Johnny Melville is a film director/ actor/ writer/ songwriter/ clown / lightworker / transformation facilitator & performance poet. He has performed in theatres, festivals, movies and TV in over 40 countries for the last 40 years, and wrote a review of the book in his blog -- Diary of a Fool: ... the Troupe were to play at the first Festival of Fools in Amsterdam. Many of the American hippy performers that attended that first festival were connected to the American clown Jango Edwards whose rough and dynamic form of modern Vaudeville was turning the smokers of the tulip town upside down. Jango was instrumental in guiding some of the club owners of the city to begin the Festival of Fools. So we come to the year 2014 when a former member of the group Salt Lake Mime Troupe, Michael Evans finally had his book about the both the group and the festival published in Holland. The book carries a tender charm as he waxes lyrical about the time and his friends ... What Michael Evans has done in this book is not just celebrate his time with the group but spotlights a whole cross-cultural movement of extreme richness which served as a breeding point for a huge change of cultural expression across the continent and even further afield. After the Festival of Fools, similar events sprouted up in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Rome, Zurich, Vienna and later Barcelona. A whole circuit of international venues suddenly budded from 1975 to 1985 a bit like the the development of the railway in the USA. This gave a lot of artists a lot of work and a chance to develop their skills and styles. The time of the Festival of Fools and groups like The Salt Lake Mime Troupe set many a path of discovery for the arts of today. Thanks Michael for the book and I look forward to the (hardbound) ... Edition sometime next year. Review by Michigan's CFK of Bookflurries: Our Mike Evans has published a Memoir, "The Great Salt Lake Mime Saga and Amsterdam's Festival of Fools: Memoir and Memorabilia." When I read a memoir, I also pause to think about my own life. What was I doing in the same years? How did my vision of life overlap with the authors'? Good memories, hard memories, regrets, sympathy ... all are part of my reading as the author shares his life. In this book, I see memories of people who did the hard work of becoming entertainers, who reached out to the world and shared their vision and skills. It takes courage and joy to produce a show. The challenge of setting up in varied venues from the street to small stages, to high schools is a great one. Finding enough money to live on while honing the material and getting known is very tough. This memoir is an intimate look from the inside that touches the heart the more you read about how the young artists began and worked together to create their shows. The author saw it all from the beginning in Salt Lake City to the shows in Amsterdam. He did lots of jobs to keep the show going strong such as doing art work, stage lighting, juggling, running off programs, and keeping the bus driver awake at night on bad roads. I visited Amsterdam for a few days in 1972 so I know a little bit about the bustle of that city; the trams, the bicycles, the flower market and the buildings. It is a lively city and the Mime Troupe made it livelier. Thanks to Mike Evans' gift of this book, I enjoyed a time travel trip back into the 70's when dancers, mimes, clowns, and musicians were burgeoning with creative enterprise and daring the odds to show their stuff. Author Claudio Tapia: How valuable it always is to preserve the past! And in such intimate detail, too. Mike Evans takes us back only a couple of decades, though, to a time long gone in so many ways. A delightful journey to a time when young people still invented the world around them - without writing a business plan first; when the word 'revolution' was still a matter of the soul.