O.O. McIntyre
Wilmington Morning News/November 26, 1920
NEW YORK, Nov. 25.—Thoughts while strolling around New York: Women are wearing Mona Lisa coiffures. Matinee girls with their boxes of candy. Too bad John Barrymore married! Still there are others to worship. After years of petty economics here I am at my age figuring on a wrist watch. How come! The blue grey clouds of evening forming.
Soon the lights will be kindled and scarlet-lipped Folly will beckon from every corner. I wish I was 20 again. Plump ladles hurrying away from a Turkish bath. They seem embarrassed. We can’t all be svelte. Anyway there’s something comfortable about a double chin. A window displays pipes for women. They’re doing it in England.
There’s a man for you! He’s wearing a cap with evening clothes. If Beaunash saw him he’d swoon. Ward Crane, one of the handsome boys of the movies. He carries a cane. Only a few sparrows left in the parks. I wonder if the name Crane suggested sparrows? Crowds rolling up to a corner crossing. Tension tightens. A nervousness sets in. Then a hand waves and it breaks up like a Yukon river in the spring.
The dinner hour. Limousines clog the big entrances. Life quickens its tempo. Well-fed men and women hungering for a new thrill. Ten-dollar dinners and then a mad rush to the theatre. I’ll have a better time with my book and my dog. An excitable Frenchman talking to his girl. Wish I could understand him. It may be a quarrel. And I love quarrels.
Apples in drug stores! Lots of bunk about eating one every night. I tried it once and laid awake all night. Tinny music from a dance hall. Children who should be in bed dancing cheek to cheek. And curtained rooms where the girls smoke cigarettes. I’m getting to be an old fogey. An East Indian dinner for one dollar. Curry. Rice. Paprika. I’ll try it. If it’s too hot I can dash out and pull a fire-plug.
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An ambitious office boy in a Broadway theatrical office made a killing on the ponies—a 200 to 1 shot—last summer and started out to produce his own play. The play opened in a small town in New Jersey and then tried out a few larger cities. The other day the producer returned to the theatrical office wearing an overcoat from the first act and in a grip he carried $150 worth of negligee displayed over a bed in another act. He says the trouble was that the play “should never have been produced.” Otherwise, he would have had no trouble. He now studies the form sheets daily.
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An idea of the poverty of a great city is gained when the steamers from the tropics arrive at the New Tork piers laden with fruit. Crowds of thinly-clothed men, women and children stand about waiting for the fruit handlers to throw away some of the rotting fruit. They seize upon it like ravenous wolves and what they do not eat they carry to their tenement homes.
The much-talked-of “Afgar” has set the town by the ears. The music is declared to be the most tuneful ever heard on Broadway and it is being played everywhere. The London production deals with an attempt to organize the ladles of a harem into a union. There is a walkout. The costumes are by Poiret and made the audience gasp. It also presented for the first time Lupino Lane, the English comedian, whose fame is constantly being shouted by his English admirers in Gotham. The production is due for a long run—not because of its costumes, stars or scenery—but because it has brought something Broadway has needed for many months. New, whistling, tuneful tunes.
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