Judge — September 21, 1918 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Mr. Memory, Manager: By Lawton Mackall actors and play- wrights! I'll see what I can do for you. But let me impress upon you the fact that my office hours here in this orchestra chair are only from 8:20 till 11, so you'll have to be brief and to the point. “What? You inform me that you are ‘artists,’ and therefore deserve special con- sideration? Pardon me, but you are kidding yourselves. - OOD EVENING, [ broker is trying to sell the restaurant that has failed and packs it with non-paying Bolsheviki to impress the prospective buyer. Y. I can use that much of ‘Why Worry ’— “What! You object to my choosing so little and call my selection arbitrary? Ob- jection overruled. 1 prefer to be arbitrary. Next! he Walked in Her Sleep’? Very amusing. I'll choose the pretty somnambu- list in her becoming nightie, + and the pessimistic husband Why, for all your fine preten- sions you can’t amount to a thing until I, Old Man Memory, hire you. Until accept you and give you a job in my outfit, nobody knows who youare. Even your name in electric lights over the front of a theatre wouldn’t mean anything unless you were one of the stars I have made familiar to people’s minds. And why do you employ special press agents and do all sorts of wild things in order to get your names and pic- tures in the papers? Just in the hope of securing a place with me! “Don't set me down for a grouch because I talk this way, for I am not. I’m all right if you stand in with n I'm even indulgent. I make the public predis- posed toward a poor play simply because the author had a good one last season. I make people continue to like an actor after he has become lazy and conceited; I make them imagine his mannerisms are signs of genius. I gloze over the faults of my favorites; thirty years from now, I'll create the impression that the new actors can’t compare with the old ones, and that commercial- ism is ruining the stage. “Well, what have you got to show me this evening? This play ‘Why Worry’?—yes, yes, I'll give this special consideration be- cause of its being by the au- thors of ‘Business Before Pleasure.’ Well, I'll take the Avon Comedy Four as the Jazz Band waiters—I'Il keep the leader anyhow, even if I have to let the rest go. The other Jewish characters are true to life, but in New York City they are not altogether a novelty. The dialogue is funny, but I have no conven- ient way of retaining it— except perhaps the speech: at! You call a trom- boner a musician? Let me tell you, a cow can make as = good music as that and give Aan milk besides.’ And I'll keep “apidniehs Fe the scene where the Jewish — ing their way and the wife who is always on to him—thereby accounting for his pessimism. Next! “Double Exposure’? Clever farce, but spun out. T'll use it boiled down to the idea that two husbands had their astral bodies interchanged. ‘The four personalities are so vivid that I will retain them and the color of Janet Beecher’s gowns—the blue gown and the gold one —and John Cumberland’s technique of surreptitious booze-imbibing. Next! “Where Poppies Bloom’? Different from most of the spy melodramas in that the action takes place near the front. The hall of a shelltorn French chateau i such a relief from the scemingly inevitable English liv- ing-room that I think I'll keep it. I'll keep also the droll human nature contabs between the British Tommy and the American ex-cowboy in the foreign legion; and the exciting scene at the end where the spy almost escapes and the terrific bomb explosion, and Marjorie Ram- beau’s protracted explosion when she (suppesed to be a lady of high degree) bawls out her Hun husband like an infuriated chambermaid, Next! “*Lightnin’ ’? Eventually I will keep a siderable part of this play, for I expect to sce it at least once more. At any rate, I’ve already hired Frank Bacon as the lovable old braggart, for the next twenty years. “*A Very Good Young Man’? I'll keep a batch of those delicious caricatures— Wallace Eddinger as the pain- fully model youth, Mrs. Man- delhar per and her man-eating daughter and soulful waiter. And so Mr. Memory con- tinued complacently, - not realizing in his egotism that some of the most successful shows are the cheerful time- killers which are meant to be forgotten as quickly as pos- sible so that the same stunts and jokes may be dolled up into new shows next season. comicbooks.com