STORM WARNINGS FOR NEW YORK

Anyone wishing to see New York summer shows, or any other New York shows for that matter, had better run like everything. Any day now the walls of the city are going to topple in, and, with a blare of trumpets, the Forces of the Lord are going to smite New York, even as Sodom and Gomorrah were smitten. New York is riding for its Big Fall, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it came around the end of this week.

Probably never before in the history of disrobing (see Taine’s “A Short History of Unhooking and Unbuttoning,” Harpers’, 1897, 1 vol., 345-pp. octavo) have so many young ladies appeared with so few clothes before so many people at once. It is recorded that in ancient Rome the puellæ wore fewer clothes at the annual outings, but their audiences were comparatively small and selected from a list of socially possible people. Today, in the Borough of Manhattan, the young folks appear before a Winter Garden full of practical strangers—that is, they are strangers at the beginning of the show. By the end of the first act, it is as if they had known them all their lives. Just as no man is a stranger (or a hero) to his Swedish rubber, so, by the price of a ticket to “The Great Temptations” you can have at least twenty people in New York whom you know awfully, awfully well. And yet they say that New York is cold and aloof!

All this levity on my part is just whistling past the graveyard. I, personally, am pretty worried. You can push the Forces of Vengeance just so far and then—buckety-buckety—down comes the ceiling. Ask the Sodom Chamber of Commerce. And the worst of it is, that just as the rain sheds its benefits on the just and the unjust alike, the fact that you have been home and in bed every night at ten o’clock isn’t going to help you a bit when your whole city begins to smell as if something was burning and then suddenly goes up in a puff of brimstone. You can’t go out and argue with a Pillar of Fire and explain that you, personally, have been spending your evenings building bookcases. If your town goes, you go too, and no back-talk.

Now, in my case, the prospects are even more depressing, because the job from which I eke out barely enough money to buy gin for my children makes it necessary that I attend the opening performances of all these wrath-provoking shows. I don’t like them. I would never go to see them if it were not for the fact that it is my life-work. Often I sit through them with my eyes shut. But I am unquestionably on record in the office of the Snooping Angel as sitting in D-113 at the Winter Garden. And when they are making out their lists for culprits to be hit on the head by falling walls or swirled up into the skies on a fiery horse with nine heads, my name probably is right there among the “B’s” as a constant and incorrigible attendant at these festivals of sin. The angel probably doesn’t do more than take a look over the audience. You can’t expect him to go to the box-office and see who paid to get in or find out why they are there.

I am unquestionably on record as sitting in D-113.

If I get through this summer all right, I am going to hire an assistant. Then, whenever a Shubert show is announced or something called “A Nuit in Paree,” I will slip him the seats and say: “Here, Joe, go and enjoy yourself.” In this way I may be able to escape the extra heavy punishment in store for participants and get out of the general cataclysm with perhaps just a broken ankle or singed eyelashes. It is going to be bad enough for the simple bystanders without getting mixed up in the private showing. The only break that I have ever had in this line was that I was in France at the time of Earl Carroll’s champagne-bath party in New York. When I got back I found my invitation on my desk. If I had been there, covering the affair for my paper, they would have taken flashlight photographs.

And, after all, what fun is there in going to these displays? “The Great Temptations,” for example, probably contains fewer real temptations than a Christian Endeavor convention. The thing is too unreal ever to constitute actual menace. You hear somebody announcing that, if the audience will remain seated, there will now be a parade showing the way parsnips are cooked in all the different countries of the world. Then eight girls walk across the stage, one representing Nell Gwyn cooking parsnips, one Cleopatra, one Thaïs, and so forth. It is very dull indeed, and the fact that the girls are clad as if they were just getting ready to turn on the hot water doesn’t help, or hurt, anything. The whole thing is highly academic, and unless you are interested in the cooking of parsnips, you are going to find yourself looking at your program to see how long it will take to empty the theater with every seat filled. If the Forces of Judgment only knew it, the display of what the advertisements call “feminine pulchritude” is one of the most innocuous of all forms of theatrical entertainment. It is like looking in at a delicatessen window. It is too much.

However, try to tell that to the Watch and Ward Society. Try to convince that great, big old Nine-Headed Horse, when he comes snorting down out of a cloud of fire with a flaming subpoena made out in your name, that these exhibitions bore you. Just say to him, if you can make your voice heard above the thunder and lightning and bellowing rocks, that a show where a nine-tenths naked lady walks across the stage means no more to you than watching the Stamford local go through New Rochelle, and listen to him laugh. Why, you will probably get a million years extra in the biscuit oven just for saying such a thing.

You see, he has heard that line a good many times and he is getting a little tired of it, just as you would, yourself, after the first few million years. He knows that nobody ever will admit that he goes where he shouldn’t because he likes it. Every single time it is a case of being on duty, as you might say; making an investigation for some reform agency, or getting material for a book, or showing an out-of-town customer a good time. Even the out-of-town customer has the alibi that he is just trying to find out whether things are really as bad in New York as the papers have been saying they are. He would much rather have spent the evening writing a report to the firm about conditions in the textile industry, but he didn’t think that he could afford to miss an opportunity to get some first-hand information about the decadence of the present age.

So the only thing that there is left to do, if we are going to save ourselves and the biggest city in the country from a horrible fate, is to stop the Messrs. Shubert from putting on shows like that. And the way to stop them from putting on shows like that is to go to them and say: “Messrs. Shubert, put down that mending for just a minute, I want to talk to you. I am a married man with a family and I have a lot of work that I have to do before I die. I have insurance to pay up and I have a house which has to be painted before it can be sold. Now, you and your shows are leading this whole city into inevitable destruction at the hands of the Forces of Vengeance. No city can go on as New York is going on giving pageants about the twelve different ways of cooking parsnips, without incurring Divine Wrath to a fatal extent. Won’t you, for the sake of the wife and kiddies, put, let us say, a girdle of large hydrangeas on your choruses and perhaps an old-fashioned shawl? Won’t you arrange it so that it won’t be quite so incriminating for a man who wants to go straight to be numbered among the patrons of your entertainments?”

And if the Messrs. Shubert just laugh and go on with their mending or whatever it is that they happen to be doing at the time, the only thing left for me to do, at any rate, is to do my duty without flinching—accept my complimentary tickets, and go to these shows wearing a tin helmet and carrying a letter from my pastor in my pocket against the Day of Judgment.