TO CATCH LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE
To Catch Lightning in a Bottle is a grits & glamour story about women who buck the system, racial injustice, and America’s unquenchable obsession with celebrity.
Trigger Warnings– this manuscript depicts racism, racial slurs, racial violence, alcoholism, nightmares about traumatic events, sexual predator, and natural animal death.
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THE STORY: Martha Jean Dooley wants to be a third-generation left-handed baseball pitcher, just like her daddy and her granddaddy. The trouble is, in 1953 Westabooga, Alabama, young ladies don’t play baseball. To make matters worse, Martha Jean turns 12 and suddenly can’t spend time with her best friend Thomas (because she is white and he is not). Martha Jean declares that it’s going to be the worst summer of all human experience.
Then, the girl meets Victoria Blaine – glamorous, desirable, and prone to alcohol-induced-viciousness. Months earlier, the actress started a catfight that broke into a brawl that shut down the first televised Oscars. After that very public spectacle, Victoria Blaine had been cast out of Hollywood and dropped into the backwater town of Westabooga, where nobody knows a Dior from a Ding Dong.
Now, ordinarily Martha Jean is an unwavering tomboy, which requires that she hate all things girlie but she quickly develops a film-star fascination with the actress. This obsession helps the girl escape the hard reality of her own life–a terminally ill father, a grim mother, and a dirt-poor existence on a run-down chicken farm. But all too late, Martha Jean discovers that the movie star’s beauty is really ugly to the bone.
Set in the pre-civil rights South, To Catch Lightning in a Bottle is an uplifting and often humorous coming-of-age story about a girl who discovers the ugliness of the world but escapes with her hope intact. It’s about a beautiful, bad woman who never finds redemption. And it’s about a psychopathic millionaire, a heart-broken mother, and a creepy old man who talks to crows.
*Cover by May Photo & Design