Well, you missed it. You can pick it up off the Dutch American Heritage Museum website, I'm told, but it may well be one of those things where you just had to be there. It was great fun--and that's all I ever promised.
When, months ago, I discovered that my museum board colleague had developed a fascination for a character from a huge book, The Story of Sioux County, I couldn't help but remember that the story she loved (an inn-owner, a woman, taken to jail for not paying a tax the town put on its liquor dealers), I couldn't help but remember pulling that same story from the same old volume and using it in my very first attempt to write anything at all. That story, "The Mocker," was a selection in Sign of a Promise and Other Stories (1979).
So, when the board asked me to come up with something for its final attraction of the Nights at the Museum programs, I thought it just might be good to use that story (Mother Mouw--what a great name!) as the basis for a readers theater presentation.
It was a ball. You'd have to find a real sourpuss to claim that it was anything less than a joy for the audience and a treat for me--using material that, for me, is 50 years old. But for Orange City too, where it actually happened, many, many years ago, Mother Mouw dragged off to jail on the Constable's wagon, sitting in dignitiy on her bed, her dog at her side, to serve time for refusing the pay a tax on liquor, a tax she claimed patently unfair.
Wonderful story.
A story 150 years old.
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