It's a two-a-day. If you don't do business with
him, come back to-morrow morning."
A quick dozen of questions rushed to Lilly's lips, but instead she laid
down a new ten-dollar bill, crammed the slip into her palm through the
hole in her glove, and went out, the snapping torrent of typewriting
already resumed.
The Union Family Theater was the first of a succession of variety houses
that was to spread, first to Harlem, then Philadelphia, and later gird
the country like a close-link chain. Vaudeville prefaced with
stereopticon views, designed to appeal to the strict respectability of
the most strictly respectable audiences in the world.
The high-class Rialto houses might pander to low-class comedy and
Broadway take its entertainment broad, but Robert Visigoth laid the
corner stone of subsequent fortunes when he decided that a
ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville audience that smells sour of perspiration
and strong foods demands entertainment as pink and as sweet as a baby's
heel, and that a gunman in the gallery will catcall his prototype on
the stage.
Let the Noras and all the pyschanalyzed Magdas go their problematic and
not always prophylactic ways, the Visigoth Family Theaters wanted 'em
sweet, high-necked and low-browed.
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