16,046. MY VAUDEVILLE

MY VAUDEVILLE

   Mr. Bolcom and Mr. Weinstein are sitting somewhere. They've come up with an idea! They're thinking of calling it Mastergate, or Power Failure maybe, and are not yet sure but they're seeking commitment now from a hundred backers. 'This could be the play that makes us much more,' Bolcom says, 'nothing succeeds like excess, as they say.' There's a thought! They have adapted a play from 411BC, about Athenian and Spartan woman who stage a sex strike to get their husbands to stop warring. [It was titled 'Lysistrata']. Listen to these names for sure: Menken Zeppel Gelbhart. They're trying to decide, and for a subtitle are thinking about 'Phallus Doesn't Live Here Anymore.' Weinstein says 'This can be good; the original from which we base it is just filled with loaded references to genitalia and intercourse as a weapon, or the denial of intercourse as a weapon anyway.' He begins chuckling, and then starts reciting from the original play by Aristophanes, which lines he has apparently gleefully memorized: "You will fly from the room at the mention of bush. You will offer no pussy, not one bit of tush! Tell them our ankles won't visit our ears...Hands off their phalluses! Let them get calluses! Don't let their chalices overflow!"

   Then Weinstein again: 'So, you see how much filth is fun. How much an entire new vaudeville can be built around the charade, the facade, of making fun of others for cause  -  the ones we're addressing who won't address us back but rather pay their good money to enter our lair! So we have play palace after play palace erected up and down the Bowery, like in the old days; all that laughter and comedy! We can build a new, gated street, all our own! Think of the powerful magic we can create! A wide street of dreams all our own, why a very Broadway from before there was a Broadway! We'll make an industry of this sex and no sex stuff, and if we have to throw some moralizing in, we will; what was the name of the war again? The Philadelphia War? The Palpitation War? Oh, it doesn't matter, we'll make a name up. All those displaced people, wandering around these little streets all glum and stressed out. Cheek by jowl, tenement and condo, all together, and we'll get the ones with the condos and the dough. For the poor ones, they can find something else to do, like picking through rags and garbage. Old law versus new law, air-space rights or not! Nothing but nothing, this gruel is cruel!"

   "Over at McGuirk's Suicide Hall, remember, all those whores in that mean hotel. They were so miserable that 3 or 4 a day would jump to their deaths from the roof. My grandfather used to tell the story to anyone who'd listen. From where he worked he could hear the thuds! "Fer dis ish America remember, and youze wants to jump, you jump and no one stops you! It's a free country then and whadya' I care see! Yiddish was his pipeworn first language and he never quit it! Sounded loud 'round the sewers of the filth there. They once called it the gutter language; the very workshop tongue of the Devil Beelzebub himself! We can remake the world we want!"

   And then came the wars, screwing everything up, and killing the Bowery. World Wars, I and II, Gallipoli, Auschwitz, Crimea and the Sudetenland! Yes, the words of he prophets really were 'written on the subway walls,', and how about that! Picture this, says Bolton: "Ethel Dray singing, on the stage, 'I wandered sick like a curious dog along your wine-fed eerie streets, and nothing was found or said, except the winding sheets of all the dead! The trickling rumble of the streetcar and hearse ad no difference between them. No place to lay my head, even if it was alone.' And she sings that scene as she's walking old Prince Street, and right up by the Bowery too. But the last I heard of her it was 1899 and she ung her head like a bowl of wash, and she struggled wordless with shame, and she too died trying to walk the air, of the same old hotel  -  but did McGuirk or Dooley care or even give a damn? Did they at least step aside in the midst of their wars? NO. Not even to mutter a prayer. 'No', they said, 'just another Jewess dead! What matters, and what do I care?!"

   Weinstein nods and smiles a cheer. "I tell you, Bolton, you're right! Our new world is there!"