Booneville

1996

Booneville is a collection of narrative sketches and dramatic monologues set in a small Midwestern farm town, written in the summer of 1996. Rather than a single plotted play, these pieces are character studies and slices of small-town life, each told in the warm, wry, first-person voice that runs through so much of Ken Bradbury's writing. They read like material for a one-person show or a revue — short, spoken portraits of the people, humor, and quiet heartbreak of a place that could be anywhere along a country creek.

The town of Booneville is presented as a peculiar ethnic mix in a region otherwise settled by German communities. Where the neighboring towns are "tidy and tight" but not "one bit funny," Booneville is full of fun — a place the narrator grew up assuming was the way of the whole world, only to discover, with some affection and some loss, that it was a "pleasant delusion." The sketches range from broad comedy to genuine tenderness: a boy dragging the world's smallest dead bass seven blocks to have his grandmother take it off the hook; a man who goes to every farm sale but can never bring himself to bid, because each sale is "the end of a life"; and an old woman named Una, rocking on her porch swing, "back and forth and back and forth," whom the narrator simply likes to be with.

Across the pieces, recurring threads emerge — corn detasseling season, the Tilt-O-Whirl at the summer fair, music learned crookedly from the only teachers a small town has to offer, and the long memory of farm families. The collection is by turns funny and elegiac, an affectionate archive of a vanishing rural world.

Sketches

Bass — A 12-year-old boy, in town to visit his grandmother Esther every summer during corn-detasseling season, drags "the world's smallest bass" seven blocks home dangling from his new 21-speed Schwinn, having caught it in the "piddly little nothin' two-bit stream" two houses down — for Grandma Esther to take off the hook. Esther's late husband Bill had made the cherry clock that hangs in the narrator's kitchen.
Drummy Sutton — A portrait of a man and his open-air, walls-less outdoor privy built high "like a king on his throne," waving at passers-by with a certain air of nobility.
Farm Sale — A man who attends every farm auction but can never bring himself to bid, because each sale is the end of a family's life on the land.
Funny — A meditation on Booneville's odd ethnic makeup — a mix amid surrounding German towns that work hard but "aiin't one bit funny" — and on the narrator's childhood "pleasant delusion" that everyone's family, like Aunt Florence's, was full of funny stories.
Heifer — Roger Smith's tall tale of his city cousin Morris from Galesburg, who visits Stub & Sylvia Smith and their boys Roger and Frog in Pike County, and is tricked by mischievous Frog into being hitched into a horse double-tree alongside a 4-H heifer — the "Country Fun Machine" — for a ride promised to "make the Tilt-O-Whirl seem plumb Baptist."
Music — How a Booneville upbringing "crippled" a musician: a trumpet held sideways (copied from tall, left-eye-blind bandmate Jimmy Zimmerman, behind whom he sat in the Booneville band) and a piano played with the right pinky tucked under (copied from Mildred Smith, who played for the Dexter Community Club and had broken that finger reaching into a windmill pump as a girl) — yet no one can beat him for originality.
Tilt Kiss — A girl confronts Terry Sweeting over a kiss he stole on the Tilt-O-Whirl, insisting the ride's tilt had nothing to do with it — "I'll bet you had that kiss planned all summer!" — yet still offers him two tickets for the roller coaster.
Una — A tender second-person address to an aging widow rocking on her porch swing, "back and forth and back and forth," after her husband Oliver's death — her grandson a PhD in California, her hands "like dried sticks in a silk glove."

Production Notes

These eight original sketches and monologues are dated across three days in July 1996 — Drummy Sutton (July 7); Bass and Heifer (July 8); and Farm Sale, Funny, Music, Tilt Kiss, and Una (July 9). They are wholly original Ken Bradbury material, not adapted from any licensed work. No cast list, program, or formal production documentation survives in the archive, suggesting Booneville was a body of monologue writing rather than a fully staged production.