Mumble, Memory, by Karl Boyken

In the mid to late 1970s, while I was a student at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, I was a member of The Folies du Tous, an amateur acting troupe. We wrote and performed our own one-acts, mostly on a stage upstairs at That Place, a bar in downtown Ames, at 205 Main Street.

Laurie Canton (now Rogers) founded the group. The name was bastardized French for "the follies of all." As with most memories from the 70s, my recollections are hazy, but I think Laurie conceived of the Folies as a project for a theatre or literature class she was taking. She wanted to do something like Absurdist drama. Laurie, Brian Brockhouse and I wrote most of the material. We were all big fans of Monty Python and Firesign Theatre, and our skits were mostly colored by their work, rather than Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco.

We did charge 50 cents admission a night, so I could claim we were semi-professional. But with some noteable exceptions, most of us didn't intend to make writing and acting a career. Laurie, Jerre Bovett, Brian, Jean Meyer, and Ron Suhr were in the Folies from start to finish. Georga (Duncan) Accola was with the original group but left after the first season. Denny Wilson, Cheryl (Miller) Slavik and Sue Hutchens came to the Folies after we'd been performing for awhile. In the spring of 1975, I left the group and moved to Iowa City, but I moved back to Ames at the end of the summer and rejoined the troupe. There was one actor in particular whose name I don't remember but who was with us for some time, a guy with wavy blond hair and glasses. Al Thompson, maybe?

There were others who never appeared onstage but who contributed. We had an actual director or two. I think the first was named Clay something or other. George Sprague directed the melodrama. B. J. Fishman often handled ticket sales and acted in a couple Food Day skits, and she did voices for our radio plays. Tom Carmody handled lighting for the melodrama. Brett Voorhees did some announcing for us, performed in the melodrama, and helped us with advertising. Howie Jung played the organ for the melodrama. Daniel Pavlik created the program for the melodrama, and maybe did some of the newspaper ads, too.

Besides That Place, we also performed for events and fund-raisers around town. I remember that the evening after a tornado had ripped through the nearby town of Jordan, we opened for Holly Near at Dugan's Deli. We also performed at Dugan's for some kind of Democratic shindig, with Tom Harkin in the audience. There was a Food Day benefit at University Lutheran Church, and we even road-tripped to the Memorial Union at The University of Iowa.

Our biggest production was the melodrama More Than a Mother's Heart Can Bear, Or, Down for the Count. Laurie and Brian wrote it while I was living in Iowa City. When I moved back to Ames, Laurie and Brian worked me into the skit as Father Time. We also produced some radio ads for our shows. A Canadian student named Morris, I believe, produced a couple of radio plays for us, which never saw distribution.

In 1978, most of us were finally graduating from ISU and getting real lives, and although we considered moving to the Bay Area and trying to make it big, like Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre from Iowa City, it became clear that the Folies were at an end. The group dissolved, and we all went our separate ways.