April 22, 2019 – davidbruceblog #2

• Entertainers in show business can be big, and then, later, they can be not so big. Marty Allen and Steve Rossi were big: They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show44 times. In the 1990s, Penn Jillette and Teller of Penn and Teller fame were headlining at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Being headliners, they were in the big room — the room with the theater where the audience plays attention to the performers. Penn and Teller would open the next night, and this night Penn got a call from Mr. Rossi inviting him and Teller to see Allen and Rossi perform their act in a lounge. Lounges are places in the open. They don’t have walls, and unless the entertainers are in a band that makes a lot of sound, it can be difficult to get people to pay attention to you. In addition, the noise that can be heard coming from the casino can be a big distraction. Allen and Rossi were funny; they were committed to putting on a good show; they were great. But this was not the high point of their careers, and few people were present to pay attention to them, although Penn and Teller and a few others were enjoying the act. In a break between bits, Teller, who had been intently watching and laughing at the comedy, looked around the room and noticed the few people who were present and the noise that was coming from the casino. Penn leaned over to him and said, quietly, “You know, this is us in a very few years.” Teller looked around again, smiled, and replied, “I am so OK with that.” Penn, happy with the reply, cried a little.

• Singer/songwriter Jack White used to make a living as an upholsterer. As you may expect, he was an unusual upholsterer. Everything in his business — clothing, tools, even his van — had to be yellow or white or black. Why? He explains that it was “an aesthetic presentation.” When he made out his bills, he says that he used crayon. When he restored furniture, he hid in the upholstery poems for the next upholsterer who would restore the furniture. Mr. White says, “I thought, we’re the only ones to see inside this furniture, we should be talking to each other, like the Egyptian masons might leave a message on the stone they were putting in the pyramid.” He even formed a band with another upholsterer. The band, obviously, was called the Upholsterers. They recorded a single, made 100 copies, and hit them inside the furniture they restored. Mr. White says, “Not one’s been found yet. They were on clear vinyl with transparency covers, so even if you x-rayed the furniture you wouldn’t be able to find them. I know where a couple of them might be, but it’s very funny in that sense.”

• M.F.K. Fisher began writing because a man was reading an old book about Elizabethan recipes in a public library. When he left the book on a table, she looked at it because she liked its smell and began reading it. She said, “Later I wrote about those recipes simply to amuse my husband and our friends, just as to this day I write books for myself.” She did write well. She wrote that “a well-made dry Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.” Her feminism sometimes shows in her writing. She and her first husband “sweated out the Depression” by doing such things as cleaning other people’s houses. She remembers, “It annoyed the hell out of me because he got 50 cents an hour and I only got 35 cents because I was a woman.” Selling her first piece of writing was a joy. She got $10 for the essay and $15 for an illustration that she created to go with the essay. She remembers, “I thought — am I a writer or am I going to be a sort of mediocre illustrator for the rest of my life?”

• Like many writers, Carl Sandburg had a great wealth of experience from his childhood and his many jobs to draw upon for inspiration. As a young boy, he was arrested for skinny-dipping in a neighborhood pond. His parents thought that the arrest was silly; they had seen Carl naked when he was born, and they saw him naked whenever he took a bath in a laundry tub. Young Carl once got a summer job washing bottles from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. in a bottling works. (This was before modern child-labor laws.) He was allowed to drink as much soda pop as he wanted, and he drank so much that he got diarrhea and lost his job. For a while, he rode the rails as a hobo. One night he and four other hoboes tried to sleep in an empty boxcar, but it was so cold that they gave up and walked to a jail where a kind sheriff let them sleep on the floor of a cell. When Carl attended college, he had a job as a firefighter. His professors knew that whenever the town’s fire whistle blew, Carl had to leave class and fight a fire.

• Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis became a musician not because of a love of music, but because he watched musicians and he noticed that they drank, they smoked, they got women, and they slept late. He watched to see which musicians were most noticed, and he noticed that the drummers and the tenor saxophonists were widely noticed. To him, playing the drums looked like it took more work and so he learned to play the tenor saxophone. When he told this story, he always said, “That’s the truth.” He probably made a good decision not to play the drums. Lester Young played drums, but he switched to the saxophone because he would want to spend time with a woman, but while he was busy putting away his drums after a gig her mother would call her and she would leave and go home. Putting away a saxophone was a whole lot quicker.

• “When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?’” — Don Marquise

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