Human Flower Project
A Nickname That Goes to Your Head
An 82-year-old munchkin stays pot-bound.
As the mayor of Munchkin City points Dorothy to the Yellow Brick Road, “The Flower-Pot Girl” (Margaret Pellegrini) and other munchkins stand by.
Our father-in-law, like many boys, was named for his dad. In order to avoid confusion around the house, everybody called him “Junie” (for junior). I remember at his 60th birthday celebration a number of years ago, he quietly remarked, with a foreshadowing of Mick-Jagger-dom, “I always wondered what it would feel like to be 60 and have people still call you ‘Junie.’” So what did it feel like? “Silly as hell,” he replied with a smile.
When my in-laws retired in another state, he decided to switch out of the old nickname and go by “Tom” instead. Today, unless they’re back in Louisville or in Lexington, Virginia, where he attended college, nobody knows what my mother-in-law means when she slips and calls out, “Junie!”
On the contrary, Margaret Pellegrini, who’s about my father-in-law’s age, clings with all the fervor of English ivy to her childhood assignation: “The Flower-Pot Girl.” Margaret was 15 years old when Hollywood scouts gave her a casting call as one of the 124 munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Pellegrini explains that she had been “passing out samples of potato chips” at the Memphis State Fair when a group of fellow “little people” (midgets) asked her to join their act. She declined but gave the troupe her phone number and two years later heard from a movie agent.
Pellegrini says she was paid $5 a week (considerably less than Toto’s $125). She appeared both in the meet and greet scene, just after Dorothy’s house has squashed the Wicked Witch of East in downtown Munchkinland, and as a little “flower chick” cracking out of an egg in a nest of babies.
Margaret Pellegrini, “The Flower Pot Girl”
at a recent appearance
And since then? “I had another small part in a movie called ‘Johnny Got His Gun,’ which is a war picture. And it didn’t go over so big...I went out to the [1939] Treasure Island World Fair [in San Francisco]. Then I went back home and started to work as a nightclub waitress. I got married and I had two children, and I’ve got five grandchildren and eight great grandchildren. In 1982, my husband passed away. In 1985, I went to my first “Wizard of Oz” festival--and from then on....”
...Pellegrini has resumed her role as “The Flower Pot Girl,” at book-signings, conventions and, most recently, celebration around the release of The Wizard of Oz on DVD. She’s one of seven surviving munchkins. With a frock like she wore in the Land of Oz and a container of faux flowers on her head, Margaret is relishing her nickname at age 82. (Granted: “The Flower-Pot Girl” beats the heck out of “Junie.")
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