The Coonridge Digest
For roughly two decades Ken Bradbury kept up a tradition all his own: The Coonridge Digest. It began as a newspaper column and grew into a beloved readers-theatre show, returning year after year — folders of scripts survive from the late 1990s through 2018 — with new monologues written for each season. The pieces were short, plainspoken, and unmistakably Ken: little stories about ordinary people that turned, gently, toward grace.
The setting was Coonridge, a fictional small town on the Illinois prairie, narrated most often by Freida Marie Crump — the folksy Midwest housewife persona Ken wrote under, a tart-tongued, big-hearted churchgoing woman who knows everyone's business and means them no harm. Every dated script opens with the same title line: The Coonridge Digest / By Freida Marie Crump. Around her moved a whole cast of locals — her husband Herb who hates visiting other congregations because "everybody there knows when to stand up and sit but him," and neighbors like Hooley the perpetual hitchhiker, Sonny the joke-telling "fetcher & finder," and Frank the old farmer who memorized poetry while he plowed. Coonridge had leash laws that, "like talkative uncles, no one pays much attention to."
The genius of the Digest was its blend. Most pieces are funny — a broken church copy machine becomes "a crisis of legendary proportions" — and then they quietly land somewhere true, usually closing with a short prayer. Across the years the monologues kept the same warm, devotional-and-comic rhythm that made the show a fixture of Ken's writing life. Two short samples in his own voice:
Years later I chaperoned a girls' basketball team on a very long bus ride. Thirty teenage girls can make the shortest jaunt an expedition. I finally asked her. I said, "Becky, I went to the funerals of your father, your mother, and your brother. Every time, it was you who were trying to comfort the rest of us. How'd you do it?"
She looked at me with a pair of blue eyes that would melt a leaden heart and said, "Freida, I knew at those times that if I thought about myself, I'd never make it. I had to get more concerned with other people than with myself. That's the gift God gave me."
"But Frank," I said, "Where'd you put your tools?"
"Oh back in the shed," he said. "Wouldn't done any good to carry the tools. I never could fix anything."
Lord, make Your words a part of me. Let them become so much of me that I become more of You.
Cast
When The Coonridge Digest was staged live it was performed by a small ensemble, the Coonridge Players. The Oct. 1, 2004 "Coonridge Live!" benefit listed:
- Sylvia
- Bob
- Marian
- Ken
Production Notes
- Author. Ken Bradbury wrote all of the Coonridge material — the monologues, columns, and devotions — under his pen persona Freida Marie Crump. The forward to the Coonridge Devotions collection is signed "—Ken Bradbury (Freida Marie Crump)," describing the form as "foibles, flops, and foolishness, but an enormous amount of faith," with each piece closing in a short prayer.
- A multi-decade run. The Coonridge archive holds year-named script folders spanning roughly 1997 through 2018. A 2017 monologue still signs off in Freida's voice: "You ever in Coonridge, stop by."
- The book. Coonridge Devotions is the devotional book form of the monologues, gathering the same comic-and-devotional pieces for reading.
- "Coonridge Live!" (Oct. 1, 2004). A 7:30 p.m. benefit at the Amvets in Jacksonville for judicial candidate Larry Custer. The WLDS radio ad billed it as "Coonridge Live! A totally ridiculous evening of humor (and wisdom)," with tickets at Due Gatti's Coffee House, OTW on West Walnut, or Colton, Downy and Hubbard. The evening ran in eleven parts: Opening Lines, Camp Sunshine, Mope and Whine, Nebo, Small Town Laws, Pairing Up, Big Buffet, Midwest Familiar, Kuster Phone, Church Music, and Closing Lines.
- Recordings. Three primary archival recordings survive: the 1996 staging at New Salem (Theatre in the Park), the 1995 Quincy "Coonridge the Show," and an additional filmed performance.