THE DO-RIGHT MAIN CHARACTERS
DELPHA WADE, early 30’s
Delpha harbored small-town dreams as a girl in the Piney Woods of East Texas. The only child of a single mother who died not long after they moved to the big city – Beaumont – Delpha was 19 and working at a diner when two men assaulted her. She stabbed one of them fourteen times, fatally, and wounded the other. While local gals admired her gumption, a male jury punished Delpha for excessive self-defense. As the movie opens, the Watergate Summer of 1973 is just beginning and Delpha is out on parole, considerably tougher and smarter after fourteen years in the Do-Right. It’s a strange new world – after all, she’s missed the most changeful decade of the century. And she faces the triple challenge of exorcising her past, avoiding the greedy clutches of the legal system, and reinventing herself as a free woman. But first she needs to figure out how to make a living on the straight and narrow.
TOM PHELAN, late 20’s
As the teenaged son of a prosperous Beaumont legal family during the Kennedy years, Tom applied himself to the folkways of his knucklehead friends – chasing girls, getting drunk, driving too fast – with notable gusto. His attempts at self-inflicted brain damage failed, however, and his compulsive reading kept him college-bound. For a few years he went back and forth between school and odd jobs – the odder the better – before shocking everyone by volunteering to serve in Vietnam during the heaviest fighting of the war. Shaken by what he encountered as a combat medic, he worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for a couple of years, ending up at loose ends back in Beaumont. It was time for one more radical turnaround, and his family had to pretend they were surprised when he chose the most eccentric option available – hanging out a shingle as private investigator. The ink on his business cards is barely dry when our story begins, as Delpha Wade walks into his office looking for a job.
LUCINDA ROBBINS, late 40’s
As a girl growing up in a suburb of Dallas, Lucinda endured plenty of teasing for answering too many questions in science classes, and by the time she graduated high school she was determined to work in science come hell or high water. Lucinda met Charles Robbins in 1944 at a Christmas dance in Austin, where she attended the state university, and he did research for the war effort. They clicked like a Swiss watch and married soon after the war. Charles, a gifted research chemist with a sideline in plant biology, took a job with Daughtry Chemical in Beaumont while Lucinda pursued her studies, happily interrupting her academic career in 1954 for the birth of a son, Isaac. When Charles passed away from cancer early in 19 73, his life's work shunned, Lucinda's grief pulled her down a dark path.