Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/254

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN nine years ago. He and his staff have the management not only of a club but a fair-sized hotel, for there are fifty-four bedrooms on the upper floors, some occupied transiently, others permanently, and every room haunted by the ghost of one or more plays written therein. Each of the rooms originally was furnished by some one member. In token of this the rooms were named for the donors and carry brass name plates on the doors. As at The Players, any male more than twenty-one in any way connected with artistic life, even as a patron, is eligible, professional critics and dramatic agents only excepted. In practice this leaves the membership open to virtually any man of voting age who wishes to join, and whom the members wish to have, within the limits of sixteen hundred. The barring of critics and booking agents was a wise provision intended to avoid a source of potential friction in one case and to prevent the club from being used as a jobbing office in the other. The club has no quarrel whatever with either.

Unlike The Players, half or slightly more of the sixteen hundred are active in the theater. The nonprofessional half includes as wide a variety of occupation as a Rotary Club. For