Synopsis

Life in Skedee …

God has chosen the angel, Gabriel, also the narrator of our tale, to watch over Thyme Quinn, age 20, Oklahoma plains small town country farm girl, engaged to small town minister, Josiah Washburn, who lately seems to be gettin’ cold feet regarding their nuptial agreement.

Thyme takes her fears this morning to her special friend, God, there in the meadow out back of her and her mama’s dilapidated farm. God suggests to her, knowingly, that it will all work out, but Thyme is not convinced. She turns to her best friend Lizzie Cranbottom, the town vamp, but she is of no help either. A marriage in Thyme’s future looks bleak and things do not get any better when she, a certifiable virgin, begins to suspect that she might be, in fact, pregnant.

How could this possibly be? Through a series of near comic misses she finally learns of her fate from Gabe — grisly alcoholic Night Watchman at the town Junkyard (a clone of our angel narrator, Gabriel, in disguise.) Her fiancé, Lizzie works to try to prepare Josiah to set a date, but to no avail. 

At first, Thyme is horrified, by not only the overwhelming responsibility of mothering such a human, but also dreads trying to explain all of this to Josiah, A weddin’ now seems out of the question. Thyme is crushed.

Josiah, thinking that Thyme has probably gone looney on him, tries to get her to check herself into a local sanatorium. Now the wedding is off. However, once again, our unforeseen hero, Gabe, saves the day by revealing himself as an angel to Josiah, convincing him that Thyme’s pregnancy is legit.

Time passes. Word gets out around town that Thyme’s and Josiah’s wedding and their forthcoming supposed child of God, have them both “goin’ a little looney”, just like Thyme’s mama. 

The town folk abandon his church in droves and the local gossips have a jealous hey day with this “ridiculous news.” Even Thyme’s best friend, Lizzie, having her doubts, deserts her. The small-town scuttlebutt turns to scandal as the small town feelings turn to rage.

The townspeople, led by Bishop Emanuel Goodspeed, a jealous high priest of Josiah’s church, in an effort to rid their town of Satan‘s creation, all gather to ride them out of town on a rail. Mama, Gabe, a vascillatin’ Lizzie, Josiah, and Thyme hide out in the church, but Goodspeed and the townspeople come with their torches in the night. Mama and Gabe are killed trying to protect them in the turmoil, but Josiah, Lizzie and Thyme escape leaving the town behind them for good.

On the Road …

And The Odyssey and Miracle Tale begins. Destitute, an’ on the run, the three of them have no time to take anything except what was on their person, and determined to survive, our three escapees hitchhike with a trucker to Oklahoma City. Walking down the sidewalk in awe of the tall buildings, they pass a travel bureau.

Josiah (lookin’ in the window) says, “Hey, look at that blinkin’ neon sign”.  (He reads.) “See the Great Southwest — Oklahoma to California.”  “Why, It’s a sign from God!”

That’s all it takes for Josiah. They would make it to California if they had to walk there. 

The denouement: Lessons learned … hitch hiking — some people will pick up a hitch hiker, but NOBODY wants to pick up three. Truckers will pick up two women, but never two women with a man, ah yes, … the freedom of the road ahead, the beauty of the road ahead, the boredom of the road ahead, the time to reflect on what just transpired to change their lives, the time for Thyme to miss her mama, the excitement of a new adventure, the worries about their future … life on the road, sleeping in the hot sun for hours in the back of a flatbed pick-up truck, the monotony of the road, and …” Look ahead … what’s that? 

Thyme nervously says, “It looks like we’re drivin’ into a tornado …”

And so they do. The flatbed trucker wants to turn around and go back. There is no going back for our trio. They part ways and take their chance walkin’. Big mistake … right into the path of the tornado.

In the confusion they get separated and the tornado carries off Lizzie to “who knows where”. Josiah and Thyme find shelter in an overturned school bus that must’ve been picked up and deposited by the tornado.  

The next morning, in our first odyssey miracle they find the words ”Skedee School Bus” stenciled on the side of the bus knowing that they’ve already come over 200 miles from Skedee and, besides, Skedee population 139 never had a school bus!

Looking for Lizzie, they take refuge in the farmer, Morgan Abernathy‘s farmhouse basement, but his house is also carried off in the storm. And so, also has Lizzie. After the storm, Josiah and Thyme stay for weeks and help a senile Morgan rebuild and wait for the possibility of Lizzie’s return.. In payment, Morgan gives them his old dilapidated purple Studebaker found on blocks in the wreckage of the barn that he thinks might have belonged to his wife who might have died. Back on the road they say their fond farewells to Morgan and continue their journey in the old purple heap of a car who’s top speed approaches 40 mph … maybe.

But in Thyme’s mind, they’re travelin’ in style. 

Josiah, who’s drivin’ the old clunker ain’t quite so sure of that. But they drive and drive…

They make a pit stop at Howdy’s Gas Station Deluxe Convenience Store, in Amarillo, Texas. and (miracle number 2,) who do they find working there as a stock girl, but Lizzie. A joyful and tearful reunion brings our trio back together again. Lizzie, in song, tells her phantasmagorical tale of the tornado named Christine who carried her off and unceremoniously dumped her down here in Amarillo, Texas. 

They drive on happily down the road, united once again. The non-believing Lizzie looks out the window beginnin’ to wonder about “these here, miracles.”

They drive on in style… coughin’ and sputterin’  at 39 mph. Josiah stretches out in the backseat to get a little shut eye.

With Thyme now, drivin’ they come upon two people walking on the road, the bundles of their life on their backs. Thyme slows down, taps the horn and asks them,“Need a lift?” Josiah, stretched out in the backseat waking up is not particularly happy about this idea, but the minister in him understands that it’s the right thing to do. So now it’s, instead of three, there are six people in the car, Thyme: well, … 5 1/2. It’s Jose and Maria and baby Alejandro, with the stinky diapers, on their way to California.

Turns out Jose and Maria are illegal immigrants on the run as well, but as fate would have it, they all fall in love and the family evolves.

After a night of sleeping under the stars, they’re back on the road and hungry for breakfast and pull into Darin’ Darryl’s Dipswitch Diner, where they meet Elvira, the waitress, who has a fascination for Disneyland and decides to join them on their trip to California. However, seven is just too much for the purple peopleeater. Sadly, Elvira is left behind.

They make one of their many stops, so the ladies might go to the ladies’ room. Jose stays in the car looking after Alejandro and is approached and befriended by shyster, Ramon Antonio Emiliano Rodriquez, who, as it turns out, is an undercover agent for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection law enforcement agency with grossly over-zealous ambitions. Missing several salient points lost in translation because of the English to Spanish language barrier, Ramon gets the idea that Jose and Maria are meetin’ up with a whole cadre of illegal aliens, and that he is on to something really big that will certainly impress his bosses. 

So he sets up a massive bust to arrest supposedly hundreds of illegals. Trouble is, that he’s such a phony that especially Josiah and Lizzie begin to smell a rat. The problem is solved when Lizzie cleverly and heroically shuts him down and they all escape big trouble once again.

But soon enough, fate strikes yet again. The old Studebaker throws a rod and they are all back to walkin’. Across the desert, heading west. Under the burning sun. They don’t last long, and this time it looks like the final end.

But, of course, all this time, Gabriel has been looking out for them. 

Thyme whispers, “So it’s time for another miracle.” Josiah rallies the exhausted troops for one last go at the road, but to no avail. All give up.

We hear, in the distance, a car horn playing, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and coming down the road, going their way, is Slick Presley, third cousin to Elvis driving his Cadillac limousine named Mariah complete with steer horns on the front grill. Of course, he stops and invites them into a palace on wheels. When he hears they’re going to California, he explains that he can only take them as far as the Sedona turn off. They’ll have to walk from there. Saved, for the moment, they pile in and have a night of pizza and champagne as Slick drives on and talks them to sleep, telling them tall tales of his good times with Elvis.

Another miracle. Actually, two of them in a row. As he drives away once he has dumped them off, Mariah, his fabulous Caddy seems to just rise up off the road and dematerialize before their very eyes.

And our little family moves on. But not for long because now they’re in the desert and it’s hotter than hell. On top of that, it’s Thyme’s time. And she don’t trust no hospitals. Lizzie is scared to death of the responsibility to midwife the birth. Maria‘s only experience is birthing lambs in Honduras. And the men, well, forget about it. But Thyme is resolute and knows that her ‘n God’s baby is coming soon. “An we four women folk can certainly do God‘s will.”

Each character in Rosemary and Thyme has a parallel character in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in the Bible. Thyme, of course, is Mary. Josiah is Joseph. Lizzie is Elizabeth. Jose and Maria, when they lived in Honduras were shepherds. God and Gabriel, of course, are eternal. The three wise men became - Dikke Matumbeh, an African Physicist, Dr. Alfredo Encarnacion, a Bolivian Environmentalist and Zwei Xiang, a female Chinese Astronaut.

Once our Skedee trio escaped and set out on the road, periodically, one of the three wise people would suddenly appear into our story uninvited, as if crashing the party in a moment of total confusion, as if someone had switched channels, while watching a movie on the TV and then switched back. Throughout our story no one knows why or how this is happening. 

But now we’re about to find out.

In our final episode, a rush to the birth, we are joined by all three wise people who each play a powerful part in the drama. Zwei Xiang, parachutes in to ultimately help the ladies with the birth, Dikke Matumbah, in a rental car, takes us to the center of the Sedona vortex (the star of Bethlehem in reverse) where the child will be born, and Dr. Alfredo Encarnacion comes to find hope for the jungles of Bolivia and helps the family make sense of the predicaments before them.

All pile  into the car, the “now family of nine” knows that California is out of the question and the Bethlehem place of birth becomes Sedona, Arizona, the place on earth with one of the world’s three strongest vortexes. 

With nine people packed into Dikke’s rental car and heading now south to Sedona, Thyme’s water breaks. With no possible hospital, Dikke drives them out into the desert to the center of the vortex. The rest is history. Or perhaps, the future, if we’re lucky. A new and great leader is born into the world — a Gandi, a Churchill, a Mohammed, a Lincoln, a Mandela, a Martin Luther King, a Christ … is born.

We’re going to let you read the very end of the script to see just how we end this tale out there in the desert night, under the canopy of the Milky Way.

From the script…

( Maria approaches Josiah.)

Scene 9 

Maria

Josiah, would you like to see your newborn baby?

Josiah

Oh Maria, I’m afraid my heart will burst.

Maria

Come with me now. Thyme ask for you.

Josiah

Yes. Yes, I come now.

Thyme, my love … I have no words. Only tears of joy!

Thyme

Oh Josiah, my husband, look, they have made a crib of silk.

Josiah

Yes. Yes! … Oh my God, … oh Thyme … oh … she is just beautiful!