Moments later he was lying lifeless in a pool of blood, Laurie and Angela both kneeling over his lifeless body, as Laurie used every skill she had to try and bring him back. It was to no avail. Several of the guys in the bar managed to tackle the bald headed man with the gun just a second later. But it was too late for Joe, and for Jerome who would die of his wounds an hour later, and for Margie who would never walk again.

As you can see it is quite a bit different if you go back and compare it to the rewrite. Is there any doubt in your mind which is more effective? And in the original pictures there was no blood. For this blog, I photoshopped it into the pictures. It was the same problem I ran across in Laurie & Dag. I had to somehow hint at Laurie having physical desires as well as her emotional ones, yet to even suggest that she might even have had such thoughts on The Sims 2 would have had the story yanked before you can say pomegranate.

Now there will be those who probably absolutely hate the epilogue in Laurie’s Wonderful Life. It is certainly filled with quite a bit of what I call the fantasy element. But let’s not forget that at it’s heart, it is not only a story about redemption it is first and foremost still a Christmas story. It’s not that you can’t write a Christmas story without some kind of fantasy elements, but I think the best ones do include it in one form or another. Certainly the original It’s A Wonderful Life movie did, and definitely the same goes for Charles Dicken’s Christmas Carol so how can you argue with success? The only thing I can say is that if it wasn’t your cup of tea pretend that the epilogue doesn’t exist and that Laurie wakes up and everything that happened to her was just her dreams just as I guess Oz was supposed to be when Dorothy woke up (movie version). Still, when I wrote those last few lines added to the picture of Joe standing next to Laurie and Bettie, even I got choked up a bit. I had brought all of these characters to life, and at that point it was over.

So where does that leave me and where does that leave this blog. I have a couple of stories in mind that I could write. But it would take a lot of time and effort. I’m perfectly willing to give it that if I feel there will be at least a few people out there not only wanting to read it but with the patience to wait in between story chapters which because of other things I have going on. It could take several weeks to complete each one. Remember, unlike these stories that were already written, I would be writing anything new from scratch including setting up the Sims game for the story and shooting new pictures. The one advantage I would have in posting to this blog is that I wouldn't have to take so many repetitious pictures. For instance, because of the way the Sims story telling interface is designed, you have to have a picture for every single very short page. So when there is something like a conversation between two characters, you may have to have five or six different pictures of that conversation whereas for this blog you would probably only need one.

I guess that’s where that little survey comes in that I have posted in the right hand column. A lot depends on it, not so much as to what the answers are but as a way to gage how many are actually reading these stories or have read them. I can post stuff on Clyde’s Place and it doesn’t matter as much that there may not be anybody reading if at all. I can write for it at my leisure when I want and when I feel like it. But writing these stories is a bit different and to put the kind of effort into it that it would take to get going again, I have to know that there are enough people reading to encourage me to do so. So the only thing I can say is we’ll see, but it doesn’t look hopeful. In all the stories I have received comments from two people in the comments section (three if you count someone promoting a porn site) and one of them was related. I have received exactly three emails in regards to the stories and that’s it whereas when Laurie & Dag were at the height of their popularity on Sims 2, I was receiving several emails a day and hundreds of comments on my Sims page. Those are not good numbers especially when you consider that I can write a five paragraph story about American Idol for Clyde's Place and get my Inbox flooded. So if you have read or are in the process of reading, please take the survey or write to me at Clydesplace@gmail.com.

And finally, I want to thank each and every one of you who have read these stories or are in the process of doing so. I do hope that you enjoyed them and I hope that in some small way they may have touched you because in the end, that’s all that really matters to me. Whatever happens in the future, at least I have once again given these three stories a home, one I hope they can have for a long long time. Thanks again.

Clyde

Previewing Laurie's Wonderful Life

In late 2005, things were not all that great in my life. I had finished Laurie and Dag way back in June, and had lost any desire at all to write anymore Sims tales or much of anything else. Part of it was that I had poured my heart and soul into the Laurie and Dag project only to have it met with derision, and the other reason was that because I had put so much of myself into those stories, I had burned myself out.

By that fall my mother had taken very ill, and I wasn’t even sure if I would be able to fly back to Ohio to see her. But by November, I finally was able to. From the very beginning of the visit, it was quite apparent that this would be the last time I would be with her before she passed away. She had suffered a number of strokes over the years and had been confined to a bed in a nursing home for a long time. She could speak, but was hard to understand and it was often frustrating and difficult for both of us to communicate. But let there be no mistake about the fact that despite her many handicaps, she still had entire use of her faculties.

I would spend most of the day sitting with her and we would watch a lot of television. Often, it was a DVD or a movie on one of the limited selection of channels that she had. Sometimes though, she would watch the Cooking Channel or some other show that didn’t really interest me. It was during these times that my mind would wander and I would begin to think about why things happen the way they do and why they turned out the way they did.

Did you ever stop to think about the many decisions you have made in your life that if you had done them differently, your life may have taken a completely different path. Take me as an example. If I had not married wife number one, would there ever have been a wife number two? Or a wife number three for that matter? Or would wife number two simply have become wife number one? But how would I have met her since it was wife number one who wanted so desperately to move back to her home town and that is where I eventually met Mrs. Clyde II? As you can tell, you could play this game for hours if you just think of one incident or one decision you made and change it completely to alter the path that you had followed.

During this period of time that I spent with my mother, I also had lots of time to begin to think about my own mortality. I guess we all do at times like that. Dying is not something that I’m particularly afraid of. We all have to go sometime, sooner or later, so we might as well make the best of things while we are here and not worry about what happens after we are gone because let me tell you, the situation is completely out of our hands. Oh, we can possibly extend our longevity if we do certain things and take certain precautions. But it is certainly no guarantee of anything. Just because we smoke, it doesn’t guarantee that we will get lung cancer, although it does increase the odds that we will. And just because we don’t smoke it doesn’t absolutely guarantee that our lungs won’t end up as a shriveled mass of cancerous cells. There just aren’t any guarantees about anything.

So in that week I spent with my mother, I came to two conclusions. One was that even if you could go back in time and change something in your life, that doesn’t guarantee things will be better. And the second thing is that if we all came out of our mother’s womb with the word’s “Unconditional Money Back Guaranteed” tattooed on our behinds, life would be a whole lot simpler. If things weren’t going so well, then we could all just take a mulligan and try again.

During that week I spent with mom, it was also approaching the Christmas season. The two best known Christmas stories of all time also just happen to deal with these same matters of life and death. Those stories are Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. In A Christmas Carol, it is the ghosts who travel with Scrooge through time to remind him of what his life was like, what it could have been, what it should have been, and what it could still become. In It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey is given the opportunity by angel Clarence Oddbody to see what life would have been like if he had never been born.

So in the evenings, when I would leave the nursing home, I would end up at my sister’s home and on her computer with a lot of time on my hands. I had always wanted to do a Christmas Story of some kind or another and using It’s A Wonderful Life as an inspiration, I managed to put together this story, Laurie’s Wonderful Life. By the time my week with my mother came to a close and I had to fly back to California, I had also finished the text of the story.

I don’t feel bad about using the premise of It’s A Wonderful Life for my Sims story. The same premise has been used a gazillion times in other TV movies and endless episodes of TV series. It had also been remade at one time with Marlo Thomas playing the Jimmy Stewart role in a TV movie so Laurie wasn’t even the first female to have taken over the role. But once you get past the basic premise, Laurie’s story differs in many ways.

This is not a total rehash of It’s A Wonderful Life as the latter part of Dag’s Courtship of Eddie’s Father was. In the beginning it is darker in tone than one might expect. It is certainly far darker than the original and a lot harsher in the beginning than anything I have ever written. And I mean that in every sense of the word. But you have to remember that the subject matter is far more serious in the early going, and you also have to remember that it often reflected my own pent up emotions and anger at times. There are going to be those of you who will understand it, and some of you will not. Even when I greatly edited the original text so that the story would pass the censorship of the Sims 2 site, it was not exactly greeted with open arms and was the worst received story of the three that I wrote.

Yet, in the end, it could also turn out to be the best. It’s not for me to judge. It once and for all brings closure to what I now call the Baker Family Trilogy. And here for the first time, you can read the restored text that I removed so that the story would conform to the TOS of The Sims 2 web site. Be forewarned that when I do post Act One, it is not recommended for those bothered by extreme violence, or those bothered by the occasional expletive. It is not recommended for anyone under the age of thirteen.

I had some doubts about what to do with Laurie’s Wonderful Life. I had thoughts of storing it away and never using it again. It would have enabled me to write about the Baker’s once again if I so desired to. But I decided that this is their story and this is how it ends.

I also thought about holding the story until Christmas, but I honestly think the fact that the story takes place during that time of year has little to do with the over all themes. It just so happens that it takes place around the Holiday Season just as the original film happens to begin and end during that time of year.

As for my mother, I have always wondered what she would think about many of the things I have written. I know she wouldn’t care for most of the political items that I have written on my other blog. She was a staunch Republican but I’m not sure how she got that way. Well, come to think of it I do but I won’t delve into that.

I’m not sure what she would think about the Baker saga or even if any of it would have interested her. She might have liked The Kid & Me, and she might have liked Dag’s part of the story of Laurie & Dag. I know she liked the movie it was based on. I’m not sure what she would think of Laurie’s Wonderful Life at all. My mother never had the opportunity to read any of these things I started writing here or in various places around the internet. She was no longer capable of reading on her own and had to be read to. However, Just a few short weeks after I returned home from that visit with her, and just a few days before her birthday, I received the dreaded phone call.

I’m glad I was able to spend that week with my mom. Maybe if there is a God or a heaven, then possibly she is now able to read this and know that my inspiration for it came from her. Since that time, I have often returned my thoughts to things I could change in my past if I could. But like George Bailey, and like Laurie, I’m not sure it would be such a good thing to be able to do. But that is something none of us will really ever know, so you better make the right choices the first time around.

On a final note, it won't be absolutely necessary to read my other two stories on here to read Laurie's Wonderful Life. The problem is that by the time you hit the third act, you will be completely lost as to how the events that are unfolding relate to past events. However, I have tried to include a quick run down of a few of the characters as how to relate to Laurie's Wonderful Life within the story itself. At any rate, Act One should be up within a few days.

Click here to proceed to Act One of Laurie's Wonderful Life.

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.

Laurie & Dag: The Story Behind the Story Part III

(Author's Notes: This is a look back at how I created the story Laurie and Dag. WARNING! There will be spoilers if you haven't read the stories. If you would like to read the entire saga you can start with The Kid and Me by using the links in the right hand margin. Thanks for stopping by.)

As I have mentioned previously, when I was putting The Kid & Me up on the official site, it took quite a while to gain an audience. As a matter of fact, I may not have had more than two or three people reading it at all for the first two or three segments. Eventually it did find its audience even thought for a Sims story it was quite lengthy.

By lengthy I don’t mean that in regards to the number of chapters in the story. There were stories on the exchange that had far more chapters but each of those chapters wouldn’t have but 20 to 40 frames on the average compared to each chapter of The Kid & Me averaging well over a hundred. You would have been very hard pressed to find one that went into the details that I did. I know, I know, compared to a regular novel or even a novella that’s not very much story detail at all but as a Sim story, it was. At any rate, as I neared writing the last few chapters of The Kid & Me, I began to get messages from people telling me how they had started reading and had stayed up all night reading up to where I had left off. That would make any writer feel good.

So when I finally decided to do a sequel, I felt I owed it to everybody who had been loyal to The Kid and had invested a good deal of time in reading it to reward them in some way by using part of the first few chapters to wrap up some loose ends. But I also didn’t want anybody to feel that they were compelled to have to go back and read The Kid & Me to understand what was going on. So it was a tightrope but I think I pulled it off quite well.

The biggest loose ends I needed to wrap up were having Laurie learn the truth about Joe’s relationship with Susan and the circumstances of her birth. I also needed to do something about her grandparents that were mentioned in the first story, although never seen. Having Laurie discover the truth about Joe and her mother wasn’t a problem. I just had Joe tell her just like he should have done in the first place.

In my original outline that I made for the story, Laurie’s grandparents were actually still alive. I had this whole plot established where the grandparents would contact Laurie and she would go to see them against Joe’s wishes. Than being the nutty grandparents that they are, they would keep her there, lock her up in a room, and force her to recant her sins and give herself to God before going to try out for American Idol (sorry, I couldn’t resist the joke. She really wasn’t going to try out for Idol because Laurie can’t sing.). Pretty cool and scary stuff, isn’t it? Later of course, Joe would rescue her and take her home. I wrote 23 pages of this scenario, before I decided it wasn’t working out. As painful as it was, I had to simply disregard all that work.

The problem was that in order to sneak off and see her grandparents it required Laurie to do a lot of things that didn’t jive with the character as I had conceived her. It also required Chuck Easterman of all people actually doing a good deed and that I couldn’t have under any circumstances. But more important it was going way off on a tangent that had little or nothing to do with the real story I wanted to tell. But I still felt that I needed something to explain away the mysterious grandparents. What was in the story is what I finally came up with, and I think it works as well as can be expected. It is one of those incidents that help define Laurie’s character as she continues to mature. One bit of trivia though is the fact that the two elderly sims in the picture at the grandparents home are the two sims I created for the roles.

As for the house itself, it was one that I found on The Sims 2 site but I had to make a lot of modifications in it. In order to get the pictures of the crucifixion on the wall, I had to drop some Sims onto that lot and have them paint them individually. (You can have Sims paint practically anything you have a photograph of on your hard drive. Easier to do now then it was back then though). As for the room where Laurie found the diary and the photographs, all the stacks of papers and the chest Laurie examined had to be photo shopped in as well as the stacks of boxes. The notebook though was her Diary. Sims can write in their Diary at anytime or anywhere. And on a final note regarding that segment, the person you see Joe carrying out of the house is not Laurie. It was a double wearing the same clothes. An adult Sim can leap into another adult Sim's arms, but a teen Sim cannot. Well, they can now because there is a hack that enables them to do so. There wasn't one then and I had a helluva time figuring out how I was going to pull off something I thought was essential to the success of the story. No amount of manipulation would get the job done, and I was about to give up until the idea for the body double suddenly hit me.

And then there was Bettie having a baby on the highway. That may not have been absolutely necessary for this story but it was something I had wanted to do in the last chapter of The Kid and Me with Joe delivering his and Bettie’s first child. As it turned out, I didn’t think I could pull it off as far as the pictures were concerned.

It would have taken a whole lot of manipulation of the Sims and some photo shopping to get it to work. So weighing all of those factors, I decided to reluctantly drop it because I felt I was getting myself into something I couldn’t handle. By the time I started to write Laurie & Dag though, I thought I had gained enough experience in manipulating Sims to pull it off.

I managed to do so, but it was every bit as difficult to do as I thought it would be. For one thing, I had to make it look like Bettie was actually laying down to have the baby. Then I had to be able to put the baby where it needed to be. If you’ve played the game, then you know that when Sims have babies, they have them standing up. They let out with one big scream, one big moan and then the infant falls out of the sky into the mother’s loving arms. Well, it could be a father’s loving arms but that’s a different story altogether.

The other problem was that Sims did not own cars. The only vehicles the game had at that time were service delivery vehicles, a taxi, and the cars from the car pool which ran the gamut from a beat up old wreck to actually having a helicopter whisk them away to work if they had reached the top level of their career.

But, thanks to hackers, you could put these vehicles into your catalog and haul them out for use as needed although they were only meant to be props. In order to get Sims to sit in them, or even look like they were sitting in them, you had to maneuver car and Sim until you achieved the desired effect.

One way that worked (sometimes) was to command them to sit in a chair, on a couch, or somewhere else. Then you would simply pause the game, use a move objects cheat (In regular game play you can’t pick Sims up) and then place the Sim in the car. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. Other times you would just have the Sim stand with their feet going through the bottom of the car and try to photograph it in such a way to make it look like something it wasn’t. As you can see in one of the photographs, there are a lot of things Sims can only do while standing such as using the cell phone. After manipulating Laurie while she was on the cell phone, I ended up just having Angela get out of the car after Laurie gives her the cell phone because I had troubles enough maneuvering Laurie and Bettie.

When the nightlife expansion pack came out though, Sims were finally bestowed with the ability to own and drive cars. But even now if I were to do a car scene, it would probably require some manipulation.

Where did the inspiration come from for Bettie to have her baby in a car? Probably from a hundred movies and several hundred TV shows. Everybody has done that scenario at one time or another but I had not seen it in a Sims story before. However, my favorite baby being born in a car scene is the one that takes place in the movie, The Thrill of it All. In this film, Doris Day is stuck in a limousine with Arlene Francis who is about to give birth and her husband who is played by Edward Andrews and that is probably where most of my inspiration came from with the reactions of Angela’s Father being somewhat similar to those of Edward Andrews although Andrews is way funnier in his role.

Another thing I wanted to do in the early stages of Laurie and Dag and have never been able to tell if I was successful or not was to build up to the fact that Laurie was gay step by step so that it wouldn’t be clear or even an issue in the early going of the story. I wanted people to think of her as just an average but heterosexual teenager. I think it was successful up to a point, but if you’ve ever been on The Sims 2 site, you know there is not much that is secretive and word soon got around regarding “the story with the teen lesbian.” But still, my point was to show that when you realize that Laurie is a lesbian, she is no different from the Laurie you thought was heterosexual.

Before writing Laurie and Dag, I gave some thought to writing it in the third person. As a matter of fact, I thought it would be absolutely necessary that I do so seeing as how there would be so many different characters and events at different times. The problem was that I had no confidence in my third person writing skills. Part of my success with The Kid & Me was that I was able to get inside Joe’s head so that you knew what he was thinking and feeling at all times. To me, it was important that even when Joe was doing things most of us would frown on, it was necessary for everybody to understand his motives in order to sympathize with him at all. I finally decided that I could do Laurie and Dag in the first person, and was able to get around my problem by making it clear at the beginning in Laurie’s forward, that this was a story being written by family members. Each family member would then relate the events that happened to the best of their recollection. Of course if I had realized at the beginning that Laurie’s story should have been written separately, I never would have had that problem either. I think it worked itself out okay, although it is probably a device that would be better suited for a film rather than narrative story telling.

Then there was the biggest deviation of all from the outline that I had written. In it I remember that I wrote, “Laurie develops crush on class mate.” My original intention of course was to never have that crush go anywhere and for Laurie to worship the girl from afar. But as I developed and wrote the character of Angela, all of that went flying out the window. More about that next time.

Click here to read the fourth and final part of The Story Behind the Story.

Laurie & Dag: The Story Behind The Story Part II

Having decided what Dag’s story would be, I still had to come up with something for Laurie. If I wanted to do a serious story with her Sim, there were several subject matters for me to choose from.

One of the first ideas I had was doing a story about abortion. In fact, it was in the first story from that one fifties movie which I can’t mention because I may give it a go one of these days yet. But, sometimes things being iffy as far as content goes at the Sims2, I don’t know if they would let a story about a teen having an abortion get by. Certainly there would be a lot of complaints about it and when push comes to shove, I would have been the one that lost out. If the story was hidden or banned, all my work would be for naught. (as it was, a year after I posted the story that I did write, somebody got ants up their pants and several chapters of Laurie and Dag were hidden from view. Also at the time I originally wrote the story I was not sure if there was another venue where the story could find an audience.)

There wasone story I had read that had two teen male characters who were gay. That was commendable, but unfortunately the author had made them out to be the exaggerated caricatures we have always seen over the years courtesy of Hollywood.

I have known many gay people and in fact shared a home with one, and none of the gays or lesbians I knew fit the stereotypes they are often portrayed as. Coincidentally, this was taking place right after the 2004 election when Bush and his religious right supporters had used the Gay Marriage issue to help keep him in office. So I decided that I wanted to write a story about a gay teen, in this case Laurie, and what it must be like to grow up knowing all the prejudices and ridicule you are going to face in the world. How would one cope with that?

There was just one big enormous problem. I really was clueless about the subject matter. Sure, I knew how I felt about gay issues, but how does someone write about something they really haven’t experienced?

So I began to research and to read. Facts are easy to come by. Statistics are easy to come by. But facts and statistics don’t tell the story. It is those personal first hand stories that grab your attention and hold you spellbound. One of the most compelling web sites I visited was one in which each person told their individual stories about finding out they were gay, and how they came out.

I read many of them and it’s surprising how they often they seemed the same, yet were different in so many ways. Many, like Laurie, thought they were gay at an early age or experienced longings to be with another woman and only women. Often they would try to deny it, or weren’t even sure what their sexual identity was. Others were also bi-sexual. Many gays and lesbians would stay in unhappy heterosexual relationships for years rather than accept the fact that they were gay.

Some of the more heart wrenching stories I read were of adults who finally after twenty or thirty years come out of the closet. Often they lamented the years they had wasted trying to be something they were not. There were many stories of those whose families would disown them or have nothing to do with them any longer. Sometimes after many years their attitudes would change, but just as often they would not.

The worst stories were of those who had been harassed, tortured and even murdered simply because of their sexual identity. The two stories that stuck with me the most were that of Scotty Joe Weaver and Matthew Shepherd. Still there are so many others where people have been murdered and beaten, yet the religious right still to this day is fighting to have hate crimes against homosexuals excluded from the Hate Crimes Act.

But there were also many happy stories of those who found joy in lifetime relationships. There were stories of those who readily accepted they were gay, lesbian, or bi. But the fact remained that while they found happiness in their relationships, in most states they are still not afforded the same rights as a heterosexual couple. In other state states such as Ohio laws were being passed that would actually take away some of the rights afforded to the gay community by making it illegal for even private corporations to offer gay couples benefits.

By the time I had finished my research, I knew just one thing. That perhaps if the story would touch one person, or if it would somehow enlighten even one person, then all the hard work would be well worth the effort.

So finally, it was time to begin my outline. Unlike The Kid & Me which was more or less written on the fly, I wanted to make sure that I at least had the story line generally planned beforehand, even if I would have to deviate from it somewhat. To give you an example, in this original storyline, I originally had the story going all the way up to the end of Laurie’s first year of college but before I had finished the first chapter, I had already come up with a new ending, the one that you have read. Then there are the technical aspects of writing a Sims Story.

I had to make sure I had all the Sims I needed. Of course, I already had the Bakers from the previous stories, along with Lawyer Daggett, his wife Erica, and Arcadia. I no longer had Frank as his Sim file had become corrupted but I was ready to try to recreate them. Once again if I had stuck completely to my original outline I would have had to. So using Sims body shop, I created all of the Sims I would need. Of course, having acquired a bit of experience since the first go round, they came out looking quite a bit better than my original batch that I had used in The Kid & Me. This batch included, Andrew Everett, Gail Lyons, Kurt Miller, Chuck Easterman, Marcella Lyons, Elizabeth Schaeffer, Glenn Hamilton, Ronnie Hamilton, Harold Nye, and a few others. I also was able to fix some of the imperfections in Joe, Bettie and Laurie. If you’ve read both stories, you probably noticed the difference in Joe especially. Bettie’s changes were more subtle. As for Laurie, she had only a very few frames in The Kid & Me so I don’t think anybody really noticed.

If you have read some of the more elaborate stories at the Sims 2, a lot of people use what are called sets to photograph their stories, just like in Hollywood. Most of the time these are built on one large lot. The problem is that after a while, you can often tell that all the writer did was change the wall paper on the walls. So I prefer whenever possible to use actually buildings in my stories. I also did this because I felt that by doing so, it would also highlight some of the other creators at The Sims 2 web site.

In The Kid & Me, since about 90 per cent of the story took place at the Baker Home, I didn’t have to build too many of the other buildings. And yes, I did only use a set I built on the back part of the Baker lot for Dag’s stay in the hospital, and for the birth of Bettie and Joe’s first child. I built the two clothing stores I needed in that story, and simply downloaded the rest of the lots off the official web site.

The most elaborate lot I had to use for that story though was the one called Pagoda Park. You certainly will remember that lot which was a major part of the story and The Kid and Me Video. It was made by a someone with the Sim name Cocarica and you can use the link I provided to find it. I have long lost the links to the other few lots I used such as the restaurant where Bettie met Charlene.

Laurie and Dag was a different story. I would need many lots, three of which were absolutely crucial to the story. Some of these included the Elementary School where Dag would teach, the High School that Laurie and her friends attended, and of course the apartment building where Dag would eventually meet up with Ronnie and Glenn. A Sim friend of mine by the name of KiraCm1 had just built and designed the High School for someone else who was writing a story. I asked her if I could use it and she agreed. As if that weren’t enough, she designed and built the grade school from top to bottom saving me a lot of time and effort, and on top of that the apartment building. I can’t tell you how grateful I will always be to her not only for the time and energy that she put into it, but because it enabled me to spend my time developing the story instead of taking care of technical details. Kira had also designed the lot where Joe and Bettie had spent their honeymoon in The Kid & Me. The hospital that I used plus The Beanery were also designed by her. Kira no longer does Sim stuff and I haven’t heard from her in a long while. So if you’re out there somewhere Kira, thanks again for all of your help. You can still view some of her work on this page I believe, although I think you have to be a registered game user to view each lot individually. Sadly, the apartment building and the Beanery where Laurie and Kurt often visited are no longer there but I'm sure I have them in my files somewhere.

When I was originally writing the story I always tried to acknowledge the lots I had used or clothes. Now, I no longer have many of the original lot names or the links to them. Some of them no longer exist. But to everybody who built those lots, please accept my gratitude.

But as you can see, if you want to write a good story using The Sims Game, it takes a lot more work than just writing the text. Is it worth all the trouble? Sometimes it was, while at other times it didn’t seem to be. But all of that aside, I had assembled all the ingredients I needed and it was now time to write the actual story.

Click here to read Part Three of The Story Behind the Story.

Essays: Laurie & Dag - The Story Behind The Story Part I

Laurie and Dag: The Story Behind the Story
Part I: Dag, Glenn and Ronnie.

(Please Note that if you have not read Laurie and Dag or The Kid & Me, this article contains spoilers. If you are interested in reading the stories, the links are in the right hand column. The story actually begins with The Kid & Me.)

When I finally completed The Kid & Me, I had no interest in immediately starting another story for The Sims 2. It’s not that I didn’t find the experience rewarding but writing a lengthy and in depth story takes an extraordinary amount of time and patience. I’m not talking about the text, but working with and manipulating temperamental Sims can sometimes be a royal pain in the butt. It was not something I was ready to deal with again too quickly because by the time I typed on The End to The Kid, the only thing I was looking forward to was a long break from the rigors of writing.

When I had reached the midway point of The Kid though, I had in fact built up a loyal following and there were many who were urging me to try another story. After just about three weeks, I had begun to recover from the first go round of Sim Storytelling, and began to give some thought of trying again.

I began to consider many different scenarios that I might write about. The only thing I was sure of, or thought I was sure of, is that I didn’t really want to write a sequel. I had so much as said so many times during the writing of The Kid & Me, and planned to stick too that even if I did change the ending of that story at the last minute. Perhaps when I did that, it was my subconscious way of keeping the door open for the characters to return in one form or another.

One of the first ideas I had was to take an old film from perhaps the forties, fifties and sixties and converting or updating it. I think this idea had come about because of the disdain many young people have for any movie that was made before 1990. I remember reading a message from one young person in fact who said they never ever would watch a film that was in black and white. So my idea was to take a film, update it if I had to, see what kind of audience I could get, and then reveal what the film was to prove that yes Virginia, there were movies made before MTV, Vh1, and American Idol, and yes they could in fact entertain you if you would give them a chance.

So having decided on what I wanted to do my next problem was deciding which film to update. A lot of films were automatically eliminated simply because I knew it would be way too difficult to do them in them with Sims. Let me explain. What you can actually do with Sims is limited. They can’t draw a gun, they can’t do stunts, and at that time they couldn’t yet drive a car. (Yes, I know I had them driving a car in the stories I wrote but that took a lot of time and patience to get it to look like that.) However, if you have a good photo shop program and are extremely adept with it, it certainly gave you the opportunity to at least make your Sims look like they were doing something they were not. I had a photo editing program that could do some things, but it was very limited. So a lot of photo shopping was out of the question and honestly, I didn’t care for Sims stories that were overly photo shopped. (Note: With expansion pack of The Sims, they of course gain the ability to do more things, and more items to do them with. Also, as time has gone on, the wonderful hackers like those at Mod the sims2, inseminator and inteeminator, have made what you can do much easier.)

My main hope was to write a story with some teeth, that I would also be able to make a point with. There was one movie based in the fifties that was not only a film but a best selling book. A lot of it was just fluff, but there was one subplot that I thought could be adapted and I could make a point in the process. The only problem was, that subplot was so buried in forties sensibility (Note: The film was made in the fifties. The story took place in the late thirties and early forties) that I didn’t think I could move it into the 21st Century. (Note: Or so I thought. I have since changed my mind and have figured out how to update it. That project may yet see the light of day which is why I am keeping the title under wraps for now.) Undaunted, I began to look around the internet for Sims items from the fifties. I did find some fifties fashions, but I wasn’t sure there were enough to see me through what would be a very long story with many characters, but thought I might be able to get by. What finally did the project in was finding enough thirties type buildings, landscapes, and home furnishings to tell the story and to make everything myself would take way too much time. There were a few things available at the time, but not enough for what I wanted. So that was that.

I don’t know how many films I ran through my head to see if any of them could be converted for the Sims but I know it was quite a few. I had decided that because of the Sims limitations, it was going to more than likely have to be a romantic comedy. Yet, I also had the urge to add a few serious elements. I wanted to write something that even in a small way might be meaningful to someone, somewhere.

So I guess this is what I was thinking about one night when I was playing the Sims game, and playing with the Baker family. Dag had gone off to college in my game play, and Laurie was still a teen. As my Sims Joe and Bettie approached becoming elders, I thought again about The Kid & Me and how well I knew the characters, their lives, their personalities and their motivations since it was my thought process that had brought them to life in the first place. I probably felt the same way about them as Walt Disney did about Mickey Mouse. I finally realized that perhaps it would be better to stick with the Devil I knew instead of the one I didn’t know. The Baker Family would live again, and having made that decision the floodgates of my mind opened up as if a burden had lifted.

I suddenly remembered an old 1963 film that was in a similar vein as The Kid & Me, and other films such as Sleepless in Seattle, and practically every Shirley Temple film you ever saw. In fact, it struck me how similar in some aspects Sleepless in Seattle was to this 1962 film. In Sleepless, which is also one of my favorite romantic comedies, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) is a widower whose son Jonah (Ross Malinger) tries to find him a new wife. Shirley Temple, in her films, was always trying to play matchmaker for some couple so she could be adopted. Of course, in The Kid and Me, there was a chapter where the young Dag did this, but it was only a small part of a bigger story. So the 1962 film I chose was one called The Courtship of Eddie’s Father starring Glenn Ford, Shirley Jones, Ronnie Howard, and Dina Merrill. And now you know why I gave the character the names that I did, except for Dag. She of course took the Shirley Jones role and there was no way that I could possibly change her name to Shirley.

I decided to take the basic premise and expand on it. In the original film, it’s amazing how little we knew about the Jones character. The film actually centered entirely around Glenn Ford and Ronnie Howard (Yes, that Ronnie Howard.) The only time we even saw Jones was when she would come over to visit Glenn Ford or baby-sit Ronnie. By using Dag to tell the story, that alone would give it a new perspective. And that is how Dag’s part of the story was born.

As you know, in my story the first time that Dag met Glenn and Ronnie was at the apartment swimming pool. In the original film, Elizabeth (Shirley Jones) actually had known Tom Corbett (Glenn Ford) and Eddie (Ron Howard) for a number of years at least. Elizabeth had in fact been best friends with Tom’s wife when she passed away. We are never told why she died in the film but we know it was recent because Eddie is just then going back to school. And no, Elizabeth isn’t Eddie’s teacher either because Elizabeth is a nurse (but she must have had one heck of a settlement because her clothes and apartment are quite swanky, as you will see). Unlike Dag though, Elizabeth was married to a guy who apparently cheated on her (we can only guess, they didn’t spell these things out in 1963) and of course divorced him.

The first scene that I lifted from the movie for my Sims story was the scene in which Dag takes the cake over and Ronnie has a screaming fit over the dead fish. I wanted to change it to a dead dog or cat and make it different but at that time the only pet the Sims could have was a fish tank. So I just went ahead and used the scene as it appeared in the film because I felt it was important and you will see it in the clips.

In Eddie’s Father, there was also a housekeeper also but she is newly hired by Tom. The character, Mrs. Livingston is played by Roberta Sherwood and is actually quite funny. She has this running bit throughout the film about learning Spanish with a great punch line about it at the end. It was an element I couldn’t use in Laurie and Dag and if and when you see the film you’ll know why.

In Eddie’s Father there is also this running sub plot going on between Jerry Van Dyke and Stella Stevens. Tom, instead of being a manager of a TV station as Glenn was, runs a radio station at which Jerry is a womanizing disc jockey. This whole subplot isn’t entirely necessary to the film, but Stevens and Van Dyke have some good moments together, or at least Stella Stevens does. Early in the film there is also a scene where Tom and Eddie are having an outing together, run into the Stevens character who needs to borrow Eddie. Why? See the movie, but it is an example of a scene from the innocent early sixties that certainly couldn’t be used in this day and age. I mean, would you let some stranger that looks like Stella Stevens borrow your kid? On second thought, don’t answer that.

Of course, in Laurie and Dag, I wrote in a steady boyfriend for Dag by the name of Reggie. In Eddie’s Father and having just been divorced, Elizabeth has no steady boyfriend. And remember Harold Nye, the Insurance Guy? There is no such character in Eddie’s Father, and of course there is no pool party given by the apartment manager. At one point though, Elizabeth does come home with the same kind of loser that Harold is on New Year’s Eve at the same time as Tom Corbett comes home from a date with Dina. But the guy she comes home with is a bone doctor. And yes, the rest of that scene runs pretty much the same way as I wrote it.

And there are some slight differences in the way that Tom meets the Dina Merrill character (Rita) and in the way that Glenn meets his Dina although both meetings take place at work. In Eddie’s father, Rita is being interviewed by the Jerry Van Dyke character when Tom meets her instead of Tom interviewing her himself as Glenn did. I think Van Dyke was interviewing her about some fashion show, while Glenn of course was interviewing her about the wardrobe of the stations on air personalities. Of course, my Ronnie didn’t like Dina because she looked like Cruella. In Eddie’s Father, Eddie doesn’t like Rita because she has thin lips, squinty eyes, and big breasts. Good women have medium breasts and round eyes. One reason that I just changed it to Cruella as I felt since it was possible for Ronnie to have watched the Dalmatian film on video, it would seem more recent than if he were basing it on villainesses in comic books.

The biggest difference you will see is that at one point, they send Eddie away to camp. It is there that Tom and Rita come to visit, where Ronnie talks about his little girl friend Candy, and where Eddie gets mad at Rita for butting in. It is the camp that Eddie runs away from at about the same time Tom is asking Rita to marry him.


At any rate, that should give you some idea of some of the differences and similarities. In some aspects, as far as character motivation, I actually think my story improves on it quite a bit. In other aspects it does not. What my story couldn’t do is bring Ronnie to life the way the real Ron Howard brought Eddie to life. I know you’ve watched him on Andy Griffith show as a youngster, but the work he does in this film is extraordinary, and goes way beyond anything he did in that TV series. I hope if you enjoyed Dag’s part of the story you will look the film up on DVD. It is available from Netflix. Though much of it will seem dated, Ron Howards performance as Eddie is worth the rental.

Here are some clips from the film just as I promised that I strung together so that you compare it with what you read and I hope it interests you in checking it out. Watch them while you can because I don’t know how long these will stay up things being what they are.

Click here to read The Story Behind the Story Part II