Harry Warren
A major example of a typical Hollywood songwriter was the prolific Harry Warren, who was always defined as "a Hollywood movie songwriter." Warren lived from 1893 to 1981, and thus he was born right alongside movies and died about the time the musical genre lost steam. Although he did work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, the majority of his composting was done in Hollywood. The job of a Hollywood studio composer involved musical collaboration. Warren worked with more lyricists than any other songwriter: Al Dubin, Johnny Mercer, Mack Gordon, Dorothy Fields, Ira Gershwin, Gus Kahn, Arthur Freed, Ralph Blane, and Leo Robin among them. Warren's career solidified into a steady run of lifetime employment after he teamed with Dubin in 1933 for 42nd Street. Dubin was already an established lyricist, having written such hits as "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" and Painting the Clouds with Sunshine" (both with composer Joe Burke.) (He had also written one of my favorite lyrics for a Sammy Fain song: "Nobody Knows What a Red-Headed Mama Can Do.") Warren and Dubin were well suited to each other, and they were responsible for four hits from 42nd Street: "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me," "Young and Healthy," "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," and the title song. After 42nd Street, Warren and Dubin were a Warner Bros. team, and Warren took up permanent residence in California despite his dislike of Hollywood. ("It looked like a small town in South Dakota.")
Harry Warren's work defines what movie songs could and should do. In his formative years, he had played drums in a traveling carnival show, where he learned how to write a rat-a-tat rhythm with a staccato sound that worked well for tap-dancing numbers. His music was a film editor's dream because his rhythms could be matched by cutting on the beat, songs like "Chattanooga Choo Choo" or "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" (both with lyrics by Mack Gordon). His music didn't sound like the Ruritanian world of crinolines and cavaliers; it evoked images of modern America, with its zing and sass and slang, perfect for movies. Although his music is often described with words such as "melodious" and "harmonious," what he really put forth was a forward-moving line, much like the narrative of a good movie story. Warren's tunes could be set to lyrics that sounded like dialogue coming out of the mouths of real people, and audiences responded to the immediacy generated by his songs. From 1932 to 1957 - over two and half decades - Warren wrote Hollywood musicals, moving from studio to studio: Warners in the 1930s, Fox in the 1940s, MGM in the fifties, and Paramount in his last five years of active work. He wrote over 250 songs in his lifetime, and fifty of them became standards. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) lists Harry Warren as the seventh-highest ranking originator of American songs in the earnings category. The famous radio show "Your Hit Parade" (which ran from 1935 to 1953 on radio) ranked forty-two of Warren's songs in its top-ten list - Irving Berlin had just thirty-three. And yet Harry Warren is not a well-known name like Berlin, Cole Porter or George Gershwin (He once said, "Even my best friends don't know who I am"). Because he was mostly a studio employee, his music was an assignment. (He was featured in a 1933 Vitaphone short under the grand title Harry Warren, America Foremost Composer. In a brief nine minutes, he was seen performing some of his own compositions, among them "Forty-Second Street" and "You're My Everything." ) His job might need him to write for someone who was not a great singer ... or someone who couldn't sing at all but would need to look believable when lip-syncing in close-up who would be acting the song as part of the plot and characterization at that moment in the film ... or who was a famous star with a persona that had to be served. Movie composing was in service of a system. One of Warner's most successful songs, "You'll Never Know," was specially written for Alice Faye's style and voice, but since it was a World War II release, also for the mood of the audience. However, the film in which it would appear, "Hello, Frisco, Hello", was set in 1908, so Warren had to write music that could be modern, with a wartime sense of loss and yearning, and still seem appropriate to 1908. He had to juggle narrative meaning, star power, time period, and the need to sell sheet music to the audience.
When Warren arrived at Fox, he was assigned the task of writing for Carmen Miranda, who sang in Portuguese. His understanding of rhythm was perfect for Miranda because the construction of her music required a different beat, one from a Brazilian/Portuguese musical tradition. Miranda was fussy about her music and knew what she could do and what would work for her. She had her own backup group (her Bando da Luz, musicians who had accompanied her from Brazil). Warren cooperated with her, accepting her ideas and loving her band. "It was a joy to listen to them," he said. "They had such humor and gusto. They played with such vitality." Warren understood that Miranda, her music, and her band were about having fun; they were visually exciting, energetic, and empathic. His job was not to interfere with that but to accept it - a decision a Hollywood composer had to make to succeed.
Interview with harry at
Jeanine Basinger "The Movie Musical" (2019)
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The West Virginia Senate has a message for nearby Frederick County, Va. - join us. In the Civil War, West Virginia broke off from Virginia to join the Union. Now a West Virginia senator says he thinks the county could still vote to become part of Virginia. It has been 158 years, mind you. A Frederick County official shut down the idea, telling the Herald-Mail paper, basically, they're just not that into West Virginia.
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pryor Rummage Sale Ranger
At the later talent shows, perhaps because he had more time to extend himself and perhaps because he drew on his recent work with the Youth Theater Guild, Richard started taking on characters more fully. He did "impressions" of well-known figures from the community, and the audience howled in recognition of how Richard captured their quirks and body language. His favorite character, though, was an invention of his own: a black superhero too poor to buy his own suit, who went to rummage sales and put one together out of used pantyhose, a cape (which he stole), and a pair of shoes that were clownishly large: "The Rummage Sale Ranger." Like Juliette Whittaker, who built her stage out of tossed-out orange crates, the Rummage Sale Ranger made an art out of making do. He was the comic book hero of Richard's imagination and a mirror for everything he adored about the improvisational spirit of Juliette.
Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014)
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During my childhood, a neighbor had a little china plate hanging in the living room that read "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no sense in making a fool of yourself." When it came to my aborted singing career, I didn't bother to try again. I skipped right ahead to the quit, a choice I continue to regret. Rather than analyze my mistakes, I gave up and buried an ambition.
What I should have done was prepare to win, power through, and, if I truly couldn't do it, embrace the failure, then figure out how to become better. A central tenet to success is to show up again and again and again - to take an alternate approach, and keep at it until it works. And when we show up, act boldly, and practice the best ways to be wrong, we fail forward. No matter here we end up, we've grown from where we began.
Stacey Abrams "Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change" (2018)
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Purple Death
What started for millions around the globe as muscle aches and a fever ended days later with many victims bleeding from their nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. Some bled inside their eyes; some bled around them. They vomited blood and coughed it up. Purple blood blisters appeared on their skin.
The Chief of the Medical Services, Major Walter V. Brem, described the horror at the time in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He wrote that "often blood was seen to gush from a patient's nose and mouth." In some cases, blood reportedly spurted with such force as to squirt several feet. "When pneumonia appeared," Major Brem recounted, "the patients often spat quantities of almost pure blood." They were bleeding into their lungs.
As victims struggled to clear their airways of the bloody froth that poured from their lungs, their bodies started to turn blue from the lack of oxygen, a condition known as violaceous heliotrope cyanosis. "They're as blue as huckleberries and spitting blood," one New York City physician told a colleague. U.S. Army medics noted that this was "not the dusky pallid blueness that one is accustomed to in failing pneumonia, but rather [a] deep blueness ... an indigo blue color." The hue was so dark that one physician confessed that "it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white." "It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes," recalled another physician, "and it is simply a struggle for air until they suftocate. They drowned in their own bloody secretions."
"It wasn't always that quick, either," one historian adds. "And along the way, you had symptoms like fingers and genitals turning black, and people reporting being able to literally smell the body decaying before the patient died." "When you're ill like that you don't care," recalls one flu survivor, now 100 years old. "You don't care if you live or die."
Major Brem described an autopsy: "Frothy, bloody serum poured from the nose and mouth when the body was moved, or the head lowered .... Pus streamed from the trachea when the lungs were removed." Fellow autopsy surgeons discussed what they called a "pathological nightmare," with lungs up to six times their normal weight, looking "like melted red currant jelly." An account published by the National Academies of Science describes the lungs taken from victims as "hideously transformed" from light, buoyant, air-filled structures to dense sacks of bloody fluid.
There was one autopsy finding physicians reported having never seen before. As people choked to death, violently coughing up as much as two pints of yellow-green pus per day, their lungs would sometimes burst internally, forcing air under pressure up underneath their skin. In the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, a British physician noted "one thing that I have never seen before - namely the occurrence of subcutaneous emphysema" - pockets of air accumulating just beneath the skin - "beginning in the neck and spreading sometimes over the whole body." These pockets of air leaking from ruptured lungs made patients crackle when they rolled onto their sides. In an unaired interview filmed for a PBS American Experience documentary on the 1918 pandemic, one Navy nurse compared the sound to a bowl of Rice Krispies. The memory of that sound - the sound of air bubbles moving under people's skin - remained so vivid that for the rest of her life, she couldn't be in a room with anyone eating that popping cereal.
"[A] dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead; a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination." -Albert Camus, The Plague
In 1918, half the world became infected and 25% of all Americans fell ill. Unlike the regular seasonal flu, which tends to kill only the elderly and infirm, the flu virus of 1918 killed those in the prime of life. Public health specialists at the time noted that most influenza victims were those who "had been in the best of physical condition and freest from previous disease." Ninety-nine percent of excess deaths were among people under 65 years o1d. Mortality peaked in the 20- to 34-year-old age group. Women under 35 accounted for 70% of all female influenza deaths. In 1918, the average life expectancy in the United States dropped precipitously to only 37 years.
Calculations made in the 1920s estimated the global death toll in the vicinity of 20 million, a figure medical historians now consider "almost ludicrously low. The number has been revised upwards ever since, as more and more records are unearthed. The best estimate currently stands at 50 to 100 million people dead. In some communities, like in Alaska, 50% of the population perished.
The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more people in a single year than the bubonic plague ("black death") in the Middle Ages killed in a century. The 1918 virus killed more people in 25 weeks than AIDS has killed in 25 years. According to one academic reviewer, this "single, brief epidemic generated more fatalities, more suffering, and more demographic change in the United States than all the wars of the Twentieth Century?"
In September 1918, according to the official published AMA account, the deadliest wave of the pandemic spread over the world "like a tidal wave." On the 11th Washington officials disclosed that it had reached U.S. shores. September 11, 1918 - the day Babe Ruth led the Boston Red Sox to victory in the World Series - three civilians dropped dead on the sidewalks of neighboring Quincy, Massachusetts. It had begun.
When a "typical outbreak" struck Camp Funston in Kansas, the commander, a physician and former Army Chief of Staff, wrote the governor, "There are 1440 minutes in a day. When I tell you there were 1440 admissions in a day, you realize the strain put on our Nursing and Medical forces .... " "Stated briefly," summarized an Army report, "the influenza ... occurred as an explosion."
October 1918 became the deadliest month in U.S. history. and the last week of October was the deadliest week from any cause, at any time. More than 20,000 Americans died in that week alone. Numbers, though, cannot reflect the true horror of the time.
"They died in heaps and were buried in heaps." -Daniel Defoe, 1665
One survivor remembers the children. "We had little caskets for the little babies that stretched for four and five blocks, eight high, ten high." Soon, though, city after city ran out of caskets. People were dying faster than carpenters could make them. The dead lay in gutters. One agonized official in the stricken East sent an urgent warning West: "Hunt up your wood-workers and set them to making coffins. Then take your street laborers and set them to digging graves." When New York City ran out of gravediggers, they had to follow Philadelphia's example and use steam shovels to dig trenches for mass graves. Even in timber-rich Sweden, the dead were interred in cardboard boxes or piled in mass graves because they simply ran out of nails.
Another survivor recalls: "A neighbor boy about seven or eight died and they used to just pick you up and wrap you up in a sheet and put you in a patrol wagon. So the mother and father are screaming, 'Let me get a macaroni box" - macaroni, any kind of pasta, used to come in this box, about 20 pounds of macaroni fit in it - "please, please let me put him in a macaroni box, don't take him away like that.. .. "
One nurse describes bodies "stacked in the morgue from floor to ceiling like cordwood. At the peak of the epidemic, she remembers toe-tagging and wrapping more than one still-living patient in winding sheets, In her nightmares, she wondered, "what it would feel like to be that boy who was at the bottom of the cordwood in the morgue."
They brought out their dead. Corpses were carted away in anything, wheelbarrows - even garbage trucks. Often, though, the bodies were just pushed into corners and left to rot for days. People too sick to move were discovered lying next to corpses.
All over the country, farms and factories shut down and schools and churches closed. Homeless children wandered the streets, their parents vanished. The New York Health Commissioner estimated that in New York City alone, 21,000 children lost both parents to the pandemic.
Around the world, millions were left widowed and orphaned. The New York Times described Christmas in Tahiti. "It was impossible to bury the dead," a Tahitian government official noted. "Day and night trucks rumbled throughout the streets filled with bodies for the constantly burning pyres." When firewood to burn the bodies ran out in India, the rivers became clogged with corpses. In the remote community of Okak, in northern Labrador, an eight-year-old girl reportedly survived for five weeks at 20 below zero - among the corpses of her family. She kept herself alive by melting snow for water with the last of her Christmas candles while she lay listening to the sound of dogs outside feasting off the dead. Colonel Victor Vaughan, acting Surgeon General of the Army and former head of the AMA, lived through the pandemic. "If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration," Vaughan wrote in 1918, "civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth."
But the virus did stop. It ran out of human fuel; it ran out of accessible people to infect. Those who lived through it were immune to reinfection, so many populations were, in many respects, either immune or dead. "[I]t's like a firestorm," one expert explained. "[I]t sweeps through and it has so many victims and the survivors developed Immunity?"
Influenza is "transmitted so effectively," reads one virology textbook, "that it exhausts the supply of susceptible hosts."
As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began. As Arno Karlen wrote in Man and Microbes, "Many Americans know more about mediaeval plague than about the greatest mass death in their grandparents' lives." Commentators view the pandemic as so traumatic that it had to be forced out of our collective memory and history. "I think it's probably because it was so awful while it was happening, so frightening," one epidemiologist speculates, "that people just got rid of the memory"
For many, however, the virus lived on. As if the pandemic weren't tragic enough, in the decade that followed, a million people came down with a serious Parkinson's-like disease termed "encephalitis lethargica," the subject of the book and movie Awakenings. Some researchers now consider this epidemic of neurological disease to be "almost certainly" a direct consequence of viral damage to the brains of survlvors.i" The latest research goes a step further to suggest the pandemic had ripples throughout the century, showing that those in utero at the height of the pandemic in the most affected areas seemed to have stunted lifespans and lifelong physical disability.
"This is a detective story. Here was a mass murderer that was around 80 years ago and who's never been brought to justice. And what we're trying to do is find the murderer." Jeffery Taubenberger, molecular pathologist and arche-virologist
Where did this disease come from? Popular explanations at the time included a covert German biological weapon, the foul atmosphere conjured by the war's rotting corpses and mustard gas, or "spiritual malaise due to the sins of war and materialism. This was before the influenza virus was discovered, we must remember, and is consistent with other familiar etymological examples - malaria was contracted from mal and aria ("bad air") or such quaintly preserved terms as catching "a cold" and being "under the weather." The committee set up by the American Public Health Association to investigate the 1918 outbreak could only speak of a "disease of extreme communicabillty." Though the "prevailing disease is generally known as influenza," they couldn't even be certain that this was the same disease that had been previously thought of as such. As the Journal of the American Medical Association observed in October 1918, "The 'influence' in influenza is still veiled in mystery.
In the decade following 1918, thousands of books and papers were written on influenza in a frenzied attempt to characterize the pathogen. One of the most famous medical papers of all time, Alexander Fleming's "On the Antibacterial Actions of Cultures of Penicillium," reported an attempt to isolate the bug that caused influenza. The full title was "On the Antibacterial Actions of Cultures of Penicillium, with Special Reference to Their Use in the Isolation of B. Influenzae." Fleming was hoping he could use penicillin to kill off all the contaminant bystander bacteria on the culture plate so he could isolate the bug that caused influenza. The possibility of treating humans with penicillin was mentioned only in passing at the end of the paper.
The cause of human influenza was not found until 1933, when a British research team finally isolated and identified the viral culprit. What they discovered, though, was a virus that caused the typical seasonal flu. Scientists still didn't understand where the flu virus of 1918 came from or why it was so deadly. It would be more than a half-century before molecular biological techniques would be developed and refined enough to begin to answer these questions; but by then where would researchers find 1918 tissue samples to study the virus?
According to the editor of the medical journal Virology, Koen's views were decidedly unpopular, especially among pig farmers who feared that customers "would be put off from eating pork if such an association was made." It was never clear, though, whether the pigs were the culprits or the victims. Did we infect the pigs or did they infect us?
With the entire genome of the 1918 virus in hand thanks to Hultin's expedition, Taubenberger was finally able to definitively answer the Holy Grail question posed by virologists the world over throughout the century: Where did the 1918 virus come from? The answer, published in October 2005, is that humanity's greatest killer appeared to come from avian influenza - bird flu.
Evidence now suggests that all pandemic influenza viruses - in fact all human and mammalian flu viruses in general - owe their origins to avian influenza. Back in 1918, schoolchildren jumped rope to a morbid little rhyme: "I had a little bird,/Its name was Enza./I opened the window,/And In-flu-enza."! The children of 1918 may have been more prescient than anyone dared imagine.
Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)
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Allons enfants de la Patrie
Allons enfants de la Patrie
(Rouget de Lisle - 'La Marseillaise')
I had this nasty experience a year ago in a trousers shop. It was just
off the Kensington High Street. It was a modern shop, which I hadn't
realized.
When I took the selected trousers in to change them, to try them on,
they didn't have a proper closing to the changing room. They had a pair
of extremely inadequate, sort of cowboy saloon doors, about eighteen
inches deep. I don't know what the height of the normal trouser
tryer-onner but it's not six feet six which I am. And the vulnerable
area was in grave danger.
For obvious things, I suddenly realized I couldn't . . .if I wore thick
socks I would have been arrested.
Do you realize you have to bob down to take your trousers off and put
new ones on. I couldn't.
Then the awful thing was when I was struggling in there, suddenly with
mounting horror I realized that it was a bi-sexual place. There were
WOMEN in there, sitting down and looking vaguely in my direction.
Eventually I staggered out. I obviously had to have a sit-down. I had
a come-over. The nerves were twanging.
And I was lying there with the eyes closed, a voice said, "You don't
look too well. I can place on the hands. I cure things by just placing
my hands on them and then I think to myself, "Allons enfants de la
patrie." And some surge of spirit in my fingertips and my fingertips
tremble. And whoever I'm touching and caressign is cured.
He sat down beside me and said, "My card."
And it said Alonzo de Quincy.
I said, "What do you cure? Do you cure people?"
He said, "Not yet. I haven't cured people. I was hoping for a
breakthrough with you. My Auntie Ethel's glad."
I said, "I would think, no doubt she would be."
He said, "No no no. Glad glad, her gladioli. Auntie's glad was all
wilting. And I looked at it and Allons enfants de la patrie. Tinkle
tinkle tinkle went the fingertips. I stroked it. It was lovely lovely.
She could have won a prize at the Chelsea Flower Show with it."
I said, "Well, thank you for the card, Mr. Alonzo de Quincy. Should I
ever need you. . . "
This was about a year ago. and by heavens suddenly this morning we
needed him. We've had a terrible year. Don't know about you.
DISASTROUS year in the garden. It started out with the front gate
getting Dutch Elm Disease. It was. The white paint turned yellow and
the top bar sort of crumbled away, which is a symptom of Dutch Elm
Disease, in which it dies from the top. Then all all the roses along
side the drive suffered from the flu. When we got all the central
heating and the flu is just by the roses. And the oil sort of dried and
fell down by them and they all sort of died off.
And the LAWN, very peculiar, happened to during the summer with the
lawn. Round about sort of July when things are usually growing rather
fiercely, my wife said, "Do you realize we haven't cut the lawn for
seven weeks? It's not growing. It's got that new mown look. Do you
realize what that lawn's suffering from? Newmownia. It didn't grow.
It just set there and went brown."
But the worst was our pears. We've got this fantastic old pear tree.
And when these are really ripe the whole NEIGHBORHOOD gathers, BUT this
year awful mottled leaves. No pears. Little sort of round things with
spots.
My wife said, "It thinks it's a cranapple tree."
I said, "That pear tree's had a nervous breakdown. Of all things."
She said, "Well, we could never fail it now."
I said, "YES. There is just a chance in a million. A year ago I met a
man who I think could do this. I've got his card somewhere. I rushed
upstairs to the suit I wore when I went to town. Rather turned up &
buttons. There was his card. Alonzo de Quincy. Layer-Oner of Hands. No
address. So, my only hope is that he's listening tonight. So Mr. de
Quincy, if you are listening tonight. Please, please will you react
just once more to that stirring call which does so well: Alonzo, fondle
our pear-tree!"
Frank Muir
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Even as he kept working on the second-act Anatevka extravaganza, Robbins was quietly preparing what no one dreamed the show needed: another first-act dance number. The wedding celebration featured some embellished horas and then Perchik's city dance. And the inn scene's "L'Chaim," with its athletic feats and comic contrast of Jewish and Russian styles, more than sufficed as a crowd pleaser. Why couldn't Robbins leave well enough alone?
Simple. He could not forget "Mr. Redbeard," the man performing a flashen-tantz at the weddings he had visited as part of his fieldwork, and the men's revelry in the homosocial Orthodox world, where, "without any constructing elements except a rudimentary rhythm and an avid impulse to express their communal joy-the men stomped, kicked, hit the floor and tossed their arms about, flung their bodies around." Back in March, when Robbins had written to the authors with the long list of changes he expected them to make to the script and score, he offered only one unqualified declaration of enthusiasm: "The wedding scene is going to be wonderful, I think." Robbins knew an occasion for an elaborate production number when he saw one; less than two weeks from the Broadway debut, he had not yet finished turning the original story's lean mention of the wedding into a showstopper.
As a teenager performing in Maurice Schwartz's production of Di brider ashkenazi, Robbins had seen up close how a staged wedding could combine ceremonial dignity and theatrical fireworks. Eight or nine times a week, for nearly six months, Robbins took part as a supernumerary in the Yiddish play's marriage scene. Robbins doesn't mention the solemn, lavishly staged nuptials (or anything else about the production) in his notes and letters on Fiddler, but Schwartz's savvy showmanship could not have failed to make an impression. Beyond the spectacle, Fiddler's wedding scene carried forward an impulse that had made Jewish weddings a staple on the Yiddish American stage: they permitted immigrant audiences to maintain, through a secular form, pleasurable ties to ritual practices they may have left behind. At a further remove - over the distance of time and historical catastrophe, as well as geography - the Jews in Fiddler's audiences could lay claim to such a tie, even as the vigor of the dancing refuted the shame that may have been associated with it: the choreography debunked the common stereotype of weak, effeminate male Jews, so recently accused of having gone like sheep to the slaughter.
Coming right in the middle of Fiddler, the wedding scene would be central in more ways than one. In thoroughly theatrical terms it makes the show's essential gesture in a brilliant confluence of form and theme. It provides a fond and historically authentic representation of a traditional wedding ceremony - the chuppah, bride's veil, ring placed on the index finger, stomped-on glass, and so on - and swathes it, musically, in an American sensibility. Visually, the scene goes (to borrow key words from the Jewish ceremony) according to the laws of Moses; aurally, it goes according to the heartstring tugs of Tin Pan Alley. Fittingly a waltz, the song Tevye and Golde sing over the action - the tune that had made Bock's wife cry in their Westchester basement when he and Harnick first played it early in their work on the show - lilts with the thoroughly universal wistfulness of parents wondering, "When did she get to be a beauty, when did he grow to be so tall? Wasn't it yesterday when they were small?" Robbins was tempted to cut the song. He couldn't see how to stage it. What are Tevye and Golde doing? he needed to know. Bock and Harnick took turns stating the obvious: "Just have them sing it." For once - and crucially - they prevailed.
No one in the company knew about the late-night work sessions Robbins had conducted with Tommy Abbott and Betty Walberg during the weeks in Detroit, trying out choreographic ideas that Abbott kept track of. And though sometimes Sandra Kazan arrived early to rehearsal and caught Robbins onstage, clad in khakis and a white T-shirt, silently sketching out moves with his body, she had no idea what they were for. So the male dancers could not fathom why they were suddenly called for a 10:00 a.m. rehearsal in the theater lobby in Washington a week into their run there. Many who did not have demanding parts in the "L'Chaim" dance had long figured that nothing taxing was being asked of them and had stopped keeping up a daily workout routine.
Robbins didn't say much by way of explanation when the dozen men assembled in the carpeted lobby¡¤ "This is the dance at the wedding to entertain the bride and groom. Here we go." He showed the troupe some steps - walking in a circle with some bounce in the knees, to begin - and then passed out glass bottles and told the dancers to put on yarmulkes and do the steps again with the bottles on their heads. One by one, the bottles thudded onto the carpet. Robbins instructed the men to try again. And again. Sammy Bayes finally made his way through the sequence, but the movement looked so tentative and stiff as he used all his energy to concentrate on not dropping the bottle that Robbins finally allowed the men to put on hats. But he permitted no tricks - no holes cut into the crowns, no Velcro. He wanted the audience to feel the tension - for the sheer theatrical thrill as well as for the emotional echo of the precarious eponymous fiddler trying to scratch out a tune without breaking his neck. The dancers definitely felt it. Bodin wasn't the only one "scared shitless": all the men knew they would be dancing on a wooden stage and that the choreography called for some of them to slide across the floor on their knees. Glass splinters were not an option.
But the more they practiced, the more undemanding the bottle balancing seemed - standard for those who had stayed in shape and were used to "pulling up" into the dancer's efficient posture of tucked-in pelvis and lifted rib cage. Robbins selected for the role four men who found the trick easy enough to be able to make it appear arduous. Then he showed the group the next section, which most of the rest of the corps would join, featuring far more difficult moves - "whips and hooks," Robbins called them, body flings that required quick twists and jumps and changes of direction. "You're working yourself into a state of joy," he told the men. Within a couple of hours - like magic, to Prince, who watched part of the rehearsal - the men absorbed the choreography. That afternoon, Robbins called a "put-in" rehearsal. The entire cast played through the wedding scene and they burst into applause - and some into tears - when they saw the new number for the first time. That night it went into the show.
It's impossible to know exactly what moves Robbins took from Mr. Redbeard's frolics or from the communal cavorting among the men at Orthodox weddings, but certainly Robbins embellished on what he observed. Years earlier, when choreographing "The Small House of Uncle Thomas" - the second-act ballet in The King and I - Robbins hit a dead end trying to create authentic Siamese dance, despite his extensive research into the genre. Only when Richard Rodgers urged him to take some license with the movement vocabulary was he able to break through his inhibition and devise an exciting fourteen-minute dance drama that conveyed Thainess with its cocked legs, flexed feet and wrists, and wide-stance demiplies but that actually borrowed from the Balinese legong dance, Peking opera, Japanese Bunraku and Kabuki, and Cambodian dance - as well as from Martha Graham and, most important, from Robbins's own imagination. In the "Bottle Dance," Robbins similarly captured the spirit of the original by maintaining some essential elements-balanced bottle, arms pumping heavenward, the group in a frenzy-and then built on them with sheer choreographic ingenuity and showbiz panache.
Having seen one man pretending to totter drunkenly, flexing his knees and flicking his wrists, Robbins begins by doubling the spectacle: two men gently pulse their legs, twirl their hands, turn a full circle, and, maintaining their ramrod posture, sink to the floor, then spring back to full height. Pacing each other and clasping right hands, they repeat the moves, punctuating them with some formalized handclaps and slow leg swings. Next, Robbins doubles the stakes again, arraying four men balancing bottles in a lateral line, holding hands at head height. To the stately beat of the score's most klezmer-inflected music, featuring a trilling clarinet and a jingling tsimbl (or cimbalom, the hammered dulcimer of Eastern Europe), the men slide stage left, then stage right in a series of syncopated grapevine steps: on tiptoe, tracing a semicircle along the floor with a foot, tapping the ground with the heel, or completing a phrase with an emphatic full-foot stomp. The music crescendoes and climbs up the scale like a fanfare signaling that something magnificent is about to happen - and it does. The men back up, still maintaining their line, and lower themselves to their knees. The orchestra's horns kick in, cymbals crash, and the men thrust out the right leg at a 45-degree angle, and then pull themselves forward along that vector, gliding upon the left knee and bringing it in line with the right for a slight showy pause in a kneeling position. Then the same routine to the left, then again to the right and to the left. Finally they rise up and let their bottles drop into their hands. As the music quickens, more dancers join in, and they all break into a wild ecstasy of motion: leaning back and, as if sending a signal to the heavens, clapping hands with a circular sweep of the arms that propels them into a spin. Some swing a partner round, hands on each other's biceps, and they seem to take wing by virtue of centrifugal force. No circle dance ever looked as vehement as the brief, brawny turn they make together before lining up side by side and linking hands with crossed arms. Thus joined, they advance downstage as a mass of throbbing rhythm for the finale: they jump and whirl and land on bended knee, arms outstretched - both a gesture of devout supplication and the quintessential footlight finish, made iconic as far back as 1927 by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (playing another Rabinowitz/Robbins pulled away from Judaism by show business).
That first night the dance was performed - and forever after - the audience exploded at the end. Here was Robbins's choreographic genius radiantly on display: two and a half riveting minutes of innovative movement that revealed situation and character, fed the action, and, in its very form, encapsulated the show's ideals of Jewish revivification and cultural adaptation. Legendarily, Boris Aronson watched from the back of the house that night and at the close of the dance turned to Richard Altman and said, "Any man who can do that, I forgive everything."
Mostel was back onstage by that point and the show, having been played before audiences some forty times, had found its groove - that place where the performers have absorbed into a kind of muscle memory all their cues and technical tasks and can devote their energies to being wholly present in their fictive reality.
But Robbins was still fretting over the big chorus number at the beginning of the second act he had yet to put into the show. After a week or so of rehearsing it, he had begun to wonder whether he could really the scene with the refugee coming through town, given that it so functioned as a setup for the song and dance. And even the song like a drag on the action at a point when so much more of the story yet to unfold. Even so, the pot-and-pan-clanging dance could be the element that would bring down the house as surely as the "Bottle was doing in act 1.
Alisa Solomon "Wonder of Wonders" (2013)
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Being a high school football hero was heady stuff for young Pollard, but his life was not all touchdowns and glory. As one of the few black players in the Chicago interscholastic league, he received more than his share of verbal and physical abuse. Most opposing teams singled him out as a target for rough play, piling on, and outright illegal acts aimed at injuring him. Although his teammates did their best to protect him, they did not always succeed. After a 1911 road game against Rockford High School, the Tech Prep noted that "they were laying for Pollard up there, but they missed him." To combat the dangerous situation, Pollard used a unique tactic that during the course of his career became one of his trademarks and discouraged would-be ruffians intent upon maiming him. When tackled, he would roll over on his back, cock his legs, and flail them bicycle-style to prevent piling on. Despite this technique and the training his brothers had given him, Pollard sustained several injuries during his senior year, at least one the result of dirty play. ? John Carroll "Fritz Pollard" (1992) ?
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Though there had been some restrictions imposed by Congress, there were ways to skirt the new laws. "We can't allow companies to just keep inverting out of the United States. It's just bad. It's wrong for business. It's wrong for jobs. I'm talking against my business. We made a ton of money." ? Trump returned to printing money. "We'll just borrow," he said, enamored with the idea of heading the federal government, which had the best credit rating in the world, so they could borrow at the lowest interest rate. ? [Gary] Cohn didn't mention a report that had come out during the campaign which said the Trump Organization's business credit score was a 19 out of 100, below the national average by 30 points, and that it could have difficulty borrowing money. ? You just can't print money, Cohn said. "Why not? Why not?" ? Congress had a debt ceiling which set a cap on how much money the federal government could borrow, and it was legally binding. It was clear that Trump did not understand the way the U.S. government debt cycle balance sheet worked. ? Inflation would probably be steady. Automation was coming, Cohn said - artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics. We'll manage the labor supply more efficiently now than we ever did in the history of mankind. So look, you're in the most precarious time in terms of job losses. We now can create labor with machines. ? "If you're here eight years, you're going to deal with the automation of the automobile and truck. About 25 percent of the U.S. population makes a living driving something. Think about that." ? "What are you talking about?" Trump asked. ? With the self-driving, autonomous vehicle, millions of people are going to have to reenter the workforce in different jobs. That would be a big change and possible large disruption. ? "I want you to come to work for me," Trump said. ? "Doing what?" ? Trump mentioned deputy secretary of defense. ? "First of all, I don't want to be deputy secretary of anything," Cohn said. ? How about director of national intelligence? ? Cohn indicated no. He was not sure what the job did. He later learned it entailed overseeing the CIA and all the other intelligence agencies. ? "You trade commodities," Trump said. "Why don't you think about being secretary of Energy?" ? No interest. ? Trump tried to convince Cohn to become director of the Office of Management and Budget. ? No. Cohn knew it was a horrible job. ? "You know what?" Trump said at the end of what had become an hour-long meeting. "I hired the wrong guy for treasury secretary. You should be treasury secretary. You would be the best treasury secretary." ? Mnuchin, right there, didn't say a thing or show any reaction. "Come back and tell me what you want," Trump said. "You'd be great to have on the team. It'd be fantastic." ? Five minutes later while Cohn was still in the building, he saw a television flash breaking news: President-elect Trump has selected Steve Mnuchin as treasury secretary. ? "That's crazy," Jared said. "Mnuchin just put that out. You freaked him out so badly in the meeting." ? Bob Woodward, "Fear: Trump in the White House" (2018) ?
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Currently in humans, H5Nl is good at killing, but not at spreading. ?There are three essential conditions necessary to produce a pandemic. First, a new virus must arise from an animal reservoir, such that humans have no natural immunity to it. Second, the. virus must evolve to be capable of killing human beings efficiently. Third, the virus must succeed in jumping efficiently from one human to the next. For the virus, it's one small step to man, but one giant leap to mankind. So far, conditions one and two have been met in spades. Three strikes and we're out. If the virus triggers a human pandemic, it will not be peasant farmers in Vietnam dying after handling dead birds or raw poultry - it will be New Yorkers, Parisians, Londoners, and people in every city, township, and village in the world dying after shaking someone's hand, touching a doorknob, or simply inhaling in the wrong place at the wrong time. ? Mathematical models suggest that it might be possible to snuff out an emerging flu pandemic at the source if caught early enough, but practical considerations may render this an impossibility. Even if we were able to stamp it out, as long as the same underlying conditions remain, the virus would presumably soon pop back up again, just as it has in the past. ? This book explores what those underlying conditions are. The current dialogue surrounding avian influenza speaks of a potential H5Nl pandemic as if it were a natural phenomenon - like hurricanes, earthquakes, or even a "viral asteroid on a collision course with humanlty" - which we couldn't hope to control. The reality, however, is that the next pandemic may be more of an unnatural disaster of our own design. ? Since the mid-1970s, previously unknown diseases have surfaced at a pace unheard of in the annals of medicine - more than 30 new diseases in 30 years, most of them newly discovered viruses. The concept of "emerging infectious diseases" used to be a mere curiosity in the field of medicine; now it's an entire discipline. Where are these diseases coming from? ? According to the Smithsonian, there have been three great disease transitions in human history. The first era of human disease began thousands of years ago with the acquisition of diseases from domesticated animals, such as tuberculosis, measles, the common cold - and influenza. The second era came with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in an epidemic of the so-called "diseases of civilization," such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. We are now entering the third age of human disease, which started around 30 years ago - described by medical historians as the age of "the emerging plagues." Never in medical history have so many new diseases appeared in so short a time. An increasingly broad consensus of infectious disease specialists has concluded that nearly all of the ever more frequent emergent disease episodes in the United States and elsewhere over the past few years have, in fact, come to us from animals. Their bugs are worse than their bite. ? In poultry, bird flu has gone from an exceedingly rare disease to one that crops up every year. The number of serious outbreaks in the first few years of the 21st century has already exceeded the total number of outbreaks recorded for the entire 20th century. Bird flu seems to be undergoing evolution in fast-forward. ? The increase in chicken outbreaks has gone hand-in-hand with increased transmission to humans. A decade ago, human infection with bird flu was essentially unheard of. Since H5N1 emerged in 1997. though, chicken viruses H9N2 infected children in China in 1999 and 2003, H7N2 infected residents of New York and Virginia in 2002 and 2003, H7N7 infected people in the Netherlands in 2003, and H7N3 infected poultry workers in Canada in 2004 and a British farmer in 2006. The bird flu virus in the Dutch outbreak infected more than a thousand people. What has changed in recent years that could account for this disturbing trend? Influenza is "transmitted so effectively," reads one virology textbook, "that it exhausts the supply of susceptible hosts." ? As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began. As Arno Karlen wrote in Man and Microbes, "Many Americans know more about mediaeval plague than about the greatest mass death in their grandparents' lives."? Commentators view the pandemic as so traumatic that it had to be forced out of our collective memory and history. "I think it's probably because it was so awful while it was happening, so frightening," one epidemiologist speculates, "that people just got rid of the memory." ? For many, however, the virus lived on. As if the pandemic weren't tragic enough, in the decade that followed, a million people came down with a serious Parkinson's-like disease termed "encephalitis lethargica," the subject of the book and movie Awakenings.? Some researchers now consider this epidemic of neurological disease to be "almost certainly" a direct consequence of viral damage to the brains of survivors. The latest research goes a step further to suggest the pandemic had ripples throughout the century, showing that those in utero at the height of the pandemic in the most affected areas seemed to have stunted lifespans and lifelong physical disability. ? "This is a detective story. Here was a mass murderer that was around 80 years ago and who's never been brought to justice. And what we're trying to do is find the murderer." - Jeffery Taubenberger, molecular pathologist and arche-virologist. ? Where did this disease come from? Popular explanations at the time included a covert German biological weapon, the foul atmosphere conjured by the war's rotting corpses and mustard gas, or "spiritual malaise due to the sins of war and materialism." This was before the influenza virus was discovered, we must remember, and is consistent with other familiar etymological examples - malaria was contracted from mal and aria ("bad air") or such quaintly preserved terms as catching "a cold" and being "under the weather." The committee set up by the American Public Health Association to investigate the 1918 outbreak could only speak of a "disease of extreme communicability." Though the "prevailing disease is generally known as influenza," they couldn't even be certain that this was the same disease that had been previously thought of as such As the Journal of the American Medical Association observed in October 1918, "The 'influence' in influenza is still veiled in mystery." ? In the decade following 1918, thousands of books and papers were written on influenza in a frenzied attempt to characterize the pathogen. One of the most famous medical papers of all time, Alexander Fleming's "On the Antibacterial Actions of Cultures of Penicillium," reported an attempt to isolate the bug that caused influenza. The full title was "On the Antibacterial Actions of Cultures of Penicillium, with Special Reference to Their Use in the Isolation of B. Influenzae." Fleming was hoping he could use penicillin to kill off all the contaminant bystander bacteria on the culture plate so he could isolate the bug that caused influenza. The possibility of treating humans with penicillin was mentioned only in passing at the end of the paper. ? The cause of human influenza was not found until 1933, when a British research team finally isolated and identified the viral culprit. What they discovered, though, was a virus that caused the typical seasonal flu. Scientists still didn't understand where the flu virus of 1918 came from or why it was so deadly. It would be more than a haif-century before molecular biological techniques would be developed and refined enough to begin to answer these questions; but by then where would researchers find 1918 tissue samples to study the virus? ? The U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology originated almost 150 years ago. It came into being during the Civil War, created by an executive order from Abraham Lincoln to the Army Surgeon General to study diseases in the battlefield. It houses literally tens of millions of pieces of preserved human tissue, the largest collection of its kind in the world. This is where civilian pathologist Jeffery Taubenberger first went to look for tissue samples in the mid '90s. If he could find enough fragments of the virus he felt he might be able to decipher the genetic code and perhaps even resurrect the 1918 virus for study, the viral equivalent of bringing dinosaurs back to life in Jurassic Park. ? He found remnants of two soldiers who succumbed to the 1918 flu on the same day in September - a 21-year-old private who died in South Carolina and a 30-year-old private who died in upstate New York. Tiny cubes of lung tissue preserved in wax were all that remained. Taubenberger's team shaved off microscopic sections and started hunting for the virus using the latest advances in modern molecular biology that he himself had helped devise. They found the virus, but only in tiny bits and pieces. ? The influenza virus has eight gene segments, a genetic code less than 14,000 letters long (the human genome, in contrast, has several billion). The longest strands of RNA (the virus's genetic material) that Taubenberger could find in the soldiers' tissue were only about 130 letters long. He needed more tissue. ? The 1918 pandemic littered the Earth with millions of corpses. How hard could it be to find more samples? Unfortunately, refrigeration was essentially nonexistent in 1918, and common tissue preservatives like formaldehyde tended to destroy any trace of RNA. He needed tissue samples frozen in time. Expeditions were sent north, searching for corpses frozen under the Arctic ice. ? Scientists needed to find corpses buried below the permafrost layer, the permanently frozen layer of subsoil beneath the topsoil, which itself may thaw in the summer. ?Many teams over the years tried and failed. U.S. Army researchers excavated a mass grave near Nome, Alaska, for example, only to find skeletons. ?"Lots of those people are buried in permafrost," explained Professor Ji~hn Oxford, co-author of two standard virology texts, "but many of them were eaten by the huskies after they died. Or," he added, "before they died." ? On a remote Norwegian Island, Kirsty Duncan, a medical geographer from Canada, led the highest profile expedition in 1998, dragging 12 tons of equipment and a blue-ribbon academic team to the gravesite of seven coal miners who had succumbed to the 1918 flu. ?Years of planning and research combined with surveys using ground-penetrating radar had led the team to believe that the bodies of the seven miners had been buried deep in the eternal permafrost. ?Hunched over the unearthed coffins in biosecure space suits! the team soon realized their search was in vain. ?The miners' naked bodies, wrapped only in newspaper, lay in shallow graves above the permafrost. Subjected to thawing and refreezing over the decades, the tissue was useless. ? Nearly 50 years earlier, scientists from the University of Iowa, including a graduate student recently arrived from Sweden named Johan Hultin, had made a similar trek to Alaska with similarly disappointing results. ?In the fall of 1918, the postal carrier delivered the mail - and the flu - via dogsled to a missionary station in Brevig, Alaska. Within five days, 72 of the 80 or so missionaries lay dead. With help from a nearby Army base, the remaining eight buried the dead in a mass grave. Governor Thomas A. Riggs spent Alaska into bankruptcy caring for the orphaned children at Brevig and across the state. "I could not stand by and see our people dying like flies." ? Learning of Taubenberger's need for better tissue samples, Johan Hultin returned to Brevig a few weeks before his 73rd birthday.? Hultin has been described as "the Indiana Jones of the scientific set." In contrast to Duncan's team, which spent six months just searching for the most experienced gravediggers, Hultin struck out alone. ?Hultin was "there with a pickaxe," one colleague relates. "He dug a pit through solid ice in three days. This guy is unbelievable. It was just fantastic." ? Among the many skeletons lay a young woman whose obesity insulated her internal organs. "She was lying on her back, and on her left and right were skeletons, yet she was amazingly well preserved. I sat on an upside-down pail, amid the icy pond water and the muck and fragrance of the grave," Hultin told an interviewer, "and I thought, 'Here's where the virus will be found and shed light on the flu of 1918." He named her Lucy. A few days later, Taubenberger received a plain brown box in the mail containing both of Lucy's lungs.? As Hultin had predicted, hidden inside was the key to unlock the mystery. ? Many had assumed that the 1918 virus came from pigs. Although the human influenza virus wasn't even discovered until 1933, as early as 1919 an inspector with the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry was publishing research that suggested a role for farm animals in the pandemic. Inspector I.S. Koen of Fort Dodge, Iowa wrote: ?"The similarity of the epidemic among people and the epidemic among pigs was so close, the reports so frequent, that an outbreak in the family would be followed immediately by an outbreak among the hogs, and vice versa, as to present a most striking coincidence if not suggesting a close relation between the two conditions. It looked like "flu," and until proven it was not "flu," I shall stand by that diagnosis." ? According to the editor of the medical journal Virology, Koen's views were decidedly unpopular, especially among pig farmers who feared that customers "would be put off from eating pork if such an association was made." ?It was never clear, though, whether the pigs were the culprits or the victims. Did we infect the pigs or did they infect us? ? With the entire genome of the 1918 virus in hand thanks to Hultin's expedition, Taubenberger was finally able to definitively answer the Holy Grail question posed by virologists the world over throughout the century: Where did the 1918 virus come from? The answer, published in October 2005, is that humanity's greatest killer appeared to come from avian influenza - bird flu. ? Evidence now suggests that ALL pandemic influenza viruses - in fact all human and mammalian flu viruses in general - owe their origins to avian influenza. Back in 1918, schoolchildren jumped rope to a morbid little rhyme: "I had a little bird,/Its name was Enza/I opened the window/And In-flu-enza."!" The children of 1918 may have been more prescient than anyone dared imagine. ? The word "epidemic" comes from the Greek epi, meaning "upon," and demos, meaning "people." The word "pandemic" comes from the Greek word pandemos, meaning "upon all the people." Most outbreaks of disease are geographically confined, just like most disasters in general. Wars, famines, earthquakes, and acts of terror, for example, tend to be localized both in time and space. We look on in horror, but may not be affected ourselves. Pandemics are different. Pandemics are world-wide epidemics. They happen everywhere at once, coast to coast, and can drag on for more than a year. "With Hurricane Katrina, people opened their homes, sent checks and people found safe havens," writes a global economic strategist at a leading investment firm, but with a pandemic, "there is nowhere to turn, no safe place to evacuate." ? The word "influenza" derives from the Italian influentia, meaning "influence," reflecting a medieval belief that astrological forces were behind the annual flu season. In 1918, though, the Germans called it Blitzkatarrh. To the Siamese, it was Kai Wat Yai, The Great Cold Fever, In Hungary, it was The Black Whip. In Cuba and the Philippines, it was Trancazo, meaning "a blow from a heavy stick." In the United States, it was the Spanish Lady, or, because of the way many died, the Purple Death. ? Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)
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The cast, on the other hand, was in a shambles - actors sick, dancers injured, everyone in a state of advanced exhaustion. But from their point of view, Robbins was faring even worse: he was "having a hard time," in Kazan's generous phrase; Pendleton deemed him "in a torment"; Bodin thought he was "unraveling." Harnick cracked a joke in a discussion about a song revision, and when Robbins glared at him and snapped, "I want that lyric as soon as you can get it," Harnick remembered Sondra Lee's advice: "With the tone of his voice and the look in his eye, I thought: 'Okay. This is the time. Stay out of his way.' " ? That wasn't really an option, though. Rehearsals resumed in a hotel ballroom within hours of the troupe's arrival in Washington, while the scenery was being put in at the National Theater, and production meetings continued every night. In the absence of the Chava sequence, Robbins was still struggling to find a big production number for the second act - he thought the audience wanted one. When he renewed the notion of a company song about Anatevka, Bock and Harnick came face-to-face with their "bete noire number 2." In the first, light and humorous version, spurred by the arrival of a letter from New York, the villagers asked, "Is it really such a paradise, America? / Nothing but unhappy people go there / People who hunger for letters from where? / Anatevka, Anatevka." For bringing the action to a halt, this song was abandoned after a few performances at the Fisher. ? But Robbins clung to his desire for an act 2 wallop. Though Fiddler was successfully defying many of the conventions of a midcentury book musical - no overture, no flirty chorus girls, no reprises, no simple plot line, no happy denouement - Robbins wasn't letting go of a presumed need for a big number to start off the second half with a surge of energy and to win the sort of ovation that "Tradition," "Tevye's Dream," and "L'Chaim" were drawing in act 1. At the nightly meetings, he pushed for an occasion to put in something splashy. He liked Stein's suggestion that a refugee from another town passes through Anatevka and, on his way out, disparages the town as a "mudhole," prompting the locals to defend their home in a tuneful boast charming for its modesty. Bock and Harnick responded with a zesty song called "A Little Bit of This," which began with Golde intoning, "What does he mean, a mudhole?" and soon had Tevye chiming in: "Let him go to Minsk or Moscow or Pinsk / Let him go to America. / What does he think he'll find? / Everything is here! / Maybe not a lot / But every little thing a man could need or want we've got." They wrote two more introductory options, all three of them leading to a chorus in which the people catalog their worldly possessions: "A little bit of meat / A little bit of fish / A pot and a pan and a glass and a dish / A little bit of wood / A little bit of twine / A slice of bread and a drop of wine / All very small, small indeed / But in Anatevka, all we need." The song expressed a romantic ideal of the shtetl that Maurice Samuel and Abraham Joshua Heschel had made popular more than a decade before: that what the people lacked in material wealth they made up for in spiritual riches and communal cohesion. Though the number went through several transmutations before being fixed as the mournful hymn preceding the expelled Jews' exit, this sentiment remained at its core: both a compliment to contemporary audiences for how far they had climbed from their humble origins and a reminder of all they may have sacrificed for their achievement. ? Through the three weeks in Washington, Robbins feverishly built and rehearsed the number, bringing nearly the entire company onstage for the sort of high-energy spectacle audiences would have expected from the choreographer of West Side Story. A villager singing about a pot begins to bang on it with a ladle, another thumps a spoon against a pan, a third plinks a cup with a fork. One by one, then in twos and threes, the villagers join in the merry rhythm making with various household utensils. Some hit a table, others stomp the floor in the syncopated beat that builds and builds, until the orchestra comes in with a jaunty melody and the whole town gets caught up in this celebration of simple means. Meanwhile, the individual townspeople - the performers making use of the biographies Robbins had required them to write - present themselves in dance. The fishmonger and hatmaker hawk their wares; the street sweeper twirls in off-center turns with his broom (a bit of choreography made possible by the skills of the man in the role, the dancer Sammy Bayes). The women in the corps, having had their opportunity to dance taken away when the Chava ballet was cut, now weave through the action in a pretty, simple-looking sequence built of complicated steps. Robbins insisted that the troupe retain their bearing as villagers. "Give me klutzy!" he admonished the men. The dancing accelerated into exuberant patterns-and performers, giving him plenty of klutzy, barreled into one another during rehearsals. One of them, John C. Attle, was knocked out in a collision one day. That hardly deterred Robbins. He worked the scene every day for a week. ? Alisa Solomon "Wonder of Wonders" (2013)
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731211b A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou Omar Khayyam - 'Rubaiyat' ? I've been asked by the vicar to give some advice about young men about to be married. ? Now in 1848 Punch's advice to young men about to be married was "don't." I don't agree with this. I think young men should get married. ? If I had to choose one piece of advice, gentlemen, I would say this, that when you get married you'll find that women have an eccentric attitude towards personal hygiene.? Women expect one to bathe more than once a month. ? Now this I totally and absolutely disagree with. I think it's unhealthy and dangerous.? ? The history of baths is rather interesting. Well, it's not very interesting. I won't go into a lot of historical detail and bore you. I don't know.? I might as well ? Baths really came from the Persians like a lot of things.? Like polo and cats and markets and carpets.? The Persians invented mixed bathing.? They had men and women in the same bath. ? The next you hear of it, it cropped up in Greece with Archimedes. ?Archimedes was in the habit filling his bath right up to the rim and then leaping in.? And this slopped all over the bathroom which eventually let him to measure the amount of water which slopped over which he discovered equalled his own weight, so his discovered this principle that a body displaces its own weight in water.? And also it made the towels so wet that when he chucked it on the bath-rail it pulled the nails out in the bathroom floors, so he invented the screw. ? Bathing really started in England in Cornwall and there they used to bathe in the spring. Now we bathe or women would have you bathe every night.?? And this can be very dangerous. ? Your skin, gentlemen, before you get married, is like a Fair Isle sweater which covers you in its entirety. ?It has essential oils in it.? It's like a sort of knitted garment keeping your bones from sticking out.? And it's sort of edged around with lips to stop your mouth from fraying.? It's got some embroidery on top where your hair is.? But essentially it's a living breathing thing full of oil. ? Now if you rub over this rancid oil and acid boiled up into a cake, you destroy all these waxes and oils.? And just like a Fair Isle thing and the air can get in and your ribs will rust.? ? What you need to do is this, gentlemen, once a month, when your wife is out, strip naked.? Stand in the bath and dab yourself lightly with rain water.? It's pure water.? Just stick a jug under drain pipe of the gutter? and keep it ready. Dap yourself lightly over your salient features with a little bit of cotton wool moistened with rain water. Now nything like sort of mud or axle grease that you've got onto, you scrub vigorously with a DRY loofah.? Not damp but dry.? That will get off all the rough stuff. ? Just to tone up your whole system and get all the sort of dirty marks off, rub yourself with a circular motion with half a stale loaf.? Bread is terribly good for absorbing grease and you can use it for rubbing out pencil.? Rub yourself ALL over and this will dry off the rain water and will tone up your whole system. ? So what I'm saying, gentleman, my one piece of advice I can give to you about to be married is don't go in for this AWFUL pagan bath rubbish. Let's go back to Persia and go back to the words of that marvelous old woman who made the outsized tents, Old Ma Cohen, what you need, all nature needs to see a perfect clean and fragrant body is a jug of rain, a loofah, bread - and thou. ? --Frank Muir,? "The My Word Stories" (1977) ? Frank Muir 573b
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A second can mean so much in football. At Saturday's Iron Bowl, the
first half seemed like it was over, then officials put a second back on
the clock. Auburn used that second to kick a field goal, and they ended
up beating Alabama by 3. Now an Auburn dean is rubbing it in. Joe
Aistrup told professors they could add a single second to final exams.
He wrote, when every second counts, Auburn men and women make great
things happen.
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pryor Richard Pryor on Jesus
Richard Pryor on Jesus: ? Man, I know Jesus. Shit, he lived over there in the projects. Nigger ain't shit. I knew the boy's mama personally. That's right - Mary. The girl with big titties. Pretty black girl, man. Had personality all over her face. Well, that's right. I knew her. I'm the one responsible for that girl. She wasn't no virgin either, 'cause I know a couple of niggers eased up there and got some. ? I remember when her son Jesus was born 'cause her husband Joe damn near killed her. 'Cause she told him God made the baby. He beat her with a pool stick. Said, "Bitch, you gonna tell me who the daddy of this baby is." Damn near broke that bitch's neck. She fessed up-found out it was Jimmy Walker. ... ? Shit, I been around. I ain't no fool, I study peoples. I know where peoples comin' from. Shit, I'm a people-ologist. ? Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014) ? ?
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He was frustrated by the amateur code which mandated that college athletes should play for no pay. Coach Bill Sprackling, who held a full-time job at the Collier Wire Company in Providence, later recalled that numerous stories circulated that Pollard would attempt to solicit funds from downtown businessmen who were enthusiastic about Brown football. Just before a Saturday game, the stories went, Pollard would explain that he was financially strapped, and that if he did not get his bills paid he would not be able to play in the upcoming game. The former Brown assistant coach maintained that Pollard "was quite successful in this." Although there is no solid evidence to support Sprackling's account, it is consistent with Pollard's business dealings in later years. His son recalled him as an "operator," who always had several financial deals going to support himself and his family," ? Brown opened its 1916 football season on September 30 with a game against Rhode Island State at Andrews Field. The Rhode Island Rams were clearly overmatched, but made a stronger showing than in previous years. Brown rolled up three touchdowns by the early part of the third period and went on to an 18-0 victory. That Brown missed three extra points in the game was not unusual for a team of that era. In 1916, points after touchdown either had to be kicked from placement or drop-kicked from a position perpendicular to the point where the ball crossed the goal line for the touchdown. In many cases, the kicker was forced to attempt the conversion from an acute angle. The alternative for the scoring team was to punt the ball out of its end zone to the kicker, who then attempted a kick in the face of the on-charging defensive team. Thus, the success of a conversion after touchdown most often depended on where the ball crossed the goal line on the scoring play." ? Pollard had an outstanding game against Rhode Island, but like most of the regulars sat out the fourth quarter. The Brown Daily Herald designated Pollard and halfback Jimmy Jemail, who scored two touchdowns, the stars of the game. The highlight of the game for Brown was the outstanding play of about a half-dozen freshmen who played most of the second half. The play of fullback Walter de Vitalis, who scored one touchdown, and Dune Annan, a future professional player who replaced Purdy at quarterback in the fourth period, indicated that Brown had more depth than in 1915. ? On the Brown campus, Pollard was also a celebrity, but he was careful to share credit for his good fortune with his teammates and the university. As Pollard later explained, "I felt very highly honored and only wanted to keep my feet on the ground because I felt that our whole team had played a very important part in my having received this great honor and I did not want to do anything which might reflect on Brown University or any of the players." While Pollard was genuinely grateful to his teammates and school, he also knew that the racial code of the day demanded that he, a young black man, be properly modest and humble in accepting this honor. Yet, he would have a difficult time keeping his feet on the ground. His brash, assertive personality took over. He later admitted that "I was young and foolish and crazy. I was Fritz Pollard, All-America, and my head was getting a little bit big then," ? One day in mid-January 1917, President Faunce summoned Pollard to his office and introduced him to a dignified looking gentleman whom Faunce identified as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Faunce asked whether Fritz knew who Mr. Rockefeller was, and Pollard replied that he did not. Rockefeller, an 1897 Brown graduate and former manager of the school's football team, asked Pollard a number of questions, and then he was excused. The next day Faunce visited Pollard's Hope College room and explained that Rockefeller thought Fritz's room was too cramped, with all the pressing equipment and the clothes hanging everywhere. Rockefeller, the president explained, had made arrangements for Pollard to have another separate room for his living quarters and new pressing equipment, all at Rockefeller's expense. Evidence suggests that Rockefeller later had the files destroyed which related to his subsidy of Pollard; at the time, Pollard recalled Faunce telling him that "from now on you won't have any financial worries," ? Apparently Faunce saw no inconsistency with the arrangement despite his earlier statement at the Harvard football rally that "if a man wants to get paid for playing football Brown University is no place for him." Rockefeller's visit to campus came within a week of a National Collegiate Athletic Association meeting at which the University of Chicago football coach and athletic director A. Alonzo Stagg introduced a resolution calling for a survey of intercollegiate athletics "with particular reference to their moral influence." Stagg maintained that "a college was responsible for the actions of its athletes, and that when they practice the dishonesty that is known to be the case in many instances, the fault is that of the college." Certainly Pollard had no qualms about Rockefeller's generosity; he purchased the latest pressing equipment in downtown Providence, selected a second, more spacious room in Hope College for his living quarters, and forwarded the bills to Faunce's office." ? During the spring semester, Pollard engaged in a large number of campus and off-campus activities which consumed a good deal of his time. In the winter, for example, he cultivated his lifelong interest in music by playing the slide trombone in both the Brown Band and Orchestra. Late in March, Pollard performed in a musical number in a popular student-produced theatrical farce along with Ink Williams, who did a clog dance with quarterback Jimmy Murphy. The inclusion of the two African-American students indicated that they were being accorded a greater degree of acceptance by the white student body. Pollard was also a member of the varsity indoor and outdoor track teams, and quickly established himself as one of the premier hurdlers and sprinters in New England. Beyond this, he played in the student-organized interclass basketball league. Brown did not field an intercollegiate basketball team in the prewar era ? ? John Carroll "Fritz Pollard" (1992)
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In August 2010, six years before taking over Donald Trump's winning presidential campaign, Steve Bannon, then 57 and a producer of right-wing political films, answered his phone. "What are you doing tomorrow?" asked David Bossie, a longtime House Republican investigator and conservative activist who had chased Bill and Hillary Clinton scandals for almost two decades. ? "Dude," Bannon replied, "I'm cutting these fucking films I'm making for you." ? The 2010 midterm congressional elections were coming up. It was the height of the Tea Party movement and Republicans were showing momentum. ? "Dave, we're literally dropping two more films. I'm editing. I'm working 20 hours a day" at Citizens United, the conservative political action committee Bossie headed, to churn out his anti-Clinton films. ? "Can you come with me up to New York?" ? "For what?" ? "To see Donald Trump," Bossie said. ? "What about?" ? "He's thinking of running for president," Bossie said. "Of what country?" Bannon asked. ? No, seriously, Bossie insisted. He had been meeting and working with Trump for months. Trump had asked for a meeting. ? "I don't have time to jerk off, dude," Bannon said. "Donald Trump's never running for president. Forget it. Against Obama? Forget it. 1 don't have time for fucking nonsense." ? "Don't you want to meet him?" ? "No, 1 have no interest in meeting him." Trump had once given Bannon a 30-minute interview for his Sunday-afternoon radio show, called The Victory Sessions, which Bannon had run out of Los Angeles and billed as "the thinking man's radio show." ? "This guy's not serious," Bannon said. ? "I think he is serious," Bossie said. Trump was a TV celebrity and had a famous show, The Apprentice, that was number one on NBC some weeks. "There's no downside for us to go and meet with him." ? Bannon finally agreed to go to New York City to Trump Tower. ? They rode up to the 26th floor conference room. Trump greeted them warmly, and Bossie said he had a detailed presentation. It was a tutorial. ? The first part, he said, lays out how to run in a Republican primary and win. The second part explains how to run for president of the United States against Barack Obama. He described standard polling strategies and discussed process and issues: Bossie was a traditional, limited-government conservative and had been caught by surprise by the Tea Party movement. ? It was an important moment in American politics, Bossie said, and Tea Party populism was sweeping the country. The little guy was getting his voice. Populism was a grassroots movement to disrupt the political status quo in favor of everyday people. ? "I'm a business guy," Trump reminded them. "I'm not a professional ladder-climber in politics." ? "If you're going to run for president," Bossie said, "you have to know lots of little things and lots of big things." The little things were filing deadlines, the state rules for primaries - minutiae. "You have to know the policy side, and how to win delegates." But first, he said, "you need to understand the conservative movement." ? Trump nodded. ? "You've got some problems on issues," Bossie said. ? "I don't have any problems on issues," Trump said. "What are you talking about?" ? "First off, there's never been a guy win a Republican primary that's not pro-life," Bossie said. "And unfortunately, you're very pro-choice." ? "What does that mean?" ? "You have a record of giving to the abortion guys, the pro-choice candidates. You've made statements. You've got to be pro-life, against abortion." ? "I'm against abortion," Trump said. "I'm pro-life." ? "Well, you've got a track record." ? "That can be fixed," Trump said. "You just tell me how to fix that. I'm - what do you call it? Pro-life. I'm pro-life, I'm telling you." ? Bannon was impressed with the showmanship, and increasingly so as Trump talked. Trump was engaged and quick. He was in great physical shape. His presence was bigger than the man, and took over the room, a command presence. He had something. He was also like a guy in a bar talking to the TV. Street-smart, from Queens. In Bannon's evaluation, Trump was Archie Bunker, but a really focused Archie Bunker. ? "The second big thing," Bossie said, "is your voting record." "What do you mean, my voting record?" ? "About how often you vote." ? "What are you talking about?" ? "Well," Bossie said, "this is a Republican primary." ? "I vote every time," Trump said confidently. "I've voted every time since I was 18,20 years old." ? "That's actually not correct. You know there's a public record of your vote." Bossie, the congressional investigator, had a stack of records. ? "They don't know how I vote." ? "No, no, no, not how you vote. How often you vote." ? Bannon realized that Trump did not know the most rudimentary business of politics. ? "I voted every time," Trump insisted. ? "Actually you've never voted in a primary except once in your entire life," Bossie said, citing the record. ? "That's a fucking lie," Trump said. "That's a total lie. Every time I get to vote, I voted." ? "You only voted in one primary," Bossie said. "It was like in 1988 or something, in the Republican primary." ? "You're right," Trump said, pivoting 180 degrees, not missing a beat. "That was for Rudy." Giuliani ran for mayor in a primary in 1989. "Is that in there?" ? "Yes." ? "I'll get over that," Trump said. ? "Maybe none of these things matter," Bossie said, "but maybe they do. If you're going to move forward, you have to be methodical." ? Bannon was up next. He turned to what was driving the Tea Party, which didn't like the elites. Populism was for the common man, knowing the system is rigged. It was against crony capitalism and insider deals which were bleeding the workers. ? "I love that. That's what I am,", Trump said, "a popularist." He mangled the word. ? "No, no," Bannon said. "It's populist." ? "Yeah, yeah," Trump insisted. "A popularist." ? Bannon gave up. At first he thought Trump did not understand the word. But perhaps Trump meant it in his own way - being popular with the people. Bannon knew popularist was an earlier British form of the word "populist" for the nonintellectual general public. ? An hour into the meeting, Bossie said, "We have another big issue." "What's that?" Trump asked, seeming a little more wary. ? "Well," he said, "80 percent of the donations that you've given have been to Democrats." To Bossie that was Trump's biggest political liability, though he didn't say so. ? "That's bullshit!" ? "There's public records," Bossie said. ? "There's records of that!" Trump said in utter astonishment. "Every donation you've ever given." Public disclosure of all political giving was standard. ? "I'm always even," Trump said. He divided his donations to candidates from both parties, he said. ? "You actually give quite a bit. But it's 80 percent Democratic. Chicago, Atlantic City ... " ? "I've got to do that," Trump said. "All these fucking Democrats run all the cities. You've got to build hotels. You've got to grease them. Those are people who came to me." ? "Listen," Bannon said, "here's what Dave's trying to say. Running as a Tea Party guy, the problem is that's what they are complaining about. That it's guys like you that have inside deals." ? "I'll get over that," Trump said. "It's all rigged. It's a rigged system. These guys have been shaking me down for years. I don't want to give. They all walk in. If you don't write a check ... " ? There was a pol in Queens, Trump said, "an old guy with a baseball bat. You go in there and you've got to give him something - normally in cash. If you don't give him anything, nothing gets done. Nothing gets built. But if you take it in there and you leave him an envelope, it happens. That's just the way it is. But I can fix that." ? Bossie said he had a road map. "It's the conservative movement. Tea Party comes and goes. Populism comes and goes. The conservative movement has been a bedrock since Goldwater." ? Second, he said, I would recommend you run as if you are running for governor in three states - Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. They were the first three caucus or primary states. "Run and sound local, like you want to be their governor." A lot of candidates made the huge mistake of trying to run in 27 states. "Run three governor's races, and you'll have a really good shot. Focus on three. Do well in three. And the others will come." ? "I can be the nominee," Trump said. "I can beat these guys. I don't care who they are. I got this. I can take care of these other things." ? Each position could be revisited, renegotiated. ? "I'm pro-life," Trump said. "I'm going to start." ? "Here's what you're going to need to do," Bossie said. "You're going to need to write between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of individual checks to congressmen and senators. They'll all come up here. Look them in the eye, shake their hand. You're going to give them a check. Because we need some markers. You've got to do one-on-ones so these guys know. Because later on, that'll be at least an entry point that you're building relationships." ? Bossie continued, "Saying, this check is for you. For $2,400" - the maximum amount. "It's got to be individual checks, hard money, to their campaign so they know it's coming from you personally. Republicans now know that you're going to be serious about this." ? All the money, Bossie said, was central to the art of presidential politics. "Later that's going to pay huge dividends." Give to Republican candidates in a handful of battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida. ? In addition, Bossie said, "You're going to have to do a policy book. You ought to do a book about what you think about America and these policies." ? Bannon gave an extended brief on China and its successful efforts to take jobs and money from the United States. He was obsessed with the threat. ? "What do you think?" Bossie later asked Bannon. ? "I'm pretty impressed with the guy," Bannon said. As for running for president, "Zero chance. First off, those two action items. The fucker will not write one check. He's not a guy who writes checks. He signs the back of checks" when they come in as payments to him. "It was good you said that because he'll never write a check." ? "What about the policy book?" ? "He'll never do a policy book. Give me a fucking break. First off, nobody will buy it. It was a waste of time except for the fact that it was insanely entertaining." ? Bossie said he was trying to prepare Trump if he ever did decide to run. Trump had a unique asset: He was totally removed from the political process. ? As they walked on, Bossie found himself going through a mental exercise, one that six years later most Americans would go through. He'll never run. He'll never file. He'll never announce. He'll never file his financial disclosure statement. Right? He'll never do any of those things. He'll never win. ? "You think he's going to run?" Bossie finally asked Bannon. "Not a chance. Zero chance," Bannon repeated. "Less than zero. Look at the fucking life he's got, dude. Come on. He's not going to do this. Get his face ripped off." ? ? Bob Woodward, "Fear: Trump in the White House" (2018)
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Coming events cast their shadows before
Coming events cast their shadows before (proverb) ? That phrase, word for word, exactly as you heard it, without one syllable altered or twisted, that phrase was the scathing retort I made, at the age of seventeen, to Trent Nugent, who was the artistic director, juvenile lead, and theater blessee of the Willstone Thespians. ? Now I must explain that I had joined the Willstone Thespians for only one reason. Because, at the age of seventeen I had extremely sticking-out ears. I mean extremely. With my flat cap on, the silhouette of my head resembled nothing so much as a Austin Seven with the two side doors open. Which of course made me extremely diffident with girls.? ? And that is actually is what made me join the Willstone Thespians. Because among young men of that day there was a very widely held theory that the best possble way to get girls flocking to you was to be the star in an amateur dramatic society. And of all our local amateur dramatic societies the thespians attracted by far the largest female following. ? This wasn't so much because of the quality of their plays or the standard of their acting.? It was due practically completely that the bloke who printed their posters was a little on the short-sighted side. ? This was demonstrated by the enormous crowds that rushed to see their production of Patrick Hamilton's play Rope and it was a similar error which brought the house-full notices out for Ivor Novello's Careless Rapture. ? But as I say, when I joined them for their winter season my purpose was quite cold-blooded: to work my way up through the company 'till I could take the starring role in The Desert Song. ? I went along at the beginning of the season and presented myself to Trent Nugent. Now there was an insufferable character.? Trent was actually, in the society, more or less all-powerful. ?And accordingly it was to him that I explained that I wanted to end the season as the Red Shadow but until then I was perfectly willing to work my way up to it. ? "All right, very well," he said, ?"In our first production, we'll just give you a walk-on part."? ? Now that expression a walk-on part I took to be the customary theatrical jargon 'till I saw what the first production was: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. And I was to be the bridge.? ? There was apparently some altercation with the scenary builders which meant that I spent the major part of Thornton Wilder's great work stretched out between two paper-mache rocks with hand-rails attached either side of me being walked on. ? Nevertheless I did feel that I'd served the necessary apprenticeship, so when we finally came to the first read-through of The Desert Song I thrust myself in front of the company and without prompting I recited the whole of the Red Shadow part, chucked in a snatch of One Alone to Call My Own, to say nothing of two choruses of the Rift Song. ? When the rest of the cast broke into spontaneous applause I could tell that Trent Nugent was really impressed. He said, "That was very good.? Very good. I think" And he handed me a script. ?"I think you've earned this." ? And when I looked down at the part circled for me my gorge leapt. I was Third Sand Dune. ? I said, "Wait a minute.? What about the Red Shadow?" ? He said, "I'm terribly sorry. but that's quite out of the question.? You see I was cast for that before the season even opened." ? That was where I made that aforementioned retort. ? "In that case," I said, "This amateur dramatic society shouldn't call themselves the Willstone Thespians.? They should call themselves The Coming Events." ? He said, "Why?" ? I said, "Because," without altering or twisting a syllable, "It's Coming Events cast their shadows before." ? Dennis Norden 573a
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If there was an award for thinking on the fly, it should absolutely go
to a German driver who was on the autobahn last week when he noticed
that his car smelled weird. He pulled over, popped the hood, and the car
was on fire. He had no fire extinguisher, but he did have beer. He
grabbed bottles from the case in his car and put out the fire.
Authorities said the fire department did show up, but there was nothing
left for them to do.
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Around this time, Richard fell into his first performance as a comic. In his memory, his first stage was the brothel's backyard in the mid-1940s; his first prop, a pile of dog poop. He was wearing a spiffy cowboy outfit his grandfather had given him and was sitting on the edge of a brick railing, looking for all the world like a miniature version of his heroes John Wayne or Lash LaRue. Then he threw himself on purpose off the railing, and his family broke out in laughter. A few more falls, and the laughter didn't stop. The comedian-in-the-making conceded that his routine was over and ran to his grandmother, but along the way, he slipped on the pile of dog poop. Again, roars of laughter. Eager to please, he did what any attention-craving child would have done: he repeated his pratfall, dog poop and all. "That was my first comedy routine," he said. "And I've just been slipping in shit ever since." If comedy was partly the art of self-humiliation, early on Pryor realized he had a knack for it. ? Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014)
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He was frustrated by the amateur code which mandated that college athletes should play for no pay. Coach Bill Sprackling, who held a full-time job at the Collier Wire Company in Providence, later recalled that numerous stories circulated that Pollard would attempt to solicit funds from downtown businessmen who were enthusiastic about Brown football. Just before a Saturday game, the stories went, Pollard would explain that he was financially strapped, and that if he did not get his bills paid he would not be able to play in the upcoming game. The former Brown assistant coach maintained that Pollard "was quite successful in this." Although there is no solid evidence to support Sprackling's account, it is consistent with Pollard's business dealings in later years. His son recalled him as an "operator," who always had several financial deals going to support himself and his family,"
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Brown opened its 1916 football season on September 30 with a game against Rhode Island State at Andrews Field. The Rhode Island Rams were clearly overmatched, but made a stronger showing than in previous years. Brown rolled up three touchdowns by the early part of the third period and went on to an 18-0 victory. That Brown missed three extra points in the game was not unusual for a team of that era. In 1916, points after touchdown either had to be kicked from placement or drop-kicked from a position perpendicular to the point where the ball crossed the goal line for the touchdown. In many cases, the kicker was forced to attempt the conversion from an acute angle. The alternative for the scoring team was to punt the ball out of its end zone to the kicker, who then attempted a kick in the face of the on-charging defensive team. Thus, the success of a conversion after touchdown most often depended on where the ball crossed the goal line on the scoring play."
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Pollard had an outstanding game against Rhode Island, but like most of the regulars sat out the fourth quarter. The Brown Daily Herald designated Pollard and halfback Jimmy Jemail, who scored two touchdowns, the stars of the game. The highlight of the game for Brown was the outstanding play of about a half-dozen freshmen who played most of the second half. The play of fullback Walter de Vitalis, who scored one touchdown, and Dune Annan, a future professional player who replaced Purdy at quarterback in the fourth period, indicated that Brown had more depth than in 1915.
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On the Brown campus, Pollard was also a celebrity, but he was careful to share credit for his good fortune with his teammates and the university. As Pollard later explained, "I felt very highly honored and only wanted to keep my feet on the ground because I felt that our whole team had played a very important part in my having received this great honor and I did not want to do anything which might reflect on Brown University or any of the players." While Pollard was genuinely grateful to his teammates and school, he also knew that the racial code of the day demanded that he, a young black man, be properly modest and humble in accepting this honor. Yet, he would have a difficult time keeping his feet on the ground. His brash, assertive personality took over. He later admitted that "I was young and foolish and crazy. I was Fritz Pollard, All-America, and my head was getting a little bit big then,"
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One day in mid-January 1917, President Faunce summoned Pollard to his office and introduced him to a dignified looking gentleman whom Faunce identified as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Faunce asked whether Fritz knew who Mr. Rockefeller was, and Pollard replied that he did not. Rockefeller, an 1897 Brown graduate and former manager of the school's football team, asked Pollard a number of questions, and then he was excused. The next day Faunce visited Pollard's Hope College room and explained that Rockefeller thought Fritz's room was too cramped, with all the pressing equipment and the clothes hanging everywhere. Rockefeller, the president explained, had made arrangements for Pollard to have another separate room for his living quarters and new pressing equipment, all at Rockefeller's expense. Evidence suggests that Rockefeller later had the files destroyed which related to his subsidy of Pollard; at the time, Pollard recalled Faunce telling him that "from now on you won't have any financial worries,"
?
Apparently Faunce saw no inconsistency with the arrangement despite his earlier statement at the Harvard football rally that "if a man wants to get paid for playing football Brown University is no place for him." Rockefeller's visit to campus came within a week of a National Collegiate Athletic Association meeting at which the University of Chicago football coach and athletic director A. Alonzo Stagg introduced a resolution calling for a survey of intercollegiate athletics "with particular reference to their moral influence." Stagg maintained that "a college was responsible for the actions of its athletes, and that when they practice the dishonesty that is known to be the case in many instances, the fault is that of the college." Certainly Pollard had no qualms about Rockefeller's generosity; he purchased the latest pressing equipment in downtown Providence, selected a second, more spacious room in Hope College for his living quarters, and forwarded the bills to Faunce's office."
?
During the spring semester, Pollard engaged in a large number of campus and off-campus activities which consumed a good deal of his time. In the winter, for example, he cultivated his lifelong interest in music by playing the slide trombone in both the Brown Band and Orchestra. Late in March, Pollard performed in a musical number in a popular student-produced theatrical farce along with Ink Williams, who did a clog dance with quarterback Jimmy Murphy. The inclusion of the two African-American students indicated that they were being accorded a greater degree of acceptance by the white student body. Pollard was also a member of the varsity indoor and outdoor track teams, and quickly established himself as one of the premier hurdlers and sprinters in New England. Beyond this, he played in the student-organized interclass basketball league. Brown did not field an intercollegiate basketball team in the prewar era
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John Carroll "Fritz Pollard" (1992)
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