Premise:
The triumph of respect
and equality over ignorance
The story idea is as follows
Employee of the Month:
A young woman
has just got her first job as a door-to-door salesman, the company she works
for specialise in selling a range of sports items and wear. When arriving at
her office, her co-workers are all male, they look up in disgust and turn to
each other and start whispering. She meets with her boss and finds out what she
has to sell and her route. Upon leaving his office she is stopped by one of her
co-workers, who laughs and her and asks ‘Aren’t you scared you’re going to
break a nail?’ astounded by the man’s ignorance she pushes past him and gets
off to her first day.
She gets
on with her job and by the end of the day she returns to the office, the man
who confronted her earlier is celebrating, he had just been awarded employee of
the month, for selling the most items. His picture was hung on the wall for all
to see, he approaches the young woman and mocks her, suggesting she should give
up and retire back to her home.
Determined
to do well the young woman heads out for the next month, successfully selling
lots of items and become a very well respected and known individual around the
office. The figures of each salesman and woman are tracked and it appears that
the young woman and the ignorant man are tied for points; it comes down to one
last transaction.
The
boss
decides to send both of them out to houses that have never bought
anything from the company before. The woman arrives at the house and
knocks on the
door, an old man answers and slams the door in her face. Intent on not
giving
up the woman knocks on the door again, the man answers once more and
asks what
she wants, the woman explains she is trying to sell a skateboard. The
old man
laughs and questions why a woman is trying to sell a man’s thing, the
woman isn’t
fazed by the rudeness of the man and she places the board on the floor,
she
skates around outside his home, which shocks the old man. Impressed with
her
effects he agrees to buy the board and apologises for his misjudgement.
She
returns to the office to see that the man had failed to sell his last item,
there for she becomes employee of the month, everyone celebrates and the story
ends with a close up of her photo on the wall.
Set in a world that is a zoo, so all the characters are animals and the environment reflects the animals that inhabit it. For example, there is fences that separate the land that is owned, much like the zoo cages, the land and house reflect which animal live there.
Hey Charlie,
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you're actually using the zoo proactively enough yet? If your environment is a zoo, perhaps you might think about the zoo being emblematic of 'imprisonment' or 'delimited horizons' - which gives you an 'escape' plot / 'freedom' story. I can see then how a skateboard might become an important object in terms of effecting escape/freedom. I'm thinking suddenly about animals that might not have any speed/wheels of their own - like a sloth or some other famously 'slow' animal, who might value a quicker getaway - and remember, your skateboard could be a composite object (i.e. it doesn't start off as an actual skateboard, but rather is created from other artefacts to be one). I'm wondering too, if a door-to-door salesman (always on the road, always travelling) might be another indicator of freedoms unavailable to your main character (or its opposite?) Perhaps the door to door salesman comes to the zoo to watch the birds in the aviary - maybe he feels as trapped in his job - maybe the door-to-door salesmen liberates all the animals from their cages as he hopes to be liberated from his own. (Maybe - in flashback - we're shown how this boring middle-aged salesmen used to be young and colourful (a punk on a skateboard, colourful t-shirts, dyed hair, 'exotic', 'wild' and 'untamed' - and he's become trapped and repetitive and caged in his life, just as the animals in the zoo are; see how all the objects etc are reinforcing the conflict between 'freedom of movement' and its opposite?
Like I said, all of this comes from thinking about the zoo in more symbolic/thematic ways :)
This gives me a whole new outlook on the zoo, thank you Phil!
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