Nov. 11, 2004

Dear Julie,

We were in Springfield, Mo., watching a performance of "Nunsense" starring our niece, Darci, as one of the five Little Sisters of Hoboken. One of the nuns on stage asked if any Catholics were in the audience. His neckware gave one man away.

"Oh, is that little Johnny Leibrecht?"

A Catholic priest in the audience walked out during my first "Nunsense" experience years ago. It might have been when the nuns went tap dancing across the stage, but there were lots of other opportunities. There was a time when religion was the last thing anyone but Lenny Bruce laughed at. The priest was not ready for that time to end.

Now here was John Leibrecht, bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, out in the audience.

There's pressure for you, but Darci and friends handled it like pros. From the stage, Sister Hubert gave the bishop grief over the name bestowed upon her when she became a nun.

"Hubert?"

Mickey Rooney beat "Nunsense" to this plot long ago. But the Little Sisters decide to put on a talent show for a reason Rooney and his gang never encountered: Bad vichyssoise. Thanks to convent chef Julia Child of God, botulism has introduced all the convent's other nuns to their Maker, and the survivors need more money to bury the last four nuns still in the deep freeze.

If irreverence isn't your kind of humor, "Nunsense" isn't your kind of musical.

The director cast against type in picking Darci to play Sister Robert Anne, the tough talking Brooklynite who hopes to add this show to her record of thefts. Darci is the doted on baby of the family, the Homecoming queen. Sister Robrt Anne is streetwise. Darci grew up in Neosho, a Southwest Missouri town of 10,000 known for producing Tyson chicken, La-Z-Boys and Thomas Hart Benton. Her streets weren't mean.

That's the mysterious feat required of actors, to imagine yourself being someone you're not. Watching Darci sing and dance, I remembered the 10-year-old girl who a decade ago entertained us in her living room with Elvis impersonations. She was doing the same thing on a different scale.

Learning to be what you want to be is tough. At dinner before the performance, a friend of Darci's who is in his second year of medical school complained that the elderly woman he was assigned for a geriatrics class was difficult for the young doctors-to-be to work with. "She just doesn't know how to talk to us," he said.

He is smart and eventually will figure out that it is he who must learn how to talk to her.

Darci is smart and held her own with a group of talented and more experienced actresses and is grasping the difference between acting and impersonation.

After the show, the bishop came on stage to congratulate the actresses and to be photographed with them. He was beaming.

Darci's family was, too. It's exciting to have a niece who's an actress. We agonize with her over every audition. Now she's gunning for a role as the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz." If she gets it, she gets to fly. Homecoming queen as wicked witch. She just has to imagine it.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.