Care, Cure, Corruption Series
These Shining Lives
By Melanie Marnich
Sarah Butts, Director

These Shining Lives takes as a lens the strength and determination of women considered expendable in their day, exploring their true story and its continued resonance. Catherine Donohue and her friends have loving families and good jobs painting glow-in-the-dark watch faces at Chicago’s Radium Dial Company, and the 1920s seem full of promise. The war is over, the economy booming, and Catherine bobs her hair and treats the girls to banana splits to celebrate their new prosperity. The tragedy comes when Catherine and her colleagues begin falling ill, one by one, with mystifying ailments. When the cause of their symptoms finally becomes clear, Catherine and her friends must find a way to deal with their own inconvenient truth: that the job they love has betrayed them. This is a story of survival in its most transcendent sense, as these women refuse to allow the company that stole their health to kill their spirits or endanger the lives of those who come after them.