Article about last week's LHOP cast reunion in Nebraska!!

[catlover79]

Beatrice (NE) Daily Sun

By Joelyn Hansen/Daily Sun staff writer
Monday, June 18, 2007 9:39 AM CDT

As seats filled up fast outside the Homestead National Monument of America Education Center Saturday afternoon waiting to see ‘Little House on the Prairie' cast members, it was a different story inside the center.

There, performers from the hit 1970s and early 1980 television series reminisced about their lives on the show and afterward.

The seven cast members from the show who appeared at Homestead National Monument this weekend were Karen Grassle, who played Caroline Ingalls; Charlotte Stewart, Eva Beadle; Alison Arngrim, Nellie Olsen; Brenda and Wendi Turnbaugh, Grace Ingalls; Radames Pera, John Sanderson/Edwards Jr.; Brian Part, Carl Sanderson/Edwards.

Even after all these years, the cast members remain close.

“We're still all friends,” Arngrim said.

Arngrim said that many years ago they decided they were tired of just getting together at funerals, so now they try to make a commitment to get together at least once a year.

Cast appearances, like the one at the Homestead and other places around the country, make a wonderful opportunity to do it, she said.

“Now we can way that we get to see each other,” Arngrim said.

Through the years, especially with the help of e-mail, cast members say it is much easier to stay in touch.

A month or two ago, they lost a dear friend and former cast member, Dabbs Greer, who played the Reverend Alden on the show.

They were able to easily know about his illness and death through e-mail as Part kept other cast members informed, Grassle said.

“Brian was a great conduit of information,” Grassle said. “It was really, really marvelous.”

And sitting back and watching them as they talked and laughed back and forth, it is apparent they truly are friends.

The cast said they enjoy making appearances and meeting their many fans. With the show airing in 100 countries, they have a lot of fans.

“It's an opportunity to acknowledge the people who made the show as popular as it was,” Pera said.

This was the first cast appearance for Pera, who played John Jr., one of Mary Ingalls' love interests on the show.

Many of their fans stay closely in touch with them, Stewart said. Just as they keep in touch with e-mail, their fans keep in touch with them through e-mail.

“We get lots of e-mail,” Stewart said. “We've got people that contact us on a daily basis.”

Stewart says she often is e-mailed by people who have become educators because of her character she played on the popular series.

“I'm proud when people e-mail me and say they were encouraged to finish their education and become teachers,” she said.

It's always a fun and interesting experience for the cast members as they appear to talk about the show and answer the many questions their fans have for them, including the strange and weird questions.

“We've definitely been asked some weird questions,” Arngrim said who has been asked several times about the wig she wore on the show and if she and Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls, are still enemies.

Arngrim reassures fans that she and Gilbert are good friends.

“Melissa Gilbert and I are best friends,” she said.

”If we had not been friends we wouldn't have gone as far in the fight scenes. We knew we could get really crazy because in the end we knew we would go for Slurpees at the 7-11.”

“I often get asked what it was like to kiss Mike,” Grassle said about questions she has been asked.

She has also been asked about questions about her role on the show and its portrayal of women.

Grassle, who is an advocate of women's rights, said she always saw the role of Caroline Ingalls as a strong role for women.

In addition, she said she thought the role represented the women of the homesteading era who had tremendous strength to do what they did.

“It took tremendous bravery for women to go into those places,” she said.

The cast members are proud to have been part of the show.

“When I first read the pilot, I knew Little House on the Prairie was going to be really popular,” Grassle said.

Aside from their work on Little House, the cast members have gone on to other successful projects, which include being parents and activists raising awareness and money for different causes and charities.

Arngrim and Pera are both involved work in the Screen Child Actors Guild as they work to establish guidelines and laws that protect child actors.

Arngrim is also involved in charity work that raises awareness for AIDS and child abuse.

Stewart, who is a 16-year breast cancer survivor, for the past 16 years has worked to raise money for breast cancer research.

With only minutes before they are to make their appearance, the cast finishes their conversations and prepares to meet their fans. As they head outside they are greeted with a familiar song, the theme from Little House, and the cheers from the estimated crowd of 1,000 people.

Fans from around the globe travel

to Beatrice to see ‘Little House' cast

By Joelyn Hansen

Daily Sun staff writer

It's not every day a Beatrice event draws hundreds of people from across Nebraska, the United States or even the world.

But for any ‘Little House on the Prairie fan,' Beatrice was the place to be this weekend to get a chance to meet some of their favorite Little House cast members at the Homestead National Monument of America.

Barnaby Marriott, from Brighton, Sussex, England, and Eric Caron, from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, were up bright and early Saturday morning to get prime seats for the event.

They traveled thousands of miles from across the Atlantic Ocean and across the Canadian border to see some of the cast members from the hit television series from the 1970s and early 1980s.

“I'm a huge fan,” Marriott said.

Marriott, who owns all of the ‘Little House on the Prairie' episodes on DVD and can quickly spout episode names, said he has been a longtime fan of the show from an early age.

“I've loved it since I was 11 years old,” he said. “As the years went on, I've loved it even more.”

Many of the episodes rank as favorites for him, but the one he says he likes the best is the episode entitled “Bunny,” as he enjoys watching the scene where Nellie Olson takes a trip down the hill in a wheelchair and ends up in the pond.

“The wicked side of me loves Nellie and Harriet Olsen,” Marriott said.

He had the first opportunity to meet Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Olsen, and Charlotte Stewart, who played Ms. Beadle, a few years ago when he interviewed them for a Web site.

Since then, he has stayed closely in touch with them and many of the other cast members from the show.

Marriott and Caron are both part of a large global network of fans from across the world through the Internet site Prairiefans.com.

Kellie Thompson, from La Vista and one of the fans up early Saturday morning, saw the cast for the first time two years ago in Beatrice.

Since then she said she has met and talked with many other fans of the show, including some of the cast members, in the Prairie Talk chat room.



Click on the link below to see some fan pictures! (No, I wasn't there. )
http://www.prairiefans.com/interviews.htm

[APPLEI]

does Radames Pera have gray hair?
i barely recognized him