I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.
There were a great many in vaudeville - people who never quite came through. But they had their place, and they filled it. They kept theatres open. Those pan-timers, those interstate-timers, those four-a-dayers, those six-a-dayers - they were an integral part of that endearing merry-go-round called vaudeville.
My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working.
When my brother and me got into performing in the late '40s and early '50s, it was a sensational opportunity to learn from our elders. Every show we played had a dancer, a comic, a juggler, a singer, an acrobat. I came to appreciate virtuosity in all forms of the business.
I'm a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.
My interest was magic, believe it or not. I became an amateur magician and did something like 400 magic shows through my teen years.
I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.
Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight.
So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!
I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.