Actorviews (1923)

Lynne Overman’s Long Rehearsal OMING home after a coca-cola with Lynne Overman, who plays (immortally, I think) the soused hero in “Just Married,” I blew the dust from the gilt top of my Roget’s “Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases” and opened the helpful volume at the word Sobriety. For while Mr. Overman’s alcoholic art is, as I had learned, in the nature of self-expression, he is, in the language of a once familiar ballad, on the water wagon now — for three years, and, he says, forever. Roget, I found, does not list water wagon. Sobriety and teetotalism are his only abstract nouns under this head. One who does not imbibe is a waterdrinker, an abstainer, a teetotaler, a Good Templar, or, grouped, a band of hope. To take the pledge is Roget’s single verb, and for adjectives he allows only sober and sober as a judge. A teetotal of exactly ten. But under the adjoining head of Drunkenness Roget runs on to the tune of some two hundred words and phrases. One may revel all the way from temulency to tremens, inducing these states by a consumption of gin, grog or even the Edgar Allan Poetic “blue ruin.” One may, according to Roget, p. 413, “drain the cup,” “splice the main brace” and “take a hair of the dog that bit you” to become a toper, a tippler, a soaker or a toss-pot. In a word, there are two hundred chances of a