“Also, you had such a success with Of Mice and Men, ” he said. “Anything you did as a follow-up would probably be a disappointment by compar- oh, jeez, look at that! John Wayne just got an arrow through his hat! Lucky it was the twenty-gallon deluxe!”
I was more miffed by the idea that my second effort might fall short than I should have been. It made me think about how Sadie and I couldn’t quite equal our first performance on the dance floor, despite our best efforts.
Deke seemed completely absorbed in the TV as he said, “Besides, Ratty Sylvester has expressed an interest in the junior-senior. He’s talking about Arsenic and Old Lace. Says he and the wife saw it in Dallas two years ago and it was a regular ole knee-slapper.”
Good God, that chestnut. And Fred Sylvester of the Science Department as director? I wasn’t sure I’d trust Ratty to direct a grammar school fire drill. If a talented but still very damp-around-the-edges actor like Mike Coslaw ended up with Ratty at the helm, it could set his maturing process back five years. Ratty and Arsenic and Old Lace. Jesus wept.
“There wouldn’t be time to put on anything really good, anyway,” Deke went on. “So I say let Ratty take the fall. I never liked the scurrying little sumbitch, anyway.”
Nobody really liked him, so far as I could tell, except maybe for Mrs. Ratty, who scurried by his side to every school and faculty function, wrapped in acres of organdy. But he wouldn’t be the one to take the fall. That would be the kids.
“They could put on a variety show,” I said. “There’d be time enough for that.”
“Oh, Christ, George! Wallace Beery just took an arrow in the shoulder! I think he’s a goner!”
“Deke?”
“No, John Wayne’s dragging him to safety. This old shoot-em-up doesn’t make a lick of sense, but I love it, don’t you?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
A commercial came on. Keenan Wynn climbed down off a bulldozer, doffed his hardhat, and told the world he’d walk a mile for a Camel. Deke turned to me. “No, I must have missed it.”
Sly old fox. As if.
“I said there’d be time to put on a variety show. A revue. Songs, dances, jokes, and a bunch of sketches.”
“Everything but girls doing the hootchie-koo? Or were you thinking of that, too?”
“Don’t be a dope.”
“So that makes it vaudeville. I always liked vaudeville. ‘Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are,’ and all that.”
He dragged his pipe out of the pocket of his cardigan, stuffed it with Prince Albert, and fired it up.
“You know, we actually used to do something like that down to the Grange. The show was called Jodie Jamboree. Not since the late forties, though. Folks got a little embarrassed by it, although no one ever came right out and said so. And vaudeville wasn’t what we called it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was a minstrel show, George. All the cowboys and farmhands joined in. They wore blackface, sang and danced, told jokes in what they imagined was a Negro dialect. More or less based on Amos ’n Andy. ”
I began to laugh. “Did anyone play the banjo?”
“As a matter of fact, on a couple of occasions our current principal did.”
“ Ellen played the banjo in a minstrel show?”
“Careful, you’re starting to speak in iambic pentameter. That can lead to delusions of grandeur, pard.”
I leaned forward. “Tell me one of the jokes.”
Deke cleared his throat, and began speaking in two deep voices.
“Say dere, Brother Tambo, what did you buy dat jar of Vaseline fo’?
“Well I b’leeves it was fo’ty-nine cent!”
He looked at me expectantly, and I realized that had been the punchline.
“Did they laugh?” I almost feared the answer.
“Split their guts and hollered for more. You heard those jokes around the square for weeks after.” He looked at me solemnly, but his eyes were twinkling like Christmas lights. “We’re a small town. Our needs when it comes to humor are quite humble. Our idea of Rabelaisian wit is a blind feller slipping on a banana peel.”
I sat thinking. The western came back on, but Deke seemed to have lost interest in it. He was watching me.
“That stuff could still work,” I said.
“George, that stuff always does.”
“It wouldn’t need to be funny black fellers, either.”
“Couldn’t do it that way anymore, anyway,” he said. “Maybe in Louisiana or Alabama, but not on the way to Austin, which the folks at the Slimes Herald call Comsymp City. And you wouldn’t want to, would you?”
“No. Call me a bleeding-heart, but I find the idea repulsive. And why bother? Corny jokes… boys in big old suits with padded shoulders instead of cornpone overalls… girls in knee-high flapper dresses with lots of fringes… I’d love to see what Mike Coslaw could do with a comedy skit…”
“Oh, he’d kill it,” Deke said, as if that were a foregone conclusion. “Pretty good idea. Too bad you don’t have time to try it out.”
I started to say something, but then another of those lightning flashes hit me. It was just as bright as the one that had lit up my brain when Ivy Templeton had said that her neighbors across the street could see into her living room.
