Meanie Bonini

Like Shirley MacLaine’s character in STEEL MAGNOLIAS, Meanie’s a cantankerous old bat whom everyone fears. Everyone except her neice, Bikini, that is.

Bikini’s father’s older sister, Meanie is a sixty-two year-old hermit and witch who lives alone in a secret lair beneath the last old house in Middletown, where she has come and gone for forty years, nearly undetected.

Meanie wears a typical all black witch uniform with striped socks and black sneakers. She has the regulation mole on her nose, pointy yellow fingernails and dirty, scraggly hair. However, instead of a pointed Halloween “witch” hat, and an “old lady dress,” Meanie prefers a worn, black sweatshirt with a pointed hood she almost never puts on her head (it’s just too powerful). Instead, usually sports a baseball cap emblazoned with an “M.” For dramatic flair, she occasionally affects a dark poncho.

In addition to her lifelong study of witchcraft and herbal medicine, Meanie has a passion for watching multiple channels of cable TV, and likes to “control” the neighborhood through the use of a video surveillance network. This is probably the source of the playground rumor that Bramblewood is haunted by a ghost. Plus, her vast collection of white marble statues cast ghost-like shadows when viewed from the outside.

Remembered by few Middletowners, Meanie has spent the last forty years in her own internal exile due to several, nearly simultaneous, tragedies. First, Meanie’s former best friend Millicent turned on her, then her beau left for boarding school because war broke out in Europe, and finally, her parents passed away within months of each other. With each passing year, Meanie retreated farther and farther into Bramblewood until no one remembered she was there at all. This delicate balance is overturned when Bikini and her brothers come to live with Meanie while their parents are overseas.