"The actor sees himself so large, and the rest of the world so small"
I stopped. "What is it?" I inquired.
"A man came up to me as I was leaving the stage door and said: 'Why, you're not really colored, after all!'"
A star of my acquaintance recently dismissed an excellent business manager because that individual mentioned the author of the play in his advertising. "You're not working for Scribble; you're working for me", was his comment. Another has ceased to be a friend because I told him that I didn't care for his performance. A third has clippings of the criticisms that have treated him best pasted on the inside of his card case and shows them to you if he can get your ear and your button-hole.
Everybody talks shop a good deal, but shop is the only thing talked on The Great White Way. Art and science and literature, politics and wars and national calamities have no interest, if they have so much as existence, for the player. "Awful catastrophe that earthquake in 'Frisco!" I exclaimed to an intimate I met at breakfast five or six years ago.
"By George, yes!" said he. "Costs me twenty weeks I had booked over the Orpheum Circuit."
Your shoe dealer, though he converses about shoes from eight in the morning until six at night, at least drops the subject during the evening. The typical histrion reads nothing in the papers except the theatrical news and refuses steadfastly to discourse on any other subject. This is equally true of the manager.
"Alan Dale came three nights running"
The theatrical world is as much of and to itself as though the Rialto were a tiny island isolated in the waters of the Pacific. It has its own language, its own daily journal, its own celebrities and its own great events. The jargon spoken would be absolutely unintelligible to a layman. "I doubled the heavy and a character bit because the Guv'ner said cuttin' everything down was our only chance to stay out. We hit 'em hard in Omaha, and it looked like a constant sell out to me, but the Guv'ner swore the show was a frost and we was playin' to paper." What would be your translation of this, gentle reader? Doesn't sound like English, does it? Yet it is—English as you hear it on Broadway.