DANCING FOOLS

Script No. 231 - August 4, 2001

If you live in the U. S. and you caught a recent edition of tv’s Good Morning, America, you might have seen one of their audience participation events, where couples competed to see who could dance all night and still remain on their feet the following morning. Or perhaps a college or university near you sponsored such an event, with proceeds going to a charitable or fund-raising cause. You may even have seen the short-lived stage musical Steel Pier. And if you’re of a certain age or have a slew of cable movie channels, you may also have seen 1969’s film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. Somehow, the idea of dancing as an endurance sport is one concept most of us are familiar with. We may not all of us understand it, still, we’re willing to let some other bunch of nuts knock themselves out. But whose idea was it, anyway?

It had all started in England in March of 1923, but that contest only lasted nine hours. The Scots raised the bar to 14 hours, the French pushed it to a full day. At the end of the month, New York City dance instructor Alma Cummings, set out to beat the Europeans. 27 hours and a number of partners later she held the record, only to lose it the next week to another New York couple. Time to get tough. Discarding her high-heeled shoes Alma then hopped to it and set the record, briefly, at 50 hours. After Homer Morehouse of North Tonawanda, New York, danced 87 hours straight before dropping dead, New York City spoil-sport authorities tried and failed to call a halt to the madness. They stopped a contest after 12 hours. The dancers bounced out onto a waiting flatbed truck which took them, still dancing, to a pier where a waiting ferry carried them to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Authorities there chased them out and the event bounced back across the river to Manhattan. They finally ended up in northeastern Westchester County where worried city officials allowed file clerk Vera Sheppard to set a new record at 69 hours, before halting the craziness. The record kept climbing. 167 hours. 168 hours, the equivalent of a full week. Then 182 hours; and 8 seconds. Finally, St. Louis dancer Bernie Brand topped it all off at 217 consecutive hours.

So. It all started in England in 1923. Well, not really. It was in England. But the year was 1600. And who was the nimble-footed egotist who began it all? Comic actor by the name of William Kempe. When the Earl of Leicester's Men touring company of entertainers set off on a tour of the Low Countries and Denmark in 1585, William was on the bill as a solo performer. Gaining a reputation as a dancer as well as a clown, he moved up in theatrical circles. He soon moved over to the Chamberlain's Men, where a young playwright also named William was whipping out plays for the company. Kempe originated a number of Shakespeare’s clown roles, most famously Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. Eventually the two Wills had a falling out over Kempe’s scene-stealing antics, and soon Kempe was a free agent. To keep his name in the public eye he accepted a bet and announced he would dance a jig. All the way from London to Norwich, 114 miles. He set out on February 10, 1600, along with several cronies. 23 days later he bounced into Norwich, his bet won. Typical English weather had forced many layovers, so he’d only actually danced for nine non-consecutive days. Of course theater people like to pad their bios a bit. So thereafter he publicized himself as William Kempe, the Nine-Day Wonder.

© 2001 David Minor Eagles Byte

INFERNAL DIN ?

Script No. 244 - November 17, 2001

The pipa and the Han Dynasty of China grew up together. When a king calling himself Shi Huangdi or First Emperor came to power around 221 B. C. he feared barbarian hordes from the north and began a crash building program, erecting a series of protective walls that would soon merge to form the Great Wall. Needless to say, he did none of the labor himself, leaving the grunt work to the peasants. A later Chinese scholar would write, “When the people suffered from being forced to build the Great Wall, they played the instrument to express their resentment". Looking somewhat like the Western lute, the pipa has a shallow, pear-shaped body and a long neck supporting 3 or 4 strings. It’s played with a wooden plectrum, or pick, with the “pi” sound made on the downstroke and the “pa” on the return. Sort of like the “plink-plunk” sound we make vocally today to simulate a banjo. The instrument grew in popularity, with various rival schools established around China to further develop both instrument and repertoire. It’s outlasted all succeeding dynasties and in descendent forms remains probably the most popular instrument in the country today.

Speaking of succeeding dynasties, you know what they say about the best laid plans. While the emperor was guarding the front door against the barbarians, with his enormous public works project, younger rivals sneaked in the back door. A series of battles ensued, with a rebel named Liu Pang coming out on top around 202 B. C., and establishing the Han Dynasty.

Some of the earliest pieces written for the pipa have survived and are still being played. One of these, the martial “Ambushed on Ten Sides”, mimics the progress of one of the early battles. The names of the segment suggests the intensity of the piece - Setting up Camp, Beating Drums, Sounding Horns, Firing Cannon, Calling the Rosters, Manoeuvering Troops, Laying Ambush, The Skirmish, The Major Battle, Farewell to Concubine Yu, The Suicide, and The Rout. A critic from the Tang Dynasty describes it, "... as if thousands of warriors and horses are roaring on the battle field, as if the earth is torn and the sky is falling". A contemporary describes how, "... The thicker strings rattled like splatters of sudden rain, the thinner ones hummed like a hushed whisper. Together they shaped strands of melody, like larger and smaller pearls falling on a jade plate."

Listeners here in the West have often had trouble getting used to Chinese music, with its five-tone scale that makes the melodic line secondary to the quality of individual notes. When a San Francisco newspaper editor went to a Chinese concert in November of 1869, if he heard a band version of something like “Ambushed on Ten Sides” he would have agreed that the music was originally written to express resentment. He may never been in battle but he drew head pictures of his own. He wrote, “Imagine yourself in a boiler manufactory when four hundred men are putting in rivets, a mammoth tin–shop next door on one side, and a forty-stamp quartz mill upon the other, with a drunken charivari party with six hundred instruments in front, four thousand enraged cats on the roof, and a faint idea will be conveyed of the performance of a first-class Chinese band of music."

© 2001 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Script 66 - STAR'S EVENING

© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Not to be too morbid, but death, as ever, was at the center of many stories in 1922. One, dating back a few millennia, was confirmed in November as archaeologists discovered the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

Some deaths would remain shrouded in mystery, even into to our own time. In Hollywood, film director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered. And closer to home, in Linden, in western New York, 72-year-old Frances Kimball was battered to death in her home. Two years later, in 1924, three other people were murdered in the same small hamlet. None of the four crimes was ever solved.

Giovanni Martini had cheated death once, by not being in the wrong place at the right time. But Martini, George Armstrong Custer's orderly at the Little Bighorn forty-six years previously, died in Brooklyn this year.

There were other, relatively serene deaths. The literary world lost several leading figures. In Paris the semi-invalid Marcel Proust passed away at the age of 51. William Henry Hudson, born in Argentina, also died this year. Most of the public would remember him not as the naturalist he was by profession, but by his one novel and its central character, Rima, the Bird Girl, of Green Mansions .

One of the most mourned of those dying in 1922 was Mrs. Alexander P. Moore. She was winding down from a long and varied career when she died on June 6th. Her husband, her fourth actually, a Pittsburgh newspaper publisher and Republican stalwart, had just helped put Warren G. Harding in the White House. Mrs. M. had worked tirelessly on the campaign as well, and Harding did not forget. Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had recently arrested 6,000 U. S. citizens on the grounds of Bolshevik sympathies and deported close to a thousand, including Emma Goldman and Wobbly labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood. Anti-immigrant feelings were also running high in these post-war years. Harding decided to send Mrs. Moore to Europe to try and discover what compelled thousands to flee their homeland and sail to American shores. She labored mightily and came up with the unfortunate and simplistic conclusion that “Alien infiltration wrecked Rome.” Immigration should be curbed. Continuing to lecture even though weakened by a fall suffered on board ship while returning home, she soon wore herself out and was dead a few weeks later. It was in this rather bizarre scenario that the world lost one of its most colorful characters, a woman who had sent male hearts racing in a series of operettas, made audiences laugh in Weber and Fields vaudeville skits, and turned Come Down My Evening Star into the favorite song of thousands. To all of those thousands of fans Mrs. Moore, born Helen Louise Leonard sixty years earlier, was far better known as Lillian Russell.

INFERNAL DIN ?

Script No. 244

November 17, 2001

The pipa and the Han Dynasty of China grew up together. When a king calling himself Shi Huangdi or First Emperor came to power around 221 B. C. he feared barbarian hordes from the north and began a crash building program, erecting a series of protective walls that would soon merge to form the Great Wall. Needless to say, he did none of the labor himself, leaving the grunt work to the peasants. A later Chinese scholar would write, “When the people suffered from being forced to build the Great Wall, they played the instrument to express their resentment". Looking somewhat like the Western lute, the pipa has a shallow, pear-shaped body and a long neck supporting 3 or 4 strings. It’s played with a wooden plectrum, or pick, with the “pi” sound made on the downstroke and the “pa” on the return. Sort of like the “plink-plunk” sound we make vocally today to simulate a banjo. The instrument grew in popularity, with various rival schools established around China to further develop both instrument and repertoire. It’s outlasted all succeeding dynasties and in descendent forms remains probably the most popular instrument in the country today.

Speaking of succeeding dynasties, you know what they say about the best laid plans. While the emperor was guarding the front door against the barbarians, with his enormous public works project, younger rivals sneaked in the back door. A series of battles ensued, with a rebel named Liu Pang coming out on top around 202 B. C., and establishing the Han Dynasty.

Some of the earliest pieces written for the pipa have survived and are still being played. One of these, the martial “Ambushed on Ten Sides”, mimics the progress of one of the early battles. The names of the segment suggests the intensity of the piece - Setting up Camp, Beating Drums, Sounding Horns, Firing Cannon, Calling the Rosters, Manoeuvering Troops, Laying Ambush, The Skirmish, The Major Battle, Farewell to Concubine Yu, The Suicide, and The Rout. A critic from the Tang Dynasty describes it, "... as if thousands of warriors and horses are roaring on the battle field, as if the earth is torn and the sky is falling". A contemporary describes how, "... The thicker strings rattled like splatters of sudden rain, the thinner ones hummed like a hushed whisper. Together they shaped strands of melody, like larger and smaller pearls falling on a jade plate."

Listeners here in the West have often had trouble getting used to Chinese music, with its five-tone scale that makes the melodic line secondary to the quality of individual notes. When a San Francisco newspaper editor went to a Chinese concert in November of 1869, if he heard a band version of something like “Ambushed on Ten Sides” he would have agreed that the music was originally written to express resentment. He may never been in battle but he drew head pictures of his own. He wrote, “Imagine yourself in a boiler manufactory when four hundred men are putting in rivets, a mammoth tin–shop next door on one side, and a forty-stamp quartz mill upon the other, with a drunken charivari party with six hundred instruments in front, four thousand enraged cats on the roof, and a faint idea will be conveyed of the performance of a first-class Chinese band of music."

© 2001 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Today, eight-plus years after the above was written, I was reading Dee Brown's WONDROUS TIMES ON THE FRONTIER, when I came across the following in the chapter GREASEPAINT IN THE WILDERNESS. As reported by actress Miriam Follin Leslie - wife of the New York City newspaper editor Frank Leslie - during her 1877 railroad tour the western U. S.:

"Then these grotesque and phantom-like figures began a series of the strangest evolutions . . . to the accompaniment of that frightful discord of barbaric sound, until it all seemed more like a feverish dream, the fancy of a lunatic, or the vision of an opium eater than an actual stage peopled with human beings."

Speaking of that latter audience type: Around the same time Cincinnati Commercial reporter J. H. Beadle wrote: . . . the whole crowded with Celestial [Orientals] and noisome with the smokey fumes of some weed I can't recognize . . ."

Perhaps Miriam Leslie would enlighten Beadle at some future point.

MMG 103

Let it not be said that dramatist William S. Gilbert, who poked good-natured fun at almost everything else, couldn’t target himself and partner Sir Arthur Sullivan. When we take yet another look at the “Modern Major General” lyrics, we hear:

I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,

I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes!

Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,

And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.

We know what he’s referring to when he mentions Pinafore. But who were Gerard Dow and Zoffanies. I’m glad I asked. I’ll tell you. (That was about as subtle as a song cue.)

Gerard, or Gerhard Dow (variously spelled D-O-W or D-O-U-W) was a Dutch painter, born in Leyden on April 7, 1613. By the time he was fifteen, Dow had been apprenticed in painting on glass and engraving. He spent the next three years studying with the painter Rembrandt. His own early works were very much in the style of the Flemish master, but he soon developed his own style, probably a 17th century version of an Andrew Wyeth, for his paintings were described as displaying, “all the details...down to the most trivial.” Not being able to obtain brushes fine enough for his purpose, he manufactured his own. It’s said he spent five days painting a single human hand. Models soon became scarce - no one could sit still long enough. No one could touch him when it came to painting scenes lit by candles or lanterns, such as in The Evening School. Dow’s paintings brought high prices and the president of the Hague paid him a thousand florins a year for the right of first refusal. Dow died in 1680.

Johann Zoffany was born in Frankfort-on-Main in 1753, to the architect of the prince of Thurn and Taxis. Running away from home at the age of thirteen, Johann made his way to Rome, where he studied painting for the next dozen years before making his way to England in 1758. He struggled for a few years before royal commissions from George III and Empress Maria Theresa put him on the map. Speaking of the map, Zoffany was all over it. After spending time in Austria and once again in Italy, he traveled to India, where he painted for three years before returning to England, dying there in 1810. Dow and Zoffany certainly give the lie to the stereotype of the starving artist dying in poverty.

© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte

MMG 101

“I am the very model of a modern Major-General.” - Words from Pirates of Penzance. Most of you know the piece. But do you have the necessary knowledge to qualify for the post of modern major-general, at least as it existed in Victorian Times. We’ll skip a few of the more arcane pieces of knowledge, particularly the math bits. There’ll be no “equations, both the simple and quadratical”; no “binomial theorem...with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.” We’ll also have none of the “integral and differential calculus, or “scientific names of beings animalculous.” Count your blessings.

Let’s turn instead to another section of this military bragadoccio. The MMG goes on to state, “I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's.” We’re most of us quite familiar with the myraid tales, legends, musicals and theories about King Arthur. But who is this Caradoc. He must have been chosen by William S. Gilbert for some other reason than to just rhyme with “paradox.”

Actually, the rhyme proves to be rather apt. For there seem to be more than one Caradoc. Number One is the Welsh saint, who died in the year 1124. Onetime harp-player to King Rhys, prince of South Wales, one of the early Tudor clan, he was dismissed for losing one of the prince’s favorite greyhounds. He went off to serve the Bishop at Llandaff, in today’s Cardiff, where he became a hermit, eventually ending his days on an island off the Pembroke coast. He was never formally canonised, in spite of the intervention of the chronicler Gerald of Wales.

Caradoc Number Two turns up in the royal line of the Kings of Brittany in the fifth century. Number Three is the twelfth-century historian Caradoc of Lancaruan, who wrote a History of Cambria and a Life of Gildas, another British monk-historian. In the latter work Caradoc becomes one of the first writers to introduce Guinevere into the Arthurian legends.

Confusing? But hold. There’s a Number Four. It turns out that the name Caradoc is a Celtic form of the Roman name Caractacus. Caractacus is almost as much of a legend as Arthur. A British chieftan, he fought the Romans around 48 to 51 AD, until being captured, hauled off to Rome and executed.

Those of you who know the Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics well, can see where I’m going with this. For our moder major-general goes on to expound on his familairity with “ev'ry detail of Caractacus's uniform.” Confusing? It was probably meant to be.