Life — April 16, 1925 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

Labor Troubles 'HIS department has had considerable trouble in the past with its circus reviewing-staff. One year we sent our seven-year-old son to cover the event, and, while his report- ing and judgment were satisfactory, he became intolerable in the consciousness of his success and at the sight of his opinions in print, and demanded a raise in wage (from fifty to seventy-five cents and taxi-fare to Madison Square Garden). So the next year we employed scab labor in the person of our five-year-old son, who was only too willing to do it for a quarter and pay his own taxi-fare out of that. But he was unreliable as a reporter, owing to its being his first circus. The thing ended in his bursting into tears at the explosion of the clown automobile (a thing this department feels like doing to this day) and having to be led out. The resulting report, as it appeared on this page, was incoherent, to put it charitably. This year, then, being still of the belief that the circus should be reviewed by a minor, we decided to spend money like water and send both boys, now aged nine and six respectively. In this way we hoped to get the mature opinions and cool sophistication of one in combination with the enthusiastic though temperamental reactions of the other, and between these perhaps some fairly definite idea of what the circus is like. That is just what we did not get. The two reports are contradictory in practically every respect and are worthless. Such as they are, we print them below, with apologies to those readers who are accustomed to rely on this page for its news of the world of entertainment. oD a Ce ee EEE O the circus program we find a note to the effect that “During the progress of the menage number, Alf Loyal’s Miniature EQUI-CANINE CIRCUS will make its first American appearance on one of the stages.” According to our elder reporter, the “Equi-Canine Circus” consists of a troupe of little black dogs with false heads on to represent horses. The younger reporter insists with considerable heat that they are real little horses. Any one who says that they aren't, is crazy—and something of a cad. In the first place, they look like real horses and in the second place, they are real horses. His senior asks, in a cynical manner, if he ever heard of horses as small as that, to which the answer is no, but you don’t have to have heard of a thing to have it so. The rest of the argument is not important enough to be put into the record. Another feature of the circus which made a great im- pression on the nine-year-old is the loss of a bustle by a clown who is dressed as a woman. According to this report, the clown is walking around the ring when suddenly the bustle, together with half of the skirt, comes off and stands stationary while the rest of the clown goes ahead. On his attention being called to it, he turns and whistles, whereupon the bustle in the skirt starts running toward him and joins itself to its proper place. It is all very, very funny. The junior member denies that this happened at all. It is merely a figment of his brother's imagination. What really occurred that a man came running by with a skeleton chasing him. The man screamed but the stuck close, and they both disappeared through There was absolutely nothing about a woman with a bustle. He OA SY ND so it goes. One says the real feature of the show is a man who sits on a big tower of tables and gradually tips over until they all fall with a crash. The other admits that this was all right in its way, if you like that sort of thing, but maintains that the real artistic event of the after- noon was a man who came in and allowed another man to blow him up by means of a tube inserted under his waist- band to a size never before attained by any man in the history of the world. The general effect of these reports is so confusing that it will be necessary for this department to visit the circus in person to see just what really goes on. ye wz MW a> NE thing that the young critics did not experience at this performance in Madison Square Garden was a queer feeling around the diaphragm at the thought that this is the last time the blare of the band and the crack of the whip will ring out through the spaces of the big barn. For before another spring comes around the Garden will be torn down. We would devote a sentimental paragraph here to the ghost army of clowns, prizefighters, prize Aircdales, pranc- ing horses and motor boats which might well attend the last night of the building’s career, but last year we wrote a similar paragraph against the threatened destruction of the Hippodrome, and the Hippodrome is still standing and pack- ing them in. When we see with our own eyes the gaping hole in Madison Square where the Garden once stood, we'll do a really fine paragraph. We're nobody's fool. Robert Benchley. comicbooks.com