Biweekly Theater Writing Challenge #10.1 - Mother-daughter flashback in The Waiting Room

I am working on scraping together a one-act play for my last playwrighting assignment. Though I don't love it, I have settled on writing a family drama about a family sitting in the hospital waiting area waiting for their daughter to have her C-section. The pregnancy was unexpected and unintentional and the family is not happy that it happened at all. As they wait, the story is interspersed with flashbacks of events in the family's history that took place in the same hospital that led them up to this point. I want the girl's mother, Lynette, to be unhappy about her daughter's having a baby because she had a poor relationship with a mother who had her too young and didn't want her. This scene goes from the end of a scene in the present with the family in the waiting room, where Lynette hints to her other daughter Margaret about their poor relationships, and ends in the scene in the past where the grandmother Beverly has just received bad news about her illness.

( It's a bit generic, but hopefully will fit into the larger context... )

Pixie dress

So hanging in the window of the thrift store all this past month was this dress:

I liked it the minute I laid eyes on it, and put my name down so that when they changed the display they would put it aside for me. I love all the details on it, the gathered tulle bodice, the pearlescent beading, the lace at the waist, the crisp pleats and sharp points of the skirt. When I was first going to try it on I thought it must be too small-- since my weight gain I feel like a house --but I was pleased to find it a very nice fit. It has shirring in the back, which probably helps. So home it came with me. Here is a closer shot of the details.

I'm not sure why I wanted this dress. The peachy-pink color isn't really a flattering one for me, and it's so ornate that I don't know where I'll ever wear it. But I think it looks like a dress for a pixie, or maybe a china doll or a young girl from an earlier century. If I'm lucky I can wear it as a costume sometime, in a larp or a play. Or maybe I'll throw another party just to give an excuse to debut it. The lovely thing about thrift store dresses is that they're a cheap way to get the thrill of pretty fancy things and it doesn't matter if you don't wear them very much.