Episode 1 - eating ice cream with your eyes closed

EPISODE 1 - Eating Ice Cream With Your Eyes Closed

From the series: Eating Ice Cream With Your Eyes Closed
Created by David Brown
30 minute dramedy - Episode 1 of 10 - Real-time narrative

LOGLINE
A train dumps Macca into Mayoonderie. Dayne is humiliated at work. A Tupperware party goes rogue. Doug arrives sweaty and shouting. And somewhere in the middle of it all, someone makes a decision that can’t be undone, and someone else sees it happen.

SYNOPSIS
We open at the train station. MACCA, travelling from Queensland to Mayoonderie to collect his granddaughter Sharday for the school holidays, is thrown off the train after calling out racist policies. With no transport and no welcome, he’s stranded.

DAYNE, 17, queer-coded, fragile and alert, is enduring a routine shakedown at the servo where he works. SHAUN, a local thug, goads and bullies him. It’s cruel, calculated, and humiliating. The humiliation simmers, it will boil later.

DOUG arrives in town by bus; loud, red-faced, and ready to sell cheap merch to the Mayoonderie Bowling Club. He’s abrasive, overconfident, and instantly out of his depth. When he realises his merchandise is misprinted “Bolling Club,” his spiral begins. By night’s end, he’s wandering the streets with a slab of stolen beer, looking for someone to fight or follow.

MARTIN, a nervous removal company’s estimator on his first job, arrives at a hoarder’s home where he meets a Grandmother YONNI, her whip-smart granddaughter SHARDAY, and a living room shrine built from grief. Martin thinks he’s here to assess a pack and move. He’s wrong.

Elsewhere, GINNY, NAY, and YOLANDA are heading to the local pub prepared with a half-pissed feminist spoken word ambush. Meanwhile, cruising around Mayoonderie in a souped-up ’89 Nissan, GARY and GYPPO round-up a half-drunk wheelchair driving philosopher, DOMINGO and bring him back to another wise-cracking grandmother; VALDA. Her house is being used for the Tupperware Party doe-show when the girls get back from the pub. And setting things up is the Tupperware hostess, the very pregnant, CHERRY.

Back at the servo, Dayne makes his move. He robs the till. Quietly. Smoothly. Then disappears. MACCA, who’s watched this unfold from a distance, says nothing. The night has only just begun.


THEMES
Racial injustice and displacement: Macca’s ejection from the train sets the tone.
Queer shame and resistance: Dayne’s journey begins with humiliation.
Grief as performance: Martin’s estimation task becomes an emotional trap.
Toxic masculinity in freefall: Doug represents the chaos of male collapse.
Women and class rage: The Tupperware party becomes both battleground and release.
Silence as power: No one says what they really mean but everything’s felt.