Little House on the Prairie 50th Reunion and Festival THIS WEEKEND!

I wonder if Shannen Doherty will be there?

Will Jason Bateman be there?

R2 no. No Kyle Richards either.

Will Albert and Nancy be there?

I'm so jealous, OP!

Who are you going to try to hook up with?

If only it was happening in Mankato

100% True Story...Decades ago when I was working I had a "client" who lived in Northern California who swore he "knew" Dean Butler. Claims they met in the S.F. area. I believed him too because if you were going to make up a celeb friend---why would you pick Dean Butler and not Brad Pitt?

Is Alfred still a sizzling hot piece of prairie ass?

Alfred?

GMA interview

Bonnetheads - and no Melissa Sue Anderson

I’ll be there Saturday! Jonathan Gilbert, who played Willie Oleson, has reconciled with his sister Melissa and will be making his first public appearance in 40 years! Also there, Bonnie Bartlett, best known as Barbara Thorndyke on The Golden Girls!

Melissa Sue Anderson and Matt Labyorteaux are the only two living cast members not appearing!

Sorry, of course Shannen, Kyle, and Jason Bateman will not be there, but they were from the later seasons when the cast was so large they needed a Moldovan Massacre to thin it out!

Was it this past weekend or is it this coming weekend?

R13 be sure to try and get close to Grassle. She is brimming with LHOTP behind the scenes never revealed gossip! Pump her for info.

R8 Dean Butler turned me on to the max when I was 8 yrs old.

WHORE!

Op and R8 I’m jealous. I’m stuck here in East Hampton.

OP here. The festival starts tomorrow! I’ll report back with details. Jonathan Gilbert is the late addition that has everyone talking. WHAT DOES HE LOOK LIKE!?!?!

That will be fun OP - please report back !. Will Melissa aka Laura Aka Beth reunite with Manley?.

Will OP wear a tributary sun bonnet? I might.

Will any of the men wear an honorary bulge, in tribute to Michael Landon?

I was molested.

Mrs. Oleson is shrieking in tribute.

Simi Valley might get more response if they had a Manson reunion at Santa Susanna Pass.

R24 I just spit out my coffee reading that. Well played, friend.

[quote]I was molested.

Yeah, but by your own brother?

Is Lindsay Sidney Greenbush (Carrie) gonna be there? Ask her why she portrayed Carrie as developmentally disabled.

Albert's real life (but adopted) brother is there. He played Andy Garvey, I read a comment on Facebook that said his brother didn't come because the crowd was too big for him.

I think I recall reading Albert was on the autism spectrum. This could come into the play with the fear of crowds.

Laura has locked down the crazy homeless lady got a shower at the shelter look.

Will half pint be bringing the shitbra?

Will Melissa Gilbert’s estranged brother show? This is the perfect event for a heartwarming reconciliation.

Ma can arbitrate.

He did, r33. The pictures I saw on FB of him aren't great...time hasn't been kind. I saw at least one shot of them together.

Any pictures of the shitbra?

It looks like she’s wearing the shitbra over her 21st century prairie dress in some of the pictures from the event.

Little Shitbra on the Prairie?

Little House on the Shitbra?

I’m so anxious to know more!

Supposedly his instrgram.

Grassle!!

Whoa, what a coincidence, just yesterday I decided to watch a Melissa Sue Anderson video on YouTube, totally out of the blue. She has aged well.

Gladly most of the cast was made of children and teens and therefore the majority of them are still alive to celebrate 50 years later.

I have never watched the final season of this show, supposedly it consisted of three tv movies released in early 1984, this thread will make me look for them and try to watch them.

R23 and R29 I am howling laughing. Grateful for our DL wits.

This is my favorite thread of the week. I'm an old DL whore and love the resident wit and sass of our little sewing bee.

Melissa Gilbert is like "Ok, I'll wear the fucking bonnet but around my neck only. And you cocksuckers are paying me in advance or NO DEAL".

Were Linwood Boomer and Dean Butler there?

Was there today. Jonathan Gilbert (Willie) reluctantly did a Q & A with Alison Arngrim (Nellie) late in the day. They hadn’t seen each other in 41 years, as Jonathan had cut off contact with everyone connected with the show.

He took questions from the audience, and the last one was “Where have you been?”

It turned into a very touching moment, where he talked about spending decades trying to find out what his reality was (he had previously spoken about being seven years old, adopted and being thrust into nine years working on a television show set in 1879 simply because his sister was the star). He said he traveled the world, cut off contact with everyone from his youth (including Melissa, whom he hadn’t spoken to in over thirty years), worked in finance in NYC, had a spiritual awakening, and realized in the last few days that the home he had been looking for was right there all along. Very Wizard of Oz, but he was so well spoken, earnest and kindly that it moved several people around me to tears. And they had great stories about Mr. and Mrs. Oleson.

Also saw Melissa Gilbert, Karen Grassle, the twins, Ketty Lester, Dean Butler and Lucy Lee Flippen, and Linwood Boomer.

The only cast members I didn’t see in person were Patrick Labyorteaux and Miss Beadle (poor Bonnie Bartlett canceled due to illness).

Wow, that’s a great lineup

Thanks for the write up on JG

Gee, who ever thought that dull MTV celeb reporter Chris Connelly would still be around? (I never watch GMA.)

Did Ketty Lester tell any battering ram jokes?

Melissa Gilbert was never able to escape that role.

My bonnet lies over the ocean...My bonnet lies over the sea...🎶

Melissa Gilbert did several lucrative TV movies in her teens and continued that work with the Lifetime Channel, etc. once she grew up.

She didn’t make it as a movie star, but did keep up a respectable employment history on TV (?)

But still was never able to escape being identified first and foremost with Little House and Laura Ingalls.

I don't know if there has ever been a tv show since that made me cry so much. The fat woman story alone. Mary!

[quote]R55 But Gilbert was never able to escape being identified first and foremost with Little House and Laura Ingalls.

I’d say that’s true of many stars, though. Actors are extremely lucky to get one hit show. Only a few span off into many different popular roles.

Won’t Arnold Schwarzenegger always be The Terminator? Roseanne will always be Roseanne. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams will always be Laverne & Shirley, etc.

It’s not that unusual. In fact, I think it’s a matter of course.

R57 Yes and no. Melissa Gilbert was a child star. The others you mentioned weren't.

She then was a teen star, but grew up and attempted an adult career, sometimes in sexy roles.

Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, various other child and teen stars made a transition to adult stardom, but there hasn't been a longstanding demand for Melissa Gilbert as an adult star.

Penny Marshall had a very successful second career as a director, and Arnold went into politics.

Natalie Wood and Elizabeth Taylor grew up to be beautiful women, so...

She stayed with the show a long time, even though she did become a sort of breakout star, doing remakes of Diary Of Anne Frank and The Miracle Worker while she was still on Little House. Also, she later became president of SAG.

Did you take any pictures you can post r47?

Is a picture up thread of a graying older man Jonathan?

Yesterday I listened to a podcast interview with Alison Arngrim from 2021. She’s quite the talker. Around the 36 minute mark she discusses Johnathan Gilbert. She described him as very intelligent, but eccentric even as a child. He periodically kept it touch with the cast by email and text, but he refused to see anyone. The podcast is well worth listening to if you’re a fan of the show.

R47, I meant to thank you for your post. That was so cool to hear Jonathan’s story.

I'm stuck back at R54 and Joe Penny's hairy chest......*drools*

R47 thank you for the update to the day. I love you lots.

Dean Butler has aged very well ! I would

Ketty Lester yesterday

Loved Hester Sue!

Did anyone talk to Grassle about her tell-all book she put out a couple yrs ago?? It was full of salacious behind-the-scenes accusations and insights into the production cast of Little House On The Prairie

Video of Jonathan and Alison.

Jonathan on Alison/Allison.

This is pretty funny.

There's an old DL saying, "this thread is useless without pictures" - come on people, there must be tons of photos! Share...

I guess they want us to check out the Facebook group dedicated to the event (linked above). There are many pictures, videos, and complaints there.

I heard they sold out of the "Mary's 'Battering Ram' Baby Doll" in four minutes.

Jonathan Gilbert is looking for love, ladies!

So the FB page has a fair number of negative Nellies, if you will, complaining.

The event apparently wasn't well organized or managed, and many people stood in line and did not get whatever they'd been standing in line for even after many hours. (Signatures? Meet and greet? Not sure.)

Damn, Jonathan Gilbert is handsome.

When did the birds peck your eyes out, R78?

Those lean and lanky ones unzip and

*THWACK* out tumbles a python!

Thanks for posting the videos. I watched both of the ones of Jonathan. It’s so good to see him again.

[quote]Did Ketty Lester tell any battering ram jokes?

Why would she? It was Alice Garvey who died in the fire.

Jonathan comes across as gay to me. Anyone else getting those vibes?

He has great hair!

Hair looks like shit. No vibes. All in your head r83

I didn't know Ketty Lester was still around. She looks good for her age

He needs a haircut, but otherwise Jonathan Gilbert looks good

Here’s a pic of Jonathan Gilbert:

Michael always wanted to cum on my face..

It’s nice to see Jonathan again. At some point it’s better to embrace your past.

I always get Dean Butler and Daws Butler mixed up.

The evil teacher just whacked Laura's hand with a ruler on Pluto TV.

OP here- Remember the two part “Wild Boy” episode? Jonathan Kovaks was there at the festival. He is deaf and HOT. The man signing for him was also hot. I cut myself out of the picture. I am not hot.

I love that Jonathan joined the shindig. I am purposely not Googling the following question because I suspect our resident LHOTP historians will summarize what Jonathan is explaining when Nancy replaced Nellie. How did they explain that one? Was Nancy adopted from the life of a street urchin and then got a whiff of money and became a little Nellie clone?

r92, Nellie moved to New York with her husband and twins to help run his family business. Harriet fell into a deep depression, and it was suggested that she might adopt a child. (Michael Landon's answer to every problem, add another kid to the cast.) Harriet wasn't convinced until the Ingalls' latest adoptee, Missy Francis, went to visit Harriet and told her how happy she was living with the Ingalls family.

Harriet and Nels went to an orphanage (I don't remember the city, but I think Winnoka, or maybe it was Mankato or Sleepy Eye) and interviewed several children, but none where like her Nellie. Finally, they heard a wild child fighting and arguing and it was Nancy. Then she escaped the orphanage and Nels, Harriet chased her through the city before capturing her and taking her home.

Nancy was way more mentally disturbed than Nellie, that's for sure. Nellie had one psychotic episode where she flipped out in her bedroom. She was mostly just mean until she began to take that short Jewish dick, then she became nice and boring. Every episode with Nancy in it displayed some degree of psychotic behavior.

R93 Thank you. I knew I could count on this group to deliver. I remember Nancy as being the craziest, shrillest little cunt who ever cunted.

Was Sylvia there? Or the clown mask rapist?

R93 is a LHOTP historian. We needed one!

R90 I love that episode. Laura is stoic against the mean school marm.

[Quote] Nels, Harriet chased her through the city before capturing her and taking her home.

R93 That was normal back then. Kids were wild. Feral.

93 Will you befriend me. I’m a reformed Little House hater.

^^ it’s a trick! it’s nancy!

Didn’t Nancy try to kill her sister in law by locking her in a freezer?

No, R101, that was a rival for Albert’s affections as played by Melora Hardin.

R42, two out of three final movies aren’t bad. The last one broadcast( but not the last filmed) was a terrible Christmas movie that looks to have been filmed in high summer. They didn’t even try to make it look wintry.

The one where Albert is dying and the final one when they destroy the town are not bad.

Ma almost went into shock when two men caused her to drop her basket of eggs. She ran back home like she was just shot out of a cannon.

It freaked her shit. She let on like she acted like she was raped.

[quote]Ketty Lester yesterday

Wow, she looks great for her age.

I love her song "Love Letters." This is the epitome of a sexy, classy performance.

R95 she WAS there. She looked rough and she had CLOWN RAPE MERCH to sell!

Rape merch sweetie!

Why is Little House on the Prairie a Gay Icon?

Who is gay on this?

Michael Landon loved gays? What's going on?

[quote]Who is gay on this?

Well, the late Steve Tracy for one. And Alison might as well be a gay man. She volunteered for decades with AIDS patients as well, for which she is owed much thanks.

Nellie's husband? And Nellie. That's it?

No what is the appeal? Did they ever do episodes about gays or would the town of Walnut Grove have tarred and feathered and outcast the homos?

R111 What went on behind the barn or at the watering hole between the menfolk wasn't anybody's business. It got lonely on that Prairie for the single young men, traveling salesmen and widowers. But they did what they needed to do discreetly. Pa knew and reckoned it was just nature.

R111 sounds insufferable

Pa bent Albert over the hay bale many, many times.

In your mind r114

R109, the camp factor was high. My God, Harriet and Nellie alone... And then, there was also a lot of "outsider" stuff about kids who didn't "fit in".

Ma killed me with her miss perfect goes abusive mother persona

[quote]Why is Little House on the Prairie a Gay Icon?

Because we like watching the little 'tard run part way down the hill and then trip.

R118, Her mother was rushing to get her on set for that scene and put her shoes on the wrong feet. The apple doesn't fall far from that tree.

r118 is referring to lindsay sidney greenbush

Does anyone know if Mrs. Shitbra was there? She forced all three of her kids into acting, I can imagine her being a stage mother at the reunion as well.

At least Sara branched out and had the totally original idea of ladies sitting at a table chatting about current events and hot flashes. Then when they all got too hot, she went back to her roots on Roseanne 2: Electric Boogaloo.

I would have wanted to ask Charlotte Stewart what it was like filming “Eraserhead” and “Little House” at the same time.

I saw a TV movie when I was little where nymphomaniac housewife Susan Blakely was sleeping with all these men right and left. At one point a workman comes to the house and she’s lounging around in a robe. Then… well, you know.

I thought, “You mean, strange men can just come to your house, and you can have sex with them??”

Why, yes. Yes, you can.

—————-

WASHINGTON POSE: [italic]The put-upon heroines of puffy-eyed potboilers used to be "by love possessed." Now we have new possessions. In "Secrets," ABC's Sunday Night Movie, Andrea Fleming is so disturbed by the death of her possessive mother that she turns into an instant nymphomaniac.

"Secrets" is a luridly entertaining two hour eyerow-raiser, airing at 9 p.m. on Channel 7.

Noel Coward wrote, "How potent cheap music is," and cheap melodrama can have its charms too; thus are so many TV programs born-again B-movies. What saves "Secrets" from being glib and fitfully tawdry exploitation of an hotsy totsy subject is chiefly the performance of Susan Blakely as Andrea, her first big TV role since being killed off, at her request, from "Rich Man, Poor Man."

This isn't what you'd want ot risk calling a great job of acting, but Blakely is certainly and consistently watchable. Her pouts, frets and tears are enigmatic to say the least; she's a thawed Faye Dunaway, aloof but reachable. And as she goes about seducing everybody from her kid sister's 17-year-old boyfriend to a blind piano tuner, Blakely does convey both the desperation of people helpless before impulse and the undeniable thrill that a child gets from being very naughty and knowing it.

The character's mad outbreak of indiscriminate whoopee is triggered by the death of a mother who had taught her religiously to follow the old values and old rules of sexual conduct for proper young ladies. "Nobody believes that yuck any more," notes the younger sister. Why sis never developed the princess syndrome so ingrained in Andrea is one of those little details that the James Henerson script doesn't supply.

It is a screenplay, though, much more interested in effects than in causes. The causes are knocked off with a few top psychological California truisms - be yourself, don't repress your feelings, and all that. Ah, but the effects! Blakely standing naked in front of the piano tuner is sensationalism bordering on black comedy, and the fact that this is television, and we are all curious to see "how far" the scene will go, gives this and all of Blakely's overtures and fantasies the kind of titillating tensions a hard-core porno movie could never precipitate in a theater.

How far? No very far. Just far enough to be fun and frustrating at the same time. Just far enough to pretty much guarantee that "Secrets" will be a lollapalooza in the Sunday night ratings

Oh. I’m in the wrong thread!

Well, if anyone knows where to stream that complete film - -

Can I just say how much I love 227?

[quote]Because we like watching the little 'tard run part way down the hill and then trip.

Come to think of it, it felt familiar...

Everyone's favorite episode is just starting on Pluto...

THE HALLOWEEN DREAM

It's spooky Halloween and Albert dreams of Indians!

OP here- I've been home from the festival a week now and I STILL can't get over the deaf hotness of "Wild Boy" Jonathan Kovacs. Who knew he would steal the show! TikToc presence and author Raven Stone recently did a game of "how many shots" with the men of Little House. Like, how many shots would it take for you to fuck...I'll start...Michael Landon. ZER0. ZERO SHOTS. You next? I'll give you a name. DEAN BUTLER-Almanzo Wilder. How many shots?

A dozen shots.

Dabbs Greer??

R128 that is very trashy

R128 MARY! (Ingalls Kendall)

Would a kindly DLer please explain "shirtbra" to me? I've been reading this on DL for years and have never known the origin.

Thank you.

There is an air of unresolved mystery about the Shitbra.

Either Mellissa Gilbert’s stage mother used to threaten to beat her with one when she made mistakes on set, OR Gilbert was overheard warning her kids with “having to get out the shitbra” when the group was leaving a store.

Of course, the abuse could have been generational.

I think either way it was concluded one would poop in a bra cup, then swing it around and around as a weapon. Kind of like a lot of quarters in a sock.

Linwood Boomer…ZERO SHOTS

I was at the Simi Valley festival and it was like lightening in a bottle. All those people together again probably for the last time. I was super emotional meeting Karen Grassle. She's a feminist and at 82, looks amazing. They were all very nice and I thanked Alison Arngrim for all the work she did in the 80s through today for people living with AIDS. She was a pioneer as was Scottie McGregor who played her mother. Alison's father was gay. MARY!

Why doesn’t Melissa do LITTLE HUSTLER ON THE PRAIRIE for Lifetime? The story of a down on her luck but spunky madam in the Old West.

Alison Arngrim and Tori can be in it, too.

I just watched the one with Albert bleeding and getting sick R103, now there are two of them left to watch.

It certainly was a great movie, but I didn't expect any less from little house on the prairie.

Funnily enough, two nights ago I caught an episode of Highway to Heaven on Pluto Tv, I knew this had been Michael Landon's final series and it seemed entertaining, but I was totally shocked to see that Victor French was also one of the main characters and to learn that he also died of Cancer, like Landon, just a couple of years before Michael himself died.

Glad to see I wasn't the only to notice that Nancy was even cuntier and worse than Nellie R93.

I remember the episode when Nellie came back for a visit, during season 9 and Nancy wouldn't stop antagonizing her and bugging her to the point that she asked Laura if she also had been that awful as a child, and Laura said No 😂

[quote] Why is Little House on the Prairie a Gay Icon?

Because Michael Landon's jeans were tighter even than Gary Sandy's on WKRP.