Bookending the movie with Mary Badham at beginning and end

Bookending the movie with Mary Badham at beginning and end made NO SENSE and it added nothing to the story.

First thing that makes no sense is, how is this little girl (who is apparently the same age she was in the story she tells) surviving? And, she's telling it like it happened a while ago, yet she is the same age. She just "lives on the rails" with her doll? She meets little boy, tells her story, and walks off? It just had no ring of reality to it.

Plus, bookending the movie like this does nothing but make it longer. We don't learn anything appreciably from it that we would if they had just told the story straight. In fact, it just raises more questions than it answers (eg, why/how is this girl all alone in the first place?) And when making a movie, if you can cut 15 slack minutes off the film, you do it.

Pretty sure the only reason this affectation is in the film at all is because this is how the original short story was written, and director Sydney Pollack didn't have the imagination to remove it.

(On second thought, being able to tell this story as if it happened in the past is the only way you get to the title "This Property is Condemned"-- so it's simple: just change the title.)