'I want the tribute 
for my husband': Polo widow hopes to see late actor's play performed

POLO – It’s been a bit more than a month since Pat Gjonola’s husband died.

She’s spent a lot of time crying since her best friend and partner of 39 years died.

She writes down everything she can remember about Dick: Where and how they met (The first time, at a nightclub where they both were performing, when she told him he was rude; the second time, a year later, when both were singing and acting in an industrial production about bathroom fixtures), things he would say to their boys, and funny anecdotes (like that time he was stopped by airport security, on his way to a Gillette gig, with a briefcase crammed full of deodorant cans).

When Pat talks about Dick, the performer in her comes out. She stands up and does a soft-shoe routine in her dining room. She breaks into song. She crosses her eyes and humps her shoulder and draws circles in the air with her hands, while she plays CDs of Dick’s commercials on the stereo.

She, a singer/actress, and he, an actor/singer, always complemented each other perfectly, she said.

The times she most often talks about are the 1980s, before the couple moved back to Illinois, when Dick was portraying the Burger King in children’s commercials in Los Angeles.

That’s when Dick wrote his opus – a play about Mother Goose and nursery rhyme characters – and that’s when the two performed the play, along with every student in their son’s Catholic school.

Although they’ve employed an agent since the play was written, in 1989, and although they’ve been “shopping it out” for 20 years, the Mother Goose play “just never went anywhere,” Pat said.

Now that Dick is gone, more than ever, Pat wants to find a home for the work that meant the most to her husband.

Dick wrote the play, “Mother Goose on Trial,” while the couple’s youngest son was sick in the hospital. They weren’t sure their 4-year-old would survive.

“We always thought that, out of this tragedy – out of the ashes – came this wonderful development,” Pat said. “All I can do now is keep trying to connect and keep trying to tell a story. I want the tribute for my husband.”

Dick died at 69 of cancer, after a 3-year battle.

Pat works as a real estate agent in Polo, where she grew up before moving to Chicago and meeting Dick. The couple and their sons moved back to Polo in the 1990s, but Pat said the town was never “home.”

“There’s nothing to do here, unless I can get Mother Goose going,” she said. “I don’t have any girlfriends; my life is over now.”

She’s hoping someone – anyone – will pick up Dick’s play.

“And I’m going to be Mother Goose – that’s going to be in the contract.”

If she can find a buyer, she wants to turn the money around to a cancer treatment center.

She’s confident the story that Dick wrote is still relevant today, and just needs the right venue.

“The story is something that is not going to go away,” she said. “It’s something that is timeless.”

The play

"Mother Goose on Trial" is a musical comedy – a courtroom drama that sets the rhyming matron against nursery rhyme characters. The players are based on real-life historical figures: Humpty Dumpty, for example, is humpbacked King Richard III; Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary is Mary, Queen of Scots.

If you're interested in picking up this play, call Pat Gjonola, 815-946-2423.