After movie role, it’s back to motel life
At the Kissimmee motel Pamela Wiggins calls home, the 36-year-old theme-park worker waits for the afternoon school bus to deliver her daughters, ensuring the kids bypass any drunks, drug dealers or would-be pedophiles.
Naomi, 6, bounces in, drops her pink Barbie backpack and proclaims her day has been “super great.” Rebekah, 7, follows glumly, shuffling in and flopping herself on a bed, where her 3-year-old sister is napping under a lump of blankets.
“I miss Brooklynn,” Rebekah announces. “She is my friend, which I love very much.”
That would be Brooklynn Prince, the Winter Springs actress whose spirited portrayal of Moonee, a child living in a motel much like this one, has brought talk of an Oscar.
For a few fleeting months last year, Rebekah worked as Brooklynn’s stand-in for “The Florida Project,” posing as technicians adjusted lighting and stepping before
the cameras for scenes shot from the back. Rebekah and Brooklynn are the same age, the same height, roughly the same weight, and have the same shade of long brown hair. They could easily pass for sisters, if not twins. Rebekah felt like royalty. That summer brought lunches with Brooklynn’s costar, Willem Dafoe, attention from hair and makeup and wardrobe people, and production staffers who held umbrellas over Rebekah’s head and placed straws in her bottled water.
The work also brought the family enough money to buy groceries for a month, fix their old van and pay its yearly registration and insurance.
The film’s October release briefly reunited the girls, but now Brooklynn has gone on an international publicity tour, and Rebekah has returned to her family’s budget motel room along Osceola’s main tourism corridor, a stretch of highway that is home to hundreds of lowincome families.
The Wiggins moved in three years ago and counting, since a pipe burst in their rental home, leaving the place flooded up to Pamela’s knees.
The landlord couldn’t afford to make repairs. Code enforcement said the family had to go.
Rebekah’s 9-year-old brother, an inquisitive, animated kid named Solomon, may have taken it hardest. “I feel like the world is ignoring us, like we’re the dirty people or something,” he says.
In all, there are seven of them — Pamela, her husband and five kids, ages 15 to 3 — in a single $250-a-week room. Dad works full time at Universal. Mom works part time at Walt Disney World. They rarely see each other.
Their place has a small refrigerator, a microwave oven, a used three-drawer dresser, a row of plastic storage bins for their clothes and, at the moment, an old artificial Christmas tree serving as a Hanukkah bush. The family, devoutly religious, cannot afford a menorah. As it was, the tree was a donation from the Community Hope Center, the nonprofit down the street where Pamela has applied for housing and gotten help with food stamps.
The adults and the toddler sleep on a full-sized mattress, turned sideways for more room. The three middle kids share a lower bunk bed a few feet away, and the teenager sleeps alone on top.
“He told me he wanted his own space,” says Pamela, noting the irony.
Solomon was born with a congenital defect that has caused countless urinary infections and, a year ago, nearly killed him. He has undergone 16 surgeries so far, with more to come. Medicaid covers his medical bills now, but there’s no compensation when Pamela has to miss work to shuttle her son to doctors or stay by his hospital bed.
“People judge me all the time — ‘Why did you have so many children?’” Pamela says. “But I wasn’t in this situation when I had them, and my kids are the future. For me, they’re my gift to the world.”
Rebekah was her first girl — dramatic, creative, sensitive. She sleeps with a wellworn toy lion she calls “Tigey” and whispers each night into his fuzzy little ear.
“I tell him all my feelings, so he’s like my feeling guy,” she says. “He helps me with a lot of stuff. I love him.”
When she was chosen to be in the movie, she says, she told Tigey she was nervous.
“I thought maybe the people [wouldn’t] like me,” she says. “But … they did. And the breakfast girl? Wow, she was nice. I mean, nicer than a cherry pie with ice cream.”
Rebekah wanted to be an actress before someone from the production crew saw her playing in the motel parking lot and brought her to director Sean Baker. The experience only fueled her desire.
Baker, who took a liking to the family, says he tried to get them into a Kissimmee housing program where they could have some stability.
“But because of the fact that there are seven of them, they didn’t qualify,” he says. “They’re a great family, and we’re still working with the [Community] Hope Center, but my hope is to get all those families there into a better situation.”
Mary Lee Downey, the Community Hope Center’s executive director, says she has tried, too.
“Even if her family does qualify, we have such an affordable housing crisis in Osceola County that it’s hard to find her — and the many, many others like her — a home,” she says. “We definitely need some heroes, some people who own property and own homes, to not just look at the bottom line but to look at the heartbeats.”
Until then, Rebekah dreams of what it must be like to have power and choices, to have a father who doesn’t have to work extra shifts, a refrigerator that always has food, and enough space so that she can escape her brothers and bring back Garfield and Sophia — the cats her parents had to give away when they lost their home.
“If this was a castle,” Rebekah says, “I would make all the rules. I would be queen.”