Luzy-Ann and Lake both grew up in a small southern
town. No big deal. They were the daughters of flower children
Brent and Violet, who moved from California to Mississippi to care for Violet’s
sick, aging Aunt Tatem. Luzy-Ann was
older and adopted from Vietnam. Lake
was younger and the real, biological child.
The real child because she really was similar to her parents, free
spirited and autonomous. Luzy-Ann,
crushingly out-of-place in the Bible-belt mindset of the south, squeezed
herself into a white mold that was so pristine, her “yellowness” shone through
all the more garishly. Here is the
story of two sisters, whose ties ended with their last name but whose love for
each other remained the same.
When the playground bullies picked on Luzy-Ann and knocked
the books out of her hand, she fought back, and was punished by the
teacher. When the church-wives
commented on her yellow skin, she donned gloves and wide-brim hats, and even
bought some “brightening” lotion (a.k.a. “whitening” lotion). None of this advanced her much in the eyes
of the wicked-tongue matrons of that pious town, until she figured in a vague
way that she could only gain acceptance by beating them in their own
devotion. To god. Values.
And small-town smugness.
By the time Luzy-Ann and Lake are in high school, Aunt Tatem is still dying by inches,
energized by Luzy-Ann’s remarkable transformation into what she deems is a real
southern girl. But Luzy-Ann did not
achieve her remarkable paradigm of church-goer come gossip without a cost. Learning to ignore the bigoted snips of the
townsfolk, she ignores the exhortations of her own family. When she plans to organize an abortion
protest in the same public park as a group of White Supremecists, her parents
forbid her to go. How the skinhead was
able to persuade Luzy-Ann to that right-to-lifers were not much different than
racists you’ll just have to read the screenplay to find out. Yet not surprisingly, Luzy-Ann sneaks off
and attends the demonstrations at the park.
Demonstration singular, for there wasn’t much of a party representing
the pro-lifers, not surprisingly enough.
When Luzy-Ann’s parents discover she is gone, they race
after her. At the park, Brent demands
Luzy-Ann come home with him. When she
refuses, and Brent literally drags Luzy-Ann away, a skinhead steps in to fight
for her “rights”. A riot ensues, and
Violet is hurt and killed. Brent dies
soon after. And Luzy-Ann falls ill with
bronchitis that lingers.
Aunt Tatem dies when Luzy-Ann reaches the age of majority
and she takes on the duty of raising Lake.
But with no experience behind her overwhelming sense of religious duty,
and because Luzy-Ann had few to asymptotically approaching zero dates of her
own, she hung around when Lake got ready for her frequent dates. Once while Lake is getting ready for a date,
Luzy-Ann discovers a tampon wrapper in the wastebasket. She demands that Lake “take it out”. Exasperated, incredulous, not really serious
or she would have thought about it, Lake tells her goads/dares Luzy-Ann to take
it out herself. For a child who
suffered the bigotry of a white small town, this was a nothing challenge to
Luzy-Ann. She tackles Lake just as her
date arrives at the front door. In six
and three-quarter hours, the whole/entire town knows about the X sisters
girl-on-girl action. And for once,
Luzy-Ann had more calls for dates than she could confess in one session to a
Father X.
It does not help that Lake is the normal rebellious
teenager, and Luzy-Ann does her best to teach and punish her. When Lake is arrested for joyriding with a
bunch of boys, Luzy-Ann comes to the jail, but decides to leave Lake there and
think about what people will say when they find out that she’s been cavorting
with boys. So Lake finds out the
non-limit to which Luzy-Ann will sell her out in the name of Christian values,
and moves to California because she is afraid that “when they come to take me,
you’ll not only let them in, but you’ll open the door in welcome…For the good
of my soul, of course.”
Luzy-Ann eventually marries; a few years later her husband
Stan, unceremoniously divorces her--even though Luzy-Ann tells him he cannot
since they’re Catholic. Her life in
this town all but gone and her lungs deteriorating, Luzy-Ann finds that she has
won the lottery, a tradition she plays whenever the pot gets over three
million. Because her cat Butterfly
cannot tolerate traveling, she leaves her with a pet store who will find a home
for Butterfly. At the same moment, a
boy with his puppy walks by. The puppy
chases Butterfly down and across the street and up a tree, but the puppy gets
hit with a car while racing across the street.
Distraught and inconsolable, the boy asks if he will see his dog in
heaven. Luzy-Ann decides to set him
straight, informing him that dogs have no souls and therefore cannot go to
heaven.
She sells the house, says good-bye to her handsome priest
wistfully, buys a relic for protection on the road (Saint ______ for those of
you who are interested), and surprises Lake when she shows up unannounced at
Lake’s doorstep.
Living together once again, nothing is changed except the
backdrop. But Luzy-Ann has passed her
formative years and the only thing that the climate of Southern California can
do for her is incite her sneering, sectarian ways. She offers the relic to Lake, who questions its authenticity and
demands that any redecorating, i.e., pinning crucifixes to the wall and altars
in the living room be removed. They
don’t embarrass Lake, she just doesn’t need it, and neither do her friends, who
are fascinated by Luzy-Ann almost like an iridescent insect under a microscope:
small but flaming. On her side,
Luzy-Ann develops a crush on one of Lake’s male friends, not ____, the gay one,
but ______. He goes out with Luzy-Ann
twice because he is amused and wants to find out if she is the real thing. She is: with the false eyelashes, the demur
puff-sleeved dresses, the matching hat and gloves, the wrap skirt that she
wears at the beach on her date with ____.
At the beach, X finally gets her to relax and even snakes in
a kiss. In her languid, unguarded
moment, Luzy-Ann muses/reveries why should could not be a good priest-ess. She’s read the Bible and has a lot to say
about the gospel. When X brings her to
a charismatic church one fine Sunday, Luzy-Ann gets into the spirit but still,
she has to attend a Catholic mass for it to count. X finds out, like her former husband Stan, that she really is the
tight-arsed old maid she lets on to be.
While Luzy-Ann panicked about the few dates with X, she
still had time to butt into Lake’s date: yes, he’s practicing, Lake informs
Luzy-Ann, he just happens to be a dred-locked Middle-Eastern practicing
Buddhist. Yes, Lake scoured everywhere
to bring him home, purpose for Luzy-Ann.
But when Luzy-Ann will not stop harping on him, Lake tells her to move
out, with her lottery winnings, she can afford it.
Lake calls Stan. He
comes to California and see
But the Southern California weather must have seeped skin
deep into Luzy-Ann’s unnaturally pale skin.
She went shopping with lake and friends along an outdoor mall. Part of the road had some construction work
going on. A construction worker was
working shirtless in the hot sun. Lake
looked, X looked, and even Luzy-Ann gave a long glance when they dared her
to. A few weeks later, when Luzy-Ann is
out shopping, she sees X and a girl.
Jumping out of her conservative self, she invites X over to see her new
place. X declines and when Luzy-Ann
realizes that he does not want to go out on a third date, she protests “but you
kissed me.”
Stricken, with her cough getting worse, Luzy-Ann attends an
abortion protest at the Planned Parenthood where Lake works. There, she meets Greg, a fanatical Christian
who appears, acts overexcited at this particular rally, for some reason. Luzy-Ann also spots Y walking into the
clinic. Y visits Lake for a
consultation and leaves. Luzy-Ann,
busy-bodying in, approaches Y, and offers Y money to keep the child. That way X can keep writing while helping Y
raise their baby. When Luzy-Ann returns
to the fray, Greg is wide-eyed and glassy in anticipation. From his ranting, Luzy-Ann believes that he
has set a bomb in the clinic, but Greg will not tell her anything because he
knows her sister is inside. Torn
between her moral fervor and an act of disloyalty to the cause and the safety
of her sister and others inside, Luzy-Ann approaches the building with dread
and a self-created thinly disbelief.
The security guard grabs her, spurning her into action. She finds her sister and tells her that she
thinks a bomb is inside. Not wanting to
panic their clients, Lake and a nurse rapidly evacuate the clinic, but not
before Lake gets caught in the explosion.
Lake gets better, but Luzy-Ann does not. Yet she has made leaps and bounds. When she runs into a little boy whose old
dog has died, she does tell him that all good dogs go to heaven. She also returns to the shopping strip where
the construction worker is still shirtless and digging in the hot sun. Herself, hatless with a skin revealing
dress, Luzy-Ann pretends she is lost and asks for directions. This leads to her inviting him to a drink at
the bar. When she leaves, Luzy-Ann
steps backward into some wet cement.
The construction worker laughs and worries over her while he cleans her
off; Luzy-Ann says that she can’t help but look up (emphasize this in
screenplay).
Sometime later, Lake wakes her young son for Sunday Mass, in
memory of her sister who ___, but never stopped trying.
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