More transcript on "Flowerville and the Greenies"

I realize this section of transcript maybe a better introduction to the play. It is from an interview with David Sonnie, which occurred the day before the interview with him and Larry. I promise that I will get some transcripts from women online soon. It is just that I started the"finetuning" of transcripts with the ones that I thought would be hardest to do and these interviews both had a lot of interruptions and people talking at once, so I started with them.

Also, a quick note on the transcripts. The only things I have left out without any explanation are a lot of "um"s and "uh"s and "you know"s. I've done the traditional "..." to indicate such matter is left out. However, to confuse things a little more, I've also used "..." at the end of a sentence or phrase to indicate that a sentence sort of died out in the middle, and also to indicate where someone interrupted a thought. Those of you who know me, know that I am often the interrupter, but with David and Larry, I had stiff competition in that area.

Anna




DS: ...Now this happened a funny way... It was after the thing in 1976...where everybody [at Head Start] quit and all that. Not everybody was fired.

AW: It was after that?

DS: Yes, it was a reaction to it. And I said, “You know what? We’ve got a problem here, our own employees don’t understand what’s happening. Uh they don’t understand what we’re up to any more. You know we’ve lost. We’re trying to run all these programs, you know, like to be a CAP, or something, and we’ve lost the thing, and so, if there’s some way to let them know.”

Now we used to do something in the clinic, uh on a ritual basis, where we’d invite the, the, you know, what do they call them, the caseworkers, and all those counselors, and all those people were invited to clinic. And um it was wonderful. The, the clinic women would cook, uh, uh surplus food and stuff, you know, like bulgur, and all that. And they would cook these wonderful meals, you know, and uh you’re eating bulgur. And the guy, you know they would go, “What’s bulgur?” And you know, “That’s what they would give us to eat.”

You know, uh one of my memories of early Roseburg was out on uh, uh north of town, you know out 99 really. Uh I was for some reason going early in the morning, up at five or something like that. And I saw in the fog, you know cold wet fog, I saw a line of bedraggled people stretching as far as I could see them, next to this building. And I went, “What the hell is that?” It looked like a painting, you know. It was the commodity, uh surplus foods commodity handout. And that’s what they did, have them line up ungodly hours of the morning to get this bulgur and this stuff, you know, and that was routine.

Uh, so we invite all the caseworkers, and counselors, and all those people from the agencies, all very middle class, you can bet on that, and feed them food. And we would show them a skit. And we would, and they would play the role of the welfare recipient, or whatever, you know. And uh, and the women in the clinic would play the roles of the receptionist, caseworker, and everything else. And these were so funny, and they were mostly like role plays, spontaneous, right?

But they were, I used to sit in the room and just go, “My God, they’re expressing things that I don’t, that I thought that couldn’t be expressed,” you know. They would treat them a certain way and they would ask them questions, you know. This was back in the day when they used to talk, if a woman became pregnant, you know, uh they would ask her about when, where, how, and what positions they’d used. This was supposedly helping out the uh investigation into paternity. But actually it was just absolute insulting, everything, it was very offensive.

And so they would ask them questions like that, in terms of the interview, or something, and it was, and everybody laughed, it wasn’t just me. You know what I mean, it was just so funny in telling, you know. So out of that grew, uh we said we ought to, you know, have a big skit, which turned into a play. And that’s “Flowerville and the Greenies.” I’ll never forget, one night about 8 o’clock, I called up Margaret, and I said, “Listen to this Margaret, blah, blah, blah, this is what I want to do.” And she goes, “Ooh, let’s do it!” That’s Margaret, you know, “Let’s do it!”

AW: She said that you did it for a Head Start conference, or something. There was one that came out of, from out of town, district or something.

DS: Well, uh, what happened was, yeah, it started off, you know, like small, and then like it, I’ll never forget we were at the uh, we used to meet frequently, for all reasons, at the uh, community building in the housing project. And uh, so here all the… See I didn’t know everybody wanted to be in the play, I really didn’t. But every woman in the clinic wanted to be in the play. And pretty soon, oh my God, so I had to go back and re-write the entire thing to make it a cast of thousands, you know. And, and so every woman in the clinic was involved, and most of the people in Head Start, you know, a couple of employees thrown in. Mary.

AW: I heard she was the nice lady and Margaret was the, the narrator and addressed it with green face. And she said afterwards she went and they went uh with a little bit of green paint and anybody who wanted to be a greenie could get a little dot of green on them somewhere.

DS: They went. We went to Portland and bought fabulous amounts of green make-up. You know, what do you call it, grease paint.

AW: Uh-huh.

DS: And uh so that was the punch line. See, and so here’s the premise, well you’ve read it, I guess, it doesn’t look good on paper, by the way. But with those people that you know so well, and I know so well, doing it, it’s just amazing. So Margaret was the narrator, like you said, and uh here I was the director, behind the scenes, which is just exactly what I like, huh.

And so when we finally got to a certain, we did it one time small, one time bigger, then we went to Umpqua College and did it in their beautiful new facility, you know. They had a great thing with lighting and all that stuff. So, house lights dim and here comes inexplicable, right, “It’s not easy being green.” Real softly sung by Kermit, you know. And then Margaret would, the spot would come up. I just love that equipment out there. And there’s Margaret, inexplicably, with a green face and she would say, “I, I want to tell you a story.”

And you know Margaret. We worked a lot on this, right, uh because she’s a very good actress. I mean she takes direction real good, you know. And she’d lean forward, “And I want you to listen.” And the big pause I got in the audience, “Um, you know, what is this?”

So, anyway, the story goes, there once was a little town, called Flowerville, get it? And uh the Flowerville people were very upset, you know there’s a lot more to it than this. But, and the nice lady said this, and there’s Mary, [in a high pitched voice] “Well! I da da da dah.” And uh here’s a logger, and one of our dad’s, you know a guy that went to the pre-employment clinic, came in [in a gruff voice] “These people don’t know how to act!” You know they would say all these terrible things about the poor people. And then so finally the city council and the, everybody decided to do something about it. They would pass a law that everybody had to have their face painted green. All poor people had to have their face painted green so we could tell them from the others. Isn’t that great?

So, then act two is uh, you know this is uh we had production levels, but uh suddenly all the actors came out uh green. See everybody was green, not just Margaret. And then the nice lady, uh Mary, uh I used to take her back stage and just, and she was all prettied up, you know and nicely talking about these people don’t know how to act, they have no manners, and you know. And then uh I would, I, to get her into it, I would rough her up, you know, and do this little, and put green spots all over her face, right? And then we would literally throw her on stage and so Mary would come staggering on and say, [high voice] “Uh, my nice husband left me, my nice children, I don’t even think, my nice children, what am I going to do?” See what I mean, she was slowly turning green. And she was, and, and, and she was capturing that uh one uh, one pay check away from welfare. It was magnificent.

The logger, all these people, the caseworkers, all concerned. And then people started having a little bit of green on them, in the play. They, we, we had half greenies, you know. We had polka-dot greenies. We had all kinds of greenies. And don’t forget we had a big cast because so many people wanted to be in it. So uh there were actually four big productions and one was for a state wide conference. And that was a blow out, I mean that was unbelievable.

And so like, like Margaret said, at the end, uh, “Can you listen? Can you?” You know, and, and they would, and so all the greenies were looking at the audience, like this, and then the lights would go up. And Kermit would come back, “Its not easy being green.” They walk out and just offer some of this make-up to people. And some people would go, you know, “Thank you.” [dabs at his face] And some people would go “smerrrh!” [smears his hands over his face] You know what I mean? And it was just amazing. It got to be its own thing, you know what I mean. Uh, casting was an issue because people, they started competing for who got the best parts and stuff. I had to create new parts for, there were so many people wanting to, from the clinic.

AW: I can tell. There, there’s greenie 1, greenie 2, and new greenie 1, new greenie 2. [laughs]

DS: But it was really something, and uh they tried to reproduce it a couple of times uh after that, but you know you can’t ever... You know, it’s like everything else. You have to, you have to be there, or whatever. And so it kind of gets lost in the translation. Or I was looking at the script and realizing, “Wow, man that script just doesn’t quite capture it for me.” You know, the script is the old one from those days. But there, if you noticed, they’re, what do you call it, reproduced all over the place and everybody had their own script. [David is referring to the fact that the copy of the script is a mimeographed copy.]

AW: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

DS: And see that was it, now there you go, it was the philosophy being played out. Is these people, I said, “Now don’t worry about memorizing this stuff, I mean the hell with that, if you want to take your script on stage and read it, it doesn’t matter. Right?” But almost nobody, you know how people rise to the bait. They go, and they, they memorize it and do beautiful, beautiful things, the most touching. They, they embellished the speeches and stuff to where they were just over the top, it was just.

AW: A collective effort again.

DS: Again, a collective effort. And, and uh I, a germination that went crazy, kind of, it was just wonderful, just wonderful. Hell, we wanted to go on the road, you know, we were all full of show biz.