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Take Hold
A film by Rhonda Buckley
I can't leave home. There’s no one to leave. Home keeps leaving me.
Iris and Maeve are best friends. They grow up a small town, Villa Marie, amid a former air force base. Iris would say a town of used- to- be, sitting in a fog bank where planes don’t fly.
Iris is a singer and guitar player, mainly at the local bar. She paid $5 to her young friend Jimmy at the arcade for his guitar when she was 10 and has played it ever since. She hangs on her mom’s last words “Everyone dies famous in a small town.” That’s the note her mom Pauline wrote, when she left not for the first time, but for the last time she would see her.
Iris, inspired by women; a local girl wins big on Jeopardy, a woman chopper pilot speaks at the base, and Penny has her very own bar. But Iris no matter how hard she tries can’t seem to be that woman.
Iris hangs on in a town of small moments. Plays the Star of the Sea, wins 3rd place, and gets to play weekends at the bar as the prize. She comes home every night to Wes on the steps. He loves her and is always there.
Iris and Maeve take to the road to play a few gigs. Maeve skips out and takes the bus out west. She never returns to Villa Marie or to Iris. Iris longs for something to hold onto, to grasp, or take hold, all that comes in her wake disappears.
Maeve is different, she always has to go, fearless of hardship. She’s had an unfit boyfriend at an early age, and a miscarriage from the bar owner 10 years her senior. Maeve takes her chances it can’t get worse. She abandons Iris.
Iris tries to find Maeve. Her friend Paige shows her a new social media program Facebook, and Iris asks Maeve to be her friend, again, online. She doesn’t accept. Lonely takes a whole new turn without Maeve. Iris gathers a bit of a following on social media, with her bar gigs posted on her site. She now has over 400 followers who think her music is pretty good.
In an act of bored rebellion, Iris tells Wes to go home on his own one night. She walks by a circus in town, ends up drinking with the men who seem enamoured at first. They give her a free ride on the Ferris wheel then turn on her, taunt her, and burn her guitar in an oil drum as a lark while they drink. Iris still on the Ferris wheel is helpless in the sky, humiliated and enraged. She jumps off the ride, grabs the handle that is left and storms home to find Wes waiting up.
Ten years pass. Iris doesn’t play guitar. She thought singing and playing was her ‘thing’. Iris marries Wes, renovates her grandmothers, then mom, Pauline’s home. She’s the first to make it a home. Wes even buys her a new guitar, but she doesn’t play. She becomes an office clerk like all the others in her small town. “Get a real job on repeat in her head.”
Maeve moves on gets a good job, a husband, a fancy car, and home. She finally comes back to town to take care of her dying mother. Iris is swimming at the Harold Hotel, and eyes Maeve on the balcony. Maeve is dressed to the nines. Iris is furious. She reverts into the teenage girl that Maeve abandoned on the bus 10 years ago.
They eye each other hard. Iris sings out it’s called ghosting, you know. Maeve sings back, what? I read it on Facebook. When you abandon your friend and never talk to them again, it’s called ghosting. Maeve walks away.
Next day Iris walks into her hum drum office and Maeve is her boss. Iris now has to take orders from Maeve. Despite their adventures as young girls they pretty much end up in the same office as everyone else in this town.
Iris and Maeve moms die, within the same month. Maeve’s mom, Tina, gets Iris to visit and makes Maeve own up to her mistake abandoning Iris. Iris finds her mom’s urn in a mailbox one day, full of ashes with no return address.
Iris and Maeve are forced to reconcile as grown women in a small town; homemakers, married, live two doors apart. It’s not their dream, but not terrible. They fought as foolish schoolgirls, and in the end, they need each other. Everyone does die famous in a small town, it’s only your best girlfriend who is worth hanging on to. Take Hold … she will get you through.
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