On paper, it may not seem that Nashvillian Estelle Condra has much in common with Buffalo Bill Cody. He was a masculine American icon, a skilled sharpshooter. She’s a pretty blonde from South Africa, an actress who’s blind. But Condra is preparing a one woman show to tell children all about the legendary Wild West performer.
It’s a more natural fit than you’d expect.
Estelle Condra has never seen the silent film footage of Buffalo Bill in action during his heyday, but she can create for her audience a vivid mental image of the show.
“…Clippety clop, clippety clop! And he did somersaults on the horses back, and he landed back on the horse’s back! Clippety clop, clippety clop!”
Buffalo Bill had a theatrical flair that Condra says she’s always shared. “I was a very dramatic child. I was never just sick, I was dying.”
Condra’s parents directed that energy to the stage right away. She went to a school for the performing arts, studied drama in South Africa and London. But all the while, she says her eyesight, which had never been very good, was fading away bit by bit. “It was so gradual that I think I might have been blind for a long time that I suddenly realized, you know, you can’t see anything.” She never let that stop her from performing. “I went on with my life,” she says. “So many people still don’t know that I don’t have any sight at all.”
Condra saw her last glimmer of light twenty years ago. That’s about the time, while visiting friends in Cody, Wyoming, she discovered the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, a museum that let her “see” its sculptures by touching them. “They give me cotton gloves and I can explore everything.”
Frederic Remington’s painting of Buffalo Bill Cody, “In the Limelight”
For two decades, Condra has made regular trips from Nashville to Cody and the museum. She performs at schools there. She rides horses. And the actress who didn’t let blindness stop her career seems to have found a kindred spirit in Buffalo Bill himself.
“He was in the limelight all the time. Thirty years of performing, travelling, making ends meet, because the show wasn’t always profitable. And he was always doing it no matter what.”
When Cheekwood struck a deal to exhibit part of the Wyoming museum’s collection, Condra says it felt natural to take on the task of introducing children here Buffalo Bill and the animals in his show.
Condra in costume as “Tilly the Filly,” the horse that tells the story of Buffalo Bill
“Uncle Charley Horse said that Mr. Bill Cody had horse sense. Didn’t matter how many times he fell off, he got back on (clippety clop) he had horse sense!”
Condra will perform her one-woman show for families visiting Cheekwood tomorrow, and for school groups through early December. She plans to take it to Wyoming sometime next year.
Web extra:
Listen to Condra tell about the thrill she had thanks to a visit to very small school in rural Wyoming.
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