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A Perfect Mess

2001 · Triopia Grade School and touring area elementary schools (west-central Illinois)

In place of the usual high-school speech contest, Ken Bradbury sent his Triopia students out on the road in the winter of 2001 with A Perfect Mess, a 45-minute children's theatre piece built around a tangle of mangled fairy tales. As he explained it to his troupe at their first meeting, twenty-five years of contests had grown wearisome — two months of hard work for a handful of judges, sports schedules and after-school jobs forever in the way. So instead, costumes, makeup, scenery, music and dance, played not for a panel but for gymnasiums full of delighted grade-schoolers.

The story belongs to a little girl named Jodi who loves her broken, odd, secondhand dolls. Her mother insists she throw them away before a visit from Grandma, who is sure to be a perfectionist. When Grandma finally arrives — played at each stop by a local teacher in a gray wig with a cane — she raps that cane on the floor, silences the panic, and declares the show's whole point: "Nobody's perfect." The dolls spring to life, pull Grandma into the dance, and the message lands plainly: you don't have to be perfect, all you've got to be is yourself.

Around that frame the cast played dolls frozen in position as audiences filed in, then unfroze into a "mess" of fairy tales — three blind mice, Jack and the beanstalk with a two-actor giant under one cloak, the Big Bad Wolf and three pigs, and more. The show needed only a flat patch of gym floor, no stage. At every school a brave local child was recruited to play the Goose, with a single line — "Quack" — while the cast led the youngster gently around and set them safely back in the audience. ("There's nothing worse in theatre," Bradbury warned a principal, "than grabbing the wrong goose.")

Songs

Cast

Additional doll cast included Cale Neff (Snuffy), Katie McDannald (Mickie D), Kim Stock (Kimmy), Melinda Snodgrass (Mellicious), Julie Surratt (Princess), Daniel West (Woozer), Callie Phelps (Kay Pee), Jessica Anderson (Jessie Lou — Raggedy Ann), Mandy Bergschneider (Embee), Katie Huppe (Whoopie), and Jackie Clinton (Sweetiebabe). At each stop, Grandma was played by a local faculty member and the Golden Goose by a child from the host school.

Production Notes

A Perfect Mess was written and directed by Ken Bradbury for the Triopia Traveling Theatre Troupe, with a cover page dated 2001. Rehearsals ran through late December 2000 and January 2001, fitted around an unusually full schedule of girls' and boys' basketball tournaments. After a guest performance on January 28 and a home show at Triopia Grade School on January 29, the troupe took the show on the road, performing at Roodhouse, North Greene, Carrollton, North Grade, Jefferson, and Murrayville schools, then later a second tour through Ashland, Virginia, Beardstown, Franklin, Our Saviors, and Winchester on February 8 and 9, 2001.

The show asked nothing of host schools but a gym floor, an enthusiastic audience, a willing child for the Goose, a good-natured (and loud) local teacher named in the script, and the day's lunch menu — small local touches woven into the performance. Bradbury's own road journal records the chaos and joy of touring: blue van chased by yellow school bus, a wheelchair-using girl who was the day's biggest fan, a Jefferson School crowd so wild the cast invented "a new word for theatre," and Sean Anderson stuffing toilet paper into his tights mid-show while Matt Johnston stepped in as the hero of the day. Through it all the troupe ate its way across the county — Dairy Queen, Hardees, Taco Bell — and proved, school by school, that nobody's perfect.