Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures [antikvár]

CHERRY Summer 1929 Isa was the youngest Emerson by ten years: the blondest, hap-H piest accident. It was John, Elsa's father, who was the most ^ pleased by her company. His older daughters already wanted less to do with the Cherry County Playhouse, and it was nice to have Elsa skulking around backstage, her white-blond hair and tiny pink face always peeking out from behind the curtain. Elsa was a fixture, the theater's mascot, and the summer crowds loved her. The Cherry County Playhouse, so named because of the cherries Door County produced, was housed in a converted barn on the Emerson property in Door County, Wisconsin's thumb. The barn was two hundred feet off the road, which had been renamed Cherry County Playhouse Road in honor of Elsa's parents' efforts and because there was no real reason not to. From May until September, tourists from Chicago and Milwaukee and sometimes even farther afield drove up and stayed in the small wooden rental cabins for the entire summer. After days spent on Lake Michigan or Green Bay, they would pile into the old barn and sit on wooden pews cushioned with calico pil-