The Wilder Life (47 page)

There are other destinations I could visit. In central Missouri, near a town called Rothville, there is now a sign to commemorate the place where the Ingallses may have built a log cabin and lived for a year or less before setting out for Kansas. Laura would have been only a year old, and in the biography
Laura,
Donald Zochert refers to the place as “this little unremembered house on the Missouri prairie,” a phrase so forlorn that it sometimes makes me want to drive out there just to stand at the edge of the field.

I could drive a considerably shorter distance to a place in Elgin, Illinois, where Charles Ingalls, Laura's pa, had lived for a time as a boy, marked only by a few Ingalls family graves in a tiny fenced plot on someone's lawn. Or I could go to South Troy, Minnesota, since records indicate that Laura's infant brother died near there, and while the exact location of his gravesite or the house where he died is unknown, some Little House fans have been known to stop in South Troy just to visit a marker displaying a copy of his death certificate.

And sometimes I want to see the piney woods near Westville, Florida, where Laura and Almanzo had spent their doomed interlude in 1891. I understand there's even a historical marker there now, so that you can see exactly where they'd been miserable. I guess if I wanted to, I could consider all these places as entry points into my Laura World. I could keep changing the boundaries and make it bigger and bigger, a weird kind of manifest destiny.

There are also places I can't visit, of course. Given the chance I'd probably wander around the farmland surrounding Plum Creek looking for any sign of the Wonderful House, because
someone
somewhere has an idea of where it might have been. I wished I could see all the little houses now disappeared, even the burned-down house where the Ingallses had camped for the night at the end of
Little House on the Prairie,
even though I know that may well have been fiction, and even though this whole yearlong tour had taken me past so many other vanished places where a luckless family had once lived.

It was enough that these places had once been real, that they were still a
little
real.

My friend Kara agreed to see
Little House on the Prairie
:
The Musical
with me, an undertaking that required a drive to St. Paul, Minnesota, in October. It seemed to be getting as much publicity as a Broadway show, especially since it starred Melissa Gilbert as Ma, but just like the real-life Ingalls family, it was a road production, playing in small cities like Madison, Wisconsin, and Des Moines, Iowa, and Oklahoma City. It hadn't opened in New York and it didn't appear it would be coming to Chicago anytime soon. Kara said we could stay with a friend of hers in Minneapolis for the weekend, so off we went.

I didn't know quite what to expect from
Little House on the Prairie
:
The Musical.
I don't usually go for anything with a Colon, The Musical tacked on the end of it. But maybe the show was a good idea—after all, the books were full of music in their own way, all those lines of lyrics marching down the page whenever Pa played his fiddle. As a kid, I'd always tried to hear the songs in my head, even when I didn't know them at all, so I was curious to experience the show in musical form. Besides, I had seen so many different Lauras by now—all these pigtailed pageant players and look-alike contestants, book cover models and actresses and even a wide-eyed anime character—why not see one more Laura, a singing and dancing one to boot?

Kara had volunteered to be my Indian guide, and she wasn't kidding. My familiarity with the Twin Cities was limited to what I'd seen in the movie
Purple Rain.
I knew that there were lots of expressways, because Prince always drove his motorcycle around under them, but I wasn't prepared for how complicated they were. From a map they looked fine, but all the Internet driving directions read like tax forms. Luckily Kara could navigate.

“Do I go on 394 or do I stay on 94?” I asked her on the way to the theater when yet another boggling array of ramp signs appeared. “Or does it become all the same thing, or what?”

She peered down at the screen of her BlackBerry. “This says stay in this lane until we see the exit for 241B,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I was panicking.

She held up the phone. “My spirit guide is not wrong,” she said. And it wasn't.

We arrived at the Ordway Theater nearly an hour early and wandered around the vast, carpeted lobby with the rest of the growing crowd. What does one wear to the musical theater? Kara and I had no idea, so we'd worn nice dresses, just to be safe.

“Do you think we overdid it?” I asked Kara, as we walked by a woman whose sweatshirt was emblazoned with a moody trio of wolves. “I feel like Nellie Oleson on the first day of school.”

“Oh, you mean the
snobby
one, right?” Kara said pointedly.

I had to laugh. “Well, yes.”

But never mind, this was still the fanciest Laura-related excursion yet. We went up the grand brass-railed staircase to the mezzanine lobby where two bluegrass fiddlers played a duet. There were even little beverage carts that served glasses of wine, and, for six dollars, a drink called the Half-Pint, a concoction of vodka, açai berry liqueur, and Sprite. We each ordered one immediately.

“No matter what happens on that stage tonight,” I told Kara. “Just being able to have a Laura Ingalls Wilder–themed cocktail makes it all worthwhile.”

“Hear! Hear!” Kara said. We clinked our plastic glasses together. The Half-Pint tasted like a prairie breeze, we decided, only fizzier.

An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain
, read the first line of the words on the screen. The Homestead Act of 1862 was projected onto a scrim that covered the stage, so that we could all sit in our seats and contemplate history while we waited for the lights to go down. The text was much abridged, of course: just the basics (free land, not to exceed 160 acres, must be age twenty-one or head of family, five-year residency required, some exclusions may apply, etc.) in two brief paragraphs.
Be it enacted
, began the first one.
And be it further enacted
, said the second. Below them, Lincoln's signature gleamed forth. The words were in white, floating on the blue screen that was lit just like a sky so that it all looked like a divine decree, like an offer that nobody, least of all Pa Ingalls, could refuse.

Next to us were two girls in track pants and hoodies; they looked to be in their late teens, both of them extremely pretty, like blond, bored angels. I would find out from talking to them later that they were two friends from Michigan. (“Upper Peninsula,” one of them said. “Our town is really small.”) They'd come here in a chartered bus to shop at the Mall of America, and while they'd hadn't read the books or seen the TV show (“My mom has,” the other one said), they were here mostly because they'd always wanted to see a stage musical.

One of them got up and went off somewhere; the other, the one sitting closest to me, snapped pictures of the auditorium until an usher came over and asked to see her camera. The girl stepped out into the aisle so I couldn't quite hear their conversation, but after the usher left, she plunked back down in her seat and sighed loudly.

“He told me I have to delete my pictures,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

I shook my head. “The show hasn't even started.”

“He said everything here in the theater is copyrighted,” she said. “Like what does that even mean?”

I had no idea, I told her. It did sound kind of confusing.

“It's just a
place
,” the girl said.

Little House on the Prairie: The Musical
didn't set out to dazzle the way
Phantom of the Opera
or a Bob Fosse production might. There wasn't much to the set besides a bit of split-rail fence, a section or two of boarded wall for the shanty scenes, and behind it all the backlit sky. “Sweet and simple” might have been the operative term for the set design, as if Laura Ingalls Wilder had written the memo herself. Nevertheless, compared to the wobbly community-theater charm of the summer pageants I'd seen, the show was still stunning: in fact it seemed to
pop.
The opening number portrayed dozens of chorus members Going West in pantomimed wagons headed stage right. Even from where we were sitting in the mezzanine, everyone looked clear, crisp, and in high resolution, though of course we were there in person.

The musical wasn't based on the namesake book or the TV show. Rather, it was a composite of the later Little House books, from
On the Banks of Plum Creek
onward
,
with events compressed and rearranged into a two-hourish-long epic set in Dakota Territory. In this version, Mary goes blind during the Long Winter, and the prairie fires that always threatened throughout the book series claim the wheat fields of the De Smet settlers (Little House convention dictates that
something
always has to happen to the wheat).

The story starts late enough in the Little House chronicle to have skipped all the problematic Indian stuff in Kansas, though Dr. Tan, the black doctor, is borrowed from one of the earlier books in order to make the cast more multicultural. At one point Laura yells something to Pa like, “We shouldn't have taken the land from the Indians back in Kansas!” and Pa bows his head.

I glanced over at Kara, who was smirking a little. “Ahem,” she said.

Melissa Gilbert made Ma seem a great deal more fun than she probably was in real life, portraying a woman who still liked to dance a jig once in a while. (Of course, it helped that she didn't have a tiny fourth kid around, since Baby Grace had been written out of the story.)

As for Laura, she was definitely of the “spunky” school of Laura Ingalls Wilder impersonation, stomping around tomboyishly in a patchy dress like some Pippi Longstocking of the Dakotas. The actress who played her was a petite young woman who had that boundless, almost improbable-seeming musical-theater energy: she leapt and twirled and careened and even somersaulted across the stage prairie, sort of like Peter Pan in a petticoat. As impressive a performance as it was, it suddenly reminded me that I identify with Laura mostly from the inside, that usually I want to
feel
like her more than I want to see her.

The story was easy to follow but somehow hard to recognize. People went west, including this one family, with this one girl and her two sisters. There was a house, and then a town, and everyone was proud and happy. Then came the blizzards and sickness and fires and lost crops. Mary went blind and Laura vowed to “be her eyes.” By the second act it began to feel more familiar: I heard lines I knew from the books and started to feel like I was there. A few things, of course, hadn't changed a bit: Nellie Oleson was still the scene-stealer, overdressed and awesome.