The Member of the Wedding Playbill with Ethel Waters

Outspoken tomboy Frankie befriends the family s maid in one of the most beautiful plays ever written about loneliness and love. Tall, awkward, and lonely, Frankie Addams has a vivid imagination but no friends. Even her father calls her a great big long-legged 12-year-old blunderbuss, and the friendless girl spends most of her time in the kitchen, pouring out her heart to Berenice, the gentle and wise family cook and housekeeper. Frankie< >s jealousy of her brother< >s impending marriage, and her curious belief that she must accompany him and his bride on their honeymoon in order to belong, drives her to strange measures. She devises a desperate plan, reinventing herself as the seemingly sophisticated F. Jasmine, a gawky beauty in a pink dress who looks closer to 16 than 12. But she's ill prepared for what follows from this troubling game of make-believe. Carson McCullers captures the universal in the particular in this sensitive, nuanced portrayal of one girl's struggle into adulthood. A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: June Angela, John Cothran Jr., Ruby Dee, Daniel Henson, Victor Mack, Jena Malone, Lawrence Pressman, Jacquelyn Riggs and Tegan West.

The novel that became an award-winning play and a major motion picture and that has charmed generations of readers, Carson McCullers’s classic The Member of the Wedding is now available in small- format trade paperback for the first time. Here is the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother’s wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin — not to mention her own unbridled imagination — Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself. “A marvelous study of the agony of adolescence” (Detroit Free Press), The Member of the Wedding showcases Carson McCullers at her most sensitive, astute, and lasting best.

The novel that became an award-winning play and a major motion picture and that has charmed generations of readers, Carson McCullers’s classic The Member of the Wedding is now available in small- format trade paperback for the first time. Here is the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother’s wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin — not to mention her own unbridled imagination — Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself. “A marvelous study of the agony of adolescence” (Detroit Free Press), The Member of the Wedding showcases Carson McCullers at her most sensitive, astute, and lasting best.

Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: At the suggestion of her friend Tennessee Williams, Southern writer Carson McCullers adapted her novella The Member of the Wedding into a touching and poignant play that was an enormous success when it opened on Broadway in 1950, and has long since become a classic of the American theater.With compassion, veracity and wit, in The Member of the Wedding Carson McCullers depicts the intrinsically enmeshed lives of whites and blacks in the American South. Julie Harris became a star playing the awkward, twelve-year-old tomboy Frankie Adams, who falls deeply in love with her older brother and his fiance. Exhilarated by her naive conviction that being a member of their wedding means she will become what she calls the "we of me, " Frankie is devastated when she learns she is not invited on the honeymoon. Bernice Sadie Brown, who has experienced a lifetime of love and loss, is a surrogate mother for Frankie. Portrayed on stage and in the film versions by the great Ethel Waters, Bernice is an epic character, fiercely loyal, down-to-earth, and centered by deep faith.

   In her first novel in forty-seven years, Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class.  Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie.  Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society, " we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.   With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

Ethel Waters overcame her disadvantaged childhood to become the most famous African American actress, singer, and entertainer of her time. Her critically acclaimed move to Broadway in the mid 1920s—after having first triumphed in Black vaudeville during the Harlem Renaissance—brought the startlingly innovative and subtle character of Black Theatre into the mainstream. Ethel transformed such songs as "Dinah, " "Am I Blue?, " "Stormy Weather, " and Irving Berlin's "Heat Wave" into classics and inspired the next generation of Black female vocalists. She gave sophistication and class to the blues and American popular song, and she influenced countless singers including Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra.Tough, uncompromising, courageous, and ambitious, Ethel Waters became one of the first African American women to be given equal billing with white stars on the Broadway stage. In 1943, the film version of her Broadway success, Cabin in the Sky, established her as Hollywood's first Black-leading lady. In such plays as Mamba's Daughters and films including The Member of the Wedding, she shattered the myth that Black women could perform only as singers. For her work in Pinky, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, the second African American to be so honored.Although she was arguably the most influential female blues and jazz singer of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as a major Black figure in 20th century theatre, cinema, radio, and television, she is now the least remembered. In Ethel Waters: Stormy Weather, Stephen Bourne documents the career of this monumental figure in American popular culture, offering new insights into the work of this forgotten legend. Supplemented by fourteen photographs, this biography leaves little doubt as to why—for decades—no other Black star was held in such high regard.

“Like all writers of original genius, Miss McCullers convinces us that we have missed something which was plainly to be seen in the real world . . . She is a master of peculiar perception and an incomparable storyteller.” —V. S. PritchettUpon publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its compassionate glimpses into its characters’ inner lives, her story gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated. In The Member of the Wedding, McCullers tells the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother’s upcoming marriage. It is a coming-of-age story that showcases McCullers at her most sensitive and enduring best.

   In her first novel in forty-seven years, Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class.  Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie.  Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society, " we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.   With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

Why an entire book dedicated to the morning of the wedding? Because every bride has one and no one has written about it! Why? Because, no other vendor is present that early in the morning to tell you! This is not a hair and make-up book, it is about what I, as the hair and make-up artist, have witnessed at hundreds of wedding mornings at various locations over 25 years! Wedding mornings are as varied as the bride. Some brides are getting married at home, some wedding mornings occur at a hotels, resorts or quaint Inns. But keep this in mind; each location and every wedding morning of has its own set of challenges. Sure, I could control hair and make-up services, but many other situations were simply out of my control in creating a great morning of experience. Time management, food issues, guest mishaps, bridesmaid meltdowns, dressing dilemmas, pet interruptions, relational dismay, fostered this very needed and exclusive book, The Morning Of Your Wedding. I thought, why are so many mornings, so chaotic? As I researched to see what has been written about the morning of, most books only dedicated a small insignificant paragraph if they mentioned that time period at all! Depending on the time the wedding begins and how many are involved, that morning of is anywhere from two to seven hours long!Allow me to share. Allow me to educate, so you can make some important decisions for your wedding morning of! Have a beautiful and joyful wedding day!