Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/142

 fellow who for many months played the piano in one of the picture houses for all four performances each day, and he was saying that he used to break the monotony of his every day routine by looking for familiar faces in the crowd which gathered for each performance. He was constantly impressed, he said, with the frequency with which he could pick out the faces of the same undergraduates in the same places. How they could afford the time was more than he could see. As I have had a chance at the end of the semester to glance at their scholastic records, I was convinced that they could not afford to do it.

It is primarily as a time waster that I have objected to this variety of amusement, but the character of the shows themselves might well be objected to. Even viewed purely as recreation they do not rank high. The jokes and the pictures are often coarse, the comedy is often wretchedly low, and there is almost inevitably mixed up in each bill constantly recurring and objectionable sex complications. I do not myself very often attend these plays but get my impressions from what I hear the fellows say who are regular patrons of the show houses. During the last few weeks, however, I have seen two of what were advertised as the better class of picture plays. The leading rôle in each case was taken by a well-known