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Thriller

The Source

How often do you get to sit and have dinner with an 82-year-old ventriloquist, an 80-year-old magician, a big band singer in her nineties, an octogenarian comedian, and an old timer who once played the musical saw on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour? I thought I was getting too old to feel thrilled. After all, “thrill” is usually a word reserved for five-year-old birthday parties and seventeen-year-old bungee jumps, but last week I reverted to my childhood for a bit. I got a thrill. I’d long hear about this theatre museum housed at Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, right next to the Old Threshers grounds. It was on my to-do-someday list, but the chances of my being in Iowa with a couple hours to spare were slim. Then I received a letter in the mail saying, “Your membership in the Theatre Museum has been paid by Richard Elsenpeter.” Richard Elsenpeter! That was Toby Dick Ellis! Anyone who grew up in the Channel Ten WGEM listening area in the 1960’s new that The Possum Holler Opry was the only locally produced TV show to outdraw the Super Bowl. You’d rush home from church and turn on Channel 10 to catch Toby Dick Ellis, Flaxxy Frizzle (who’s final residence was in a Jacksonville nursing home), the Ray Tyson Dancers and a host of other country singers to see what was happening in Possum Holler. Toby Dick, still very much alive and living in Quincy, traveled with Midwest tent shows most of his life before developing his Elsenpeter Marionette Show which toured the Jacksonville area many times. A long, lank, and unbelievably kind man, Elsenpeter would seek out the special education students in a school to help him set up his stage. He was as much of a small town idol as this small town boy could have. So when the invitation arrived to take part in the three-day conference at the Museum of Repertoire Americana in Mt. Pleasant, I cleared my schedule and took off across the flooded Mississippi. The museum itself is appropriately located in a cemetery, a fitting place for an art form that’s pretty much dead. It’s neat little brick structure dedicated to preserving memorabilia and artifacts from the days when Vaudeville and tent shows would bring a bit of culture to the hinterlands of America. Their collection is impressive and certainly one of a kind . . . ancient lighting equipment, costumes, props, scenery, actual letters from such theatrical notables as Edwin Booth and Sophie Tucker, and something I’d never seen or heard in my life: a “player accordion.” Like a player piano, the thing had punched rolls inserted into the body of the instrument. All you did was squeeze and the accordion did the rest. . . as if a regular accordion wasn’t bad enough. The weekend was a mix of academics presenting papers on such pithy topics as “The Jesuit priests’ evangelization of the Lakota Indians with morality plays,” and “How Vaudeville mirrored the country’s economic condition.” But my real thrill came when the old troupers would simply reminisce about their days on the road, sleeping in barns, stealing rides on trains, clearing the thrown tomatoes off the stage, and carrying guns to get them through certain parts of Arkansas. And most of this group still had their stuff. Actually, there were two magicians at my table, both in their eighties, both trying to one-up the other with slight-of-hand tricks involving various pieces of silverware and napkins. Where else could you get a show like that? The ventriloquist fashioned his napkin into a hand puppet and the puppet talked to me during most of the dessert. The climax of the weekend was a show presented by the Troupers. The conference consisted of observers like me, the theatre researchers, and the Troupers themselves. One old gal had written a show featuring about a dozen of the old song-and-dance folks. They had one rehearsal, which was the standard number for traveling shows, and at 8 p.m. on the final evening the houselights when out, a spotlight hit the stage, and the show began. Being someone who’s had his lines murdered onstage before, I should share the director’s angst as the actors only paid passing reference to the script, but that mattered little to me or to anyone in the audience. We were seeing history walk the stage. Then came the highlight of my “thriller” weekend. My old hero, Toby Dick Ellis, took the stage and did a song I can remember him singing on Channel Ten fifty years ago. He stood there (a bit feeble, but ramrod straight), red wig on his head, one tooth blacked out, and sang, “I had a dog named Sandwich! I had a dog named Sandwich! The reason we called him Sandwich . . . .is because he was half-bred.” Okay, maybe it doesn’t take much to excite me, but I was by-golly thrilled!