Hard to Explain!
A bit in doubt as to whether her husband had gone to their mountain cabin with male escorts, friend wife decided to call up and find out. The following conversation took place:
Husband—Hello! Hello!
Wife—Hello, dear, what are you doing?
Husband—Why, I was just washing out my X, Y, Z’s.
Central on the wire—I’m “wringing” them!
Bang!!!
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Mother may I a-riding go?
Yes, my sweet Lucille
But give your friend this sound advise,
Keep one hand on the wheel.
* * *
All forms of love, I know tis true
Are bound to cause a quake or two
But still I’m betting, the most upsetting
Is love in a canoe.
* * *
A girl is getting old when she begins to sigh over the pictures in the album.
* * *
Living together when tied with the bonds of matrimony is often a knotty life.
* * *
The solid man has no sediment in his makeup.
* * *
What is home without a cellar?
Bobbed Hair Genii
Although the rest of New York can’t seem to see why they are so excited about it, all the high brow married ladies of Greenwich Village are in a lather of emotion. Ruth Hale has set ’em free.
Rah for liberty, freedom and Ruth!
Owing to Ruth, the down-trodden girls with bobbed hair and hubbies, no matter how many times they are married, need not lug around the old man’s name any longer. No more of this “Mrs.” stuff south of Washington Square.
It seems that the young lady genii who inhabit the Village and have flights of soul and yearn and yearn, occasionally fall in love and get married and go to live in apartments with kitchenettes, dumb waiters, husbands and other furniture. But to their intense indignation, the butcher and everybody right away begins calling them Mrs. Thingambob, entirely forgetting the undying fame of the names they used to sign to their poems. So the girls proceeded to strike.
Fannie Hurst, the lady who says her husband comes to call on her twice a week, Inez Gillmore, who is married to Will Irwin, and a lot of girls similarly encumbered, organized the Lucy Stone League, Lucy being a lady who refused to stand for the outrage way back in 1855. Ruth Hale was one of the members. She is a writer young lady who married Heywood Broun, the dramatic critic, and dared anybody to call her Mrs. Broun.
The United States government took the dare. When she wanted to go to Europe, the State Department got in bad with Greenwich Village by writing out her passport in the name of “Mrs. Heywood Broun.” She indignantly refused to accept it, refusing to go to Europe at all and leaving the place flat.
She has now won what the girls consider to be a tremendous victory for “The Cause.” Through the courts she has compelled a real estate owner to deed a certain piece of property to “Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale, his wife.” The Greenwich Village ladies straightaway celebrated the event by adopting a new constitution for the Lucy Stone League—which is one way of giving a cheer, not to say a yell of triumph.
If it’s all right with Ruth, it’s all right with me, but it is certainly going to make complications. You will have to keep dragging the host of the party off to one side and keep demanding in a hoarse whisper, “Say, before this goes any further, is this Jane somebody’s wife?”
There’s also another terrible affair in the Village. Every bobbed hair is on end with excitement over what happened to “Grace” of the famous “Grace’s Garret.” This is one of the places in the Village where they get together and tell each other how the jealous magazine editors have turned down their work through spite.
Grace Godwin—of course, she has a husband named Sperry, but that doesn’t count—runs the place, she says, more as a harbor for lonely souls than as a depot for eats. Well, the other day, five or six lonely souls happened in for a dish of tea; but all the said lonely souls were inhabiting black bodies. Grace called the lightest colored one aside and told him how it was. Of course, the Village is awfully democratic and all that but—well, he ought to be able to see for himself—with so many of the other lonely souls being hot-headed Southerners and all. How was she to know that the colored brother was a famous sociologist with a Yale degree and that the rest of the party were all university high brows. They brought law suits against her and got a verdict for $600, which is more money than the Village ever heard of at one time before. Grace of “Grace’s Garret” has given the Village solemn warning that if any more dark tinged lonely souls come along she is going to close “The Garret” and move out of the Village.
But if it comes to that, everybody else is moving out of the Village anyhow. So many purse-proud outsiders have invaded New York’s Latin Quarter that the rents are murder in the first degree. The real Villagers are moving out to Brooklyn—than which there could be no worse fate for a Villager.
Ziegfield Follies girls tell me that all the time the police were supposed to be searching for Nicky Arnstein, the alleged bond robber, Nicky was in his wife’s dressing room. He is married to Fannie Brice of the Follies and used to come to the show every night disguised as her colored maid.
Now that we are on the topic, a burning piece of information should be hurried out to the waiting world. Ziegfield says that hereafter he is going to have all the chorus men in the show sing from behind the scenes. Nobody wants to see them anyhow. Hereafter, they just represent noise—like a drum.
A little movie girl of my acquaintance has recently joined the Follies and what she sees behind the scenes at the Famous beauty show fills her with awe for the human appetite.
“To tell you the truth,” she says, “Those girls don’t care much about millionaires. They infinitely prefer to go around with chauffeurs because they don’t have to worry about which fork to eat with. They have to have millionaires around on account of their appetites. No ordinary fortune could keep those girls filled up. In a previous existence most of them must have been boa constrictors. They eat all the time. One girl, famous for her beauty, starts in with a good dinner before the show. All during the intervals when she is not on the stage, she has waiters bring her lunches in her dressing room. Her bill averages forty dollars a week for the little snacks she eats between her dinner before the show and the supper with a millionaire after the show. That girl ought to marry a Service of Supply Depot.”
The little newcomer says that nearly all the lovely beauties whom we have imagined as dining on lark’s tongues and poetry have appetites like traffic cops.
What they need in New York right now is a new country for the movie stars to be born in. They have a dreadful time trying to get Pola Negri located. Ever since the foreign pictures began to pour in with this Negri lady in the leading part of most of the plays, they have been trying to get her born in some inoffensive place. The press agents have had her in turn an Italian, a Swiss, an Austrian and a Roumanian. As a matter of fact the lady’s real name is Paulette Schwartz. I can’t possibly imagine what her nationality can be!
Similarly worried, the film magnates have finally decided that Josef Schildkraut is part Turkish and part Roumanian.
Well, never mind, they are both great artists. Two of the greatest Europe has ever sent us.
Oddly enough, Pola Negri has reconciled the rival film producers to the horrors of censorship. Only a few weeks ago, they were appealing to high heaven to be saved from the monster. Now it has occurred to them that censorship is the only protection the American film industry has against being swept to destruction by cheap but beautiful German pictures.
The competition is almost murderous. “Passion,” the super film in which Negri first appeared in America and which would have cost at least half a million dollars in the United States, was made for $22,000 in Berlin. Pola Negri gets a salary whose bigness has made Germany open its eyes; in our money it would be only $45 a week. Of course, there could be but one outcome to competition like that. Nearly all the German pictures and particularly all those of Pola Negri are decidedly “rough” in spots. They are very much bedroom, etc. The American censors may save the situation by cutting the gizzards out of them. A big Italian picture recently arrived in New York wherein the extra people were paid four cents a day. It was a very beautiful and very fine picture. There’s no denying it. Only the censors can save the movies.
That long suffering and modest soul, Evelyn Nesbit, has finally retired from the stage after some years spent in a vain attempt to startle the world with her “message” to young girls. She has opened a novelty store in the “roaring fifties” in New York City and will manage it in person.
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