Niagara Falls All Over Again Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the real world, Des Moines, walking streets called
Walnut
and
Mulberry
and
Grand
. The sun had come out just in time to set. Already I wanted to run back to the theater, set up camp on one of the velveteen seats. I thought it was the only place in the world like that.
Vaudeville
, Hattie had said, and I thought that
vaudeville
meant only this one theater with this particular handful of performers on this solitary afternoon. Had I understood, I might have died of pleasure, there on Grand Avenue on the afternoon of my tenth birthday.
    â€œI liked the Indian girl,” I said.
    Hattie snorted. “Her? She’s no more Indian than I am.”
    â€œI liked her,” I said, aware of my treachery.
    The day had gotten too warm for Hattie’s fur hat, so she gave it to me to carry. Behind us, the sun bounced off the gold dome of the State Capitol building. “I think I’ll be a dancer,” Hattie said. Then she took the hat back from me, and stopped.
    â€œHmmm,” she said. She set her hat on my head, then angled it rakishly—she had to hook it on my ears so it wouldn’t fall down around my nose. “What will you be?”
    I felt transformed by my new headgear, foreign, ursine, despite my own everyday noggin underneath. Well, wasn’t that the point? Like the man who sang dressed as a woman. Except I knew the right answer as I looked at Hattie. A sister-and-brother act, and Hattie couldn’t sing. She tilted her head in the same direction that she’d tilted my hat. “A dancer,” I said. “Me too.”
    â€œWe’ll have to practice,” she said, and I said, “Sharp and Sharp.”
    â€œSharp and Sharper,” she answered. “Partners?”
    My first contract.
    The Comic Baby
    Comedians rarely have happy childhoods. Cue the violins: they should be whining “Laugh, Clown, Laugh” right about now.
    For instance: Rocky. All of his childhood stories were about brands of misery, even when presented as high slapstick. He was, he said, the only child of college professors in Boston, and he’d worked in various capacities in burlesque houses from the time he was eleven. His first burley house was the Old Howard in Boston’s Scollay Square, where he’d been allowed to occasionally touch the dancers, a gift he described so vividly I could feel it: small hand on a big thigh, half your palm on stocking and half on skin, your middle finger ticking along the border like a metronome, not being able to decide which version of leg you liked better.
    When he drank, Rocky would speak fondly of the women he met then. Sometimes he made it sound as though he’d slept with plenty; sometimes he claimed his cheeks had permanent slap-burn, so clumsy and sudden were his advances. A childhood in a burlesque house! I was skeptical.
    â€œSafest place in the world for me,” he said when he was outlining his show-biz life the day after we met.
    â€œBut you were
eleven
,” I said. “Didn’t your parents go looking for you?”
    He shook his head as though my foolishness in thinking so was sweet. “There was dancing there,” he explained. “My parents never went anywhere there might be dancing. You think they’d been brought up on an island where the locals performed human sacrifice in tap shoes. As a kid, I was punished if I even walked too enthusiastically. No. I left. My folks let me go.”
    â€œAnd that was the end of it?”
    â€œOh, we write,” he said, “but they are sorely disappointed in their only offspring.”
    â€œWhat did they want you to be?”
    â€œA disappointment,” he said. “They’d
planned
on that. They just figured I’d be a disappointment in a field they understood. That way they could have written a monograph on the subject. My mother was a sociologist. She’d studied me all her life, and she never saw
that
coming, her kid becoming a burlesque comic. I