Guest Blogger – Wendall Thomas
It’s a pleasure to welcome Wendall Thomas as guest blogger today. Wendall’s fourth Cyd Redondo mystery is Cheap Trills . In Cheap Trills , Thomas sends Cyd to Bali in another fun adventure. When I reviewed the book a month ago, though ( https://bit.ly/3sbAor4 ), I didn’t mention Tupperware. Wendall gets to talk to you about that. Thank you, Wendall.
Cyd Redondo and the Balinese Tupperware Network
by Wendall Thomas
“Initially, my husband refused to let me sell Tupperware even part-time. Now he works for me.” Ms. Amelia, Tupperware Regional Manager, Jakarta If you’ve read any of the Cyd Redondo screwball mysteries, you know that my Brooklyn travel agent is a sucker for Tupperware. She finds its resilience and “burpable seal”indispensible for her own carry-on luggage, and in fact, gives her clients mini “nesting sets” with their plane and cruise tickets. Someone recently asked me at a reading,“What’s up with the Tupperware?” I think I gave Cyd her obsession partly because I use Tupperware when I travel, but maybe, subconsciously, it went deeper. Tupperware, from its very inception, has been a symbol of female entrepreneurship and a way of creating a community. Plus, it’s famous for “bouncing back.” So, it represents a lot of who Cyd is at heart. Tupperware was invented by Dupont employee Earl Tupper, from black, inflexible pieces of polyethylene slag—a waste product of the oil refining process used during WWII. He purified and molded it to create the iconic lightweight, non-breakable containers. But the person who invented the idea of “house parties” and of using 1950s housewives as the work force was a woman named Brownie Wise. She was a single mother who helped to develop the “party plan marketing system” for a company called Stanley Home Products. After she was told by its owner that “management was no place for a woman,” she left and was eventually hired by Tupper. She convinced him to take Tupperware out of retail outlets and use “direct marketing” exclusively, and the Tupperware Party was born. She was the one who first filled a Tupperware bowl with liquid and threw it across the room, and also the one who invented “carrot calling,” where Tupperware saleswomen urged their friends (and potential customers) to take two carrots, keep one in Tupperware and one in their regular crisper for a week. I think you can imagine which approach won. Tupperware parties became a way for housewives at the time to earn independent income without officially working outside their homes, and in many ways, it carried the seeds of the revolution for women’s rights that really took hold in the 1970s. It was also important because Wise was one of the first women to rise to an executive position in corporate America, and also to suffer a tragic, and dramatic, fall. If you’re interested in Wise, I highly recommend the book Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire by Bob Kealing.
When I was considering Bali as a location, my final decision came down to two things. First, the fourth book was due to be set in early 2007, just as Eat, Pray, Love came out in paperback, and second, because I found that, since the early 2000s, Indonesia has been the largest global market for Tupperware. The idea of Cyd’s finding a Tupperware compatriot in Bali was just too good to pass up. Over the past 20 years, Tupperware parties have had the same impact on women in Indonesia that they had on women in the US in the 50s and 60s—offering an opportunity for them to earn independent income and become a part of the workforce, whether their husbands know about it or not. By 2015, Tupperware’s sales force in Southeast Asia reached 250,000, garnering sales of more than $200 million. Joe Cochrane wrote in the New York Times, ”The company—whose business model is built on tapping into social networks—has also piggybacked on an Indonesian tradition, called an arisan, or “gathering,” in which women regularly meet with a set group of friends to catch up on family news, the latest recipes and neighborhood scuttlebutt. . . the arisans often serve as informal banks, with women pooling their money and giving the pot to one participant per gathering.” In Cheap Trills , I send Cyd Redondo to her first Balinese Tupperware party. This is what she says about it: “ I could hear Indonesian and Balinese, but no English. I might miss most of what was said, but under the squeal of children and the squawking of birds, I could hear a language I did understand—the reassuring burp of Tupperware. It didn’t matter that there were no credenzas and too much rice, these were my people.” The Tupperware network later helps rescue Cyd and the Bali starling chicks she’s trying to protect, from a group of ruthless poachers. I think Brownie Wise would be proud.
CHEAP TRILLS Logline: After her mother secretly books an Eat, Pray, Love tour to Bali through a rival agency and winds up a murder suspect, travel agent Cyd Redondo battles snake removal experts, songbird smugglers and thieving monkeys, commandeers a funicular railway, and infiltrates an underground Tupperware network, all while trying to keep three hungry, endangered Bali starling chicks alive in her purse.
WENDALL’S BIO: Lost Luggage, the first book in Wendall Thomas’s Cyd Redondo series, was a Macavity and Lefty finalist for Best Debut Mystery, Drowned Under received an Anthony nomination for Best Paperback Original and Drowned Under and Fogged Off were Lefty finalists for Best Humorous Mystery. Her short fiction appears in the crime anthologies Ladies Night, Last Resort, Murder-a- Go-Go’s, and Crime Under the Sun. She also teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA and lectures internationally on screenwriting.
BUY LINK: https://amzn.to/3PVPuc1
Wendall Thomas’ website is https://www.wendallthomas.com/
