THE AARDVARK FOLLIES
starring CASSIUS Q. AARDVARK with RUBIN, OLGA and KETANYA SCHWARTZ, MILTON BERLE, LAURENCE OLIVIER, LIONEL BIRDBATH and others
an extravaganza to out-ganza all extras!! STANDING ROOM ONLY
How d'y'like that? SRO signs up, and we hadn't even opened yet!
Well, when that curtain rose and the Aardvark came out on the backs of seventy raging rhinocerii, the crowd went into fits. And when the Schwartz girls danced the dance of the 8-1/2 x 11 Kleenex, you could have sworn that the rafters would buckle. And when Rubin did his imitation of the president (Oh that imitation of Mamie!), the Garden sounded as though 12 billion Zulus were singing, "TIDE'S in, Smirtz out."
Thirteen weeks went by with two shows a day except when Cassy got tired, and the money was rolling in. We had to save a box seat each night for Impelliterri, otherwise the cops would have closed us down. It wasn't exactly blackmail, I don't blame him a bit, that was one helluva show.
However, all good things must come to an end.
We had signed on a pair of kids named ... uh ... what in the ... oh yeah—yeah, that's it, Martin, for some fill-in stuff 'tween acts (we had to let 'em go eventually. We found 'em carrying on with one of the hat-check girls name of Monroe, or something. Oh well.) and Cass had taken off a week to go down to Monte Carlo for some sun and air. That year, the rage of the Riviera were two three-headed girls named Sally Louise Lee Munglefootz and Gertrude Alice Roberta Hitslongle (they called them SLL and GAR for short), and when they saw Cassius....
Well, it went on for three gay, mad days till I sent a wire back to New York to tell Olga and Ketanya to get down to le ville de mazuma to save Cass-boy from what might develop into a septangle.
SLL and GAR were entertaining Cass at a party one night, drinking borscht from his sneakers, when who should drop in through a skylight from a DC-6 but the Schwartz sisters who immediately began laying about them with a pair of two-handed broadswords. Fifteen minutes and ninety gallons of blood later the place was cleared of all sentience save Cass, myself, the Schwartz girls, and a drunken cockroach (something familiar about that boy) who immediately staggered to the seashore, fell in and was poisoned to death.