Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/210

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN floor, the best shows with first-rate casts can be played in them at less than the prevailing prices.

As for radio, my generation of the stage can remember when roller skating had the theater on its back for three successive years in the late eighties. The billboards were plastered with colored lithographs of bemedaled fancy skaters, and every one was dashing from the supper table to the livery stable hastily converted into a rink. I do not expect to see radio vanish as roller skates did, but I do know that the American housewife sees too much of the four walls of her home during the day to care to spend all her evenings in the living room turning dials. She wants a change of scene, she wants to see and be seen in something more than a bungalow apron. That is a constant of human nature.

One rainy afternoon in Toronto some ten years back I took refuge in a picture house. Between films a gentleman with a pronounced English accent appeared before the curtain to proclaim the bill to follow, which was to be "Carmen", an early picture of Jesse Lasky's in which Miss Geraldine Farrar starred, supported by Wally Reid as Don José and Pedro de Cordoba as Escamillo, if I recall aright; and a right good film it was too.