Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

I don’t remember the streetcar ride from downtown Valley Junction to downtown Des Moines; I don’t remember the marquee. We must have bought tickets at the booth outside; we certainly had to climb the stairs to the balcony. Still, I remember the day as though Hattie smuggled me inside, wrapped in her coat, until the moment we stepped into the house of the Des Moines Orpheum.

Ribbons and ribbons of gold, and velvet, and silk cord. The seats were pink velveteen. I grabbed Hattie’s arm, dizzy with the real perspective of the distance and the forced perspective of the railings and sloping floor. Beyond and below the balcony, more seats. The drawn curtains were darker pink; on the ceiling painted angels were made modest by floating scraps of fabric. Gap-mouthed organ pipes stood against the wall to the right of the stage. I thought of a jewelry box my mother owned, with a celluloid ballerina who popped up when you lifted the lid, and just at that moment — as though the building itself could read my mind — the organist appeared on a platform, rising from the orchestra pit, and began to play.

“From up here we’ll be able to see everything,” Hattie explained. She unfolded a seat for me.

I sat. “A movie?”

She put a gloved hand on my neck to shush me.

While people around us took their seats, the organist descended, still playing, and a troupe of five Oriental acrobats began to fling themselves around onstage in time to the music. First just grown-ups, who I took to be siblings. The tallest acrobat sprung offstage and then sprung back carrying two carpetbags, and then someone in the wings threw him a third, which he caught and set down next to the others in one swinging motion. He undid the brass buckles — in my head I can still hear them ping, though maybe the house percussionist simply struck the triangle — opened them up, and out stepped the contents: a medium-sized child, a small child, and a child so tiny it seemed like a trick, a dog in a toddler suit. Applause. The Fujiyama Japs, the program called them. Somehow, they made the way they tossed each other around seem like good manners. Pass the salt, pass the potatoes, pass the twelve-year-old, pass the baby, thank you, don’t mention it. At any moment, they might have started flinging each other into the audience. Would you like the baby? Here, sir. Hand him along the row when you’re done.

“Vaudeville,” Hattie whispered in my ear, as though that explained everything.

That one act would have been enough. But the acrobats were followed by a singer, a shrunk-down version of a play about a crooked politician, a dog act, a man who folded paper in complicated ways, a stout lady who sang about the man she loved who then pulled her hair right off her head — she was a man herself! — a comedy trio, a pair of eccentric dancers who weren’t the Fujiyamas but not bad either: they were brother and sister, which made sense when you watched them roughhouse in time to the music. While they danced they were effortless, but they panted like spaniels when they took their bows. (We did not see a young comic from Boston named Rocky Carter, though years later this myth would slip into my official biography: bitten by show-biz bug, aged ten, when he saw his future partner perform at the Des Moines Orpheum . Rocky started that rumor.) I don’t remember who the headliner was that afternoon, but my favorite act was a girl who came out on a horse and warbled a song (I’ve never heard it since) called “My Navaho Love.” All I knew was a horse inside a theater was the most astounding thing I’d ever seen, though outside I didn’t care for them one way or the other.

Most city boys of my generation were brought up on vaude. Not me. A whole lifetime, it seemed to me then, wasted. Real people on a stage, just for us! My older sisters remembered life before the movies, had seen silent film for the first time projected on the side of a building in downtown Vee Jay, the actors made haggard by bricks, and a miracle. Me, I believed in the Nabob Theater the way I believed in any geographic phenomenon. Who had installed the Raccoon River, two blocks away? God, and then He thought the place could use a movie palace too. (No doubt when Noah filled his Ark some years later, he made sure to include among his couples one straight man, one comic, who’d try to get through the door at the top of the gangplank at the same time, when even the elephants knew better.) I knew all about moving pictures: the people in them only mimed singing, and there was never a chance, when you came back the next day, that a dancer could slip or a dog jump from the stage or a girl on a horse notice a dark-haired boy in the balcony, and address a verse up there, to the rafters.

When the Indian Maid lifted her arms in the air at the end of the song, I thought I could see, just under the arch of her armpits, a margin of white skin between the brown of her body makeup and her sand-colored buckskin costume. I wanted to get up close, so I could count the beads on her bodice.

Afterward, Hattie asked me who my favorite was. We were back in the real world, Des Moines, walking streets called Walnut and Mulberry and Grand . The sun had come out just in time to set. Already I wanted to run back to the theater, set up camp on one of the velveteen seats. I thought it was the only place in the world like that. Vaudeville , Hattie had said, and I thought that vaudeville meant only this one theater with this particular handful of performers on this solitary afternoon. Had I understood, I might have died of pleasure, there on Grand Avenue on the afternoon of my tenth birthday.

“I liked the Indian girl,” I said.

Hattie snorted. “Her? She’s no more Indian than I am.”

“I liked her,” I said, aware of my treachery.

The day had gotten too warm for Hattie’s fur hat, so she gave it to me to carry. Behind us, the sun bounced off the gold dome of the State Capitol building. “I think I’ll be a dancer,” Hattie said. Then she took the hat back from me, and stopped.

“Hmmm,” she said. She set her hat on my head, then angled it rakishly — she had to hook it on my ears so it wouldn’t fall down around my nose. “What will you be?”

I felt transformed by my new headgear, foreign, ursine, despite my own everyday noggin underneath. Well, wasn’t that the point? Like the man who sang dressed as a woman. Except I knew the right answer as I looked at Hattie. A sister-and-brother act, and Hattie couldn’t sing. She tilted her head in the same direction that she’d tilted my hat. “A dancer,” I said. “Me too.”

“We’ll have to practice,” she said, and I said, “Sharp and Sharp.”

“Sharp and Sharper,” she answered. “Partners?”

My first contract.

The Comic Baby

Comedians rarely have happy childhoods. Cue the violins: they should be whining “Laugh, Clown, Laugh” right about now.

For instance: Rocky. All of his childhood stories were about brands of misery, even when presented as high slapstick. He was, he said, the only child of college professors in Boston, and he’d worked in various capacities in burlesque houses from the time he was eleven. His first burley house was the Old Howard in Boston’s Scollay Square, where he’d been allowed to occasionally touch the dancers, a gift he described so vividly I could feel it: small hand on a big thigh, half your palm on stocking and half on skin, your middle finger ticking along the border like a metronome, not being able to decide which version of leg you liked better.

When he drank, Rocky would speak fondly of the women he met then. Sometimes he made it sound as though he’d slept with plenty; sometimes he claimed his cheeks had permanent slap-burn, so clumsy and sudden were his advances. A childhood in a burlesque house! I was skeptical.