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The Burrus Sales Meeting Shows

For the better part of two decades, Ken Bradbury wrote and directed an annual comedy-and-music show for the dealer sales meetings of Burrus Seed, the family-owned Arenzville, Illinois hybrid-seed-corn company. These were not polished theatrical evenings so much as affectionate, inside-baseball roasts: original sketch comedy and song parodies (new lyrics set to familiar tunes) built entirely around seed corn, herbicides, dealer incentives, and the rivalries of the agricultural marketplace. Each year's edition parodied a TV format or genre to lampoon the corporate seed competitors and tout the small, family-owned Burrus brand. The casts were drawn from Burrus staff and regional sales managers, who gamely sang, lip-synced, and performed in drag for the dealers gathered each year — the meeting traveled town to town, so the scripts left the host town as a fill-in blank ("welcome all the folks here at ____ to the 2007 Burrus Sales Meeting").

The shows reliably bent national pop culture to cornfield ends. The 1998 edition was a Barbara-Walters-style trip through seed-corn history, hosted by interviewer "Babwa Wa Wa" and Seymour, the 2,000-year-old corn dealer, running from cavemen Og and Ug and Chief Tom Tom through modern execs from Pioneer, DeKalb, and Asgrow chattering on cell phones — all set against the wholesome "Burrus Boy" and a running gag of "100% free replant for 63 years." The 2002 edition, "Farm Family Feud," pitted the wholesome Burrus-dealer Dependable family against the snooty Big Shot family in a game-show format hosted by Tim Trabeck, with contestants buzzing in on kazoos and Don describing his oversized daughter Darlene as "herbicide tolerant." The 2007 show, "American Idol, the Hybrid Version," fielded a panel of mock judges — Ryana Secrest, Simon Cowbell, Paula Abdrool, and Donnie Jackson — who scored rival seed companies as they performed parody numbers: DeKalb appearing as Sonny and Cher singing "I Got You Babe," Pioneer turning up as an Elvis act crooning "Return to Sender," and the Burrus boys closing with "Proud Mary." A running gag had a confused executive ("Tom") wandering onstage believing he was on "Survivor," "Grey's Anatomy," and "Designing Women" in turn, only to be hauled off by grandsons Gannon and Griffin.

In later years the format shifted toward filmed video sketches featuring the recurring bumbling dealer couple Herb and Freida, who plugged Burrus products and dealer-incentive trips — in 2012 Herb gets lost en route and turns up at the Panama Canal; the 2013 sketch promotes the dealer-incentive trip to San Antonio, Texas. But the warmest entry is the Readers' Theatre version (staged in 2009 or 2014 — the surviving script is ambiguous), which set aside the parody and told the company's own origin story straight: Martin Burrus, born in 1920, planting the first acre of hybrid seed corn in 1935 as a 14- or 15-year-old farm boy. Performed as a chorus of six narrators weaving company memories against the headlines of the day, it followed the Burruses through the Great Depression, the chinch bugs and grasshoppers of the dry thirties (and the "Hopper Dozer"), the Second World War, and the 1954 drought — a piece of genuine, people-centered history made for the people who had inherited it.

Songs

The most fully scripted musical sequence is the 2007 "American Idol" edition, in which rival seed companies competed with song parodies (listed below in performance order). The 1996 script also used a string of pop songs — "Little Old Lady from Pasadena," "Earth Angel," "Alley Oop," "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," "Twilight Zone," and "Rawhide" — to introduce hybrids, though not as a staged song sequence.

Production Notes