Post-Performance Discussion – Panama Canal Museum Collection Blog

Welcome to the post-performance discussion space for
Threads of Silver and Gold: Women of the Panama Canal

Playwright and director Deborah B. Dickey has created a play in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Panama Canal. Threads of Silver and Gold: Women of the Panama Canal looks at the role of women who arrived from the West Indies, England and the United States during the construction period of the canal. Full of heroism and striving, the play celebrates the pioneering women who left behind family to face enormous challenges as they witnessed the realization of the 400-year-old dream to join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The inaugural performance of the play takes place on
February 20 at 7 p.m. at the Hippodrome Cinema in Gainesville, FL.

We will also be using this space, here on The Panama Canal Museum Collection Blog, to engage in discussions of the script, source material, and historical and contemporary contexts through which the topics raised might be viewed.

We hope this will serve to engage an audience that is not bound by local proximity, and thus lead to even richer and more varied connections between the material presented and your personal reflections as individuals and as a community.

Through this project we seek to engage constituencies at the local community; scholastic; and national and international levels in order to facilitate deep, meaningful, and sustained dialogs and spaces for reflection based around artistic production and the significant issues raised by materials in the PCM Collection.

The project is supported by

Programs in the Public Humanities Grant, from the Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere with support from the Rothman Endowment

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6 Comments

Malcolm Stone

February 20, 2015 at 11:15 am Reply

The lady lying on the locks wall with the upper portion of her body extending a bit far out, but clinging to piping to support herself is Florence Neville Miller.. Florence Neville is my grandmother and is part of the Neville family which earned three Roosevelt medals with some bars. She was divorced in the late teens and left Panama with her daughter Alberta Miller. Alberta Miller was born in the Canal Zone. My sister Lorna and I were born in Pasadena, CA, We all returned to the Canal Zone in the late thirties and my younger brother Kenny was born in the Canal Zone. Florence lived in Pedro Miguel and worked in the Pedro Miguel Clubhouse. Her job was taking tickets for theater and did some work at the swimming pool. Some PM residents may remember her.

Ray Crucet

February 20, 2015 at 6:21 pm Reply

This is extraordinary. I grew up in Pedro Miguel, went Through Elementary school there and then off to Balboa High. I was a pool life guard a few years. My Mother was an avid moviegoer and was a good friend of the ticket lady. Maybe Florance was that lady. The real kicker here is the photograph of the pretty lady, Florance Neville Miller, your grandmother. You see I in the process of writing a play set in the Canal Zone circa August 1914, around the official opening of the Canal. It is a love story about a nurse. I was inspired by a Photograph published by UF of an unknown woman standing in a emergency dam structure at Gatun locks. I first wrote a poem about that unknown lady…now the play. I’ll be reading it at a Sarasota Area Playwrights Association meeting in Appril.Sure would like to hear more about your family…
Rebecca Fitzsimmons

February 21, 2015 at 3:33 pm Reply

Malcolm,
The pictures of Florence and the Neville family that you have sent to us here at UF are some of my favorites in the PCM Collection. In particular, I love the ones where she is touring the locks. She seems like such a lively and spirited woman, and I thought that she was perfect to illustrate the cover of the play program posted above. She seems to encapsulate exactly the type of American woman from that era that the playwright was trying to convey–adventurous, bold, fearless. Thank you for sharing more about her.