One time my cousin Jenny told everybody in Stella she was going to go to Los Angeles to be in the movies. She had been given the part of Emily in "Our Town," and she was only in the tenth grade. Mrs. Bennett told her what a good job she did, and Coach Phillips told her how pretty she looked, so she got it into her head she could succeed in the motion picture business. She probably knew that everybody in the play got told the same thing, but she still took all that praise to heart—maybe because she really was pretty, especially on stage with all that make-up and her hair done. Ma and Pap were upset when they heard she was moving—Jenny was the only child to my Aunt Prim, Pap's sister, and she and Aunt Prim had been having Sunday dinner with us since Uncle Glenn passed away. So Pap called Aunt Prim to find out if it was true. I acted like I was watching TV, but I was really listening to their phone conversation. I couldn't hear what Aunt Prim said, of course, but I could kind of figure it out from what Pap was saying.
"Prim, what's this I hear about Jenny dropping out of school to go to Los Angeles? Are you goin' to let her do such a thing?"
"She won't listen to reason, Ronnie. I told her she should at least graduate, but she's set on going right now."
"She's not but sixteen! Can't you get the law involved?"
"You want I should have my own daughter thrown in jail?"
"No, you're right; throwin' her in jail won't help. But aren't you afraid—?"
"Of course, I'm afraid! I'm scared to death of her doing this."
"Are you goin' with her?"
"I am. It's either go with her or she runs away by herself. What would you do?"
"I'd do exactly the same if I was in your shoes. Maybe somethin' good'll come out of it. Good luck."
Pap hung up the phone and looked at me. I turned back to the TV, but he knew I was listening. I was sixteen, too, and Jenny and I were good friends, mainly because we were family. Sometimes when we were little, Jenny and I would fool around, you know, like kids do—but nothing nasty. We outgrew all that, and then she turned so pretty it would almost hurt your eyes to look at her. She started dating my best friend, Jeddo, when they were in the eighth grade. Jeddo was renowned for his ability to grow facial hair while the rest of us could only grow pimples.
It was in March of 1966 that Aunt Prim and Jenny drove up to Kansas City and boarded a plane for Los Angeles. Then sometime in May—I remember because school had just let out—Pap and I were watching TV when a Macleans toothpaste commercial came on, and damned if Jenny wasn't on TV, brushing her teeth and smiling like the rising sun. "Ma!" I yelled, and Pap yelled, "Julia, come here! It's Jenny!" We were both hollering, "It's Jenny! It's Jenny!" Ma came in wiping her hands on her apron and said, "Well, I'll be!"
During the summer, we saw Jenny pinning laundry to a line in a Wisk commercial, and in another ad, she was smoking a Virginia Slims cigarette, and in yet another, she had a terrible migraine, but even in her feigned pain, with her eyes shut tight and her brow scrunched up, she was radiant. Then one Monday evening in the fall—I remember because school had started again—we were all watching Gunsmoke, and a woman came up to Matt Dillon and told him a sad story about her man who had been killed by bushwhackers, and it was just her and her daughter, Caroline, and they were on their own in Dodge City without any money and no protection, and then it turned out that Caroline was, you guessed it, Jenny. Ma was watching with us, and we started yelling, "It's Jenny! Jenny's with Marshall Dillon!" Nobody was bigger than Marshall Dillon in those days, not even Sheriff Andy Taylor.
For the next six months we saw her in all kinds of shows, and then came the big one. It was a Saturday night—I remember because I was killing time before picking up my girlfriend, Ellie, to go to the drive-in picture show—and Jenny appeared on Hee-Haw where she was playing a country girl in cut-off jeans and a periwinkle halter top and long pigtails. She hopped out of a cornfield with a healthy jiggle and said in her finest Ozarks accent, "Grits and biscuits, boys, a girl's gotta have some fun!" Next episode she rolled jiggling in on a tractor and the next one she was jiggling up in a hay loft and the next one she was jiggling by a moonshine still, and each time she said, "Grits and biscuits, boys, a girl's gotta have some fun!" It was magic, like an incantation or even an exhortation. What kind of fun does a pretty girl like her gotta have? That's all any male in America could think about. All of us—rural and urban, Holy Rollers and humanists, jocks and geeks—began to fantasize about what she was doing in that cornfield or on that tractor or up in that hay loft that would prompt her to say such a thing. Before long, you could hear people saying it everywhere, not just in Stella, where we were from, but in Cassville and Neosho and over in Springfield and up in Joplin—"Grits and biscuits, boys, a girl's gotta have some fun!" They sold posters of Jenny in her cut-offs and halter top down at the Ben Franklin store, and Seventeen ran an interview with the "Grits and Biscuit Gal." She even got a bit part in a silly movie about CB radios and moonshine running. A highway patrolman opens the back of an eighteen-wheeler, and there stands Jenny, holding two moonshine jugs and wearing a periwinkle bikini. She smiles like the rising sun and says, "How do you like my jugs, officers? Grits and biscuits, boys, a girl's gotta have some fun!"