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So, 81 years ago today (on Beatrix Potter's 63rd birthday), Janet & John "Black Jack" Bouvier welcomed their firstborn child into their lavish world. Dark-haired girl baby with wide-set eyes that'd see just about the best and the worst of life. Ah well, it's all over now & has been since - 1994? Can it be so long since Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis died? Golly. And I just checked www.brainyhistory.com, which I do about everyday [go ahead: roll your eyes heavenward] & discovered that this is J.S. Bach's deathday. Uff da - can it actually be 260 years since he kicked the bucket? Yup. And somehow that doesn't seem so very unbelievable.
It happened that I had the chance to see the Wilder Pageant in Walnut Grove, MN. As soon as it looked as if the audience & cast members were not going to be thunder-stormed upon, drenched and/or struck by lightning, the pageant, entitled "Fragments of a Dream," was held not so very far from the banks of Plum Creek where Caroline Ingalls did her best to keep house in a dugout. (I took a picture of the sky, but you'll just have to trust me as to its dramatic beauty because I can't position the picture here so the sky is UP and the earth is DOWN.)
Before the all-clear, we've-got-a-field/let's-have-a-show was announced, I was perched on a hay-bale in the backstage barn, my attention torn between an electric sky full of boiling clouds, popping bright with glorious sheets & crackling, forking stabbers AND all the other people with me in the barn, hanging about its big open doorways at either end. All around me were cast members, young & old + family & friends.
More later, m'dears, honest.
