* * *
PREV TOC INDEX NEXT
Encore
* * *
New York has been in for its annual revival of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Sometimes I’m glad when they are announced, and sometimes I’m sorry.
I am glad because I happen to like Gilbert and Sullivan. Not all of Gilbert and Sullivan, but enough to rate as a fan. And I am sorry because most Gilbert and Sullivan audiences drive me crazy.
A real Gilbert and Sullivan audience has much to recommend it. It is made up of obviously nice people, most of them past middle-age, and many of them unaccustomed to going to the theater in these days when going to the theater is such a gamble. They would rather stay at home, and you have a feeling that staying at home with them would be no hardship. They look like people who would talk well at their own dinner-table, and are the only group of theater-goers who look as if they hadn’t put on evening clothes just to go to the theater. They may not be the latest thing in dinner-clothes, but you have a feeling that these people would have had them on anyway, theater or no theater.
But there their attractiveness ceases. Possibly because they do not go to the theater regularly, or possibly because they are just thoughtless (people who dress for dinner at home can be thoughtless, too), they do not realize that the fact that they have loved “Dear Little Buttercup” all their lives does not warrant them keeping it being repeated ten times by their applause. A lot of other people are sick of “Dear Little Buttercup,” if only because they have heard it in the Civic Center so many times sung by the real-estate agent’s wife. Neither does it warrant them humming it to each other, half a beat ahead of the singer.
Furthermore, a great many of the lines in Gilbert’s dialogue are not funny now, especially after one has heard them for forty years straight. They couldn’t be funny to anyone who did not know, and feel strongly about, the topics of the day in which they were written. And yet, to hear your G. & S. fans laugh, you would think that they came like a bolt from the blue and hit the nail right on the head. I am afraid that a lot of these nice people are pretending just a teenty-weenty bit.
But take “Iolanthe”! There’s a Gilbert and Sullivan opera that I could hear over and over again three times in the same evening! And don’t think I let them get away with a couple of encores to each song, either.
* * *
PREV TOC INDEX NEXT
Sporting Life in America:
WATCHING
* * *
If there is one sport which we Americans go in for wholeheartedly it is the grand old outdoor exercise of “watching.” By “watching” is not meant “kibitzing,” for a kibitzer takes things more personally than does a watcher. A kibitzer gets very close to whatever he is watching, usually a game of cards. Sometimes he is almost in the cards. Sometimes he even gets hit.
The watcher, on the other hand, is more or less detached and does his observing from a distance, as, for instance, a railing surrounding a building excavation. He offers no advice, as the kibitzer does. He doesn’t understand much about what is going on down in the excavation. His game is more gazing than really watching. After a certain period of time he seems to have crossed the border between human beings and plant life and become a form of fungus. This is our watcher.
The most common watching-fields are found around the above-mentioned cellar excavations. Just dig a hole in the ground big enough for a donkey engine to chug around in, surround it with a fence to keep people from dropping in, and you will in three minutes have a crowd of busy Americans (oh, the rush and bustle of this money-mad land!) settled along the railing, who will follow the project through to the bitter end. If the hole is big enough, and you set some compressed-air drills to work, you will have half the population of the town fascinated to the point of stupor.
The rules for the game of watching, or unprofessional observation, are fairly simple. The watcher takes his position leaning against a wooden fence, resting the elbows on the top rail with the body inclined out into the sidewalk at an angle of perhaps twenty degrees. (There is an Australian game in which the players’ bodies rest at a forty-degree angle, but in this game the player is supposed to sleep part of the time. There is no sleeping among American watchers, no siree!)
Once in position, the player fixes his eyes on some one object in the excavation below and follows it carefully. This object is known as the “quarry.” It may be either a workman, a chunk of rock, or the revolving wheel of an engine. As it moves about, either under its own steam or by some outside force, the player keeps careful watch of it until it has stopped. This counts him ten. If he loses sight of it somewhere in its course, either because of defective vision or because it gets behind some intervening object, he loses ten. If he can find two or more quarries which he can watch all at once, he becomes a master-watcher and may wear a gold eyeball on his watchchain. The game is over when one watcher has got a thousand points, but as it begins again immediately, the result is not noticeable to passers-by.
Excavation-watchers, as a class, are very conscientious sportsmen. You very seldom catch them watching anything else when they are on an excavation job. Fire engines may go by in the street behind their backs, old ladies may faint over their very heels, and even a man with a sidewalk stand of bouncing dolls may take up his position on the curb across the street, but the cellar-hole boys stick to their post without ever so much as batting an eyelash. In fact, the eyelash-batting average of some of the old-timers has gone as low as .005 in a busy season.
They are also not averse to night work. If the boss decides that the job requires coming back after supper and digging by the light of flares and torches, the watchers are on hand without a word of complaint and may even bring along a couple of friends as helpers. I myself have been caught up by the spirit of the game at night and, in amateur circles, am known as something of a speed demon at night-excavation-watching. My eyes are a little weak for daytime work, but when the flares are throwing their hellish light over the jagged walls of rock and the little men are darting about like demons in purgatory (it must be the mystic in me that is fascinated) I find it hard to pass by without giving at least fifteen or twenty minutes of my time to a general survey of the scene. One night I became so enthralled by the inferno-like spectacle that I allowed my top hat to fall off into the abyss, where naturally it was lost and will probably turn up in a hundred years or so embedded in the wall of the foundations. This will cause no end of speculation among archaeologists, for it had my initials in it and they will know that I never went in much for building, even in my hey-day. “Jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none” will probably be the sobriquet under which I shall go down in history as a result of this little incident. And even then they won’t quite understand what I was doing laying foundations in a silk hat.
Once the framework of the building is up and the wooden observation bridge removed, the game of watching becomes a little more difficult. The players may then move on to the next excavation or get jobs in offices across the street where they can carry on their watching from the windows. In several offices where I have worked I should say that at least two-thirds of the office force had been recruited from the ranks of old excavation-watchers who had come up from the wooden bridge to keep an eye on the job as it progressed. It had become almost a religious frenzy with them. Give them a desk by a window overlooking a new building across the way and put a sheet of figures in their hands to be checked up and copied by four o’clock, and long before that time they will have had six large steel girders in place and twenty red-hot bolts tossed through the air, to say nothing of having assisted at the raising and lowering of a temporary elevator at least forty times. If it is possible to place a water cooler by the window which commands the best view of the construction work, you will soon have everybody playing the game.
Of course, excavation- and construction-watching is not the only form this recreation takes. There are always drug-store windows. There is more variety in drug-store-window-watching, but it
attracts a slightly more superficial crowd than an excavation. Their hearts aren’t in it, and they stop and pass by with perhaps only a ten- or fifteen-minute wait. This is probably because of the frivolous nature of the exhibits.
A train of cars made out of cough-drop boxes running round and round in a circle may be all right for a quarter of an hour’s fun, but it isn’t getting buildings built. A man may profitably spend a few hours a week watching a red ball disappear in a mound of peanuts, but the human brain demands a little more to work on.
Of course, if there happens to be a man in the window demonstrating a strap which holds the trousers up and keeps the shoes on at the same time, then it would be worth while to stick around a bit. This comes under the head of scientific investigation. An hour would not be too much to devote to this, especially if you have a bundle to deliver or an appointment to keep in half an hour.
Unfortunately, however, window-demonstrating seems to be dying out as a trade. I don’t think that I have seen a man standing in a window in his underclothes for over a year. There are still a few ladies who do legerdemain with day-beds, but that doesn’t strictly come under the head of scientific research. Everyone knows how to work a day-bed by now. What we want is to see a new way to open bottles without a corkscrew, or a combination cuff and spat. Where have all those men gone who used to hold up three fingers at you through the glass, meaning that three times they had tried to break a watch crystal and now admitted themselves hopelessly defeated? Where are those martyrs to health who used to allow themselves to be shaken to a froth by electric vibrators? Wherever they are, they are holding up the wheels of window-watching, one of the noblest of America’s outdoor games.
* * *
PREV TOC INDEX NEXT
Sporting Life in America:
DOZING
* * *
We Americans are a hardy race, and hardy races need a lot of sleep. “Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,” Shakespeare has called it, and, except for the fact that it doesn’t mean much, it is a pretty good simile. I often think of it myself just as I am dropping off into a light doze: “Sleep, that sleeves up the raveled care of. . . knit, that sleeps up the shaveled neeve of pfor – pff – prpf – orpffif’ trailing off into a low whistle).
One of the most charming manifestations of sleep which we, as a nation, indulge in as a pastime is the Doze. By the Doze I mean those little snatches of sleep which are caught now and then during the day, usually with the collar on and choking slightly, with the head inclined coyly to one side, during which there is a semiconscious attempt to appear as if we were really awake. It is in this department of sleep that we are really at our best.
Of course, there is one form of doze which, to the casual observer or tourist, gives the appearance of legitimate sleep. This is the short doze, or “quickie,” which is taken just after the main awakening in the morning. The alarm rings, or the Lord High Chamberlain taps us on the shoulder (in the absence of a chamberlain a relative will do. And right here I would like to offer for examination that type of sadistic relative who takes actual delight in awakening people. They hover about with ghoulish anticipation until the minute arrives when they may legitimately begin their dirty work, and then, leering unpleasantly, they shake the sleeper roughly with a “Come, come! Time to get up!” and wait right there until he is actually out on the cold floor in his bare feet. There is something radically wrong with such people, and the sooner they are exposed as pathological cases the better it will be for the world). I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be nasty about it.
At any rate, we are awakened and look at the clock. There are five minutes before it is absolutely necessary to get out of bed. If we leave shaving until night, there might even be fifteen minutes. If we leave dressing until we get to the office, snatching our clothes from the chair and carrying them downtown on our arm, there might even be half an hour more for a good, health-giving nap. Who knows? Perhaps those few minutes of extra sleep might make us just ten times as efficient during the day! That is what we must think of – efficiency. We must sacrifice our petty opinions on the matter and think of the rest of the day and our efficiency. There is no doubt that fifteen minutes’ more sleep would do wonders for us, no matter how little we really want to take it.
By the time we have finished this line of argument we are out pretty fairly cold again, but not so cold that we are not conscious of anyone entering the room. We feel that they are going to say: “Come, come, don’t go back to sleep again!” and we forestall this warning with a brisk “I know! I know! I’m just thinking!” This is said with one eye partially open and one tiny corner of the brain functioning. The rest of our powers add up to a total loss.
It is one of Nature’s wonders how a man can carry on an argument with someone standing beside his bed and still be asleep to all intents and purposes. Not a very good argument, perhaps, and one in which many important words are missing or indistinct, but still an argument. It is an argument, however, which seldom wins, the state of justice in the world being what it is today.
Dozing before arising does not really come within the range of this treatise. What we are concerned with are those little lapses when we are fully dressed, when we fondly believe that no one notices. Riding on a train, for example.
There is the short-distance doze in a day coach, probably the most humiliating form of train sleeping. In this the elbow is rested on the window sill and the head placed in the hand in an attitude of thought. The glass feels very cool on the forehead and we rest it there, more to cool off than anything else. The next thing we know the forehead (carrying the entire head with it) has slid down the length of the slippery pane and we have received a rather nasty bang against the woodwork. They shouldn’t keep their glass so slippery. A person is likely to get badly hurt that way.
However, back again goes the forehead against the pane in its original position, with the hand serving more or less as a buffer, until another skid occurs, this time resulting in an angry determination to give the whole thing up entirely and sit up straight in the seat. Some dozers will take four or five slides without whimpering, going back each time for more with apparently undiminished confidence in their ability to see the thing through.
It is a game that you can’t beat, however, and the sooner you sit up straight in your seat, the sooner you will stop banging your head.
Dozing in a Pullman chair is not so dangerous, as one does not have the risk of the sliding glass to cope with, but it is even less lovely in its appearance. Here the head is allowed to sink back against the antimacassar – just for a minute to see if the headrest is really as comfortable as it seems. It is then but the work of a minute for the mouth to open slightly and the head to tip roguishly to the right, and there you are – as pretty a picture as one would care to see. You are very lucky if, when you come to and look about, you do not find your neighbors smiling indulgently at some little vagaries of breathing or eccentricities of facial expression which you have been permitting yourself.
The game in all this public dozing is to act, on awakening, as if you had known all along what you were doing. If your neighbors are smiling, you should smile back, as if to say: “Fooled you that time! You thought I was asleep, didn’t you?”
If they are not quite so rude as to smile, but look quickly back at their reading on seeing your eyes open, you should assume a brisk, businesslike expression indicating that you have been thinking out some weighty business problem with your eyes closed, and, now that you have at last come on its solution, that it is snap-snap! back to work for you! If, after a furtive look around, you discover that no one has caught you at it, then it will do no harm to give it another try, this time until your collar chokes you into awakening with a strangling gasp.
The collar, however, is not always an impediment to public dozing. In the theater, for example, a good, stiff dress collar and shirt bosom have been known to hold the sleeper in an upright position when otherwise he might have plunged forward and ba
nged his head on the back of the seat in front.
In my professional capacity as play reviewer I had occasion to experiment in the various ways of sitting up straight and still snatching a few winks of health-giving sleep. I found that by far the safest is to keep one’s heavy overcoat on, especially if it is made of some good, substantial material which will hold a sagging torso erect within its folds. With a good overcoat, reinforced by a stiff dress shirt and a high collar, one may even go beyond the dozing stage and sink into a deep, refreshing slumber, and still not be made conspicuous by continual lurchings and plungings. Of course, if you are an uneasy sleeper and given to thrashing about, you will find that even a heavy overcoat will let you down once in a while. But for the average man, who holds approximately the same position after he has gone to sleep, I don’t think that this method can go wrong. Its only drawback is that you are likely to get a little warm along about the middle of the second act.
If you don’t want to wear your overcoat in the theater, the next best method is to fold the arms across the chest and brace the chin against the dress collar, exerting a slight upward pressure with the arms against the shirt front. This, however, can be used only for the lightest of dozes, as, once unconsciousness has set in, the pressure relaxes and over you go.
Dozing at a play, however refreshing, makes it a bit difficult to follow the argument on the stage, as occasionally the nap drags itself out into a couple of minutes and you awake to find a wholly fresh set of characters on the scene, or even a wholly fresh scene. This is confusing. It is therefore wise to have someone along with you who will alternate watches with you, dozing when you are awake and keeping more or less alert while you are dozing. In this way you can keep abreast of what has been happening.
Chips Off the Old Benchley Page 6
