Cooking Up a Play Based on Brownie Guide

Some writers reach deep into their past for inspiration.

Matthew Aldrich hopped on a Greyhound bus, rode to Belzoni, Miss., and reached deep into a thrift shop book bin for his.

That is where he found a 46-year-old Brownie Girl Scout manual that he has turned into a stage play that is turning heads at the UCLA theater department.

Aldrich’s production is called “Brownie Scout Handbook.” He says its characters and dialogue--taken directly from the 1951 Scouting guide--are a perfect metaphor for life in America during the early 1950s.

The 45-minute show, which will be presented Saturday at the Westwood campus, is a fitting finale to the back roads bus odyssey that took Aldrich to a series of rural hamlets in the South over the summer.

Using a $2,000 university president’s grant, he went south looking for ideas for plays he hopes to write and direct. The 23-year-old college senior said he hit pay dirt in nearly every little town he visited.

He found the citizens of Alton, Mo., raising money for a local resident’s surgery by staging “pie suppers.”

He met an elderly Natchez, Miss., woman who invited him into her antique-filled antebellum mansion and gave him a crash course in Southern hospitality.

He was befriended by a bartender in Belzoni who tossed him the keys to his pickup and invited him to go visit the local catfish farms that have turned the town into the self-proclaimed “catfish capital of the world.”

The town’s thrift shop provided the Brownie handbook for $1.50.

“Oh, my. Oh, my,” Aldrich wrote of his unexpected find in the journal that he kept during his trip.

“I’m pretty sure I want to adapt the handbook into a play. It’s just too precious. I’m not sure how I want to do it yet, though. Maybe I’ll make a story about the best Brownie ever. A bionic Brownie.”

Back in Los Angeles, Aldrich decided that the handbook, full of advice about homemaking, gardening and “international friendship,” needed little adaptation.

In simple terms, the book laid out ground rules for childhood conformity--and adulthood success.

Girls in first through third grades learned the importance of knowing how to “press your hair ribbons and iron an apron” and how to make sandwiches, gingerbread and “a good stew,” as the handbook put it.

“It was a manual on how to keep women at home, how to keep them useful and obedient. And pretty,” Aldrich said.

“The drawings in it looked like stage pictures--very active and dynamic. The text was very accessible. The only thing we had to do was change the ‘you’ to ‘I’ in some of the sentences. Ninety percent of the play is lifted verbatim from the handbook,” Aldrich said.

“We’re not lambasting anybody. We simply present the text--you see what you want to see.”

Naturally, jaws dropped around the theater department when Aldrich announced that he was staging the play as a senior project.

“He had to sell us on it,” acknowledged Sarah Rincon, a 21-year-old theater student who has one of the production’s seven speaking parts.

“I’d never heard of anything like it.”

Rincon said others are still puzzled when they hear that “Brownie Scout Handbook” is in rehearsal.

“People aren’t really sure what you mean when you tell them what you’re in,” she said. “It always requires an explanation. And then people still don’t quite understand.”

Theater professor Carl Mueller said he was astonished by Aldrich’s play.

“On this trip to Mississippi towns he comes across the mundane little uninspiring Brownie handbook and immediately his mind starts churning. I must say Matthew is without question, in my 35 years here, the most imaginative undergraduate I’ve ever experienced,” Mueller said.

“Brownie Scout Handbook” will be staged at 4 and 5:30 p.m. Saturday in Room 2330 at UCLA’s MacGowan Hall. Admission is free.

Because it’s a school project, Aldrich did not need the permission of the Girl Scouts of America to produce the play. He is thinking about asking for officials’ OK to stage it off campus.

One local Scout leader indicated that permission might be granted if the play doesn’t sully the organization’s reputation.

“It’s a pretty clever idea,” said Florence Newsom, executive director of the Angeles Girl Scout Council in Los Angeles. “It sounds very funny.”

Newsom said the Girl Scouts have evolved along with the times. These days, the Brownie handbook includes information on such things as recycling, cleaning up oil spills (“how they do it in the ocean, and how to take care of one at home”) and dealing with prejudices and leadership issues, she said.

And the Girl Scouts have a sense of humor about their past, Newsom added.

“We have a very funny movie made from a 1915 training film that we use with modern comments added to it,” she said.

“In it a girl swims a river, finds a telegraph operator hit on the head by burglars and revives him--and all while she’s in her bloomers.”

As for Aldrich, his next writing assignment is to send Christmas cards to the long list of people who befriended him during his summer trip.

After that, he plans to try writing a play based on a “Little Miss Merry Christmas” festival that is the pride of one of the towns he spent a few days visiting.

But that’s another story.