The Shine from Dead Man's Bottom

by Rocky Macy

Rosie and I are on the road this morning heading for Roeland Park, Kansas, where Rosie will vacation at the home of my son and his family for a week while I travel on to North Carolina.  Rosie loves her visits to the Kansas City area and particularly enjoys standing out in Tim and Erin’s yard and barking at the yuppie, spandex-clad dog walkers who dare to parade up and down on her street.
 
I head out to North Carolina early the next morning, departing from KC’s new airport which I have not seen yet, and flying (God, I HATE flying!) to Charlotte (a major “hub”) and then on to the capital city of Raleigh.  In Raleigh I will rent a car and drive down Highway 70 to the fairly large community of Goldsboro, the home of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.
 
This will be my second trip to Goldsboro. Tim and his family and my daughter, Molly, drove me there two years ago to see a play (historical drama) that I had written produced by the Spotlight Theatre Company, an amateur acting group out of Seymour Johnson AFB.  I had written that play, “Crimes in Desolation,” in 2013 while recovering from heart surgery, and still had a lot of emotional attachment to it.
 
This coming week the Spotlight Theatre Company will be doing another of my plays.  I wrote “The Shine from Dead Man’s Bottom” around twenty-five years ago, and this week’s two performances (Friday and Saturday nights) at the beautiful Paramount Theatre in Goldsboro, NC, will be the first time that it has ever been staged anywhere.  The play, a hillbilly comedy, is (I think) funny stuff, and I am anxious to see the audience reaction to the material.  I know that the Spotlighters will do a fine job with the presentation.
 
The central character in the story is Mean Nadine Thigpen, an unmarried fourteen-year-old who suddenly has matrimony on her mind.  Nadine lives in a rustic cabin with her parents, Big Pappy and Little Mammy, and her brother, Booger, who sleeps outside.  Booger sleeps outside by choice because a couple of years earlier he had tried to hypnotize one of the family’s chickens, but the process backfired and Booger wound up being hypnotized himself and believing that he was a rooster.  Now his sits on the roof of the cabin and crows to announce the arrival of company, and when he is not at his post on the roof, he is usually in Little Mammy’s garden scratching for bugs and worms. 
 
Big Pappy is a moonshiner who had generally been known for making the finest “shine” in the community of Dead Man’s Bottom.  One unfortunate day, however, Mean Nadine knocked Booger off the roof of the cabin and he landed in the rain barrel and tainted the water – the same water that Big Pappy used in the production of his shine.  The result was a bad batch, and when the sheriff’s mother, “the Granny Woman,” dropped a jug in her cabin, it broke and ate a hole through her 12-inch concrete floor.  The Granny Woman declared vengeance on Big Pappy and vowed that he would not see the sunrise the next morning.
 
So, as the play opens, Little Mammy is tasked not only with her normal chores like plowing the fields and worming the mule, she also has to make plans for Big Pappy’s funeral as well as the wedding that Mean Nadine says she is having – although just whom the groom will be has not been clarified.
 
Again, as the play opens, Mean Nadine has just borrowed Big Pappy’s pickup truck and pulled down the wall of the local jail in order to free “Scratchin’ Jones,” a chicken thief whom the fourteen-year-old spinster thinks will then be obligated to marry her.  But Scratchin’ Jones is too smart for Mean Nadine, and he stays in his cell.  Another prisoner, however, does use the sudden collapse of the wall to escape, and he is a motorcycle outlaw by the name of Harley O. Bandana.  Harley and Mean Nadine meet and quickly fall in love.
 
But before Mean Nadine and the man she calls “Harley-O Bananner” can tie the knot of matrimony, they have to deal with Mean Nadine’s efforts to force the local minister to change her name back to just plain Nadine, a report of revenuers out in the hills looking for Big Pappy’s still, and resolving an ancient family feud.
 
Throughout the course of this theatrical endeavor, we also learn some of the finer points of the “Code of the Hills,” pick up several theories of what it means when there is a ring around the moon, and learn who has been stealing ladies’ bloomers from the local clotheslines.
 
I understand from the director, Janelle Donovan, that the play, with an intermission, will run about an hour-and-a-half.  I will be there for some – and possibly all – of the rehearsals this week, as well as for the two actual productions – and I am really looking forward to it!
 
Break a leg, Spotlighters!