Stone Fence’s Miss Pringle’s Mini-Skirt

Stone Fence’s Miss Pringle’s Mini-Skirt - theHumm August 2024

Stone Fence Theatre opened its twenty-second season on July 24 with Miss Pringle’s Mini-Skirt, a new musical comedy by award-winning journalist Johanna Zomers. The show, which she wrote last winter on trains and planes and in guest apartments in Ireland, England, and Spain, is based on her experiences growing up on a pioneer farm in Brudenell, Ontario (near Killaloe) and going to school in one-room schoolhouses just before they were all closed in the 1960s.

The show tells the story — not uncommon at the time — of a young city woman who comes to the country to teach for a year and experiences severe culture clash. The musical styles of the show alternate between the traditional country sounds of Mac Beattie, the Ottawa Valley’s best-loved songwriter, and music like that of The Beatles and other ’60s pop icons.

“The many rural one-room schoolhouses along remote backroads contained our world in the era before television,” says Ms. Zomers, who currently writes for The Eganville Leader, for which she has won awards from the Ontario Community Newspaper Association. Earlier in her career she freelanced in news, public affairs and features for TV and newspapers in Ottawa. “These schoolhouses provided our social life, our recreation and our entertainment, in addition to a well-rounded education. With our classmates we slogged through snowdrifts, fought off black flies, lost our rubber boots in the spring mud on the Opeongo Road. We fought, we played, we terrorized each other with tales of the cruel school inspector, the crabby parish priest, the imaginary scary witches and wolves surrounding us in the bush on all sides.”

While the story belongs to Ms. Zomers, the script and music were developed in collaboration with several others. Company producer and musical director Ish Theilheimer and Kathy Eisner worked with her on the story and script details. Mr. Theilheimer wrote most of the music, along with local musicians Clint Degarrie, Kirk Harber and Dexter Sernoskie, and he co-wrote the song lyrics with Ms. Zomers. The show is co-directed by Shirley Hill and Sarah Wright.

“The story and songs in Miss Pringle’s Mini Skirt are patched together from memories, made perhaps a little more dramatic and evocative in the telling,” notes Ms. Zomers. “Miss Pringle, her students, their parents, the school inspector and the parish priest are fictionalized composite characters but are inspired by the very real people who inhabited my childhood world. I loved writing this play, trying to capture the spirit of a simpler time and an era that was vanishing even as we lived it.”

In the play, Miss Pringle, the rambunctious “big boys”, the dreaded school inspector, deaf old Father Crabby, rebellious teenager Loretta and her exhausted mother tell the story in the songs and dances of the era. Whether it’s the warnings of missile attacks on the NORAD Pine Tree Line, or the rapidly changing role of women, Miss Pringle’s Mini-Skirt promises a lively fast-paced look into a time when everything was changing all at once.

Performance Details

There will be seven dessert-theatre performances this summer and five performances in fall, all at the Rankin Culture and Recreation Centre in Pembroke. Details and tickets are available online at stonefence.ca or by phone, toll-free at 1–866–310–1004. All seats this season are reserved seats, with the box office run by the company’s new ticketing partner, TicketsPlease (TicketsPlease.ca, 485–6434).

Wendo Van Essen — Nothing Felt Better - theHumm August 2024

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

On the back of her Artist Trading Card at the top righthand corner of this page, Wendo Van Essen explains WHY she is a Fibre Artist: “I cannot not be making something.” And of all the somethings she has tried, fibre arts have felt the best. Pun intended. Even during her interview, Wendo was busily at work creating an adorable needle-felted zebra as a gift for an upcoming baby shower. Needle felting involves sculpting creative shapes from (usually) wool fibres with special notch......

Stone Fence’s Miss Pringle’s Mini-Skirt - theHumm August 2024