Actorviews (1923)

86 Actorviews down and said to: ‘This is supposed to be a quiet party’? — do you know who?” ‘‘Elsie Jams’ mamma,” I answered. “And right you are !” said mamma’s Elsie. “Lemme tell you,” she raced. “There’s never a wild place in Paris or New York or Chicago that I wanted to see that my mother wouldn’t go along with me to see it. There never was a dump so tough my mother wouldn’t go to it with me, if I wanted to go. If my tastes don’t happen to be chronically dumpish, that’s not mother’s fault. But lemme tell you that she’s there for any time or place. If I want to sip a jazzbo cocktail or a shimmy fizz, mother’ll go with me to the awful cave where they’re brewed and we’ll sip ’em together. She’ll do anything I ever wanted to do — and more. “And that’s only a tiny side of her companionship. She’s there for anything that happens to me. If I stub my toe and start to fall — well, I don’t land on a tack, but on mother. Show me a man like mother and I'll be willing to hear people say, ‘Yes, he belongs to Janis and Janis belongs to him.' But they aren’t made. And I’ve looked. And I — like Henry George — I’m for men, God love ’em ! But when I gaze around a luncheon at my girl friends that used to be girls, and see most of them divorced or getting divorces, and hear them say with the salad — it always comes with the salad — ‘Well, Elsie, here’s another luncheon and you’re still a spinster!’ — I can’t help but notice that their note, which was one time one of pity, is now the note of envy. I tell you I’m glad of the privilege, the beauty, the hell-roaring fine companionship that comes of batching it along with mother.”