Intrigue

Gail discovers the shocking news that she is adopted during a heated argument with her sister, Joan. With the reluctant support of her adoptive parents and baby sister, Penny, Gail goes in search of her biological mother and true identity.

The Macaulays - husband and wife Fred and Lois, and their three daughters, seventeen year old high school senior Gail, sixteen year old Joan and nine year old Penny - are a typical upper middle class family living in Los Angeles. Their general love for each other is nonetheless infiltrated by standard sibling rivalry with Penny being the pest, and Joan being envious of everything that Gail, as the oldest teetering on the brink of womanhood, has. At this stage of their lives, what Joan wants most of Gail's is her serious boyfriend Chuck, a television installer, with who Joan openly flirts. Joan's pursuit of Chuck is despite she having her own doting casual boyfriend Bert, someone more appropriate for her age. Chuck is someone Fred and Lois approve of if and when Gail ends up deciding that she wants to marry. Within this situation, Fred and Lois have kept a secret from their daughters that they long ago decided that they wanted to keep secret from them forever: that Gail is adopted. On Gail's eighteenth birthday, days before she is set to graduate from high school, the commencement where she is scheduled to give a speech as class vice-president, Joan learns the secret, and in a fit of acute jealousy blurts it out to Gail, the information which Fred and Lois cannot deny. This information not only affects Gail in her relationship with her family, especially her parents and Joan, but also with Chuck and how she approaches graduation in her injured psyche. This situation becomes even more complex when Gail decides to take her parents up on something they can probably arrange: a meeting with her biological mother, someone that they themselves have never met.—Huggo