The Neenah Council meeting was preceeded by a showing of the movie, "Edge of Reality", a production of students at Neenah High School.
"Edge of Reality" is a reality show-like chronicle of a teenage drinking party during which one of the boys passes out and falls down the stairs, banging his head hard enough to draw blood. His tipsy friends decide to take him to the hospital. That's the start of the trouble.
The driver weaves along the road and hits one of two girls who left the party early to walk home. The car swerves across the road and crashes into a light pole, throwing the girl in the passenger seat through the windshield. The boy who fell down the stairs is injured further and winds up halfway in the front seat. The driver is relatively unharmed. God watches over drunks and little children...
The girl he hit dies on the pavement. The girl thrown through the windshield dies in the emergency room. The injured boy is told that his spinal chord is severed and that he'll never walk again.
The movie shows a couple Neenah police officers arriving at the first girl's home to tell her parents. The ER doctor tells the mother of the other girl.
The driver is arrested for drunk driving and taken to the lockup at the Neenah police station. There he stays while his friends' lives are ruined.
The epilog of the movie is a visit to the cemetery six months later by a group of friends including the paralyzed boy. They speak of the driver as having gotten fifty years in prison. The paralyzed boy succumbs to a fit of self-pity and lashes out at his friends. It is just about the most painful part of the movie to watch.
Superbly done all around. The authenticity of the situations, the police, EMT, and hospital procedures, all support the natural and believable acting of these talented kids. They have bountiful reasons to be proud of what they've accomplished. They also have substantial reasons to believe that what they've done could have a positive impact on anyone that watches it.
You can watch the movie on-line at the Appleton Post-Crescent site and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I hope that it's shown all over the country.