From 13-Year-Old Anne’s Journal —
April 23 – EXCELLENT
“Almanzo gets an extra job to secretly get money for the blind school. Then he takes sick and Laura goes to him. Gets better and they kiss. Meanwhile Nellie and Percival are getting married. Pa tells Laura & Manly 1 year!”
November 9, 2026
From Tracy —
Recently, I got the chance to watch a double Little House on the Prairie episode with my dear friend Anne. On a luxury bus. Over excellent WIFI. All very unfitting for the writers of a blog about hard living on the prairie.
We haven’t watched an episode together in probably a decade or more. Ironically, this was a highlight of what should have been an exceptional girls’ weekend with a mutual high school & college friend. But due to LHOP-worthy acts of God, the weekend was a mess.
We were trying to visit the beautiful campus of Cranbrook, an arts college northwest of Detroit that looks like something out of an English fairy tale and is full of architectural marvels. The Saarinen Family! Two Frank Lloyd Wright houses! A really good art museum! Turn-of-the-last-century estate and Japanese gardens!
But due to bad storms that ripped up the area right before Labor Day weekend and caused spotty but persistent power outages, things got primitive real fast. The power outages caused last-minute hotel changes and cancelled tours, and then there were the hornet stings and forgotten CPAP parts, and well, it was like watching Pa’s wheat get mowed down by hail. In slow motion.
Anne will tell you it was a wonderful weekend and I am being a whiny bitch, but honestly, it was a LONG walk for a little drink of water, if you know what I mean.
But on to the actual episode. As a premium subscriber of YouTube, the algorithms know I love LHOP snippets. And so, I am fed a steady diet of Nellie being Nellie. But then there was a sweet clip of her looking blissful while eggs dripped off her head that hit me like a punch in the memory sternum.
Ah, Percival. What a cute, sexy little man. One of those characters you might have forgotten all about because he came so late in the show. But he was one of the only people to really stand up to both Mrs. Oleson and Nellie. He’s basically a business consultant, and he comes on to teach Nellie how to run her hotel and restaurant.
Ok. Let’s stop right here. I am not a Nellie fan. She pretty much makes me grind my back molars into dust, but her parents, who raised her to be a spoiled brat wife for somebody rich, want her to run BOTH a restaurant AND a hotel? By herself? Dear God.
What. Were. They. Thinking?!?
I doubt even Mrs. Ingalls could pull that off. The restaurant alone would be too much work for one person. But they want to make her a marriageable catch and force her into a situation she’s neither trained for nor suited for. Frankly, that’s f*cked up.
Ok. Nellie Pity Party over. It will (probably) never happen again.
In struts Percival, and he won’t take Nellie’s shit. And when he calls her “pretty” during an argument, which is probably the only time she’d ever heard that from a grown man, she becomes smitten. The neat trick is that the actress Alison Arngrim makes us believe it. That’s because it came from her heart. She really did love Percival/Steve Tracy.
This next part is going to be hard.
Actor Steve Tracy died from AIDS merely two years after the series ended. He was in eleven episodes of LHOP, he made some guest appearances in other shows, and then he was gone at age 34. He was one of the very first actors to publicly die from AIDS.
In this video, Alison talks about Steve and what he went through. Watch till the end to find out where his ashes ended up. It’s AMAZING.
And here’s a deeper dive on Alison’s AIDS advocacy and friendship with Tracy.
Ok. Here’s some levity.
I would be amiss not to point out that Steve was also in a really raunchy Russ Meyer film before his time on LHOP called Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. (Co-written by Robert Ebert!) It’s a 1979 Satirical Sexploitation film, but this content is NOT safe for work, people.
Just imagine a little gay Jewish man from Ohio starring in this straight man’s fantasy. Eeek!
And finally, I NEED for you to see Alison’s BANGIN’ BEACH BODY as she poses with Steve. WOW. Who knew all that was going on under the high collars?
As for the second love story in this massive double-decker episode, we have the long-suffering Laura and Manly. Here’s my honest take. Almanzo is dying from BIG TIME BLUE BALLS and wants to get it on with Laura. But she is still too young to get married, and Charles says HELLS TO THE NO.
So Almanzo throws a very unmanly baby fit and storms off. Then, much like my carefully planned Labor Day Weekend, the whole thing comes unraveled, and Laura and Manly break up through a series of miscommunications and accidents.
I remember as a young girl watching the show being VERY stressed out every time this couple came on screen because the stakes always seemed so high. I’m positive I chewed my nails till they bled. Which was a thing I actually did a lot back then.
And my goodness, they even manage to squeeze in some Blind School Drama, and when is that ever NOT happening?
But, thankfully, there is some comic relief in this episode to ease the tension. There is the Biggest Bow on the Prairie, for one. I am sure as shit they could have spotted it from the International Space Station.
PS: I absolutely need to listen to Alison’s “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch” book on Audible, which she, thanks to Gods, reads herself. I did not know she is so interesting and deep. That’s not very common in former child actors, IMHO.
Bless her.
From Anne —
Tracy is right, all I remember about our Labor Day weekend is the good stuff: the modernist mini golf course, the preserved-in-amber Frank Lloyd Wright homes, and the massive pancake we had for brunch in a joint decorated with taxidermy and portraits of Madonna (a Michigander by birth). And yes, it was delightful to flip open Tracy’s huge laptop and binge this two-part LHOP episode together on the bus back to Indy, sharing a pair of earbuds.
I too remember digging what juicy episodes these were with super-charged, double romance drama.
First, Manly and Laura. Manly goes from bully (marry me NOW) to martyr (I’m gonna haul ice blocks for 10 hours in the rain to help Laura with her goal). Laura goes from suicidal (from which Ma saves her with a brilliant monologue) to real estate tycoon (gimme this building, the blind school needs it).
I love that part of the problem is the Whore of Sleepy Eye: a saloon girl just trying to turn a trick, eyeing Almanzo, and causing Romeo-and-Juilet-level misunderstanding. [Let’s give that enterprising ‘ho some credit: she was played by this actress].
The scene that always stuck in my craw was pneumonia-sick Almanzo quivering in the ice bath. The dude got sick from handling ice and now you’re going to drown him with ice cubes? I could feel that cold in my teeth. No kiss from Laura (or even the Whore of Sleepy Eye) is going to melt that shit.
The romantic trajectory of Nellie and Percival is way more fun than Laura and Manly’s saga. Percival, the frog prince. Nellie, the baddie who needed just one compliment to turn her away from the Dark Side.
You have to love Nellie’s stream of mean “short” puns (screenwriter Landon clearly had fun with that). And part of the perfection of the subsequent eggs-dripping-down-her-wig scene we all adore is the soundtrack: severe discordant strings, worthy of a Hitchcock flick.
Also love Nellie trying to make herself shorter by doing a duck walk ostensibly to make Percival feel taller. To love as well: Percival’s general badassery as a sharp biz consultant and as tamer of a formerly incorrigible beast. And the way Percival gets hit by a stray recess ball right after Nellie’s love confession; apparently he bravely suffered through multiple takes.
Speaking of bravery: thanks for your consummate research, Tracy. That first wave of AIDS deaths was so mysterious and terrifying. But I always say: artists never die. Forty-six years later, we’re still talking about Steve Tracy.
Percival lives!