SATIRE
The Romance of yesterday is the Satire of to-morrow. Juliet to-day would be a lovesick flapper. We’d regard with tongue in cheek her moonings to the moon. There is such a fine line between the smile of sympathy and the smile of sophistication, that the author confesses she is still in doubt which the heroine of “Footlights” will call forth—if either.
[3]
]FOOTLIGHTS
CHAPTER I
Have you ever been in a small town, small time vaudeville house? Well, even if you have, and could live through it, you’ve probably never seen that mysterious region known as “backstage.” You’ve never heard warped boards creak under the lightest step. You’ve never stood in the wings waiting for your turn, trying to escape the draught that is everywhere, shivering but afraid to sneeze. You’ve never dodged misdirected tobacco juice. You’ve never endured the composite odors only a one time “opery-house,” sometime warehouse, another time stable, can produce. You’ve never done your three a day, rain, shine or blizzard, then rushed to catch a local with oil lamps swinging weirdly overhead and a jerky halt at every peach tree. But most of all, if you’re a woman, you’ve never known what it is to sit weeping in a pea-green walled dressing-room because you chose to do the darn thing yourself and won’t go back home and admit you’re beaten.
If any one of these experiences had been yours, you’d probably walk straight into the pea-green dressing-room referred to, pat Elizabeth Parsons on the shoulder and say, “I’m with you, old girl! It’s a black, black world. No sunshine anywhere! Never was, never will be!”
As it happened, those in her world at the moment were not of her world. They were a hardened lot, with hands ready to dig down and share a copper with a pal, with glib greeting in their own peculiar patois as they swung [4] ]through the stage entrance, but inured to creaking boards, to combined odors, to oaths and tobacco juice and icy currents that gripped more sensitive shoulders like the hand of death. Life had handed them a deal that wasn’t exactly square, perhaps. Almost any of them would have been a knock-out on Broadway! But they had reached the point where emotion, as well as indignation, expressed itself in shrugs.
They could snore peacefully in a swaying day-coach, dreaming of the hour when the flower of success would spring up by the wayside. So Elizabeth Parsons wept alone. Her make-up boxes reeled in every direction as her head went down in their midst. Her hands, pressed against her lips, tried to still the sobs she knew were cowardly. Her body shook with that least beautiful of human emotions, self-pity, and she wished she were dead.
A gale of sleet and snow tore against her little alley window. It rattled the single pane furiously. It forced its way through cracks and dripped into pools of water on the stone floor. It blurred the already dull electric globes round her dressing-table with a dank mist and soaked a chill into her bones. But it had nothing whatever to do with her tears. They were the result of an accumulation of misery and loneliness, and finally the receipt of a wire from her booking agent advising her that her route had been changed. For the next three days she must play her own home town.
It was the crowning humiliation! She had endured the disappointment of all the rest of it; but to go back to the barnlike old theater in Main Street, wedged between movies and tinsel acrobats, was too much. To [5] ]hear the wagging tongues and see the wagging heads of those who had warned her two years ago that New York was a pit of the devil; to let them see that even his satanic majesty had let her sink into oblivion, was more than she could bear.