STEEL MAGNOLIAS

It was a beautiful evening and a packed house at Totem Pole theater last night where Melissa Gilbert stared in this girly girl play.

My friend and I took our wives to dinner and then to the play, which reminded me of the television show Cheers.  It was about the bond shared by five women during the death of a daughter, not in a bar but in a beauty parlor.  As the title suggests, the women characters were both as delicate as the magnolia, and as tough as steel...... another example of art imitating life.

Melissa Gilbert is well know as Laura Ingalls "half pint" in the television series Little House on the Prairie. 

Gilbert's parents divorced when she was 8 years old and she lost her real life father at age 11.  She said of her TV father Michael Landon, "I wanted him to be my father substitute. I loved that man and I loved the way I always felt safe, crying with him. Now, granted, it was on film. But generally, I was crying about what was going on with me for real when I was with him. And he was always there to hold me. That's the only time I let that stuff out. So, he was there in most of these scenes, comforting me. It was sort of a father/daughter relationship in my eyes."