"This show'll be out sooner than that," was the cowboy's answer, as he pulled his barker and began shooting the tips off the side lights. He had just emptied his "weapin" and was about loading up again, when the frightened audience was reassured by the stage manager stepping on the stage and saying, "Mary, you are excused for the remainder of the evening. Go dress right away."
A "chair sweater," or "stuffer" as she is called out West, is a girl who sits in the first part, and who has nothing else to do than wear skirts short enough to display her limbs, and join in the choruses if she can do so without knocking the life out of the selection. After the first part she sits in the boxes and "works" the boys for drinks. If she can't make anything in the boxes she goes out into the audience—in the lowest of these dens—and flits from one place to another getting a drink here, and by that time "spotting" somebody over there whom she esteems worthy of "striking." She keeps this up all night, until the after-piece—the cancan, or whatever else it may be—is reached, when she goes behind the scenes and appears on the stage in the same street costume she has worn out in the audience. The "chair sweater's" lot is not a happy one. While pursuing her sudorific vocation she innocently imagines that she is making an actress out of herself, and I guess she is—a "dive" actress.
Now and then the "chair sweater" combines her own business with that of her employer by selling her own or other photographs to "grays." Some of these pictures are of the vilest kind, but they sell readily to the patrons of the "dive," and as the sale is effected quietly, even an honest granger now and then buys one, "just to show 'em up around the grocery."
LAURA DON.
The variety "dive" usually closes its performance with a fiery and untamed cancan, all the people of the company joining in the dance, the men usually in the character costumes and "make-up" in which they have appeared before in their sketches or acts.
BENEDICK AND BEATRICE.
Beatrice:—Talk with a man out of window?—a proper saying
Benedick:—Nay but Beatrice;—