"The agent of the Doorstep Comic Opera Company," the dramatic critic replies.
"Well, the next time he comes in here just tell him this is not a deaf and dumb asylum. We don't want any serenades from side-show blowers. Don't give his d—d old company more than two lines, and make it less than that if you can."
Fortunately for the profession this style of advance agent is dying out, and men who understand newspapers better are coming in. There are many real gentlemen, clever, quiet and effective, in the business, like Mr. E. D. Price, formerly of the Detroit Post and Tribune; Frank Farrell, who graduated from the New Orleans Times office, and others who have forsaken journalism for the equally arduous, but more lucrative positions that enterprising and long-headed theatrical managers offer them.
The advance agent sees that the hall or theatre is in proper condition, looks after the sale of reserved seats, distributes his "comps" as judiciously as circumstances will allow, and confronts everywhere he goes the cunning and omnipresent dead-head—that abomination of the show business who will spend $5 with an agent to get a free ticket from him, when admission and a reserved sent may be purchased for $1. If the dead-head fails to circumvent the agent he quietly awaits the coming of the company, when he lies in ambush for the manager, of whom he demands a pass or his life. In fact, the manager often has to undo a great deal that his agent has done in a town, and to do over again much that the avant-courier had seemingly done in a satisfactory manner. The company, too, frequently find the way not so smooth or pleasant as the agent has represented it to be: the hall or theatre in which the performance is to be given is often a dingy, dismal place that is not only without conveniences of any kind, but what is worse, may not be proof against anything like demonstrative weather; the hotel fare is bad, and the accommodations no better; the mayor, the town council, and sometimes the prominent citizens, must have free passes; the local papers want hatfuls of complimentary tickets, and with a house half filled with dead-heads and one-third of the benches empty, they must, in the face of most discouraging circumstances, appear as entertainers or meet with the severest denunciations of the pigmy press and the most galling criticism from the ungrateful army of dead-heads.
Now and then an actor or an actress contracts a cold during a barn-storming tour, and the nomadic life not being calculated to aid the healing power of medicines, the seeds of death are sown, and soon the played-out player sinks from sight, and without causing a single ripple upon the surface of the great sea of life, goes down to the grave. The agent and the manager, too, share this danger, and altogether the life of professional people when "on the road" is not so bright or joyful as to cause any one acquainted with their trials and troubles to envy them their lot.
"ON THE ROAD."