Profile

Canon

'My name is Mrs Murdock. I teach Shop class at Rydell High School, Los Angeles, California. In between times, I fix things, I create new ones, and I keep my boys outta trouble. Well, outta serious trouble.'

Mrs Murdock is a teacher in the film Grease who helps a rowdy group of boys (the T birds) to restore a run-down vehicle in order to win an illegal drag race. She even attends the race on the grounds that she doesn't expect her boys to let her down, and she won't let them down either. There is some suggestion that her presence is partly to ensure some safety, as she draws the line at one of the boys driving with concussion. She is the tiny redhead in overalls in the following clip:



If you watch the whole film carefully, she appears at the start complaining how long the term is, and can also be seen supporting the school at other outside events.

Millicanon
Mrs Murdock has no canonic backstory before the film set in the 1950s or even a first name.

'I was born in 1910, and grew up travelling around the western United States with my father working on the railroad. In 1926 I met Big Bill Murdock; he was a giant even then, his beard was thick and black, and I never saw a man with so many tattoos. He was gentle as a lamb underneath it all, which was as well, 'cause my ma near had a fit when she laid eyes on him and his motorcycle. Father took him on as an apprentice engineer, and once he was earning enough for us to live on we got married.

We finally settled in California when Bill got a job in a depot. We tried for children, but it wasn't to be, and that's how we set foot at St Mary's Orphanage in 1935 - dressed as smart as could be, fooling them that we weren't a pair of bikers. Usually those places find you a baby. I suppose we were both a little surprised when we took home a fourteen-year-old boy, Melvin, who was going to change our lives.

Melvin lived with us for two years, and we watched him go from angry and troubled to a fine young man, a fair few things getting smashed in the process. I suppose we must have got a taste for helping raise scoundrels, because as Melvin was due to leave home we went back to the orphanage and picked up another.

By 1942 when Big Bill was called to help the war effort, we'd fostered and adopted fifteen boys we picked up aged between ten and fifteen. Some of them had been in juvenile detention, or had failed adoption into another family. We did what came natural - we kept them busy, we taught them to build and fix and create, and broke into that natural child's instinct to take stuff to pieces.

Four of them were still living at home when we found out Bill was dead in 1943. After that, the orphanages would give me no more troubled boys, and in truth I knew that was right because there'd been many a time Bill had stepped in to stop someone losing their teeth. They gave me one more boy, a so-called 'feeble-minded' child, Ernest, whose good-natured temperament reminds me of Bill. After I lost Bill, I trained and started to teach shop, which was the only subject I ever was interested in.

It's now 1955 and my boys are all grown up. Now my job is keeping my students out of trouble, with a bit of hard work and elbow grease.'

Characteristics
Bonnie is short, aged 45, about 5'1', with flaming red hair. Both in and out of school she is most commonly seen in a pair of tan overalls with 'Rydell High School Auto Shop' on the back. She has a casual grasp on her students, often turning a blind eye to some of the slightly less legal stuff they get up to if it's keeping them out of worse trouble.
She has a dry sense of humour and isn't easily shocked.

World characteristics
Mrs Murdock comes from the film Grease, which is a musical universe and therefore comes with the occasional burst into song. It's also a high school film, set in the fifties, which means the vast majority of the teenagers are heavily gender stereotyped.

Biker gang
Bonnie's nickname as a biker is 'Boney Red' - the story being that she was given the vest as an initiation present, and that it was supposed to be just 'Red', but the biker who went to get it made misunderstood and wasn't quite sure how 'Bonnie' was spelled. Bonnie felt this was a story enough in its own right. She rides with the Iron Scorpions, who are 'technically an outlaw gang, but not all that keen on doing anything criminal'.

[Disclaimer: Mrs Murdock is from the film/musical Grease and is the property of Paramount Pictures; this journal is for role-playing purposes at milliways_bar from which no profit is made]