Life — June 17, 1926 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

through reviewing plays, it is not going to be that of a Cossack. This is final. No offer, no matter how flattering, from the Cossack authorities would tempt us ever to get on one of those horses and stand on our head in the saddle. We are nobody's fool. The aggregation of Cossacks (or “Djighits,” as they like to be called, which seems strange when you learn that it is pronounced “Jiggets”) recently at Madison Square Garden in New York, on their way across the continent, seem to have this horseback riding pretty well in hand. They play all kinds of games on horseback, with the pos- sible exception of chess. They make pyramids on horse- back and hang by one foot from the saddle. They ride through a wall of fire (the local authorities permitting) and they do an unconscionable amount of shouting and yipping at all times. About the only feature of their per- formance in which we felt that we could compete with them at all was the yipping. We used to be a very good yipper indeed, as a boy. W terns ce line of work we take up when we get NE of the games of the Cossacks is called “Kavkaz.” This is played somewhat in the manner of our hockey, except that there are no ice, skates or sticks. The puck, in this case, is a woolly ball, about the size of a basket- ball, which is tossed from one rider to another down the field and, if possible, past a goal-keeper into a sort of arbor-effect. We are told in a program note that the peculiar appear- ance of the ball comes from the game's having originally been played with a live sheep, whose head, in the course of the sport, became severed and was tossed about as the ball now is. The ball was substituted for the sheep's head pre- sumably after all the sheep in the neighborhood, on hearing a Cossack propose a rubber of “Kavkaz,” began making a point of being in another section of Russia before the whistle blew. R the convenience of the patrons, a scorecard is fur- nished and the players are numbered. We are therefore able to report that Sossoff, at cover-point, played a whirl- wind game for the White Hats, while Nikinshin and Jzvorin 21 for the Rimless Derbies were towers of strength on the defense. The Rimless Derbies won, but locker-room gossip had it that the White Hats were not satisfied with several decisions. The White Hats also look forward to an excel- lent season next year, as most of this year’s team are sophomores who need only a little more rib-breaking and cartilage-pulling to make them veterans of considerable (etre o "THOSE patrons desiring sex-interest in their entertain- ment will find it aplenty in the Cossack show in the number entitled “Abduction of the Bride.” In this spectacu- lar bit of rapine, we see the bridal party in the throes of stupendous intoxication, presumably following the groom's bachelor dinner. We have never scen a wedding group so thoroughly cock-eyed as this one. The bride herself does manage to keep on her saddle, but the groom is dead to the world across the horse’s neck like a sack of meal. It is a very simple matter, then, for a group of cold-sober abductors to dash up, shoot off a few guns, lift the bride to one of their horses, and gallop away with her. We must say, however, that the bride was pretty easy picking. Even though her groom had turned out to be something of a dis- appointment as a cavalier, she might at least have waited until her abductors had got her out of sight before she began to giggle. —-Hi-— HERE is also quite a bit of chorus singing done by a Glee Club, including—you guessed it—“The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” That bit of harmony for male voices must correspond in Russia to our “Sweet Adcline” in popu- larity. The singing and dancing are good, but we could have stood a little less for the sake of an extra period of “Kavkaz.” We missed one number, down on the program cryptically as “Picking Up Articles from Ground”; so we probably never shall know the nature of this act. QBore®QWeoG O yes, there was a new play opening that week. It was called “One Man's Woman” or “One Woman's Man.” It was another of those Pango-Pango-Hawaiian bits, and we left at the end of the first act. At that, we were just a slave to our conscience and our job, Robert Benchley. comicbooks.com