“I saw Alice in Wonderland in moving pictures,” said Jimsi. “It was the crow who gave us all tickets once when Aunt Phoebe was visiting us. And I saw Cinderella with Mary Pickford. Did you?”
The little lame girl smiled. “Yes, the Good Crow gave me a ticket for it, and Mrs. Smith who has an automobile carried me up there. Wasn’t it lovely!”
The two little girls gazed into each other’s eyes, beaming. “After that, I made a play of Cinderella,” said Joyce. “Mine was just a kind of paper doll play, but I had ever so much fun doing it. Sometime, I’ll show it all to you when it is dark and we can use a candle. Here’s the fairy godmother!”
She held up a silhouette doll cut with a long cloak and a pointed hat. The godmother had a wand in her hand. One would have known anywhere that it was Cinderella’s fairy!
“Here’s the pumpkin,” Joyce explained. “See! And here’s the coach! And here’s Cinderella before the fairy transformed her! (I had to make a second Cinderella figure for the play after the fairy touched her with the wand.) The way I do this is to change the figures very quickly. It takes a good deal of skill to act it out right. I had long times when I practiced with the figures last autumn. Then, when I thought I could do it perfectly, I’d give a motion picture play for Mother and Daddy in the evening. Often Miss Phoebe would come in to see my plays. She liked them. She used to help me sometimes. She thinks it’s fun!”
“We could make Red Riding Hood into a motion picture play,” suggested Jimsi. “We could make the bushes for the woods by cutting the paper out irregularly like the outline of bushes if one saw them in shadow. You cut trees, didn’t you?”
The little lame girl assented. “I’ve cut trees and fences and little hills and the outlines of houses and—oh, ever so many things more than I can think of. In Alice in Wonderland, I really made a rabbit hole and when Alice was in the field, I made the funny rabbit go walking by and go down it and I made Alice follow him and—”
“How did you ever do it!” exclaimed Jimsi. “I don’t see how you did that!”
“You see how I made the field by putting bushes and a fence in the frame, don’t you?”
Jimsi nodded.