- Playing
- What Would Scarlet Do?
- From
- Ellen Birkett Morris
We all have a quirky relative who looks at the world in thier own special way. This piece would be perfect for prom season or in combination with other pieces that celebrate the spirit of people who are lost to Alzheimer's disease.
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Piece Description
We all have a quirky relative who looks at the world in thier own special way. This piece would be perfect for prom season or in combination with other pieces that celebrate the spirit of people who are lost to Alzheimer's disease.
Broadcast History
Aired on WFPL.ORG summer of 05
Transcript
I come across my prom dress once a year, when I’m cleaning out my closet. It is made of pink eyelet and has white ruffles and a huge skirt. It is a dress befitting Scarlett O’Hara.
I hang on to it from year to year because it holds special memories. Not only of the dance, but of the shopping trip with my stepmother Betty to pick it out.
Betty was an unreconstructed southern belle by turns strong and feminine, opinionated and demur. Firm in the conviction that she was born in the wrong era, she lived out her life as a belle on the page, writing three romance novels set in the south before going on to success writing historical fiction.
As old-fashioned as some of her ideas were, when you were alone with Betty it was easy to be drawn into her world. She volunteered to take me shopping for a prom dress and I was glad for the company.
I’d picked out a black silk gown cut off t...
Read the full transcript
Timing and Cues
Ellen Birkett Morris is a writer living in Louisville, Kentucky.
Joseph Dougherty
Posted on June 02, 2007 at 03:52 PM | Permalink
Review of What Would Scarlet Do?
There's a theory about objects retaining energy and bits of personality. It may be true, or it may be something we profoundly wish. Either way, a prom dress can be about so much more than one teenage night. A pink gown can pack all the wallop of a Proustian cookie. Clear, uncluttered, honest, this is a simple essay about complex memories. Programable anywhere, certainly in discussions of mothers and daughters and the price of Alzheimer?s disease, but it's also about memory and what we value and what physical things we keep from our pasts. A small, precious cameo of a piece.