A Top 10 Moment

This will come as no surprise to people who know me, but I LOVE meeting celebrities. I've been fortunate to have had more than a dozen encounters with famous people, including Harry Connick Jr., David Letterman, Jordan Knight, Eric Clapton and Bernadette Peters, and after last Friday night, I can add one more to the list: Shirley Jones.

Shirley has been a singer and actress since the 1950s, and stared in some of my favorite musicals, Oklahoma, Carousel and the Music Man. In two of them, her co-star was Gordon MacRae, an actor and singer whom I have LOVED since childhood.

I was in the musical Oklahoma in high school and in Carousel in Greenwich before I had to quit because my nanny schedule didn't work with rehearsal times.

Well, last Friday my parents and went to an event put on by the Omaha Film Institute at the Joselyn Art Museum. They had a showing of the movie Carousel, with remarks by Shirley Jones and Mandy MacRae Daley, Gordon MacRae's daughter who lives just blocks from my parent's house in Lincoln.

Before the film, both women spoke, and Shirley took questions from the audience. Unfortunately she didn't pick me, so I planned to ask her after the movie what her audition song was for Richard Rodgers and who inspired her early on as a singer. But because I always like to make things unique - and then they become difficult - I forgot to ask her the questions when I got her autograph. We both share the same middle name - Mae - so I asked if she would sign her name as Shirley Mae Jones. She either didn't hear me or was confused and instead wrote "To Mae, from Shirley Jones." She tried to correct myself and just asked her to put "Lisa" above the name, since that was my first name. Oh well!

After we met Shirley, my parents and I found Mandy and talked with her for a bit. She was so nice and very down to earth. She grew up not far from me in Lincoln and went to Southeast HS. She was 17 when her dad died. I was 9.

In our conversation, I showed her a photo of a blanket my parents gave me for Christmas that had supposedly belonged to Gordon MacRae. She smiled and said that she remembered that her aunt had crocheted that blanket for her dad toward the end of his life. :)

My dad told her about how he would see her dad at the neighborhood pharmacy and how he remembered him singing the National Anthem at Husker football games. We also told her how for many, many years we would go to her dad's grave on Memorial Day and sing "O What a Beautiful Morning," from Oklahoma. It's a song Madelyn and I have sung on the way to daycare each day (unless it is raining, and then we sing "Singin' in the Rain") since she's been 8 weeks old.

I was thrilled to get to experience this all with Mom and Dad because they're the ones who introduced me to old musicals and fostered my love of them and of celebrities. Thank you, Mom and Dad!

 

Here is a clip of my favorite song in Carousel, sung by Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae.