HOW TO EAT SAND IN YOUR SPINACH
By
Tara Meddaugh
(c) 2018
A monologue from the full-length play,
The Victory Garden Plays:
Part I: Ruby and Millie and the Dying Cucumbers
DETAILS
Cast: Female/male
Age range: 7-12 years old
Genre: Comedy
Running time: Approximately 1.5 minutes
Setting: Rooftop garden of an apartment complex, 1940s
About the play, The Victory Garden Plays, from which this monologue was extracted/edited:
While soldiers fight abroad in WW2, those remaining on the Homefront strive to make a difference by creating Victory Gardens, supplementing limited food supply. But the pressures on the homefront extend much further than simply growing produce. A child worries her failing rooftop garden is an omen of misfortune for her father’s return from a POW camp. An infertile woman throws her purpose into feeding neighborhood families. A wealthy man whose chemical plant is commissioned by the government for war purposes struggles with how to leave a meaningful legacy not tainted with warfare. These stories, and more, are given light in The Victory Garden Plays, a series of 7 vignettes chronicling people’s journeys with their new realities of love, growth, life and death. Learn more here.
About the monologue, How to Eat Sand in Your Spinach:
Ruby, a girl of around 9 years old, is tending to her WW2 Victory Garden on top of her apartment complex in New York. Her father is in a POW Camp in Europe and she believes that having a successful garden will help win the war and bring her father back home. It’s late, and she gives her last bits of encouragement to her growing produce in their crates before her older sister makes her go to bed.
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RUBY
(Ruby gently touches some vegetable growth in a crate)
Swell job, little lettuce! Really swell! Papa’s gonna eat you up when he comes back! Oh—maybe I shouldn’t have said that! Pretend I didn’t say that. Swell job anyway, Lettuce!
(walks to next crate)
And such brave carrots! Yes, you’re brave! Brave!
(walks to next crate)
Oh, this one! This is—you’ll never believe it, Millie. But this is—can you believe we’re growing watermelon in White Plains? I told Margaret that—she’s in 44-C. You know her? She’s just a little kid. Maybe five or six. She’s so sick of that spinach her mother buys. Her mother doesn’t wash it right, even though if she listened to Mrs. Gannon on the radio, she’d know how! But Margaret says they don’t have a radio, so there’s sand in the spinach every time. I told her, when she eats it, just imagine she’s on vacation at the beach at Coney Island. I always get sand in my gum there. But—END OF EXCERPT
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Click below for the entire play from which this monologue comes:
While soldiers fight abroad in WW2, those remaining in Westchester County strive to make a difference on the Homefront by creating Victory Gardens, supplementing limited food supply. But the pressures on the homefront extend much further than simply growing produce. A child worries her failing rooftop garden is an omen of misfortune for her father’s return from a POW camp. An infertile woman throws her purpose into feeding neighborhood families. A wealthy man whose chemical plant is commissioned by the government for war purposes struggles with how to leave a meaningful legacy not tainted with warfare. These stories, and more, are given light in The Victory Garden Plays, a series of vignettes chronicling people’s journeys with their new realities of love, growth, life and death.