Wanda June

Wanda June is a character in the eponymous 1971 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June. She is described as "a lisping eight-year-old in a starched party dress" and "as cute as Shirley Temple". She was played by Ariane Munker in Between Time and Timbuktu as well as in the original New York City stage production. Munker was later replaced on the stage by Ellen Dano after she withdraw due to exhaustion, and by Pamelyn Ferdin in the 1971 film adaptation.

At the age of six, she accompanied her mother to a materialization of Winston Niles Rumfoord at his estate in Newport, Rhode Island. She was killed before her birthday party after being hit by an ice-cream truck driven by a drunk driver, but is much happier in heaven, not having to go through school and raise a family. Instead, she gets to play all the time and eat all the cotton candy she wants. She says everyone in heaven is happy, even animals, dead soldiers, and executed criminals and is grateful to whomever sent them there. Most people spend their time playing shuffleboard and other sports, or just “sit and loaf”. Because of the accident, her parents never picked up her birthday cake, which was eventually bought by Herb Shuttle to celebrate the birthday of Harold Ryan, who he, Harold's wife Penelope, and son Paul thought was dead. He suggested they could scrape off Wanda June's name from the cake with a butter knife. When Harold arrived home, having been missing for eight years, he saw the cake and wondered “[w]ho the hell is Wanda June”. His son Paul asked him the same question when he returned home, not recognizing his own father.

In heaven, Wanda June starts a club with her new friend, Major Siegfried von Konigswald, a former S.S. officer once known as “The Beast of Yugoslavia” for his brutality. Although so far it's only the two of them, they plan to get pink jackets with a yellow streak up the back that read “The Harold Ryan Fan Club”. Konigswald was strangled to death by Ryan, but Wanda June joined just because he wound up with her birthday cake. They try to get Ryan's third wife, Mildred, a middle-aged alcoholic, to join as well. Mildred at first thinks Wanda June might have been another of his wives, but she points out that she's only ten [sic] years old. The three observe Ryan while he returns a rifle he bought for Paul to his son's bedroom after Dr. Norbert Woodly destroyed Ryan's sense of self-worth. When a shot comes from the bedroom, Wanda June appears dazed, but when Ryan reappears saying he “missed”, she sucks her thumb.

Driven in a fire truck, she appeared to pick up a hitchhiking Stony Stevenson during his period in the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum. When Stony asks if he's dead, she explains that she's dead, but again says that it's actually very nice and everyone here is happy to not be alive anymore. A crowd gathers on a large map, celebrating Stony's arrival, but Adolf Hitler appears and declares that he is death. Calling himself final, Hitler proves his power by making the whole crowd disappear, except Wanda June and Stony, by telling them that there is no afterlife. When Hitler, calling her "my blond, Teutonic child", tells her to "[g]o to the worms", she kisses Stony goodbye on the cheek and disappears.