Hamming it up on the stage at That Place. First row, from left to right: Brian Brockhouse, Jean Meyer, Jerre Bovett. In the second row, left to right: Laurie (Canton) Collier, Ron Suhr, Sue Hutchens, and Karl Boyken.
In the mid-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. I first heard about the Folies in 1974, at a Halloween party at the old school building in Napier, south of Ames. Laurie Canton (now Collier) was talking about a project for a theatre or literature class. She wanted to form a group to write and produce one-acts, something like Absurdist drama. Laurie named the group The Folies du Tous, bastardized French for "the follies of all."
Laurie recruited Brian Brockhouse and me to write skits with her. We were all English majors at the time. We were big fans of Monty Python and Firesign Theatre, so the sketches we wrote were also colored by their work, as well as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. Over the winter, we turned out enough material for a show. Laurie collected a cast, and we began rehearsing. Dave and Ginny Gold agreed to let us perform at That Place, their bar in downtown Ames, at 205 Main Street.
Laurie convinced Brian and me to act as well as write. That is how I wound up wearing a skirt, strumming a guitar, and singing in front of a bunch of strangers on Wednesday, April 16, 1975, the opening of our first show. The first few performances were downstairs at That Place, on a low plywood stage. Eventually, the Golds opened the Upstairs Theatre and let us perform on an actual stage up there. Our second show opened on April 30, with the best skits from the first show and some new material. Besides performing on stage, we also produced radio spots that aired on a couple of local stations.
We did charge 50 cents admission a night, so I could claim we were semi-professional, but most of us didn't intend to make writing and acting a career. In late spring, I left the group and moved to Iowa City, to attend graduate school at The University of Iowa. That summer, the Folies performed for Summerfest in Ames and road-tripped to Iowa City for a performance at the Iowa Memorial Union, in which I participated.
Laurie and Brian wrote the group's biggest production during the summer, the melodrama More Than a Mother's Heart Can Bear, or, Down for the Count. ISU offered me a teaching assistantship, so I moved back to Ames at the end of summer and rejoined the troupe in time to have a small role. The melodrama opened on Thursday, November 13, to good reviews.
In 1976, we performed for events and fundraisers around Ames. We did a show for Food Day at University Lutheran Church on April 8. The evening of April 13, after a tornado had ripped through the nearby town of Jordan, we opened for Holly Near for a Democratic Party fundraiser at Dugan's Deli. Tom Harkin was in the audience--our "Carter" skit made him a little uncomfortable. We performed outdoors on the Iowa State University campus for Freak Week on May 13. We also wrote two radio plays, Bedtime Tales from Uncle Us and Luger Colt--Gun for Hire, which were produced in April and May but never aired.
By the end of 1976, most of us had graduated and were getting jobs. Although we considered moving to the Bay Area and trying to make it there, 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. I wrote a play, Parodos, in lieu of a thesis for my masters degree, and it was performed in the Curtiss Hall auditorium in 1977. That year, I also appeared in an ISU Theatre production of No Sex Please, We're British. That was the extent of my drama career.
I had a wonderful time with the Folies. I loved everything about the experience. Writing with Laurie and Brian was great fun, especially when it felt like we were in sync and everything we wrote seemed to work. Being onstage and performing our own material was magical. What fun!