Miss Caledonia: A one-woman show about her mother’s teenage dreams during the 1950’s
A Lunkamud (Toronto) production
Photo. National Arts Centre
OTTAWA — If you passed 15-year-old Peggy Ann Douglas on the street, you likely wouldn’t even notice her. Wearing jeans and a nondescript shirt, she’d look like any other teenager: slump-shouldered, a bit confused, wholly focused on her own struggle to figure out who she is and where she fits in the world.
But let Melody A. Johnson inhabit that young woman, and you can’t take your eyes off Peggy Ann as she travels her funny, bumpy and occasionally poignant journey from hemmed-in farm girl to singing, baton-twirling beauty contest contender who’s convinced that becoming Miss Caledonia will springboard her to her true destination: Hollywood stardom. After all, she reasons, if it happened to Singin’ in the Rain star Debbie Reynolds, why not to Peggy Ann Douglas?
Johnson, a bright light in Toronto’s Second City firmament, wrote and stars in this one-woman show about her own mother’s teenage dreams during the 1950s.
Working quickly, Johnson sketches in the main characters in Peggy Ann’s life: her father with his relentless work ethic and his “farmer’s hands and farmers tan,”; and her mother, a practical and loving woman described as “refined sugar.”
As she introduces other people in Peggy Ann’s life — among them a ramrod school teacher who boards with the family and a milk truck driver with a stutter and a crush on the teenager — Johnson also fleshes out the two parents. Peggy Ann’s father, we learn, rigid though he may be, loves his family deeply; her mother, despite a lifetime of hardscrabble farm life, has never surrendered her dreams of a little luxury — maybe an indoor toilet, for example.
And as we discover the people in Peggy Ann’s orbit, we learn more about her and her interior life. Friday nights on the farm, she says, means “murdering chickens and listening to the hit parade.” Accompanying her mother to a meeting to plan a church social means having to sit still in the home of a self-righteous temperance leader with a secret drinking problem……..