Life, 1928-01-05 · page 14 of 34
Life — January 5, 1928 — page 14: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Cartoon:** Satirizes **Mrs. Rensellaer Van Schenk**, a wealthy socialite who publicly announced her desire for "quiet and privacy" after her high-profile divorce, yet is immediately spotted at the fashionable Restaurant Pieritz in an eye-catching outfit, surrounded by onlookers. The joke mocks the contradiction between her stated wish for discretion and her ostentatious public appearance. **"Mrs. Pep's Diary" (below):** A comedic domestic anecdote about acquiring surplus Spanish art and furniture, featuring a dialogue about a supposedly "original" joke that the revue manager insists on cutting. The humor derives from the mundane complaints of wealthy individuals about servants, purchases, and theatrical productions. Both pieces target upper-class social pretension and hypocrisy.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Mrs. Rensselaer Van Schenk, having publicly announced her desire for quiet and privacy after her soul-stirring, front-page divorce case, slips unobtrusively into the Restaurant Pierritz. December Awake betimes, wishing, 12th over my breakfast tray, that domestic servants could skin oranges as adroitly as it is done in publicks, and also that some kind of sausage meat could be assembled with- out including adamantine par- ticles. Then up, and to the window to learn if the three busts which have lain outside the rear door of the art estab- lishment in Forty-eighth Street for over a year were still there, and they were, to my delight, forasmuch as I have long coveted the splendid one of General Grant with the out- standing buttons on his uni- form as a present for A, Dodds, who did once bring me from Spain a Madonna in the Andrea del Sarto manner done on a Turkish towel, so I did commission my servant Virgie to go over and bargain with the manager, thinking to pick up for a pittance what its owner had consigned to the We Poss Diary elements, but she returned with the doleful news that I might purchase the General for one hundred and twenty-five dollars, as he and Dante ComepuNn: Why do you want me to cut that gag out? Don’t you believe it’s an original joke? Revue Manacer: Certainly! In fact, I believe it's the original joke. and the lady looking like the mother of the Gracchi had been cast out for the purpose of becoming antiqued, so I did decide that a joke was a joke, and that this time it was on me. Not to mention the ulti- mate feckless buyer of the bust of a general, dead but some forty years, which had accumu- lated the apparent wear and tear of centuries. The after- noon gone in sorting our more recently acquired books, reading a little in an anonymously writ- ten one called “The Confessions of an Author's Wife,” which did nought but make its hero out to be a conceited ass and strength- en my conviction that most writers of his ilk are dull and unsophisticated, and I could not but think how refreshing it would be to come across the con- fessions of a butcher's or a traffic policeman’s wife. A light dinner this night of cream of spinach soup, stuffed peppers, cauliflower, etc., and so to Town Hall to (Please turn to page 30) comicbooks.com ch be