Hello friends! Welcome, so glad you're joining me today and I have a really fun story.

About the fantastic state of Oklahoma! So let's dive in!

I'm Sharon McMan, and welcome to the Sharon Says So Podcast.

Okay, let me start by saying I've been to Oklahoma a number of times. The people in Oklahoma

are incredibly nice. But what I want to talk about today is a man named Lynn Riggs.

Do you know who Lynn Riggs is? He is the author of 21 Full-length plays.

One of his most famous plays was called Green Grow the Lilacs.

So let me give you just a little bit about Lynn Riggs and then we're going to tell you

why you actually do know who he is. So Lynn Riggs was born in 1899 on a farm in Claremont,

Oklahoma. And his father was a cowboy and his mother was part Cherokee Indian.

So Riggs was very well known for being the sort of quiet, reserved, mild, man-erred man

who started writing after high school. He never married. He did live with a male companion.

There's a lot of speculation that perhaps Riggs had a male life partner.

So I already mentioned that he wrote 21 full-length plays and eventually his play, Green Grow the Lilacs.

He did to Broadway. And Lynn Riggs is the only Native American dramatist playwright who was writing

for the Broadway stage in the first half of the 20th century. So Green Grow the Lilacs was not a

huge Broadway success. It was very well regarded by critics. They liked a lot of aspects that the

play depicted, but not a huge box office success. You know exactly the type of piece that I'm talking

about. That happens with movies, etc. as well today. In 1942, Riggs was drafted into the army.

And while he was in the army, somebody gave the script of Green Grow the Lilacs to two gentlemen.

And I bet you will recognize their names, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein.

And so Rogers and Hammerstein had never worked together before, but they became one of the most

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