CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

THIRTY ONE
The stretch of Broadway that runs through
Times Square was once the entertainment capital of
the country. Now you would never know that it’s the
theater district. Everything is huge, garish advertising
for multinational criminal enterprises known as
corporations.

I remember, in the early part of the Twentieth
Century, in the time before Daylight Savings, that one
could walk along the street just as the sun had set and
be amazed and entertained. There was no question
that this was the Street of Dreams, Show Biz Central,
Broadway – the pulsing heart of live entertainment,
when live entertainment was all that there was.
The sidewalk in front of Hansen’s Drug
Store, right next to the Palace Theater, was a
veritable vaudeville show. You would see magicians
demonstrating new tricks to each other, musicians
with their cased instruments close by, sometimes
presenting an impromptu jam session while
comedians told each other dirty jokes that no
one could steal, as blue material was forbidden in
vaudeville. All of them were waiting for one or
another agent three floors above to stick a head out a
window and shout out, “Roy, get up here and sign this
contract. You got two weeks in Cleveland.”
The names and the destinations varied but the good news was work for show people. There were five thousand vaudeville theaters across this country and the entertainers made a good living. Nowadays, electronic information systems substitute for human beings on a stage. Entertainment expectations have been demolished by YouTube and recorded music in mp3 format. Comics and musicians work as waiters and legal secretaries by day and appear in clubs for free in the hope of being discovered, or due to the fact of their being hooked on applause. Meanwhile, the world gets crazier by the minute.
Did you know that vaudeville entertainers used to spend months – months of eight and ten and twelve hour days – just rehearsing their entrances? And when everything was just the way it should be, they started over again on the structure and content of their exits. This was done to hone to perfection a ten minute performance. Entertainment was a craft. It was about making people happy.
Theater was once the only game there was. Everyone went to the theater. It was not the elitist enterprise it is now, serving rich tourists and corporate executives on expense accounts. When the nickelodeon was first introduced, no one believed moving pictures would ever supplant the theater. In those days New York had one more legitimate theater than London did – forty here to thirty nine there -- though the large majority of legit shows were imported from the West End even then. Some things never change.
Across Longacre Square, before it became Times Square, Rector’s was the hottest spot in town, and the heat was due to the presence of stage stars. When a great actress entered, she waited on the threshold while the maitre d’ signaled to the band stand, and a Gypsy violin player came and fiddled the dame a musical escort to her table.
Rector’s was so well known, it did not even have a sign out front. Inside it had mirrors from floor to ceiling. There were a hundred tables downstairs and another seventy five upstairs, which was called Siberia – much as Elaine’s second dining room is today.
Now that world is all gone – the grandeur and the glory of live theater are no longer one of life’s nourishing staples. Broadway theater has become an exotic sweet, a confection that one brags about having sampled when back home in Indiana.
These were my thoughts as I trudged along the once-Great White Way this evening, and they led to a despondency that strikes me every couple of decades. My thoughts drifted to turning myself in, telling authorities what sort of creature I am, letting them test and x-ray me to prove it, and then explaining that the best chance of exterminating me is to chop me into little bits and scatter the pieces in remote and diverse places around the planet and hope that these bits of me were incapable of flying toward each other to reassemble.
I shook off this melancholia, though. Much as I might like to roll around in the mud of emotion, it seems impossible for me to maintain such a state of feeling for very long. What is a certainty is that I will not turn myself in, now or ever. However, it is becoming clear that I must find some other form of endeavor to occupy myself for the next few centuries. The theater was a wonderful run while it lasted.