Staff photos: Chris McGathey Evie Adams (right) gives directions during a summer theater camp at Lipscomb Elementary.

About 20 first- and second-grade girls danced in tutus, singing an original show tune and acting in a play written by three Girl Scouts working to earn the Gold Star award at a theater camp last week at Lipscomb Elementary.

Clare Watkins, Evie Adams, and Allison Cable developed the idea of the camp to encourage the young girls to take part in the Woodrow Wilson High School theater program in hopes that doing so will encourage them to graduate high school.

The overall dropout rate at Woodrow is 5.9 percent, compared to 3.7 percent for the state, according to 2007 data from the Texas Education Agency.  

Though Watkins, Adams, and Cable all live in the Woodrow attendance boundaries, none of them attend the Dallas ISD school. Watkins and Adams go to the School for the Talented and Gifted at Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center, and Cable is a student at Dallas Baptist Academy. Yet Woodrow is still important to them. They have attended a musical put on by Woodrow students every year since they were in elementary school.

The play they wrote is based on the board game Candyland and includes characters such as Queen Candy, Lady Licorice, Miss Plum, and Fairy Frostine.

“There’s princesses and fairies — things that really captivate little girls’ minds,” Cable said.
With a “Wizard of Oz” type flare, the play follows the protagonists through the candy land only to wake up at the end, with golden lollipops under their pillows.

The Scouts wrote the script for Sugar and Spite, a two act, four-scene play, in June, when they had the freedom to spend all day brainstorming.

Because they couldn’t cast, direct, and help the girls memorize their lines and the original song Adams wrote all in one week, they filmed the play. By filming, they could stop between takes and help the girls remember their lines and edit out mistakes.

The trio has been in the same Girl Scout troop since they were in the third grade. Though only four of the 23 girls from the original group are left, Watkins, Adams and Cable have stayed Scouts to help maintain their friendship. The play is their service project towards earning Gold Star awards, the highest award available to Girl Scouts, to put on their resumes for college applications.

Watkins, Adams, and Cable started planning their Gold Star award project in January. The process is similar to the better-known Eagle Scout project of Boy Scouts. The Scouts have to have 15 hours of individual work and more than 100 hours total working on the project. 

 
Each Scout had a different responsibility so that they were able to get their individual hours for the project as well. Watkins spent all of her time with the girls in between scenes playing improvisation games with them and doing other theater activities. Adams was in charge of helping film and edit the final product, and Cable put together all the costumes and helped direct the show.

Despite months of planning, the camp turned out much differently than the Scouts expected and posed new challenges.

“It was kind of surreal on Monday: ‘Whoa, we’re actually at the camp,’” Adams said of the first day.

Alice Armstrong decorates a castle before a scene during the camp’s original prouduction of  Sugar and Spite last week.

Only about 15 girls were supposed to sign up, but 22 showed up. Of those girls, one didn’t speak any English, several preferred to only speak in Spanish, and most were just learning to read, she said.

Fortunately, the Scouts had several friends who volunteered to help with the camp, one of whom speaks Spanish, Adams said.

“It’s been a lot different than what we expected,” Cable said. “I don’t think we were ready for the difficulty.”

 

But ultimately, they said, they were glad to see how excited the girls got when they were given parts in the play. The Scouts all grew up going to theater camps, and many of the young girls don’t have those opportunities.

“If you can just spend time with them, they love it, even just being in a tutu,” Watkins said.

“Sugar and Spite” was set to premiere on Thursday at Lipscomb Elementary. The parents were invited to attend, and there was to be popcorn and refreshments. Each girl in the play was given a copy of the movie.

E-mail tasha.hayton@peoplenewspapers.com