Of research and vaudeville

The item on top of the work pile at the moment is a now very battered advance proof copy of a novel called The Little Shadows by the Canadian writer Marina Endicott, published in Canada last year and due for release in Australia in February. It's about a family in vaudeville, working the circuits along the border of the US and Canada; set from 1912-1917, it shows how their lives are affected by the forces of history.

With my curiosity piqued about vaudeville and its history in Australia -- obviously such an 'American' thing was going to make its way to Canada, but did it have a substantial history here? -- I went looking in the astounding new(ish) resource provided by the National Library, Trove, which -- well, go over there and have a look.

I spent many happy hours on this site last year and the year before when I was researching Adelaide and found, among other things, a great deal of family history buried among Family Notices and roundups from 'The Country', where the ferocious rivalry between my Scottish grandma and her bossy sister-in-law regarding the organisation of fund-raisers for the War Effort in Curramulka can be seen between the lines of often profoundly corrupted text.

Apropos of which, I decided early on that since this magical resource had been provided to me then the very least I could do was take an active part in the way it works: crowdsourcing to correct the scanned text, since obviously the resources don't exist for it to be done professionally. I decided that I would correct every article I used. There's no measuring this, but my guess is that, as with Wikipedia, the longer it goes on the more accurate it will be, as more and more people use it and contribute.

Anyway, vaudeville. Oh yes indeed. There's a thesis in this topic alone: 'Racism in the content and language of journalistic reportage of vaudeville in Adelaide, 1920-1940.' Here, for example, is a paragraph from The Advertiser of September 30, 1926:

CELEBRITY VAUDEVILLE. 

Special interest is attached to the Southern Revue Company, which will be appearing for the first time in Adelaide at the Theatre Royal next Saturday, under the J. C. Williamson management. Many of the members of Joe Sheftell's revue are even blacker than negroes are usually painted, but this is not true about the chorus girls, who are much fairer than their men folk. One of the members of the company remarked while in Sydney "how mighty good every one has been to us." This is the first impression gained of Australia by one of the darkest of the members. He also explained that in the Land of Liberty "culled" folk have to travel in their own special "Jim Crow" railway carriages, and are segregated in special hotels and restaurants. This company includes many talented performers, who have been a great success in both Melbourne and Sydney — Minta Cato, the colored soprano; Joe Sheftell, the producer; Bob Williams, the comedian; McConn, Saunders, and Williams, the nifty steppers, and the chorus girls.

Did you blanch over that word 'culled'? Language is a wonderful thing when it come to the return of the repressed. It took me a few seconds to work out that it was merely an attempt at phonetic approximation of the accent of the unnamed  'dark member' (oh dear, it just gets worse and worse) and his pronunciation of the word 'colored' (interesting that the Advertiser was using American spelling in 1926).  I also enjoyed the snide reference to the Land of Liberty, implying that we in Australia have no such unenlightened attitudes, oh my wordy lordy no.

And as for the forces of history, I couldn't help noticing the tour dates on this one, from The Advertiser of September 21, 1929:

VAUDEVILLE PERFORMANCE 

Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher, announces that the annual concert to be given by her students will be held in the Thebarton Town Hall on October 22. The programme will contain several spectacular ballets, solo dances, and vaudeville acts.

(And for anyone looking for ideas for fiction, there's a whole novel for you right there in the phrase 'Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher.') Unbeknownst to either the journalist or Miss Trixie, the 1929 Wall Street Crash was imminent: Black Thursday was October 24th, two days after the concert.

Vaudeville was a notoriously unstable and insecure profession even at the best of times, as Endicott's book makes clear, with acts being sacked and theatres closing down and impresarios going broke left and right. I wonder what happened to everyone in the wake of Black Thursday: to Miss Trixie, whose pupils' parents must have hurriedly reassessed whether the budget could stand ballet lessons? To those 'culled' troupers from three years before? To all vaudeville everywhere: the performers, the backers, the managers, the theatre owners, and the audiences, many of whom may have abruptly decided that going to the vaudeville was a luxury they could definitely do without? What happened to the nifty steppers, the Men of Mirth, the chorus girls, the acrobatic violinists and the 'Gypsy' dancers, in the wake of October 24th, 1929? Whatever did they do? Wherever did they go?

There is a routine, of sorts

Every third or fourth Friday is Money Day, on which one pays any outstanding bills and chases up every little bit and bob of money one is owed (long, long gone are the days when they just automatically sent you a cheque), that number of bits and bobs today being, hmm, five, and let me tell you that the bigger the institution the harder it is to get your money out of them and the longer it takes. If the invoices add up to more than the bill payments, one is allowed to buy oneself a nice bottle of something.

Obscenity

We has it.



Found via Hoyden About Town.

This is just wrong in too many ways to count, but here are four to be going on with:

1) False advertising. A woman the size and shape of the one in the photo doesn't 'need' to wear this or any other torture garment. I am of an age to have spent the first year of my adolescence being forced to wear 'foundation garments' (then suddenly they invented pantyhose -- stockings had hitherto been kept up by girdles, and if you were over fourteen and left your legs bare you were a slut -- and the world changed overnight) so I know whereof I speak.

2) Allegedly to minimise 'figure faults' and maximise 'assets', this garment has a (porno)graphic subtext, not particularly sub, that fetishises the arse in a way that makes crotchless 'panties' look innocent, normal and sweet. I have my own ideas about where this growing arse/anal fetish is going. Between it and the various charming customs around the place -- mass abortion of female foetuses in countries where of course everybody wants a boy; large-scale rape of babies and toddlers in the belief that it will cure AIDS -- the global overpopulation problem is already well on the way to being sorted.

3) This 'body shaper' underwear craze is bringing back the quaint locutions of the 1950s, isn't that sweet? Do a quick prac crit / close reading / fisk of these corset manufacturers' advertising some time. 'Body shapers' = 'Your own uncorseted body has no shape, ew, men won't like it [*makes child-frightening bogeyman noises*], so put that self-esteem in the garbage right now and spend money instead.'

4) OK Girls, Break Through the Surface of the Primeval Slime or Die Trying department: this garment is a patriarchal instrument of torture. Do. Not. Wear. It. Or anything like it. Ever.

Those who don't understand (or don't want to understand) that 'patriarchal' can apply in a situation like this where women appear to be willingly doing these things to themselves are being literal-minded essentialists who don't understand what a patriarchal society is or how it works, and no correspondence will be entered into on this subject because I spent 17 years explaining it to fresh crops of newbie students every year and that is enough for a lifetime. In a nutshell: when you say 'Yes but women want to do this to themselves' I will reply 'Yes indeed, many of them do. Why is that, do you think?'

I know there are men out there who deliberately Google 'patriarchy' so they can turn up at strange blogs for the first time and argue the toss, and any such (instantly recognisable) comment will be binned. Go here if you genuinely want to understand this concept better than you do.

Just as well it's a Superfood

In a fit of idle curiosity, I counted the blueberries while I waited for the coffee to start bubbling up, and then I did the maths. They cost me 7.87 cents per blueberry, including the little shrivelledy one. And I'm going to eat them very very slowly.

Behind

That's behind as in not out in front, not behind as in bum, the latter being even more depressing to contemplate than the list which I now put before you. I am behind with the admin in particular, and in general with the ongoing project that is Life.

I once read an article about the importance of prioritising in the daily pushing-back of life's chaos. It recommended writing a list of every single thing you needed or wanted to do and then prioritising them into categories A (must be done, and ASAP, preferably today), B (is very desirable and should be done soon), and C (every intention of getting round to it eventually). A typical such list looks like this:

clean out the cat litter -- A
learn Italian -- C
pay speeding fine -- B/A
finish the current work novel and start the next one -- A
get a haircut -- B
go back to Tuscany -- C
write to H -- B/A
new front fence -- C/B

Etc. In practice what happens is that you get all the As done plus a handful of the Bs but the Cs never even get a look-in. However, as you can see from the forward slashes, Cs sometimes become Bs, and Bs often increase in urgency until they become As. Which is why I have made another list.

As inspired by some comments over at Laura's place about how one would spend the prime ministerial dosh if one were so fortunate as to be either an oldie or a breeder (and I, like Laura and Amanda, am neither, being, like them, too young for the former category and, unlike them, too old for the latter: like both of those fine ladies I too am what Amanda calls a 'full-time tax-paying-not-eating working schmo'), here, in alphabetical order, is the list of people I really need and/or want to contact, visit and/or hire:

Accountant
Bank manager
Beauty salon (special environmentally aware variety) (my feminist position on skincare, makeup, haircuts and so on is 'Assimilate and transcend'. Brought up in the 60s, what can you do)
Blood bank
Carpenter
Dentist
Electrician
Fence people
Gutter cleaner-outerers
Hairdresser
Local council (hard rubbish section)
Optician
Osteopath
Pest eradication people
Physio
Plumber
Plumbing supplies shop
Self-storage firm
TV antenna people
Tree surgeon
Yard-cleaning-up people

It's almost a meme, don't you think?

Some of these can wait a little longer, like the optician. Some of them can't, like the growing tree that is about to actually push the garage over. What I don't understand -- given that I can now afford at least some of these things -- is how I could have let that list get quite so long.

A half-full glass in a toenail of a day*

I've spent most of today either sitting at the desk or rushing around like a mad rabbit to places like banks and post offices doing a big pile of mind-numbingly boring and in three cases quite expensive administrative tasks, several of which I ought never to have been asked or expected to do in the first place. When I asked the woman in the post office how much stamps were for a particular sized item, all I wanted to know was the answer. When I was going through the supermarket checkout, all I wanted was for big heavy items not to be dumped directly on top of small fragile ones. And when I checked the mailbox, there were two items in it, and one was my superannuation statement, informing me that over 9% of what used to be in that account had melted away like fairy floss on the tongue between the beginning of January and the end of June.

So the other item -- the speeding fine (and yes I did totally deserve it, thank you all for asking) for $202 -- seemed as nothing by comparison, and therefore setting fire to those ten $20 bills and watching them burn isn't going to be anywhere near as painful as it usually is. Hooray.

*I am aware that this is a mixed metaphor, but it is a much more original one than something the Prime Minister is reported to have said today: 'There are big bumps in the road ahead; it's not all going to be smooth sailing.'

New books!

My immediate and, I like to think, logical response to the news that the global financial world was going to hell in a handbasket and I would very shortly be left without enough superannuation to buy me a can of baby food for my toothless gums, much less life tenure of a nice lavender-walled room in some erstwhile stately home, was to go into a bookshop and come out over $200 lighter, something I have not done for over twelve years.

Here is what I bought:

The new Val McDermid, A Darker Domain.
The new Kathy Reichs, Devil Bones.
The new Robert Drewe, The Rip: can it be true that short stories are making a comeback?
Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française, which I bought as a gift for a friend when it first came out but have not yet read myself.
Susan Wyndham's Life In His Hands, subtitled 'The true story of a neurosurgeon and a pianist', which I plan to read in tandem with Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, a gift from the friend to whom I gave Suite Française.
The new Robert Dessaix, Arabesques, which is the most beautiful Australian book I've seen since Gay Bilson's Plenty and possibly more beautiful even than that.

And, finally, a book of the kind I can't resist, called Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know, which contains simple instructions, with illustrations, on how to do stuff.

Much of this stuff is things that I can in fact already do (wrap up an elegant bouquet, make guacamole, give myself a perfect manicure, rim a glass with sugar or salt, stop bleeding, find my perfect zodiac love match, swim backstroke) as well as many things I would never in a million years want to learn to do (tie a cherry stem in my mouth, flirt with emoticons, craft a plastic-bag throw rug, lasso a calf, fire-roast a tarantula or prepare Tibetan yak-butter tea).

But there are many more that I can't do and would dearly love to be able to: perform CPR, deliver a baby in a taxi, meditate for inner peace, combat jet lag, jump-start a car and dance a steamy tango.

It's much, much too late to have a memorable first kiss, and anyway, I did.

But here's the one, Item #298 of 500, that made me think I really had to buy this book: How to Clip a Cat's Claws. I only read the instructions when I got home. Step #1, and I kid you not, complete with illustration, reads 'Start with a relaxed cat.'

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

On being a one-woman small business

Should you have ambitions to become a one-person small business, allow me to offer the following advice:

* Do not, ever, underestimate the amount of time it will take you to keep track of the money.

* If as in my case the money is coming in in oft-tiny amounts from a rich diversity of ever-changing sources, multiply that estimate by six.

* You will have to invoice almost everyone. Almost everyone will require you to invoice them in a particular format and all the formats will be different.

* Even if you continue to have an income stream from the same source over a period of time, the source will change its name regularly. Checking every time you have an invoice to send that you have in fact made it out to the correct body under the correct name will save you even more wasted time later.

* Keep all your sent invoices in one place. Make backups/copies and keep them all together in a different place.

* You will find that you need to cross-reference and cross-check your own invoices with your bank statements and match both to your tax records. Don't forget that some employers are into electronic banking, others not so much, so you can't rely on just the one set of records.

* The financial year in which you get even remotely sloppy about income and expenditure will be the financial year in which you get audited. Do not, however, think that keeping good records will necessarily save you from this. My paternal grandfather, a wheat and sheep farmer, was once investigated by the taxation people because his records were too good to be true. Investigation revealed there was no fudging, just perfect record-keeping. My grandfather was a Virgo.

* Being a Virgo helps a lot, as indeed does being a Taurus. The rest of you should get help.