"Vaudeville" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I've been hunting a job until I wore out two pair of these Sorosis things and not a bush shakes. Can't even sign a contract for a Friday night amateur contest. By gum, I'd take a job barking for a snake race. I had an offer to go into vaudeville. What do you know about that? The act hasn't any time yet, but it will get time as soon as it makes good, and to make good all its needs is a trial performance, and the backer thinks he knows where he can get a trial performance, ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... They been there. Once I answered an ad. to join a county fair. I even sent money to a vaudeville agent ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... Moreover, the widespread wealth, the feeling of democratic equality, the faintness of truly artistic interests in the masses, all reinforce the craving for the mere tickling of the senses, for amusement of the body, for vaudeville on the stage and in life. The sexual element in this wave of enjoyment becomes reinforced by the American position of the woman outside of the family circle. Her contact with men has been multiplied, her right to seek joy in every possible way has become the corollary of ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... you. Live the lot you have chosen as bravely as you can, remembering that the thorn that you have developed will never change into a rose by mere change of circumstances. Divorce and the mere shifting of the stage setting will never make your tragedy over into a vaudeville or ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... 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 ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... facsimiles in miniature of his famous sky sign. And the several thousand salespeople in the huge store were slangily nicknamed "Peter Rolls's hands." But naturally these insignificant morsels of the great mosaic were not spelled with a capital H, unless, perhaps by themselves, and once when a vaudeville favourite sang a song, "I'm a Hand, I'm a Hand." It was a smart song, and made a hit; but Peter Rolls was said to have paid both the star and ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... the steam siren effect. And, as it's right on the corner of Forty-second and Broadway, he comes near collectin' a crowd. Four or five people turn around to see what the merriment is all about, and a couple of 'em stops short in their tracks. One guy I spotted for a vaudeville artist lookin' for stuff that might ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... 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
... cadence, and I found myself humming it delightedly. At 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, ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... 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
... color of it reminded you of the 'Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,' that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You'd have known him for one, even if you'd seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton suspender and a straw ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... in New York, the persons Dr. Rainey introduced had already made themselves comparatively well-known. For the last six weeks as "headliners" at one of the vaudeville theatres, and as entertainers at private houses, under the firm name of "The Vances," they had been giving an exhibition of code and cipher signaling. They called it mind reading. During the day, at the house of Vance and his wife, ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... "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 between one who worked for ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... or luncheon and dinner both, according to the length of stay, could be 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
... regular theatre she passed, and for the same reasons, to the vaudeville, and did her regular "stunts" along with the singers, the dancers, the harlequin's, acrobats, and the burnt cork humorists. The writer of this has seen her in one of these performances, and considers it entirely ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... who were 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 shillalah), ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... yet speaking there came a loud ring at the front door of the little bungalow, followed immediately by the entrance of the manager of a down-town vaudeville house. He plunged at once into his errand. He would offer Carmen one hundred dollars a week, and a contract for six months, to appear twice daily in his theater. "She'll make a roar!" he asserted. "Heavens, Madam! but she did put ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... half-obscene, vulgar farces, which made her laugh; an angel through the cross-fire of highly-flavored jests and scandalous anecdotes, which enlivened a stolen frolic; a languishing angel in the latticed box at the Vaudeville; an angel while she criticised the postures of opera dancers with the experience of an elderly habitue of le coin de la reine; an angel at the Porte Saint-Martin, at the little boulevard theatres, at the masked balls, which she enjoyed like any schoolboy. She was an angel who ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... him with disfavour. He disapproved of the marvellous brethren on general grounds because, himself a resident of years standing, he considered that these transients from the vaudeville stage lowered the tone of the boarding-house; but particularly because the one who had just spoken had, on his first evening in the ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 was out of sight ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... pharisaism, it is not a weak claim of 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 mind what seems right for one person seems ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... walking 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
... idea of 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? He ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... city. London is different frae New 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, o' coorse—are ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... 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 ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... pretty and lively young lady, who had been abroad, gave a very happy imitation of the almost inimitable Jenny Vertpre, in the French vaudeville of the "Cat metamorphosed to a Woman," in that scene where she betrays her original nature. She purred, she frolicked, she pounced on an imaginary mouse, caught it, tossed it up in the air, and went through all the manoeuvres of a veritable grimalkin. When ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... variety of the food given to the new troops reached a higher degree than was reasonably to have been expected. The average soldier gained from ten to twelve pounds after entering the service. Provision was also made for his entertainment. Vaudeville, concerts, moving pictures formed an element of camp life, much to the surprise of the visiting French officers and ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... be allowed the pen which aims simply to raise a laugh. We do not fulminate against a treatise on Quaternions because it lacks humor. If the drawings of cartoonists are anatomically incorrect, we are smilingly indulgent. Do we condemn a vaudeville skit for not conforming to the Aristotelian code of dramatic technique? Assuredly we do not rise in disgust from a musical comedy because "in real life" a bevy of shapely maidens in scant attire never goes tripping and singing ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... To a clever storekeeper it gave a chance to establish a following. Had he, as Lincoln had, the gift of story-telling, the gift of humor, he was a made man. Pigeon Creek over again! Lincoln's wealth of funny stories gave Offut's grocery somewhat the role of a vaudeville theater and made the storekeeper as popular a man as there ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... not only endurable, it was even welcome. The poor boy was playing the air of a French vaudeville on a pipe or flageolet. "Now he is happy!" said the mother. "He is a born musician; do come and see him!" An idea struck Stella. She overcame the inveterate reluctance in her to see the boy so fatally associated with the misery of Romayne's ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... looks of 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
... him, a 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, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... concert, at which the most celebrated Signora made her debut; there was a single vaudeville, which a white satin play-bill, presented to each guest as they entered the temporary theatre, indicated to have been written for the occasion; there was a ball, in which was introduced a new dance. Nothing for a moment was allowed to lag. Longueurs ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... clever thing 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 and ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... an offense. School, college, at home, in each he went wrong. At twenty-one he left me and married a woman from the vaudeville stage. It is not of him you are to think, Emily, but of a substitute for him. For that I designed Dick; once I hoped you would marry him and ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... think fit. Thus Mr. Bull, from Aldgate, with Mrs. Bull, and only four of the younger Bulls and Cows, numbering six in all, make good their entry at the cost of 1l. 4s.—Books to tell them what they are to see and hear, the when and the how are 3s. Seats for the vaudeville (average of modest places) 9s. Ditto for the ballet 6s. Ditto for the battle 6s. Ditto for the fire-works 6s.—Total 2l. 14s.—But then they are not charged for seeing the lamps; there is no charge for walking round the walks; there is no ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... to adopt the one-act play as a regular part of the program. The play first to be acted under the new policy was Hermann Hagedorn's 'The World Too Small for Three.' This is important because the one-act play has almost no place on the professional stage. Vaudeville houses put on an occasional one-act piece of the lighter sort. The Bijou now provides a place where the serious worker in this form may see his work produced and watch the effect on the audience. That there is a constantly ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... 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
... 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
... vaudeville tactics he was by no means a second-rate scientist. Which was why he had gained his position at Southwestern Tech in the first place. He refused to work directly for the government (no sense of humor, just ...
— This is Klon Calling • Walt Sheldon
... 8 A. M. intending to get work before his eight dollars was all gone. Well, the money was burning a hole in his pocket. He wanted to see a show and he came down on the Bowery and got into a cheap vaudeville show, and quite enjoyed himself. "I came out of that show," he said, "and went into a restaurant to eat, and when I went to pay the cashier I did not have a cent in my pocket. The boss of the place said that was an old story. He was not there to feed people for nothing. I ...
— Dave Ranney • Dave Ranney
... were about to have a sick spell and then emits that famous molasses and oil kind of whistle, sufficient to identify the cowbird anywhere. The other males repeat his example and meanwhile the females look on with approving eyes, as if it was a vaudeville performance by amateurs in polite society. The cowbirds, male and female, are all free lovers. There is no mating among them. The female lays her eggs in some other bird's nest, like the English cuckoo, as if she were too busy with the duties and pleasures of society to ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... me to this country: your wide open spaces, where seeing a human being is reduced to the very lowest limit; and second, I find that in playing vaudeville houses in the winter time, I develop a sinus trouble that sticks with me until I get back here to the mountains where it disappears entirely. Yes sir! When I hit the table lands of Denver, Pocatello, Casper, Rawling, Laramie, or this town, old Sinus passes ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... the 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
... criticize him and rank him on a very different basis than if his main, and often his sole, object was to amuse the groundlings. If he often took himself and his art with hardly more seriousness than does the writer of the vaudeville skit or musical comedy of to-day, if he often wished primarily to gain the immediate laugh, then much of Langen's long list of the playwright's dramatic delinquencies is ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... 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
... 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
... as literature: all that really remains of the old French genius is its vaudeville. Great dramatists create great parts. One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have accepted, I have not seen in the dramas of the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... winter, but of three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the giggle like the gasp of a concertina, the maid who waits upon us hears an unpleasant cracked "He, he!" like the chuckle of a general in a vaudeville. ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... You wouldn't believe how much the reformers have done to induce us to come back as soon as possible. They give us all kinds of entertainment, free of charge. Three times a week we have some sort of a show, generally a band concert, a movin' picture show and a vaudeville show. Then, once a month they bring up some crackin' good show right out of a Broadway theater to make us forget that it's Sunday and we'll have to go to work the next morning. Scenery and costumes and everything and—and—" Here Mr. Smilk showed signs of blubbering, ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... You know the sort of stuff. I started it in vaudeville, and went so big that my agent shifted me to the restaurants, and they have to call out the police reserves to handle the crowd. You can't get a table at Reigelheimer's, which is my pitch, unless you tip the head waiter a small fortune and promise to mail him your clothes when you get home. I dance ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... weren't any in the reign of Louis XVI, so perhaps that evens up matters. Dysart is the only man who looks the real thing—or would if he'd remove that monocle. As for Bunny and the Pink 'un, they ought to be in vaudeville singing la-la-la." ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... fervour is more interesting than the spectacled Scotchman. Both 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 shoe-strings he is unworthy 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 ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... in most of us, we 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 his ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the idea of the dignity of theatrical art was pedantic nonsense, and he thought light serio-comic vaudeville the only class of performance worth considering. Serious opera, rich musical ensemble, was his particular aversion, and my demands for this irritated him so that he met them only with scorn and indignant refusals. Of the strange connection between this artistic bias and his taste ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... achievement. For the first four or five years of its existence, the new invention had hard sailing. Bell and Thomas Watson, in order to fortify their finances, were forced to travel around the country, giving a kind of vaudeville entertainment. Bell made a speech explaining the new invention, while a cornet player, located in another part of the town, played solos, the music reaching the audience through several telephone instruments placed against the walls. Watson, also located at a distance, varied the program by ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... woman afterwards; of course this prohibition makes him fall in love with her. Of this we have many edifying examples besides Fanchette, who, though she was so beautiful, and a tolerable actress, would never have drawn all Paris to the Vaudeville if she had not been a divorcee, and if it had not been known that her husband, who played the lover of the piece, was dying to marry her again. Apropos, Mad. St. Germain is acting one of her own romances, in the high sublime style, and threatens to poison herself for love of her ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... circus," said Mrs. Owen, quite oblivious of the undercurrent of her niece's thoughts. "When they had a vaudeville show last winter she did the best stunts of any of 'em. You didn't mention those Jewesses that I had such a row to get in? Smart girls. One of 'em is the fastest typewriter in town; she's a credit ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... departure; the hope of finding him still in Paris sent the lover flying into the Rue des Deux-Ecus, where he learned that the traveller had engaged his place at the Messageries-Royales. To bid adieu to his beloved capital, Gaudissart had gone to see a new piece at the Vaudeville; Popinot resolved to wait for him. Was it not drawing a cheque on fortune to entrust the launching of the oil of nuts to this incomparable steersman of mercantile inventions, already petted and courted ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... the thought of Flavilla, still in bed, her head, if anything, hotter than last night. Lemuel Doret wished again that he had not allowed Bella to call their child by that unsanctified name. Before the birth they had seen a vaudeville, and Bella, fascinated by a golden-and-white creature playing a white accordion that bore her name in ornamental letters, had insisted on calling her daughter, too, Flavilla. In spite of the hymn, dejection ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... wife, and I believe she was equally fond of him. A well-matched couple, evidently, from what I learned from my comedian, never embarrassed, very wide awake, content with his lot, liking nothing so much as the theater—above all the provincial theater—where he and his wife had played in drama, vaudeville, comedy, operetta, opera comique, opera, spectacle, pantomime, happy in the entertainment which began at five o'clock in the afternoon and ended at one o'clock in the morning, in the grand theaters of the chief cities, in the saloon of the mayor, in the barn ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... "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 made ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... and Boston, and appeared to know 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, did you receive your delayed luggage correctly?" (In ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... 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 cowboy or the masher vain. They over-act each part. But at the height Of banter and of ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... a Vaudeville Education and a small Tenor Voice, with the result that many a fluttering Birdie regarded him as ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... "At least we know some things. We have the figures. About one Delafield citizen in seven goes to church or Sunday school on Sunday. Church membership is one in ten. And as many people go to the movies and the Columbia vaudeville and the dance halls and poolrooms on Saturday as go to church on Sunday, to say nothing of the crowds that go on the ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... answer back as though we were a vaudeville team doing a cross-talk act. What do you do? When your boss crowds your envelope on to you Saturdays, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Othello—you know 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, ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... 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
... perennial essay in recurrence, to the effect that many wives lose their husbands by neglect of their own charms. It was full of advice as to the tricks by which a woman may lure her spouse back to the hearth and fasten him there, combining domestic vaudeville with an interest in his business, but relying above all on keeping Cupid's torch alight ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... stupefies you with gorgeous repetition, goes about and about and about, trailing phrases after him, while the procession of narrative images halts. He can be as prolix in his brooding descriptions as Meredith with his intellectual vaudeville. Indeed, many give him lip service solely because they like to be intoxicated, to be carried away, by words. A slight change of taste, such as that which has come about since Meredith was on every one's tongue, will make such defects manifest. Meredith lives ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... while he watched her with twinkling eyes. They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, his belief and friendship a spur to the ruthless energy, the driving ambition, that had ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... bon vin meuble mon estomac, Je suis plus savant que Balzac— Plus sage que Pibrac; Mon brass seul faisant l'attaque De la nation Coseaque, La mettroit au sac; De Charon je passerois le lac, En dormant dans son bac; J'irois au fier Eac, Sans que mon coeur fit tic ni tac, Presenter du tabac. French Vaudeville ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... He continued to rave about her for several mails, and then this morning a letter has come from him in which he says, quite casually as a sort of afterthought, that he knows we are broadminded enough not to think any the worse of her because she is on the vaudeville stage.' ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged eternally. I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some ties at a haberdasher's. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no premonition of what was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened to me; friends of mine had sometimes sailed the high seas of adventure or skirted the coasts of chance, but all of the shipwrecks had occurred ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... nature did not spare even Him, have not spared even their miracle and made even Him live in a lie and die for a lie, then all the planet is a lie and rests on a lie and on mockery. So then, the very laws of the planet are a lie and the vaudeville of devils. What is there to live for? Answer, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to gratify the latter, so completely did musical composition control him. Beethoven's Pastoral symphony prompted him at one time to write a shepherd play, which owed its dramatic construction on the other hand to Goethe's vaudeville, "A Lover's Humor," to which he wrote the music and the verses at the same time, so that the action and movement of the play grew out of the making of the verses and the music. He was likewise prompted to compose in the prevailing forms of music, and produced a sonata, ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... 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, ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... prisoner in the cells of the Inquisition. On returning from Greenwich, and depositing his Frenchman in some melancholy theatre, time enough for that resentful foreigner to witness theft and murder committed upon an injured countryman's vaudeville, Alban hastened again to Carlton Gardens. He found Darrell alone, pacing his floor to and fro, in the habit he had acquired in earlier life, perhaps when meditating some complicated law case, or wrestling with himself against some ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said, "every man 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 danced. ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is far beyond the puny functions of comedy and tragedy. The grotesque farce of vaudeville and the tawdry show which only appeals to sentiment at highest and often to the ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... theirs. We do not "approve their methods"—let that be understood; and thereby they are sufficiently punished. The notion that a knave cares a pin what is thought of his ways by one who is civil and friendly to himself appears to have been invented by a humorist. On the vaudeville stage of Mars it would probably have made his fortune. If warrants of arrest were out for every man in this country who is conscious of having repeatedly shaken hands with persons whom he knew to be knaves there would be no ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... heartily, but Stefan did not conceal his boredom. "Why don't you go into vaudeville, McEwan?" ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... lady that he went to parties because it was right for him to see the world: he told her that he went to the French play because he wanted to perfect himself in the language, and there was no such good lesson as a comedy or vaudeville,—and when one night the astonished Lady Agnes saw him stand up and dance, and complimented him upon his elegance and activity, the mendacious little rogue asserted that he had learned to dance in Paris, whereas Anatole knew that his young master used to go off ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the time, and in New York. I had to run up to Albany on business for two days. I got home Wednesday night too late to come out here, and I went into Proctor's roof-garden to see the vaudeville show." ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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 whole-hearted abandon ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... the Actor' successfully looted the office safe of M'Kenkie, J.F. Higgs & Co., of Cleveland, Ohio. He had just married a smart but very facile third-rate vaudeville actress—English by origin—and wanted money for the honeymoon. He got about five hundred pounds, and with that they came to Europe and stayed in London for some months. That period is marked by the Congreave Square post office burglary, you may ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... 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 ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... had gained the 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. ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... the quiet, sleepy, bloody old town of San Antonio, there was a dance hall, gambling resort and vaudeville theater, in which the main proprietor was one Jack Harris, commonly known as Pegleg Harris. Thompson frequently patronized this place on his visits to San Antonio, and received treatment which left him with ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... way," the Baroness on her side simply remarked, "yesterday, in that play at the Vaudeville, Delphine Vignot wore such an exquisite gown. She's the only one too who knows how ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... 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 guests encouraged ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... there with the carmine lips and black eyes, she is the wife of a Methodist minister and is here for the "cure" of course, like the rest. She is going to hitch her matrimonial wagon to a vaudeville "star" by way of a change! "The very day I get my decree," ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... first appearance in vaudeville of "Flo Dearmore," Tommy Watson's behaviour alarmed his friends. He ate little; it was plain to those who met him daily that he slept little, and William Adolphus Turnpike confided to Whimple that Tommy was "shaping up for the asylum." ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... guests to the Vaudeville. Lucien, in his heart, was not over well pleased to see Chatelet again, and cursed the chance that had brought the Baron to Paris. The Baron said that ambition had brought him to town; he had hopes of an appointment as secretary-general to a government department, and meant to take a ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... be in vaudeville!" declared Jimmie in reply. "For a lightning change artist, you're ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Academy were engaged to execute new 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... 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 me brandy; let me only have that, and then my hut is a palace, my wife ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... 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
... theater. In these performances a single dancer, by movements and gestures, represented mythological scenes and love stories. The actor took several characters in succession and a chorus accompanied him with songs. There were also "vaudeville" entertainments, with all manner of jugglers, ropedancers, acrobats, and clowns, to amuse a people who found no pleasure in the refined productions of the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... woman of to-day is of little use in politics or business. What's she best in, anyway?—men make the best cooks, milliners, nurses, housekeepers, stenographers, clerks, hairdressers and launderers. About the only job left that a woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville." ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... ardent disciple of the craze who has had sufficient effrontery to argue that it is a good play. Take his last play but one, "Suzette"—or "Suzanne," or whatever its girl's name was—produced at the Paris Vaudeville last autumn. The first act is very taking indeed. You can see the situation of the ostracized wife coming along beautifully. The preparation is charming, in the best boulevard manner. But when the situation arrives and has to be dealt with—what ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... to one vaudeville, anyway," said Aunt Mary abstractedly; "an' if we saw any places that looked lively we could stop a few minutes there on our way back. I've never been ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... humorous character sketches, had been left entirely in Sam's hands and consisted of a trilogy representing the characteristics as popularly conceived of the French Canadian habitant, the humorous Irishman and the obese Teuton. Sam's early association with the vaudeville stage had given him a certain facility in the use of stage properties and theatrical paraphernalia generally, and this combined with a decided gift of mimicry enabled him to produce a really humorous if somewhat broadly ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... "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 ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... become exceedingly popular. The "New Globe Theatre" (destroyed so late as 1902) and "The Gaiety" (at the stage entrance of which are the old offices of Good Words, so frequently made use of by Dickens in the later years of his life), and "The Vaudeville," were given over to musical comedy and farce. "The Adelphi," though newly constructed at that time, was then, as now, the home ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... 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 ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... at Jim fixedly. Then he shook his head. "You are in a bad way, my child. I prescribe a course at vaudeville tonight. I see you ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... a gold medal, a large cash sum, any amount of newspaper space, and an excellent opportunity to go on a vaudeville circuit. ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... approval that he gave as an encore: "Mother, Bring the Hammer, There's a Fly on Baby's Head." This "went great," as they say in vaudeville, but despite uproarious applause, the "Sweet Singer of the Wabash" declared that that was his limit for ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... the silly 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 ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... a third," said the Idiot. "A third is always superfluous—but if you must have it, make up some kind of a vaudeville show and stick it in between the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... 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
... 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
... officers from the boats of the flotilla. The smoke, mainly from pipes—three weeks having elapsed since pay day—was thick, and an excited argument, not over speeding records, or coal consumption, but over the merits of an English vaudeville actor who had appeared the week before at Freebody ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... though we were descended from eagles for instance, instead of (broadly speaking) from ape-like or monkeyish beings. Being of simian stock, we had simian traits. Our development naturally bore the marks of our origin. If we had inherited our dispositions from eagles we should have loathed vaudeville. But as cousins of the Bandarlog, we loved ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... he was thinking at the moment that the family baby was very cunning, with her bright eyes and indignant mouth. He stopped her before a vaudeville house, in a ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... fatigue was as nothing compared to the emotion occasionally produced by an error in the time that was to elapse between my two performances. I remember that, one night, having to wind up the performances at the Vaudeville, the stage manager miscalculated the time the pieces would take in performing, and found himself much in advance. He sent off an express to warn me that the curtain had fallen, and I was anxiously expected. Can my readers comprehend ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... in cheap 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 ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... and utilities lend themselves to the designs of evil-intentioned and loose-moraled women. The ease of travel, the laxity of laws, the theater, with its unchaste and indecent plays, the moving picture snows, the vaudeville resorts, whose highest priced "talent" is some voluptuous female, who has cultivated the art of draping nudity with suggestiveness and singing immoral songs, all tend to give youth a false impression of the reality of life and to make the path of the degenerate easy and profitable. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... her hair dressed high, short skirts, and a hundred or so of bad couplets.—Oh! the public will crowd to see it! And then Rinaldo—how well the name suits Lafont! By giving him black whiskers, tightly-fitting trousers, a cloak, a moustache, a pistol, and a peaked hat—if the manager of the Vaudeville Theatre were but bold enough to pay for a few newspaper articles, that would secure fifty performances, and six thousand francs for the author's rights, if only I were to cry it up ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... cabinet at the Trois Freres, or the Cadran Bleu, and the evening climax of the theater on the Boulevard, where Philippe, or Leontine Fay, or Poitier and Brunet, made a school of dramatic art of the small stages of the Porte St. Martin, the Varietes, and the Vaudeville. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... palace Tess was reveling in vaudeville In the first place, Yasmini had no Western views on modesty. Whatever her mother may have taught her in that respect had gone the way of all the other handicaps she saw fit to throw into the discard, or to retain for use solely when she saw there was advantage. The East uses dress for ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... The vaudeville show whirled and crashed and rattled on its way. Martin applauded heartily but involuntarily; Alix applauded mechanically. ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... exhibition of that mocking smartness of youth which often hides a childish heart. It was because he was so excessively sentimental and feared to betray his real physiognomy that he cut these excruciating capers. His other alternative would have been mawkishness. His vaudeville, "Love on the Nicholas Tower," which satirizes the drama of chivalry, is in the same vein and made a similar hit. A volume of "Poems" was also well received. But in 1831 he met with his first literary reverse. A second collection of verses, entitled ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... forget it. All these men, whether they're capturing Hun dug-outs at the Front or taking prisoner their own despair in English hospitals, are perfectly ordinary and normal. Before the war they were shop-assistants, cab-drivers, plumbers, lawyers, vaudeville artists. They were men of no heroic training. Their civilian callings and their previous social status were too various for any one to suppose that they were heroes ready-made at birth. Something has happened to them since they marched away in khaki—something ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... Plaza Hotel facing them from across the square. When the St. Regis was first opened popular fancy ascribed to it a scale of prices crippling to the average purse. The idea was the subject of derisive vaudeville ditties. When a "Seeing New York" car approached the Fifty-fifth Street corner the guide invariably took up his megaphone and called out, "Ladies and gentlemen! We are passing on the right the far-famed St. Regis Hotel! If you order beefsteak it will cost you five ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... to send me to him, to dress an old ulcer on his leg, that he had had for six or seven years. M. de Savoie said he was willing, so far as I was concerned; and if I used the cautery to his leg, it would serve him right. M. de Vaudeville answered, if he saw me trying it, he would have my throat cut. Soon after, he sent for me four German halberdiers of his guard; and I was terrified, for I did not know where they were taking me: they spoke no more French than I German. When I was come to his lodging, he bade me welcome, and said, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... pictures had not attained their present virulence. Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the ubiquitous film. The Bijou offered entertainment of the cigar-box-tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... sipping nectar. Van Dam told a shark story. Mavick demonstrated its innate improbability. The Major sang a song—a song of the forties, with a touch of sentiment. Jack, whose cheerful voice was a little of the cider-cellar order, and who never sang when he was sad, struck up the latest vaudeville ditty, and Carmen and Miss Tavish joined in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... present century; but at least, thinking people can consciously adopt an attitude of respect toward love, and consciously abandon as far as possible the attitude of jocular cynicism with which they too often treat it,—an attitude which is reflected so disgustingly in current vaudeville and musical comedy. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... a vaudeville manager offered you five hundred dollars a week the day after you won the championship for ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... of mind and telegraphed Jim and Alice of my success, 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 ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... I knew 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, ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... in the same year in Paris and London, and two years after in English, with Malibran as Amina. The subject of the story was taken from a vaudeville and ballet by Scribe. The scene is laid in Switzerland. Amina, an orphan, the ward of Teresa, the miller's wife, is about to marry Elvino, a well-to-do landholder of the village. Lisa, mistress of the inn, is also in love with Elvino, and jealous of her rival. Alessio, a peasant lad, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... 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 a canton-flannel ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... 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
... the above, vaudeville star and coin collector. One of those individuals whom nature has endowed with a magnificent body, and sufficient brains ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... came to us direct from the vaudeville stage performed every summer in her open-air "arena cage," until she entered motherhood, which put an end to her stage work. She was a brilliant "trick" bicycle rider. She could stand upright on a huge wooden ball, and by expert balancing and ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... companions are flighty, intriguing little women who chatter incessantly. Everything begins and ends with a laugh. This recalls some of the early works of Gogol, but, we repeat, one finds no moral element in this laughter, and these tiny comedies are in reality no more than simple vaudeville sketches. Once in a while we find a sad note; less frequently, we find the sadness accentuated in order to present a terrible drama. Such, then, are the contents of the first two volumes which came from the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... 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 singers I have named is a novice. Nor will you ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... 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 of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... idealised, everybody who had seen him liked him, respected him and admired him. Thousands had said that somehow a person felt better after he had seen Anton Lang. As a supreme test of his popularity, American vaudeville managers asked him to name his own ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... exhibition on the little platform outside the side-show tent had all the fascination of the unknown for Jerry and Chris and Celia Jane and Nora, but not for Danny, who had been to the vaudeville theater twice and who knew that this outside sample never could come up to the glories to be revealed inside for fifty cents, or a dollar and a half for reserved seats in the boxes, and ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... fail in this undertaking but even debase existing forms of art. We are informed by high authority that there is nothing in the environment to which youth so keenly responds as to music, and yet the streets, the vaudeville shows, the five-cent theaters are full of the most blatant and vulgar songs. The trivial and obscene words, the meaningless and flippant airs run through the heads of hundreds of young people for ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... Daly could not have kept his financial engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he not accepted engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville theatres [the American equivalent of our music halls], where he played How He Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience through press suggestion from which ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... when I'm safe back about ten mile from here. Just at the moment my funny bone hasn't got goin' right after me expectin' to see that feller blowed to ribbons an' remnants. But them others—say, I've seen men sittin' comfortable in an armchair seat at a roof-garden vaudeville that couldn't raise as hearty a laugh at the prize antics of the thousand dollar star comedian, as them fellers riz ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... near. They begin to see how unwise, if nothing worse, has been the weak policy of the Executive in allowing men to play at Revolution till they learn to think the coarse reality as easy and pretty as the vaudeville they have been acting. They are fast coming to the conclusion that the list of grievances put forward by the secessionists is a sham and a pretence, the veil of a long-matured plot against republican institutions. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... compel the new theatre to confine itself to the limits of its privilege. The Gymnase asked for time, was very meek, prayed, supplicated. It would have succumbed, however, but for the intervention of the Duchess of Berry. Scribe composed for the apartments of the Tuileries a vaudeville, called La Rosiere, in which he invoked the Princess as protectress, as a beneficent fairy. She turned aside the fulminations of M. de Corbiere. The minister was obstinate; he wished the last word; but the Princess finally carried the day. The day after he ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... made it impossible to read a word without spectacles, sat displaying a very creditable expanse of chest with all the pride of an old man with a mistress. Like old General Montcornet, that pillar of the Vaudeville, he wore earrings. Denisart was partial to blue; his roomy trousers and well-worn greatcoat were ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... I forgot to tell you; she wouldn't let me pay it. She took him home and put him to bed—and from what I heard on Broadway it was time somebody did! It seems they'd had an offer to go into a vaudeville piece together, and after she got him to bed she telephoned the vaudeville man, and had him bring up a contract, and they signed it, though she had to guide Vorley's hand for him. Anyway, he's signed up all right, and so is she. That's why she was so anxious about fixing it up with us. I told ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... from natural causes. Those who are out of the reach of the Prussian guns are becoming accustomed to 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. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere |
