When my sister proposed that we write a musical together, I asked her what she had in mind. She thought perhaps a western theme might be good. This is what came to mind.
Cholorrhea was a little town, where everybody knows everybody. When someone came down with the dreaded Cholorrhea (the horrendous flu-like disease that had once nearly obliterated the town, and it‘s toilet paper supply) everyone knew within the hour. When a man got intentions of courting one of the young ladies of Cholorrhea, he parents surely knew before she did.
Clarence left his wife, Colette, and daughter, Sally, with all he owned: two cows, a horse, a pair of geese, and a lazy old dog. Regrettably, Hank, the farm hand, took off with the horse after Clarence’s funeral, so Sally and her mother were left without much transportation, and only their four hands to get all the daily chores done.
So Cholorrhea came together, like small towns always do, to alleviate the burdens of their fellow Cholorrheans. The women of Cholorrhea knew just what to do. Within an hour after the funeral, they organized suitors for the beautiful Sally, and began planning the wedding. All they had to do was find the perfect groom, for the surely desperate bride.
What the ladies didn’t know was that Clarence had plans of his own. He and Sally had not only been Father and daughter, but had also been the dearest of friends, and he had wanted what was best for her. Ever since she had been small, Clarence and Collette had known that Sally would be beautiful, and sought after. Indeed, so it was when she grew up that every man in the town wanted her for his wife. So Clarence left his daughter a map to finding out whether her prospective groom came with sincere intentions. When that map goes missing, Sally becomes desperate to avoid all attempts at personal contact with any member of the community (more especially the proud mothers of Cholorrhea) until she knew how her Father could recognize the heart of a man.
It bothered Collette that she couldn’t protect her daughter like her husband always had. Clarence had been the only reason all the suitors in the town hadn’t approached Sally before. But Colette simply had to laugh though. When it came to sincere intentions, not a man in Cholorrhea seemed to have them. Nor were any of them willing to work on the farm which Sally‘s groom would inevitably inherit, as eager as it seemed they all were to have it as dowry.
None of them seemed sincere, but for the one Sally wanted to marry least. Seymour may have been the very last on her list of desirable suitors, for his clumsiness with a rope (he could hardly tie his shoes, let alone rope a wild colt), for his frivolous parents (they had once offered to buy Clarence’s farm from him), and maybe it bothered her, the way he had always been the first one to ask her to dance.
But most of all, it was because she knew her father hadn’t liked him, and Sally was sure she would never marry a boy her father didn’t like. Poor Sally.
