I'm a little bit obsessed with all things
Little House on the Prairie, and I'm not ashamed to admit it! The TV show started the year after I was born, and I don't remember a time when I didn't watch it and love it. When I was old enough to read, the
Little House books were a favorite, although I soon discovered just how different the TV and book worlds are. I've re-read them as an adult, along with several other books about Laura Ingalls Wilder, most recently the excellent
Prairie Girl: An Annotated Autobiography. And when I took a road trip across South Dakota a few years ago, I made sure to stop in De Smet, and Walnut Grove on the way back into Minnesota. On the live performance front, I loved the Guthrie's 2008 musical adaptation of
Little House on the Prairie (starring Melissa Gilbert!), and I even saw
Alison Arngrim's comedy performance of her funny and touching memoir
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch. So it's obvious I will consume Laura Ingalls Wilders' writings in any form I can, and I couldn't resist Lyric Arts' "Mainly for Kids" production of
A Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas. Playwright Laurie Brooks has turned a few pages in Laura's original memoir that never made it into her children's series, about their time spent in Burr Oak, Iowa, into a sweet little 65-minute play in keeping with the
Little House theme of family and frontier life.
