“Sing what?”
“Why, 'In Good Old Boyhood's Hour,'” and then he would sing it.
The musical composer sang us some of the lyrics, just to let us see how clever they were; but he wheezed too much to do them justice. He admitted that they would sound better if a pretty woman with a swell costume and less wheeze sang them.
The plot of the play—it was in three acts—was original, so far as there was any plot. The Princess of Pilliwink loved the Prince of Guam; but her father, the leading funny man, and King of Pilliwink, wanted her to marry Gonzolo, an Italian, because Gonzolo owned the only hand-organ in the kingdom. To escape this marriage, the Princess disguised herself as a Zulu maiden, and started for Zululand in an automobile. The second act was, therefore, in Zululand, with songs about palms and a grand cakewalk of Amazons, who captured another Italian organ-grinder. At the request of the princess, this organ-grinder was thrown into prison. In the third act he was discovered to be the Prince of Guam, and everything ended beautifully.
Perkins paid the author syndicate spot cash, and unlocked the door and let them go. He did not want any royalties hanging over him. “Ah!” he said, as soon as they were out of sight.
We spent the night editing the play. Neither Perkins nor I knew anything about plays, but we did our best. We changed that play from an every-day comic opera into a bright and sparkling gem. Anything that our author syndicate had omitted we put in. I did the writing and Perkins dictated to me. We put in a disrobing scene, in which the Princess was discovered in pain, and removed enough of her dress to allow her to place a Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster between her shoulders, after which she sang the song beginning,—
“Now my heart with rapture thrills,”
only we changed it to:—
“How my back with rapture thrills.”
That song ended the first act; and when the opera was played, we had boys go up and down the aisles during the intermission selling Perkins's Patent Porous Plasters, on which the words and music of the song were printed. It made a great hit.