Hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of dolls of our lives the podcast where we're reliving the American Girl series book by book. I'm Mary and in

a moment you'll hear from Allison I'm just and in a moment you'll hear from Allison. I'm just hopping in to offer a brief introduction of a very special guest that we got to interview both for our guest

guest herself about her illustrious career.

Our guest today is Mary Wiseman,

and if you're not familiar with Mary Wiseman,

you might know her by another name, Miss Manderley

from the Felicity books.

And in chapter two of our book, we actually

recount our trip to Colonial Williamsburg where we went to

retrace Pleasant steps it's the place she went to be inspired and was inspired I

should say to create American Girl and Mary Wiseman had a really illustrious

informative career there. She for 45 years developed training programs, conducted primary source research, and guided

tours and programs throughout the historic area. In 1981, she created a new

interpretation plan of the Governor's Palace, employing living history actors for the first time.

And she really helped to pioneer and create the concept of character interpretation, which removed people's reliance from scripted

encounters or as she'll describe kind of the embarrassing, you know, if you go to a place

that where people act like they're living in the past and you try to take their

picture and they say, what's that?

You know, she doesn't, she doesn't go for that.

Instead, she's doing really highly informed interpretation as folks in history in

1991 around the time Felicity was created. She as the artistic director for

character interpretation also became the manager of

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