"Vaudeville" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so if you could have seen the old Commodore work up games to throw Babbitt off the track. I put in most of the day watchin' 'em at it, and it was as good as a vaudeville act. About a quarter of an hour before it was time for the dose the valet would come out and begin to look around the grounds. Soon as he'd located the Commodore he'd slide off after his tea wagon. That was just where the old boy got in his fine work. The minute Babbitt ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... sulkily. "After you've kicked a fellow so that he's so sore he can scarcely move, do you expect him to do a vaudeville turn right away?" ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... where her chief duties consisted of opening the daily budget of circulars, sending out monthly bills, and telling pained-looking callers that the doctor was out just then. Her salary just about paid her board, with a dollar or two left over for headache tablets and a vaudeville show now and then. She did not need much spending money, for her evenings were spent mostly in crying over certain small garments and ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... face—the tears on her cheek—feeling the texture of her dress against his lips. Barely two hours ago! No doubt she had confided all to Maxwell in the interval. The young fellow burnt with mingled rage and shame. This interview with the husband seemed to transform it all to vaudeville, if not to farce. How was he to get through it with any dignity and self-command? Moreover, a passionate resentment towards Maxwell developed itself. His telling of his secret had been no matter for a common scandal, a vulgar jealousy. She knew that—she could not have so misrepresented ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... contributions from Constant Reader lay stuffed into the corners and pigeonholes of his desk. He sat for a moment thinking of his wife. Call her up ... spend the evening downtown ... some unusual evidence of affection ... the vaudeville wouldn't be bad. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... exactly that. I know it as though I had been there; in fact, it is highly probable I was there. You say all this happened on the night we first met? I remember coming downstairs that night—I was going out to a vaudeville show—and hearing voices in your room. I remember it distinctly. In all probability I nearly ran ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... began with volumes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud outcries about the dignity of art, and both have—well ... Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated with Gus Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaudeville Theatre; he has written a novel, the less said about which the better—he has attacked men whose shoestrings he is not fit to tie, and having failed to injure them, he retracted all he said, and launched forth into slimy benedictions. He took Fielding's masterpiece, degraded it, and debased it; ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and revivals of Hedda Gabler in Scandinavia and Germany, where it has always ranked among Ibsen's most popular works. The admirable production of the play by Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Marion Lea, at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, April 20, 1891, may rank as the second great step towards the popularisation of Ibsen in England, the first being the Charrington-Achurch production of A Doll's House in 1889. Miss Robins afterwards repeated her fine performance ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... scoffed Calderwell. "Then if you won't tell, I will. I saw Billy a month ago, you see. It seems you've hit the trail for Grand Opera, as you threatened to that night in Paris; but you haven't brought up in vaudeville, as you prophesied you would do—though, for that matter, judging from the plums some of the stars are picking on the vaudeville stage, nowadays, that isn't to be sneezed at. But Billy says you've ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... defiance upon the waistcoat and whiskers. And the waistcoat and whiskers, by way of intimating the slight degree in which they were affected by the looks aforesaid, bestowed glances of increased admiration upon Miss J'mima Ivins and friend. The concert and vaudeville concluded, they promenaded the gardens. The waistcoat and whiskers did the same; and made divers remarks complimentary to the ankles of Miss J'mima Ivins and friend, in an audible tone. At length, not satisfied with these numerous ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... has a right to his own opinions, and for my part I like to hear any one stick up for his friends. It makes no odds to me. However, here are a few facts I am going to bring before you. Four months ago, one of the turns at a vaudeville show down Broadway consisted of a performance by a Professor Franklin and his two daughters, Elizabeth and Beatrice. The professor hypnotized, told fortunes, felt heads, and the usual rigmarole. Beatrice sang, Elizabeth ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... served, and the menu should embrace a few courses of country fare. Dancing in the barn during the afternoon will be another form of entertainment, or if you wish to give an elaborate entertainment, vaudeville performers might be hired for the ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... back and laughs loudly as if he were in a bar-room. His characters, with few exceptions, are extremes, caricatures. Even his shop girls, in the limning of whom he did his best work, are not really individuals; rather are they types, symbols. His work was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, and yet vaudeville."[9] The Duplicity of Hargraves, the story by O. Henry given in this volume, is free from most of his defects. It has a blend of humor and pathos that puts it on a plane of ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... very much of the country. He was never anything but tired in speaking of it, and told me a great amount. He said many times that in the hotels there was never a concierge or portier to give you information where to discover the best vaudeville; there was no concierge at all! In New York itself, my friend told me, a facchino, or species of porter, or some such good-for-nothing, had said to him, including a slap on the shoulder, "Well, brother, ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... fear for art in a society where the process of democratization should go to its extreme limit of development point to the moving picture, the cheap magazine story and novel, the vaudeville and "musical" comedy, as a hint of what to expect. These, they will say, are the popular forms of art, to the production of which the artist would have to devote his time and skill in return for subsistence. Under the present system the people ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... you would find his boon companions in certain cafes on the Grand Boulevard and in the vaudeville theaters on Montmartre; but would it not help you a little if I ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... the end of the second verse I was so carried away by its possibilities that, turning to a group of people talking near the rail, I remarked that with rag-time words, it would be vastly popular in American vaudeville. At which everyone stared incredulously for a moment, until one of the number, realizing the situation, managed to explain, between gasps of laughter, that "Hello, my Baby, Hello, my Honey" was in its dotage in the United States. Then the laughter became general, for all were more recent arrivals ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... forming of habits and the choosing of ideals—many of these future men and women are finding their entertainment and their relaxation (and mind you, at the close of a day in school or in the evening after a day spent in the poorly ventilated office or store) in the moving-picture show or at the vaudeville. And in these places the air is apt to be both hot and impure, and all the physical conditions enervating. The emotional atmosphere, too, is sure to be abnormal, unnatural, and spiritually deadening. We find here, and in too large quantity to be a negligible ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... wonder. Why you had never heard of her. Why did her name not linger in popular songs and vaudeville jokes and cigar bands, and the memory of that gay old uncle of yours along with Lillian Russell and Stella Mayhew and Anna Held? Roxanne Milbank-whither had she gone? What dark trap-door had opened suddenly and ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... had gone up and down once or twice from the Rue Druot to the Vaudeville Theater, just as we were taking leave of each other—for he already seemed quite done up with walking—I ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the play; film the film, movies, motion pictures, cinema, cinematography; theatricals, dramaturgy, histrionic art, buskin, sock, cothurnus^, Melpomene and Thalia, Thespis. play, drama, stage play, piece [Fr.], five-act play, tragedy, comedy, opera, vaudeville, comedietta^, lever de rideau [Fr.], interlude, afterpiece^, exode^, farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta^, harlequinade^, pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe [Fr.], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame [Fr.]; melodrama, melodrame^; comidie larmoyante [Fr.], sensation ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of March 7, 1845, was one pregnant with fate where Dujarier was concerned. He had received, and accepted, an invitation to a supper-party at the Freres-Provencaux restaurant, given by Mlle Anais Lievenne, a young actress from the Vaudeville company. Among the other convives gathered round the festive board were a quartet of attractive damsels, Atala Beauchene, Victorine Capon, Cecile John, and Alice Ozy, with, to keep them company, a trio of typical flaneurs in Rosemond de Beauvallon ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of the French Theater at Paris had accompanied the court to Holland, and Talma there played the roles of Bayard and d'Orosmane; and M. Alissan de Chazet directed at Amsterdam the performance by French comedians of a vaudeville in honor of their Majesties, the title of which I have forgotten. Here, again, I wish to refute another assertion no less false made by the author of these 'Contemporary Memoirs', concerning a fictitious liaison between the Emperor and Mademoiselle ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... cautioning my wife to say nothing about it. Then I wandered about New York, contrasting my way of rejoicing with the demonstration when we three had financed the Lattimore & Great Western bonds. I went to a vaudeville show and afterward walked miles and miles through the mysteries of the night in that wilderness. I was unutterably alone. The strain of my solitary mission in the great city was telling ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... was a very great lady, sufficiently high in station to allow herself such compromising caprices,—but even so, she would scarcely have cared to play the role of a coquette in a vaudeville where he himself played the part of ninny,—or she was some noted adventuress who was in the pay of this du Portail and the agent of his singular matrimonial designs. Evil life or evil heart, these were the only two verdicts to be pronounced ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... was sixteen, my mother died, and I went on the stage. I didn't inherit her talent as an actress, having only mediocre ability, but I had a carrying voice, personality, and could dance, so I soon left the legitimate stage for vaudeville where I made something like ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... sacrifice of friends or fortune is accounted but little in the balance when the honour of La Belle France, and the triumphs of the grand "armee," are weighted against them. The infatuated and enthusiastic followers of this great man would seem, in some respects, to resemble the drunkard in the "Vaudeville," who alleged as his excuse for drinking, that whenever he was sober his poverty disgusted him. "My cabin," said he, "is a cell, my wife a mass of old rags, my child a wretched object of misery and malady. But give ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Mr. McBride, "oh, yes. I'm much obliged to you for the permission. It's as good as any vaudeville, and it's a sight nearer home. You're bound to make money. I tell my granddaughter," with a triumphant nod to the lady in question, "to bank on brains and energy and American push. I tell her," with a profound wink to Katrina, "to let this old family nonsense and society racket go hang. I'm ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... going over had prepared for it as they would for a vaudeville; they all had their faces blackened so they could know one another in the dark, and they were all allowed to arm themselves in any way they wished. Some carried revolvers, others the handles of our entrenching tools (these had small iron cog wheels at one end and they made an excellent ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... himself that one little bit of datum, one little phrase, carelessly heard now, might mean his success or failure. Didactic pedantry has its place in science, and these were scientists, not vaudeville performers. Silently, he apologized to ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... to be a novel kind of entertainment: a sort of vaudeville show in which were to figure a palmist, a gentleman set down in the programme with its gilt printing as the "Celebrated Professor Cheireman"; several singers; a couple of acrobatic performers; and ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... York or any great American city in that. There is a central district in which maist of the first class theatres are to be found, just like what is called Broadway in New York. But the music halls—they're vaudeville theatres in New York, ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... mentioned only samples of the articles on trained anthropoids. All are necessarily descriptions of the behavior of individuals who had been trained not for psychological purposes but for the vaudeville stage, and although such observations unquestionably have certain value for comparative psychology, it is well known that unless an observer knows the history of an act, he is not able to evaluate it in terms of intelligence and is especially prone to overestimate ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... dance has long ceased to be a novelty on the vaudeville stage, but as it is performed by "La Belle Selica" in the Arena at Dreamland it holds the interest of that most exacting audience—a crowd of Coney Island pleasure seekers. It is not because Selica is pre-eminent among dancers, but on account of the unusual ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... a transmitter that worked under water like a ball-point pen, broadcasting weary vaudeville routines. He scratched his head and looked wistfully at the New England shoreline—or was that Long Island? ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... judge for themselves, and they asked to be given her address, which the impresarios refused to disclose. But they secured from the managers the names of several men who taught fancy dancing, and who prepared aspirants for the vaudeville stage, and having obtained from them their prices and their opinion as to how long a time would be required to give the finishing touches to a dancer already accomplished in the art, they directed their ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... trance which knows no cares, no yesterdays, no to-morrows, nothing but the passing objects and the passing scents and sounds! And so I came, in due course of delight, to Strasbourg, where I passed a wet Sunday evening at a window, while an idle trifle of a vaudeville was played for ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Exchange, a sallow-faced clerk mounted a low step-ladder and swept a scurry of chalk marks over the huge blackboard, its margin lettered with the initials of the principal stocks. The appearance of this nimble-fingered young man with his piece of chalk always impressed Jack as a sort of vaudeville performance. On ordinary days, with the market lifeless, but half of the orchestra seats would be occupied. In whirl-times, with the ticker spelling ruin, not only were the chairs full, but standing room only was available ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... this confession to me in the entr'acte of a silly vaudeville, to witness which we had been carried by an elevator some sixteen storeys and landed on a roof crowded with palms and funny people behaving like millionaires. In the entr'acte the band sank its blare ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... having strayed from the sermon, I was glad to have it recalled by hearing Dr. Parkes say that most people preferred the jazz, the vaudeville, or ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... doctor's dismissal of him to Paris, however, and his getting better there, enables him to get up the play there. He and Wilkie missed so many pieces of stage effect here, that, unless I am quite satisfied with his report, I shall go over and try my stage-managerial hand at the Vaudeville Theatre. I particularly want the drugging and attempted robbing in the bedroom scene at the Swiss inn to be done to the sound of a waterfall rising and falling with the wind. Although in the very opening ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... story of Pierrot married to one woman and wishing to marry another; a farce mingled with passion, which had been discovered by a vaudeville-writer, aided by a poet, among the stock-pieces of the old Italian theatre. Renee took the part of the deserted wife, this time, appearing in various disguises when her husband was love-making elsewhere. Noemi was the woman with whom he was in love, and Henri ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... Lili. In themselves these plays have little merit, and, had they come from the hand of some minor poet, they would deservedly have passed into oblivion, but as part of his biography they call for some notice. The first of them, Erwin und Elmire, is a sufficiently trivial vaudeville, and appears to have been begun in the autumn of 1773.[203] He must have retouched it in January—February (1775), however, as it contains distinct suggestions of his experiences with the Schoenemann family. As he himself tells us in his ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... the Poem Games are to keep the singing, the dancing and the ideas at one pace. The repetitions may be varied according to the necessities of the individual dancer. Dancing is slower than poetry and faster than music in developing the same thoughts. In folk dances and vaudeville, the verse, music, and dancing are on so simple a basis the time elements can be easily combined. Likewise the rhythms ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... the scene I mean. I gave him a check to compensate him. He tore it up and blew it into the air with a curse. Oh, it was beautiful comedy. I told him our interview would make a hit as a 'turn' on the vaudeville stage. Nothing could calm him. I was firm, and Alessandra was ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... and suppressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national or personal freedom they have found a refuge here, and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district, while he listens through his left ear to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity of his proteges. Italy, Poland, the former Spanish possessions and the polyglot tribes of Austria-Hungary have spilled here a thick lather of their effervescent sons. In the eccentric cafes and lodging-houses of the vicinity they hover over their native ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... cinema, cinematography; theatricals, dramaturgy, histrionic art, buskin, sock, cothurnus[obs3], Melpomene and Thalia, Thespis. play, drama, stage play, piece[Fr], five-act play, tragedy, comedy, opera, vaudeville, comedietta[obs3], lever de rideau[Fr], interlude, afterpiece[obs3], exode[obs3], farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta[obs3], harlequinade[obs3], pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe[Fr], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame[Fr]; melodrama, melodrame[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a firm who did business under the name of Foreman & Sowers. They were a regular business vaudeville team—one big and broad-gauged in all his ideas; the other unable to think in anything but boys' and misses' sizes. Foreman believed that men got rich in dollars; Sowers in cents. Of course, you can do it in either way, but the ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... fault, that he could not be overlooked by the managers of the quadrennial national performance, searching with Demosthenes' lantern for a man against whom nothing could be said. They called Eric from private life to be headliner in their vaudeville. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... "Some vaudeville tank girl," was one of the similar remarks with which the women in the shade complacently reassured one another— finding, by way of the weird mental processes of self-illusion, a great satisfaction in the money caste-distinction ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... the habits of this bird may be misleading. His thick, conical bill is made for crushing seeds, but he now feeds on so many different substances that its original use, as shown by its shape, is obscured. If there were such a thing as vaudeville among birds, the common sparrow would be a star imitator. He clings to the bark of trees and picks out grubs, supporting himself with his tail like a woodpecker; he launches out into the air, taking insects on the wing like a flycatcher; he clings like a chickadee to the under side of ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... dramatic critic, and attached to a London daily paper which had decided to flatter its readers by giving special criticisms of the more important new French plays, I had come to Paris for the production of Notre Dame de la Lune at the Vaudeville. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... two conspirators as she now felt them to be. She was amused by the frequency with which Shine Taylor and Reginald Warren plied their guest with cigarettes: Shirley's legerdemain in substituting them was worthy of the vaudeville stage. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... with his feet, himself tripping on the harness and rolling at random in the welter, his snapping hoofs flashing in every direction. The wheel team, in the meantime, was doing what Packard later described as "a vaudeville turn of its own." The near wheeler was bucking as though there were no other horse within a hundred miles; the off wheeler had broken his single-tree and was facing the coach, delivering kicks at the melee behind him with ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... Occasionally we encountered groups of peasants wearing the picturesque velvet jackets, tight knee-breeches, heavy woolen stockings and beribboned hats which one usually associates with the Tyrolean yodelers who still inflict themselves on vaudeville audiences in the United States. As we sped northward the landscape changed with the inhabitants, the sunny Italian countryside, ablaze with flowers and green with vineyards, giving way to solemn forests, gloomy defiles, and crags surmounted by grim, gray castles which reminded ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... believe, that I am to come down like a pretendu in a French vaudeville—dressed in a tail-coat, with a white tie and white gloves, and perhaps receive her benediction. She mistakes herself, she mistakes us. If there was a casket of uncouth old diamonds, or some marvellous old point lace to grace the occasion, we might play our parts with a certain decorous ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... the other hand, very often go for a supper to one of the cabarets for which New York is famous (or infamous?), or perhaps go to watch a vaudeville performance at midnight, or ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... certain attractions are offered at the theaters. While these are mostly given by cheap vaudeville companies that have drifted over from Australia or the China coast, when any deserving entertainment is announced the "upper ten" turn out en masse. During the memorable engagement of the Twenty-fourth Infantry minstrels, the boxes at the Zorilla theater were filled ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... an American Bishop consented to share a Sunday night program with Elsie Janis, the famous vaudeville actress, the great Bishop became suddenly greater in the estimation of Christian and non-Christian alike, and the passionately expressive "Elsie" had a new and wholesome interpretation put upon her fun and her jokes by the ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... women upon the stage, and their increased attendance at theatres has somewhat modified the nature of the performance; even the "refined vaudeville" now begins to show the influence of women. It would be no great advantage to have this department of human life feminized; the improvement desired is to have it less masculized; to reduce the excessive influence of one, and to bring out those broad human interests and ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... that the King would be charmed to know him; and added, that one of his operas (for it must be told that our little friend was a vaudeville-maker by trade) had been acted seven-and-twenty times at the theatre at Potsdam. His Excellency then detailed to him all the honors and privileges which the governor of the Prince Royal might expect; and all ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an adventure," observed Burd. "Maybe the movie people will want her—or the vaudeville managers. They often pick up people like that, who have been ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... ha!—why, Simpson, you have an astonishing tact at making discoveries—original ones, I mean." And here we separated, while one of the trio began humming a gay vaudeville, of which I caught ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dances; a full and effective band performed the most fashionable airs, and new figures were at length introduced and announced as a source of attraction; but this place was soon pulled down, and re-built on the ground now occupied by the Theatre du Vaudeville. The establishment failed, and the proprietor became a bankrupt. A short time after, it was re-opened by another speculator; but on such a scale, as merely to attract the working classes of the community. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... All this vaudeville team business, mind you, as if we were bellowing at each other across the street. All round the room you could see old gentlemen shooting out of their chairs like rockets and dashing off at a gallop to write to the governing board about it. Thousands of waiters ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... with cloven hoof. He was said to be a Hedonist, a Marcus Aurelius; a glutton, an ascetic; a satyr, a pattern of domestic virtue; an illiterate Philistine, a collector of book plates and first editions. A legend, widely current, ran that he played chief bacchanalian at dinners whose vaudeville accompaniments were too gross for a bill of particulars; while another, equally plausible, had it that he lunched daily on a red-cheeked apple raised on the farm which had cradled his undistinguished infancy. He was popularly known ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... as was said of the Frenchman who created the vaudeville; and men, too strong-minded and above all too full of reason to give any credence to the mysteries taught by the church, have displayed a blind faith in respect to moving atoms. They think thus to set themselves free from what they call the prejudices of their fathers. They find no difficulty ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... disheartening and dragging weight. He was now sure he was being followed. He squinted back over his shoulders, only to catch sight of a nocturnal "bill-sniper" placarding vulnerable areas with his lithographed laudations of a vaudeville dancing woman. A child murderer burdened with the body of his victim could not have been more ill at ease, more ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... popular songs. She cannot be compared in this respect with Bert Williams, Blanche Ring, Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Fannie Brice, or Marie Cahill. I have named nearly all the good ones. The spirit, the very conscious liberties taken with the text (the vaudeville singer must elaborate his own syncopations as the singer of early opera embroidered on the score of the composer) are not matters that just happen. They require any amount of work and experience with audiences. None of the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... artistically are dire. New York boasts—yes, literally boasts—the biggest, noisiest, and poorest orchestra in the country. I refer to the Philharmonic Society, with its wretched wood-wind, its mediocre brass, and its aggregation of rasping strings. All the vaudeville and lightning-change conductors have not put this band on a level with the Boston, the Philadelphia, or the Chicago organizations. Nor does the opera please me much better. Noise, at the expense of music; quantity, instead of quality; all the tempi distorted and fortes exaggerated, so as to ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... head. He seemed to be saying: "This water is much too cold for me." The mamma bear was dressed in a poke bonnet and white apron, and resembled the wolf who frightened Little Red Riding-Hood, and Ikey, the baby bear, wore rakishly over one eye the pointed cap of a clown. To those who knew their vaudeville, this was indisputable evidence that Ikey would furnish the comic relief. Nor did Ikey disappoint them. He was a wayward son. When his parents were laboriously engaged in a boxing-match, or dancing to the "Merry Widow Waltz," or balancing on step-ladders, Ikey, on all fours, would ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... not divide our plays into comedies and tragedies there is frequently a good deal of humor on the Chinese stage; yet we have nothing in China corresponding to the popular musical comedy of the West. A musical comedy is really a series of vaudeville performances strung together by the feeblest of plots. The essence seems to be catchy songs, pretty dances, and comic dialogue. The plot is apparently immaterial, its only excuse for existence being to give a certain order of sequence to the aforesaid songs, dances, and dialogues. ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... After the selection of vaudeville, which was loudly applauded, the Prince Villardo presented himself, challenging to mortal combat the Moros who held his father prisoner. The hero threatened to cut off all their heads at a single stroke ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... sure," said the Lady-with-the-Bust, "I don't know what men mean by our not having a sense of humour. I'm sure I have. I know I went last week to a vaudeville, and I just laughed all through. Of course I can't read Mark Twain, or anything like that, but then I don't call that funny, do you?" she concluded, turning to ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... VAUDEVILLE, a light, lively song with topical allusions; also a dramatic poem interspersed with comic songs of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... LeHuber, The World's Unparalleled Upside-Down Man! He Doesn't Know Whether He's On His Head Or His Heels. He's Always Up In The Air About Something, But You Can't Upset Him! Vaudeville To-night—The Bodongo Brothers, Brilliant Burmese Balancers—Arctic Annie, the Prima Donna of Sealdom, and Tristan LeHuber, The Balloon Man—He Uses An Anchor For A Parachute!" At last indeed the LeHuber family will have arrived sensationally in the ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... intention of using it. The white and crimson sign flapped in the soft breeze companionably responsive to the modest announcement, "Marble Workshop, Reproductions and Antiques, Garden Furniture," which so inadequately invited those whom it might concern to a view of the petrified vaudeville within. Through the interstices of the gate the courtyard looked littered and unalluring;—the wicker tables without their fine white covers; the chairs pushed back in a heterogeneous assemblage; the segregated columns of a ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... vaudeville artist in France and who is certainly funnier than any woman on earth—had got herself up in horizon blue, and was the hit of the afternoon. The men forgot war and the horrors of war and surrendered to her art and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... revolution is identified with some musical air: when Louis XVIII. first appeared at the theatre, after his long exile, he was greeted with the "Vive Henri IV.," and the new constitution of 1830 was ushered in by the "Marseillaise." The Vaudeville theatre, we are told, during the Revolution and under the Empire, was essentially political. An imaginary resemblance between la chaste Suzanne and Marie Antoinette caused the prohibition of that drama; and the interest which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... continuing in that difficult path, Nathan had fallen, out of sheer necessity, into the powder and patches of eighteenth-century vaudeville, costume plays, and the reproduction, scenically, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... the play and players of the day will be found far more closely representative of the social tone, the political creed, the artistic tastes of the hour, than elsewhere. The drama, for instance, in vogue not long since at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Place de la Bourse, is one we can scarcely imagine successful in another city, at least to such a degree. It was Les Filles de Marbre; and this is the plot. The opening scene is at Athens, in the studio of Phidias. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... compromise them, they were given tickets to the city where they were supposed to go upon the stage. They reached the city and providentially were guided to a boardinghouse of a Scotch woman who lived next door to the alleged theatre, which proved to be a saloon in the front and a vaudeville in the rear and upstairs a ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... Italian opera; a stark Spanish drama, too intense for any but Latins, foreign; debauched vaudeville, incredibly vulgar; or at the concert-hall, sentimental Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon songs, with an audience of grave uncritical ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... dance halls. And all because a few ill-bred, fun-loving, carefree young people wrongly interpreted the new dances in their own way and gave to the steps the vulgar abandon appropriate only to the cheap vaudeville stage ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... be fulfilled. The Theatre de la Renaissance accepted his "Novice of Palermo;" but at the last moment there was the usual bankruptcy of the management,—the fourth that affected him! Then he wrote a Parisian Vaudeville, but it had to be given up because the actors declared it could not be executed. The Grand Opera, on which he had fixed his eye, was absolutely out of the question. He was brought to such straits that he offered to sing in the chorus of a small ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... Educated Ape is here, The pet of vaudeville, so the posters say, And every night the gaping people pay To see him in his panoply appear; To see him pad his paunch with dainty cheer, Puff his perfecto, swill champagne, and sway Just like a gentleman, yet all in play, Then bow himself off stage ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... of the moving-picture man was Harry Stetson. He had been a newspaper reporter, a press-agent, and an actor in vaudeville and in a moving-picture company. Now on his own account he was preparing an illustrated lecture on the East, adapted to churches and Sunday-schools. Peter and he wrote it in collaboration, and in the evenings rehearsed ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... lived on the Heights, Brooklyn. Persons from New York and other parts of the Middlewest have been known to believe that Brooklyn is somehow humorous. In newspaper jokes and vaudeville it is so presented that people who are willing to take their philosophy from those sources believe that the leading citizens of Brooklyn are all deacons, undertakers, and obstetricians. The fact is that North Washington Square, at its reddest and whitest and ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the bombardment. "You naughty child," I heard a woman who was walking before me say to her daughter, "if you do not behave better I will not take you to see the bombardment." "It is better than a vaudeville," said a girl near me on the Trocadero, and she clapped her hands. A man at Point-du-Jour showed me two great holes which had been made in his garden the night before by two bombs close by his front door. He, his wife, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... simple enough, in all conscience! A straw bonnet all the year through; a pink spencer; a Scotch plaid petticoat, and bright green or lemon-coloured boots; you may see the costume any day in Les Anglaises pour rire, at the Varietes. We all know it is a Vaudeville, and it would not be publicly acted unless it were authentic. I repeat it once more, ever since this world has been a world, Englishwomen—real genuine Englishwomen—have never been differently dressed." ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the mosaic lobby of the theater for his opera-hat. When he recovered it, it resembled one of those accordions upon which vaudeville artists play Mendelssohn's Wedding March and the latest ragtime (by request). Some one had stepped on it. Among the unanswerable questions stands prominently: Why do we laugh when a man loses his hat? Thomas burned with a mixture of rage and shame; shame that Kitty should witness his discomfiture ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... first-class vaudeville turn and shouted: "Say what you please, I notify the coroner! Hosley killed his wife so that he might marry my daughter; I have had detectives out, so I know and you ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... automobiles, and that pleasure jaunts will be fully as numerous and popular. With the important item of practicability fully demonstrated, "Come, take a trip in my airship," will have more real significance than now attaches to the vapid warblings of the vaudeville vocalist. ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... it for granted that Cousin Julia wouldn't care for the sort of things she was accustomed to any more than she herself would be interested to go about with her. Somehow the girl felt that Miss Pritchard would be devoted to vaudeville and even moving pictures—she might even refer to the latter as "movies"! Of course, that was the worst of the whole situation—Cousin Julia herself! For, no matter how singular or even coarse she might be, Elsie had to live with her and to put up with a certain ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... of his arrival, he found the house packed to the doors. The performance, vaudeville in character, had already begun, and it was only after much elbowing and crowding that he finally succeeded in making his way to Carlos' private box where the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... pensively, "I felt so sure I had got him this time." He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. It was perhaps his failure to find rest in it that restored him to animation. "It is a little thing," he murmured, "on the decline of the vaudeville." ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Olivier, I on Charles's, Celeste beside her fiance, the grandparents in front, we entered the theater of St. Martinville, and in a moment more were the observed of all observers. The play was a vaudeville, of which I remember only the name, but rarely have I seen amateurs act so well: all the prominent parts were rendered by young men. But if the French people are polite, amiable, and hospitable, we know that they ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... and Labiche have found no fit successors? One can imagine the latter laying down his pen and confessing himself beaten at his own game; for really this periodical "crusade" upon the Penny Dreadful has all the qualities of the very best vaudeville—the same bland exhibition of bourgeois logic, the same wanton appreciation of evidence, the same sententious alacrity in seizing the immediate explanation—the more trivial the better—the same inability to reach the remote cause, the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the Gymnase, partly in the Comedie Francaise. In these works Feuillet revealed himself as an analyst of feminine character, as one who had spied out all their secrets, and could pour balm on all their wounds. 'Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre' (Vaudeville, 1858) is probably the best known of all his later dramas; it was, of course, adapted for the stage from his romance, and is well known to the American public through Lester Wallack and Pierrepont Edwards. 'Tentation' ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... were glad when we joined the ladies again and when Tom talked of the amateur vaudeville show that his company had got up behind ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... accordingly; the dialogue was all omitted, and the ingenious actor aided his benefit by saving L8 8s. or L10 10s., which would otherwise have found their way into the pocket of the Examiner. When the French plays were performed in London, in 1829, Colman insisted that a fee must be paid for every vaudeville or other light piece of that class produced. As some three or four of such works were presented every night—the same plays being rarely repeated—it was computed that the Examiner's fees amounted upon an average to L6 6s. a night. During an interval, however, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... vaudeville. Father and mother were veteran legits; They loved the Bard and the "Lady of Lyons." I was born on a show boat on the Cumberland; I was carried on as a child When the farm girl revealed her shame On the night of the snowstorm. The old folks died with grease paint ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... fell into order and became normal, Una could never quite identify the vaudeville theater to which the Sessionses took them that evening. The gold-and-ivory walls of the lobby seemed to rise immeasurably to a ceiling flashing with frescoes of light lovers in blue and fluffy white, mincing steps and ardent kisses and flaunting draperies. They climbed a tremendous ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... following, when all the races were over. Another house-boat, three boats from ours, was owned by a wealthy brewer and had a pavilion built on the land back of where it was moored and connected by a broad gangplank with the boat. They used this pavilion for dancing and vaudeville, but although it was very nice and we were immensely entertained, still we all decided that it was not much like a house-boat to be so much of the time ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... novels, in the uncritical theater. Every merchant has his stock of assumptions about the mental habits of his customers and competitors; the prostitute hers; the newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had a few; the vaudeville stage has a number. We test these notions by their results, and even "practical people" find that there is more variety in human nature than ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the briefest is "The Stronger." He called it a "scene." It is a mere incident—what is called a "sketch" on our vaudeville stage, and what the French so aptly have named a "quart d'heure." And one of the two figures in the cast remains silent throughout the action, thus turning the little play practically into a monologue. Yet it has all the dramatic intensity which we have come to look ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... This deprives conversation of much of its colour and renders it rather commonplace and meagre. Unfortunately, among many of our young people, the Bible seems to be a book to be avoided or to be treated in a rather "jocose" manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, a Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and the weary comedian, when he is at a loss to get a witty speech across the footlights, is almost sure to speak of Jonah ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... which makes the false world of the stage so singularly unreal by contrast when watched from the back. The house was packed from floor to ceiling, for the Palaceum's policy of breaking away from revue and going back to Mr. Mackwayte called "straight vaudeville" was triumphantly justifying itself. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... pigeontoed, or talking through the nose, or drinking—or anything else. Any man can see with half an eye how drinking, for example, is hurting Jones; but he always argues that his own personal drinking is of a different variety and is doing him no harm. The best illustration of it is in the old vaudeville story, where the man came on the stage and said: "Smith is drinking too much! I never go into a ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... was that Mrs. Pitchley had done, there was no longer a question of her being kept out from the Pink Ball, or anything else. People were charming to her, and we met Mrs. Van der Windt herself at the Chateau at a luncheon party with a vaudeville entertainment afterwards, and also at a dinner. Mrs. Van der Windt seemed to like my cousin, Mohunsleigh, very much, too, and gave a moonlight motor car picnic especially for him, with only a few people asked besides ourselves, and the Pitchleys ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Vaudeville delight, Musical Comedy can bore me quite; One act of Ibsen from the Gallery caught, Better than Daly ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... poor city boys who have to grow up nowadays and depend on taxicabs and vaudeville for their excitement. Belonging to the band was more fun than belonging to the baseball team or the torchlight brigade or anything else. We got in on everything. They couldn't pull off a rally or celebration, or even a really successful church social, without us. I might ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... end, chews with her lips and of course I'm always excited for fear her dinner will fall overboard. The way she juggles food would get her a job in the vaudeville game any day. She sits up as tho' she'd been impaled, and the shaft broken off ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... under the control of Hyde & Behman, who were planning to convert it into a vaudeville house. Frohman went to see them and persuaded them to turn it into a legitimate theater. Just about this time the Booth Theater at Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue was about to be torn down. Under Charles's prompting Hyde & Behman bought ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... His Excellency was curt and caustic. "After the vaudeville show of last night there won't be much to-day at the State House to suit anybody ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... diners pushed their chairs back from the table and passed into another room, it was far past midnight, and the real revelry of the night was at hand. Reckless, voluptuous women from the vaudeville houses and dance halls appeared, and for hours the wine-soaked scions of nobility reeked in those exhibitions which shock the sensibilities of true men. Four men there were who tried to conceal their disgust while the others roared out tha applause ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... settle this argument," said Dan, with his ready, cheerful smile, "let me make a proposition. As I can't take both of you up to Tiffany's and do the right thing, what do you say to a little vaudeville? I've got the rickets. How about looking at stage diamonds since we can't shake hands with the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... below the little private office. He laughed shortly to himself as he opened a bureau drawer and selected a clean white shirt. The touch of the clean linen encouraged him a little. He began to whistle. He had a "date on" with Mary Louise. He had asked her to go to the vaudeville. Two or three hours of pleasant forgetfulness, anyway. Mary Louise—the thought of her brought a vague feeling of unrest. For over two weeks he had tried to get her over the 'phone. She had either been out when he had called or had pleaded some other engagement. Finally he had got the engagement ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... to say—" interrupted Margaret Howes. "I heard that Jeffries took her to the vaudeville show and I thought that was a tremendous change of heart for ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... pass through the town, they halt for a night and act. On the day of our tremendous dinner party of eight, there was an infant phenomenon; whom I should otherwise have seen. Last night there was a Vaudeville company; and Charley, Roche, and Anne went. The Brave reports the performances to have resembled Greenwich Fair. . . . There are some Promenade Concerts in the open air in progress now: but as they are just above one part ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... picked up a copy of the Scientific American and chortled to read the account of a German acrobat who was playing in vaudeville ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... dare not assert herself or be herself, lest, in some way, she should lose her tentative grasp upon the counterfeit which largely takes the place of love. If he prefers it, she will expatiate upon her fondness for vaudeville and musical comedy until she herself begins to believe that she likes it. With tears in her eyes and her throat raw, she will choke upon the assertion that she likes the smell of smoke; she will assume passion when his slightest touch makes her ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... true mountain man. He seeks neither praise nor self-glory. Upon returning from the World War he spurned a fortune in pictures and vaudeville appearances, refusing steadfastly to commercialize his war record. And with the same determination he declined to sell out to small politicians who tried to use him when he undertook to raise funds to start a school for mountain boys and girls. Knowing the need of the young ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... to get dollars and has no other idea. A girl born and reared there thinks it her mission and her duty to marry dollars. If her parents are poor, if she is compelled to "work out" as stenographer, typewriter, shop-lady, or whatnot, and if she keeps her virtue, she is a phenomenon. The vaudeville stage is recruited from her ranks. The bawdy houses are recruited from her ranks. The fetid river's yearly burden of corpses is recruited ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... blasphemies. Laforgue could repeat with Arthur Rimbaud: "I accustomed myself to simple hallucinations: I saw, quite frankly, a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums kept by the angels; post-chaises on the road to heaven, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; the title of a vaudeville raised up horrors before me. Then I explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of words! I ended by finding something sacred in the disorder of my mind" [translation by Arthur Symons]. But while Laforgue with all his "spiritual dislocation" would ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... into more general channels. The topics of the day's light talk were absolutely unknown to him. The plays, the new books, the latest popular songs, jokes depending for their point on an intimate knowledge of the prevailing vaudeville mode, were as unfamiliar to him as Miss Alice Southerland's guest. He had thought pine and forest and the trail so long, that he found these square-elbowed subjects refusing to be jostled ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... imbecility are continuous; nevertheless so many expressions of the merging-point are at first startling. We did think that Prof. Hitchcock's performance in identifying the Amherst phenomenon as a fungus was rather notable as scientific vaudeville, if we acquit him of the charge of seriousness—or that, in a place where fungi were so common that, before a given evening two of them sprang up, only he, a stranger in this very fungiferous place, knew a fungus when he saw something like a fungus—if ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... backing his dented car out of the debris, Oldershaw leaped out. His face had been cut by the glass of the broken windshield. Blood was trickling down his fat, good-natured face. His hat was smashed and looked like that of the tramp cyclist of the vaudeville stage. "All my fault, old man," he said in his best irrepressible manner, as a policeman bore down upon him. "Help me to hike our prostrate friend into my car, and I'll whip him off to a hospital. He's only had the stuffing knocked out of him. It's no worse than ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... nohow; I swan, I'm completely knocked off my feet," said Jared to the young man of the Evening Rounder, in the rustic dialect of the vaudeville. "Why, that there man—I've allus looked on him as my best friend. It was that book of his'n that give me my start, and now he turns agen me. But he's wrong, and I've got the hull town to prove it. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... dinner with one of the most lovely of foreign Ambassadresses, and was to go with her afterward to the Vaudeville, at the pretty golden theater, where a troupe from the Bouffes were playing; but he felt anything but in the mood for even her bewitching and—in an marriageable sense—safe society, as he stopped his horse at his ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... almost impatiently. "I know what you are going to say. It will be flattering to me of course. The unattached young man is dangerous to the reputation. The foreign lady is travelling alone. There is the foundation of a vaudeville in that!" ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... fell to wondering who and what he might be; but the minute the suspect came into the salon for dinner the first night out I read his secret at a glance. He belonged to a refined song-and-dance team doing sketches in vaudeville. He could not have been anything else—he had jet buttons on ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Eddie Brandes; his first fortune of three dollars was amassed at craps; he became a hanger-on in ward politics, at race-tracks, stable, club, squared ring, vaudeville, burlesque. Long Acre attracted him—but always the gambling end ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Kaiser is canned and I get back to the ol' job, eatin my 3 a day, and holdin your hand in the movies at nite, I'm gonna try fer the vaudeville. We have formed a quartet in our company, and we must be pretty good fer up to the present nobody has fired anything at us but remarks. Skinny tried to git in by telling us his voice was trained; the top sarge sed he guessed it was trained all-rite, all-rite, but he must of trained it selling ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... ring-pitching to shell-games on folding tables, which they could pick up in a twinkling and run away with when their dupes began to threaten and rough them up; the clear soprano of the singer, who wore long skirts and sang chaste songs, in the vaudeville tent ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... cannot cut the puzzling knot by simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are coming to see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as they will—and ought—to the theater, and if the theater can lift their ideals, parents would ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... millionaire, and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many noble and Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator with more than a soupcon of the vaudeville favorite in him: a Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... to go. We hadn't any Clubs to begin with, so that on his way home from business there was no temptation for him to stop off anywhere and frivol away his time playing billiards, or squandering his limited means on rubbers of bridge or other ruinous games. The only Vaudeville shows we had at the time consisted of the somewhat too continuous performances of the monkeys and the poll-parrots right there in our own back-yard, so that that menace to the happy home was entirely unknown to us, and inasmuch ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... Dixey turned me to the vaudeville stage. I could write playlets, I thought. So while Mother was busy sewing at nights I devoted myself to writing. And at last the first sketch was finished. At the Temple Theatre that week was the popular ...
— Making the House a Home • Edgar A. Guest
... vaudeville, with stare and leer. He comes with megaphone and specious cheer. His troupe, too fat or short or long or lean, Step from the pages of the magazine With slapstick or sombrero or with cane: The rube, the ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... retirement at Dartmoor, and booked him solid for a thirty-six months' lecturing tour on the McGinnis circuit. It was to him, too, that Joe Brown, who could eat eight pounds of raw meat in seven and a quarter minutes, owed his first chance of displaying his gifts to the wider public of the vaudeville stage. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... years later, and starting management on his own account in the provinces, he was financially unfortunate. The commercial success of his life was secured with Our Boys, which was played at the Vaudeville from January 1875 till April 1879—a then unprecedented "run." The Upper Crust, another of his successes, gave a congenial opportunity to Mr J.L. Toole for one of his [v.04 p.0906] inimitably broad character-sketches. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Flippancy and carelessness, haphazard interests and recklessness must result, mediocrity wins the day, cheap aims pervade the social life, hasty judgments, superficial emotions, trivial problems, sensational excitements, and vulgar pleasures appeal to the masses. Yellow papers and vaudeville shows—vaudeville shows on the stage, in the courtroom, on the political platform, in the pulpit of the church—are welcome, and of all the results, one is the most immediate, the disorganization ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... was the direct ancestor of our oratorio, so was the little pastoral of Adam de la Hale the germ of the modern French vaudeville. One of its melodies is said to be sung to this day in some parts ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... insisted on going the rounds with a party of us, and in order to shake him we entered a variety theatre, where my maudlin friend soon fell asleep in his seat. The rest of us left the theatre, and after seeing the sights I wandered back to the vaudeville, finding the performance over and my friend still sound asleep. I awoke him, never letting him know that I had been absent for hours, and after rubbing his eyes open, he said: "Reed, is it all over? No dance or concert? They give a good show ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... a Vaudeville entertainment. A woman and a man in peasants' dress came and laughed raucously, without meaning, their eyes narrowly searching the depths of the house, then they stamped their feet and whirled around, struck one another, laughed ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... handwriting may be attributed to an amanuensis. When the great man writes his next notice, I shall make it my business to be taking a bock in the Cafe de l'Europe, in order that I may observe closely what happens. There is to be a repetition generale at the Vaudeville on Monday night—on Monday night, therefore, I hope to advise you of our plan of campaign. Now do not speak to me any more—I am about to compose a eulogy on Claudine, for which Labaregue will, in due course, receive ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... young people can hardly escape contact with amusements cunningly devised to excite sex impulses and at the same time to lower respect for woman. The bill-boards and the picture post-cards, the penny-in-the-slot machines and the motion pictures, the exhibits of quack doctors, vaudeville performances, many so-called comic operas, popular new songs, the dress of women approved by modern fashion,—these all help at times to prepare young people to fall before the special temptations that beset all commercial recreation centers. Especially dangerous are the saloons, billiard ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... sat in Ronacher's at Vienna, watching a most entertaining vaudeville performance, Count Selim Malagaski was in his library, conferring ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... in fact, but these were all of the better class (our stage has made considerable headway), whereas the one that had been selected by Mrs. Chaikin's society was of the "historical-opera" variety, a hodge-podge of "tear-wringing" vaudeville and "laughter-compelling" high tragedy. I should have bought ten boxes ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... has passed the censorship, signed Agostino Balderini—a disaffected person out of Piedmont, rendered tame and fangless by a rigorous imprisonment. The sources of the tale, O ye grave Signori Tedeschi? The sources are partly to be traced to a neat little French vaudeville, very sparkling—Camille, or the Husband Asserted; and again to a certain Chronicle that may be mediaeval, may be modern, and is just, as the great Shakespeare would say, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... acknowledged reputation of a poet by his excellent works, "Psyche" and "Walter the Potter," had introduced the vaudeville upon the Danish stage; it was a Danish vaudeville, blood of our blood, and was therefore received with acclamation, and supplanted almost everything else. Thalia kept carnival on the Danish stage, and Heiberg was her secretary. I made his acquaintance ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... bellies of the clouds, I know all about the heart of Attila and the Vikings and tigers and Alexander the Great! So I think I grew a bit out there talking to that water-giant who does nothing at all—not even a vaudeville ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... begun his American career as a peanut vender with a travelling circus. At eighteen he was a side show ballyhoo; later, the manager of the side show, and, soon after, the proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working knowledge of the popular show business. That had been nine years ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... fact that magnetism is by no means confined to those who have finely trained intellects or who have achieved great reputations. Some vaudeville buffoon or some gypsy fiddler may have more attractive power than the virtuoso who had spent years in developing his mind and his technic. The average virtuoso thinks far more of his "geist," his "talent" (or as Emerson ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... in unconventional nineteenth century morning dress amongst the old-fashioned costumes of the company; but, of course, the slight amusement was for once and away, and could not advantageously be frequently repeated. Thus, take one thing with another, the life of the Vaudeville audiences at this moment cannot be truthfully described ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... Christianity, but it is common honesty, mighty truth, a cardinal and beautiful teaching of Jesus Christ to deny one's self for the welfare of the weaker brother. Let one go to hear Mansfield in Shakespeare, and his neighbor boy will take his friend and go to the vaudeville, and his only excuse to his parents and to his half-taught mind and heart will be, "Well, Mr. So-and-So goes to the theater, he is a member of the Church and superintendent of the Sunday-school; surely there is no harm for me to go." To the immature ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... be seen 'at my best,'" protested Anne. "I want the other girls to have a chance, too. Why not give a vaudeville show? Grace and Miriam can dance. Elfreda can give imitations. There are plenty of things we can do. We will advertise the show in all the campus houses, and each one of us must pledge ourselves to sell a certain number of tickets. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower |
