Daddy Long Legs

My friend and fellow young women leader, Ashley Jensen, invited me and Izzy to join her and her daughter Lizzie in seeing Daddy Long Legs at the Covey Center. It is a play neither Izzy nor I had seen, but it sounded cute and Izzy was game, so we accepted the invitation. 

We had a great time. The play is about a young women, Jerusha Abbott, who is an orphan but is sponsored at college by an anonymous benefactor who asks only that she write him one a month to tell him of how her education is going. She dubs him "Daddy Long Legs" after seeing only his shadow. She writes more frequently, he never responds, and she creates a fanciful picture in her mind of who he is. She thinks of him as old, with white or no hair, and asks lots of questions about him, but he continues to leave her in the dark about himself. In reality, he is a young man, Jervis Pendleton, who falls in love with her through her letters. He is the uncle to one of her classmates, so he contrives to meet her by visiting his niece. Jerusha quite likes Jervis but doesn't learn until the end of the play that he is her benefactor. It was a fun show, with good music, lots of humor, and a fun storyline. The letters she writes were very engaging, and because it is only a two person show and was in a tiny theater, we were right on top of the action.

Izzy spent much of the show looking at all the tech stuff. She talked about the lighting, the set, the props. She said, "It's hard to concentrate on what's going on on stage when I'm so focused on the tech aspect of the show." She also said the character names seemed liked those created by someone with a really bad Scrabble hand.