Theater Review: “Spit Like a Big Girl”
Clarinda Ross. Photo by Alysa Brennan by Nate Lee The South is America’s place for stories. It’s always been a place that, particularly in the heritage of Scotch-Irish Appalachia, reveres its words, its stories and its storytellers. Southern writers, black and white, enjoy a prestige wrought from this heritage that no other American locale affords. In her one-person play, “Spit Like a Big Girl,” Clarinda Ross more than lives up to her heritage. A professional actor and a genetic storyteller, Ross doesn’t just tell the story of growing up in Boone, North Carolina, with two college professors as parents, and herself as the parent of a mentally handicapped child. Her story is also about storytelling, itself; it’s about inheriting storytelling along with the kind of personality that makes for good stories. Her daddy, Carl (no matter their age, true Southern girls call their fathers “daddy”), “an educated redneck” and chairman of the Appalachian Studies Department at Appalachian State University, kept journals. When he died in his fifties, Ross discovered the writings and, inspired by them, started her own journals. The title comes from a seemingly typical journal entry when Ross was…
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