Docu-dramas

Marion Nicholson Blair in 1939.. 55 years old.

This is a nice portrait of Marion, five years before she died.

I have not been able able to find that Food and Cookery from 1911, or my Delineator or Pictorial Review, but I did find Le Salon de la Mode from July 1911, which I may somehow stick into my story.

Yesterday, I listend to an Afternoon Play on BBC Radio Four called A Terrible Beauty, about the deep friendship between Maude Gonn and W. B Yeats.

I guess you can call it a docu drama, in that the play tried to fill us in on the history while telling a bit of a story…. That’s sort of what I want to do with Flora in the City (or Threshold Girl.)..

This play made Yeats seem like a bit of a middle aged fool. Alas.

Marion’s Image Makeover

So, I rescanned the image of Marion in her white dress taking tea and fiddled a bit in Corel.

Why do I like this image: well, it signifies to me the essence of Tighsolas: a group of middle class women aspiring to higher things.

But they were not above hard work either. Indeed, this image of Marion is misleading.

She was about as active a person as could be. She died at 60 because she was plain burned out.

She was the only one who didn’t complain about her lot, she just got down to business.

When I finish Flo in the City, I will write Marion’s Choice, which will center on her life in 1911-1913, her work as a teacher, her courtship and her support of her family, Flo and everyone else.

It will be the Tighsolas Saga from her point of view. And the BIG Back Story will be the immigration and eugenics movements. Marion was the one who in 1905, while at McGill Normal School saw Booker T. Washington speak. She also attends a speech by the first Chinese graduate of McGill.

She also went to see Harry Lauder and to Dominion Park with her beau, Mr. Blair.
In my story, she sees a strongman wrestling snakes there as is a bit, how should we say, ‘moved.’