Saint Mazie
Mazie Phillips is a neighborhood fixture in 1920s New York City. She’s the ticket taker at The Venice movie theater, she’s a notorious flirt and goodtime girl, and she’s a regular at the speakeasy down the street. But her fun-loving exterior hides a woman more complex. She’s risen from a rough childhood. She’s devoted to her sisters and, as their own perfect stories begin crumbling, she’s the foundation to shore them up. Though she thinks herself independent, in some small way she’s always searching for love, but never finding it in a place she can take it. When the Great Depression hits, Mazie begins to look beyond her ticket cage and into the faces of those suffering in the street. The men she’d flirted with, the ones she’d sold tickets to every morning, they need her in a different way. And Mazie wants to help all she can.
Saint Mazie is as unconventional as Mazie herself. Told mostly, over decades, through Mazie’s diary, her story is also told through transcriptions of fictional, present-day interviews with people who knew her back when she was on the rise to becoming the woman lauded as “Saint” Mazie. They each hold a part of her story—the man who nursed a childhood crush, the great-granddaughter of the theater manager, a history teacher, a publisher, the son of the only man she loved. In pieces, they feel disconnected; put together, by the end, they build a life.
