Moving Picture Weekly (1915-1920)

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THE M O A' I X G PICTURE WEEKLY 21 straight back and the alfalfa is a la pigtail. If she looks beautiful then, before she's been upholstered, she'll pass any committee of judges. I saw them in their pigtails, and beyond this, I refuse to be quoted. Up until the time the chewing gum had been distributed the funniest thing I had ever seen was two Irishmen digging a grave in the north of Ireland and singing "This Is the Life," but imagine, if you can, sixty maidens, each wrestling with six sticks of pepsin, reclining Olga Xethersole like and reading such species as "Blown From Home, With No Rudder to Guide Her," and you will get a partial idea of how the Universal Beauty Special looked as it ascended the Rockies. Wherever the special stopped, hesitated or paused all industrial progress was punctuated. The smithy left his forge; the baker rolled out of his shop and bank clerks and cashiers cycloned from their institutions leaving thousands behind them. Denver just knocked ofi^ entirely and proceeded to pack its thoroughfares with eager multitudes. The city was at fever heat a couple of days before the train arrived and when the special pulled into the town the old berg just threw up its hands and became delirious. Twenty big motor cars, filled with America's beauties, preceded by a band and mounted police, crept slowly through the huge crowd which lined the streets on either side, and while the beauts stared the crowd craned its neck and jabbered, and argued and fretted and frowned. It was a poor day for corns, but a great day for the beauts. Then, just as everything was going along smoothly, as per schedule, something went wrong up above, and the 48hour man was blamed. It started to rain. Not one of these mild, silky rains, but one of those drenching affairs, which, if they get one without an umbrella, make one look as though they had been poured into their clothes. Everybody made a dash for anything that resembled shelter, and the male chaperones saw more of the beauties in that grand dash than they had during the entire trip! And when the shower ceased — great horrors! — Nathaniel Rothstein was discovered seeking mercy in the entrance of a Methodist Church! Joe Brandt found him and remarked casually it was a lucky thing Denver wasn't Salt Lake City ! Hoping to even up matters, the party then adjourned to Fisher & Daniel's, where they partook of tea and other refreshments. The tea had evidently been affected by the storm for it was really too weak to run out of the pot. After leaving Denver the next stop was Grand Canyon — not Colorado, as half the landlubbers think, but Arizona — where the party used the El Tovar for their headquarters. " Some cavity ! " said Opal Crumbliss, of Omaha, as she leaped from the dining room to tjje front porch which borders light on the Rim. " Some hole ! '" eclaimed Pauline Turner, the Missouri blonde. " Some ditch I " chimed in Margaret JIcDonough, who eased right out of a Boston convent into the beauty procession. Nat Rothstein, who was always there with the epilogue to everything, finished it with " Som-me sewer ! " Before the girls had inhaled a nickle's worth of Grand Canyon air a regular cowboy approached the party and asked how many of the crowd would like to take a trip down the caryon on burros. Now it's only three and a half miles deep in front of the El Tovar, and, as each girl walked to the Rim and peeped over, the words, "Not me," seemed to leap from each month automatically. Rather than be divested of any credit for bravado he might possess, Joe Brandt declared that he was just yearning to take such a trip, but explained that he would have to remain where he was to keep the girls from going down. The cowboy shot an implicit-confidence-inthat-statement look at Joe and then turned away in search of more business. On a trans-continental journey one starts to forget the chill upon leaving the flat country of Iowa and Missouri ; they start to perspire a little after leaving Kansas and begin to peel their clothing as they enter New Mexico and Arizona. By the time the purgatorial desert is reached the traveler has grown so hot at the mere thought of the blasted place th;it the only thing left for him to do from The Needles to Barstow is to sit out on the ob.servation and tan. And that's just what the beauts did. The result was that when the time came for us to pick the winners in the contest we were all out of gear, for half the girls had peeled the complexion they had when they left home and all were olives. They had left their beauty along the line of the Santa Fe ! It is safe to say that today the real beauty of this country is assisting in the up-keep of the road-bed of the Santa Fe system. This is the first time this fact has been disclosed, and the only reason we publish it in The Moving Picture Weekly is because we desire to keep it secret. At Las Vegas, New Mexico, the girls were treated to the unusual. Sixty of the cowiest cowboys and the wildest looking Indians in captivity, treated the girls to a breakfast that made a WhldorfAstoria menu card look like an illiterate program in a Bowery soup kitchen. It cost each of the cowboys $2.50 a throw, and they threw it in about the same easy fashion that a chocolate brother of the South throws his dice. But it was worth it, for the girls sacrificed a great deal. The train arrived there at 6.30 a. m., which the girls declared was "an uncivilized time for any maiden to put on her switch." However, Phil Le Noir, who trumpets the scenic qualities of the town in everything that's readable, declared that at this hour in Las Vegas the day is half gone. One fellow who spends an exciting life up in the Cayuga Canyon keeping the moths from nibbling the bark off the ash trees, rode twenty miles that morning into Las Vegas in order to get his first squint at a white woman in seven years. He had his pockets filled with gold nuggets and bis cow-hides covered with the dust from the pebbles. But all that he found upon reaching Las Vegas station was the crumbs of the ham and eggs. He thereupon sat down at the first becrumbed table and addressed a note to "Any one of the Sixty." and promised her enough of the nuggets to purchase a license and a "planner" if she would come back and finish the crumbs he was willing to provide for her the rest of her life. That note, like many another, fell into the long fingers of Joe Brandt, who answered it quite formally. Now that it is all over, and we have been given time to take an inventory of the trip we are inclined to think we handed a good time to the girls. We gave them a lot of thinss, including our patience, good-will, best wishes, scoldings for their own benefit, flattery when they deserved it, and so on. It's all over now. so even though we did worry and fret about these dear beauties, we loved each of them jointly and collectively, and we will do the same darn thing over again — providing we are given the opportunity.