The Cover of Life

If you ever get the chance to see The Cover of Life, make sure you take it. It’s an excellent script by R.T. Robinson, and I believe it’s somewhat autobiographical about his family.

The story is set in Louisiana during World War II. It’s about three young brides whose husbands are serving as soldiers. The girls all move in with their mother-in-law for the duration of the war.

Well, the final performance of the play was this afternoon. It really went well, and though I’m ready for some free time, I’m already missing being at the theatre and working with the great cast and crew.

It’s kind of strange during the last performance. As we change costumes during the play, we take them back to the costume room. Same with props. As the play progresses, the dressing room gets to looking pretty bare; prop tables, too. In fact, as I was waiting to go on in the second act, I was thinking the prop table looked kind of like a Christmas tree with no presents under it. Sort of sad.

Keith (my husband) was just cast in Town & Gown’s next play, Everybody Loves Opal. I believe it opens at the end of January.

Changing the subject entirely, below is a portion of the Nov. 20 column I wrote for our weekly newspaper, The Perkins Journal:

Manette Mansell wrote a funny column about the time she was cornered in her chicken house by a mean rooster for the Nov. 6 issue of the Countywide & Sun (the Tecumseh and Shawnee paper).
Anyone who’s raised any kind of livestock probably has at least one of these types of stories. Hers reminded me of the time I got treed by a hog.
We were raising this hog, and it was getting close to time to take it in to be made into pork chops.
This hog was pretty big and it had gotten pretty wise about figuring out how to escape its pen.
I went out one cool morning to feed the livestock and discovered the hog had shoved a panel of its pen down and was wandering around nearby.
Hogs are pretty smart, so as soon as it saw me, it knew it was breakfast time, and it came running.
I can sometimes be pretty smart, too, so I wasn’t about to feed it unless it was in its pen.
That’s when the battle started.
I put feed in the pen, then tried to trap the hog with the panel, but every time I did that, it would shove the panel aside and dash out.
This continued on for awhile – long enough to get us both pretty frustrated.
You know, hogs can be pretty mean.
Every time I approached it, it would try to bite me. This stalemate went on for about 15 minutes. Me, trying to get that hog rounded up and that hog charging me. I finally had to take refuge on top of a panel and just sat there, wondering how I was going to get out of that mess.
I was resting, perched up there when my friends Nancy and Louie Zirkel drove up.
Let me just back up a bit for those of you who don’t live in the country.
When you don’t have to worry about the neighbors taking note of what outfit you have on, you don’t think a whole lot about what you wear out to the barn. This day I happened to have on some red sweat pants and I had just pulled on a plaid jacket and my roper boots. I was stylin.
I wasn’t real amused when Louie sat in the car, rolling with laughter at the sight of me perched on top of a hog panel in my finery.
Nancy did giggle a little bit, but she got out of the car and helped me round the hog back up. Girlfriends always come through for ya.
(After Louie got his jollies, he got out and helped, too.)