Winfield Public Library welcomes Michèle LaRue for a performance of The Bedquilt on Monday, April 28 at 6:30pm in the library’s Community Room.

In this “riveting” program, two vibrant American stories return us to the days when quilts created community. We join a gaggle of townswomen – and meet a solitary spinster – who fashion remarkable art for everyday use.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s “The Bedquilt” reveals the suspenseful journey of an unlikely heroine: Aunt Mehetabel. Elderly and unmarried, she is taken for granted by her family…although she is “clever in the way of patching bedquilts.” Mehetabel grows as the story unfolds, winning admiration and finding self-respect. She painstakingly devotes herself to realizing her ideal: “a pattern beyond which no patchwork quilt could go.”

“The Bedquilt,” written in 1906, is introduced by the gleeful account of “A Quilting Bee in Our Village,” penned by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, eight years earlier. In Freeman’s little town, good food, gossip, and games make a successful bee – sewing is just the start.

Professional actress Michèle LaRue tours nationally with her repertoire of TALES WELL TOLD: stories from America’s Gilded Age. In The Bedquilt, she creates a dozen distinctive characters, concluding her program with Aunt Mehetabel’s surprising backstory.

Michèle’s TALES come “from a time when literature was written for the ear.” Before radio’s invention, she explains, “family and friends made their own home entertainment – reading aloud by flickering candle, kerosene lamp, or gaslight. Today, only the lighting has changed: adult audiences still hang on every word. Despite TV and films, the internet and special effects, we still crave simply to listen to a tale well told.”

 Michèle premiered The Bedquilt in Victorian Cape May, New Jersey, for The East Lynne Company, mentored by its producing artistic director, Warren Kliewer. She has performed the program twice for the prestigious American Quilter’s Society, whose president declared, “You had the audience in your command. We could have heard a pin drop.” Madison, Wisconsin’s annual Quilt Expo has also featured The Bedquilt and quilting societies in Washington State have brought back Michele three times. “I was spellbound!” they exclaimed in Seattle, and “Riveting – twice – I would love to hear it again!” Visit http://www.michelelarue.com.

A Chicago native, University of Kansas graduate, and New Jersey resident, Michèle is touring the Sunflower State with two programs:  The Bedquilt and Places, Please, Act One – theatrical poems by Warren Kliewer. North Newton is honoring his work in a four-day festival, April 24-27. Michele performs Places, Please, Act One on Friday, April 25, 11:00am, at Kidron Hall. She is a decades-long member of both actors’ unions – Actors’ Equity and SAG-AFTRA – and a much-published theatre writer and book editor.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) has been called “one of the most popular and engaging American writers of the first half of the twentieth century.” Born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, she wrote more than forty books, including translations and nonfiction, as well as novels and short-story collections.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) spent most of her life in Randolph, Massachusetts. The people she knew and the scenes she witnessed in New England form the background for most of her tales of small-town and rural life.